A million years ago (give or take 999,970), while I was briefly a psychology major as an undergraduate at U.C. San Diego, I first learned about schemas. According to Cherry, “We use schemas because they allow us to take shortcuts in interpreting the vast amount of information that is available in our environment.” The downside to the efficient ways schemas allow us to process information, however, is that they, “… also cause us to exclude pertinent information to focus instead only on things that confirm our pre-existing beliefs and ideas,” thus making it easy to reinforce stereotypes and difficult to hold on to new information that doesn’t conform to our pre-existing beliefs or experiences (Ibid.).
Because I’m white and my mixed-race husband appears white and together we’re raising our Black nine year-old daughter, one area where I am hyper alert to schemas playing out is with regard to racial bias in the education system.
When our daughter was in kindergarten, she received exceeds or meets in all categories, except following rules. When I mentioned that I was surprised by this during our parent-teacher conference, her teacher said that she marked that category because my daughter had trouble sitting still in circle time, which she said was most likely because my daughter was so much taller than her classmates and she couldn’t get comfortable in her chair. I thanked my daughter’s teacher for that clarification and asked her to annotate my daughter’s file with that commentary because otherwise when she was going to be passed to the next grade what her new teacher was going to see was a file of a Black girl who doesn’t follow rules.
That was a schema that I needed to interrupt lest it affect the foundation of my daughter’s education in the school district that was the reason why my husband and I decided to leave New York City for suburbia in the first place.
I had read alarming statistics about Black girls in the education system toward the beginning of the semester, so my protective Papa antennae were already tingly. Research shows that Black girls even at the pre-school level account for 53% of out-of-school suspension even though they represent 20% of the pre-school population, and they were five times more likely to be suspended at least once from school than white girls.
Moreover, Skiba and his colleagues found that, “… while white students and teachers perceived racial disparity in discipline as unintentional or unconscious, students of color saw it as conscious and deliberate, arguing that teachers often apply classroom rules and guidelines arbitrarily to exercise control, or to remove students whom they do not like,” which suggests cognitive biases at work. Their conclusion furthers this deduction: “[R]acial disparities in school suspension appear to find their origin primarily in the disproportionate rate of office referral for African-American students… What is especially clear is that neither this nor any previously published research studying differential discipline and rates of behavior by race… has found any evidence that the higher rates of discipline received by African-American students are due to more serious or more disruptive behavior,” (Ibid.).
While I’m a little late to post this on International Women’s Day, my intention in posting this at all is to highlight the challenge that Black girls have in school before they even grow into women where they’ll encounter similar challenges in the workplace. And while we can’t altogether stop our cognitive biases, we can take steps to mitigate them by learning about them, slowing down our decision-making processes when we’re in situations when we know we could be prone to bias, and collaborating with people who are different from us.
Looking at the world through my daughter’s eyes inspires me to help make it more receptive to all of the gifts she brings to the table—and to ensure that there will be a seat waiting for her should she choose to take it.