You’re Not Racist. You Just Act Like It Sometimes.

A blunt, slightly exhausting guide to the bias you absolutely do not have — and why “not me though” is exactly the wrong response.

Here’s a fun game. Picture a surgeon. Go on, close your eyes. Do it properly. Got one? Great. Was it a white man? Be honest. It’s fine. You’re among friends. (Well. Me. Which is close enough.)

You’re not a bad person. You recycle the way too many wine bottles you get through. You’ve definitely shared something meaningful on Instagram about equality. You always put a few coins in the pot when you see a homeless person, which felt enormously satisfying. And yet — your imaginary surgeon was almost certainly not a Black woman. Not because you think Black women can’t be surgeons. You know they can. You’d say so with great confidence if anyone asked. And still. White man. Stethoscope. There he is.

That’s unconscious bias. It lives in the gap between what you believe and what your brain actually does when nobody’s watching.

Your brain and shortcuts

Your brain is brilliant and also a bit of a shit.

Here’s the science, briefly. Your brain processes approximately 11 million bits of information per second. Consciously, you handle about 40 of them and your mental notepad can hold between 4 to 7 things at once (there’s debate about exactly which end of that range is true). The rest gets outsourced to a set of mental shortcuts assembled from everything you’ve ever absorbed — every film, every advert, every offhand comment at Christmas, every default setting baked into the culture you were raised in. Your brain isn’t evil. It’s just efficient. Unfortunately, efficiency and fairness are not the same thing.

These shortcuts fire automatically. Instantly. Before you’ve even formed a thought. Which means by the time you’re consciously deciding whether you’re being fair, the bias has already done its work and sloped off for a beer.

Laverne Cox and bias

Exhibit A: Emmy-nominated actress

Take Laverne Cox. Emmy-nominated actress, producer, one of the most compelling people to have ever appeared on a chat show sofa. By any measurable standard — a success story.

She’s also a transgender woman. Which matters here, bear with me.

Because here’s where it gets interesting. For people who don’t know that, their unconscious is already running its usual shit — filing her under “attractive Black woman,” attaching whatever assumptions come pre-loaded with that particular category. None of it conscious. None of it chosen. Just the brain doing its grotty little pattern-matching thing at forty milliseconds a pop.

Then someone tells them she’s trans.

And you can actually watch the recalibration happen in real time. The same face. The same person. Suddenly the unconscious has to go back through its filing system and move everything into a different drawer. And depending on what’s in that drawer — built up from years of media representation, jokes, casual cruelty dressed up as opinion — the assessment of her changes. Her credibility shifts. Her femininity gets put in quotation marks by people who’ve never examined why they’re doing it.

She hasn’t changed. Not one single thing about her has changed. The only thing that changed was information. And that information went straight to the unconscious, which ran it through a filter built from culture and bias and frankly a lot of bullshit, and spat out a different verdict.

That’s unconscious bias. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It just quietly rewrites the score while you’re not looking.

Meghan Markle and bias

Exhibit B: Being difficult whilst female and mixed-race

Meghan Markle married into the most scrutinised family in Britain and proceeded to be criticised for — deep breath — how she held her baby bump, how she closed a car door, the fact that she wore the wrong kind of nail polish to a wedding. Meanwhile, other women in that family have done things that are, objectively, significantly more chaotic and were described as “spirited.”

The tabloids called Meghan “difficult.” “demanding.” “divisive.” The same qualities in a white woman are called “passionate,” “exacting” or “refreshingly direct.” Same behaviour. Entirely different adjectives. That’s not coincidence. That’s the same bias running in real time, at national scale, with a print run of several million.

When she and Harry described a conversation within the family about how dark their unborn child’s skin might be, half the country said she was lying. A woman describing racism was met with — more racism. The audacity.

The bias mechanics

The bias mechanics of it, since we’re here

Confirmation bias is the one where you decide something first and then only notice evidence that agrees with you. It’s why one bad experience with a person from a particular group becomes “they’re all like that,” while a bad experience with someone from your own group becomes “well, he was having a rough time.”

Beauty bias sounds shallow because it is, and also because it’s absolutely everywhere. Research consistently shows that people read attractive people as more competent, more moral, more trustworthy. There is no mechanism by which a symmetrical face indicates good judgment. We do it anyway.

The halo effect is its close relative — where one positive trait (confidence, a good suit, a strong handshake) gets pieces together into an entire personality. Politicians and their advisors have known this for decades. Why do you think they all get photographed in shirtsleeves at a factory?

Attribution bias might be the nastiest one. When a man fails, it’s bad luck, difficult circumstances, an off day. When a woman fails — especially a woman of colour — it becomes evidence. It confirms something. One data point gets promoted to a pattern. That’s not analysis. That’s a verdict dressed up as one.

Why defensiveness fails

The bit you want to skip

The response to all of this, almost universally, is: not me though.

And I get it. Nobody wants to find out they’re part of the problem, particularly when they’ve spent considerable energy being one of the good ones. It feels like an accusation. It isn’t. It’s more uncomfortable than that — it’s a structural fact about how human brains work, which means it applies to literally everyone, including people who write blogs about it. (Noted. I’m working on it.)

Defensiveness is the wrong response. Full stop. And not in a “ooh isn’t that interesting to consider” way — in a you-are-actively-making-it-worse way. Because what defensiveness actually does, what it is, is choosing your own comfort over someone else’s reality. Someone tells you what bias felt like for them. The pause. The room that had already decided. Having to prove themselves. Again. And your response is to explain why it probably wasn’t that.

Cool. Great. Very helpful.

It’s not about your intentions. Your intentions are invisible to the person standing in front of you. The impact is what happened. That’s what’s real.

My own experience

I have skin in this game. Quite literally, as it happens — I’ve already touched on how trans women are the subject of a particular brand of bias that manages to be both tediously predictable and weirdly creative at the same time.

I know what it is to walk into a room and clock, before a single word has been exchanged, that someone has already formed a view. It’s not always hostile. Sometimes it’s just a slight recalibration. A fractional shift in how they’re holding their face. You learn to see it. Most people with any kind of marginalised identity do. It becomes a sixth sense you’d really rather not have developed.

So when the assumption shows up — and it will, because you’re human and your brain is running software it didn’t ask for — just notice it. That’s all you can do. No grand gesture required. Just a moment of “oh, there it is” and then doing slightly better.

If this resonated, you might also find these useful:

• We Need to Talk About How We Support Each Other
• The Bias You Don’t Know You Have
• The Ally You Think You Are (And the One You Actually Need to be)

Originally published at andreaking.net. Andrea King is a D&I consultant, keynote speaker and transgender woman with 20+ years of senior corporate leadership. Find more at andreaking.net.