Memo To Riley Cooper And Implicit Bias Lessons For The Rest Of Us Aug 4th 2013, 19:32
, during a performance in Jacksonville, Florida (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I appreciate the quality of your football skills for the Philadelphia Eagles in the highly diverse profession of the NFL. As with any profession, there is a culture. Part of ones success in a profession is tied to successfully embracing the culture. In light of your N-word expletive directed at an African American security guard caught on video at a Kenny Chesney concert, you made the a laudable first step toward repairing the cultural gulf to which I have a few suggestions:
Your comments: "During this time[away from the Eagles team] I'm going to be speaking with a variety of professionals to help me better understand how I could have done something that was so offensive, and how I can start the healing process for everyone. As long as it takes, and whatever I have to do, I'm going to try to make this right."
My comments:
- Don't get drunk.
- Don't get drunk and then go to a concert.
- Don't get drunk, and then go to a Kenny Chesney concert where the culture is as different from your NFL culture as NASCAR is from the NBA.
- Don't get drunk, and then go to a concert where only an African American security guard is separating you from your sense of privilege about going backstage.
- Don't seek the advice of the wrong professionals, including Paula Dean, Sergio Garcia, John Rocker or Fuzzy Zoeller.
- Don't patronize people by saying you have no idea where those comments came from. Instead, seek out the professional researchers of implicit bias and take the Implicit Association Test ("IAT") that objectively measurers your attitude about blacks relative to whites. (See http://projectimplicit.net/nosek/iat/ and the IAT test materials of Anthony G. Greenwald, PhD http://faculty.washington.edu/agg/iat_materials.htm. See also his testing methods developed in conjunction with Harvard University's "Project Implicit" at http://faculty.washington.edu/agg/iat_materials.htm.
I think you will find a wealth of information from social scientists and other professionals skilled at helping people discover unconscious biases they did not know they had. Good luck in the quest and evolution of thought. And don't feel you are alone in that quest. Training for corporate executives and employees increasingly includes self-examination and EQ, emotional intelligence ("EQ") due diligence. These programs are designed to make us more aware of how others view us relative to how we view ourselves and provide analytical constructs to improve our compliance with the culture of the employer. I am already a beneficiary. The mission you have already chosen includes examining whatever it is within you that brought out the comments you made, and perhaps viewing yourself from a new perspective. I would not be surprised if the state-of-the-art methods noted above makes you a beneficiary as well.
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