Home > Author > Jessica Nordell
1 " When we see beings as belonging to a particular group, for instance, we start to believe there's something fundamental and biological that unites all the creatures in that group, that there's some invisible essence that makes a dog a dog and a cat a cat. We do the same thing with humans: if we are told that a category is important, we infer that the people in the people in that category share a fundamental essence. We essentially them. And the more a category is emphasized, the more we think its members have a unifying thread. "
― Jessica Nordell , The End of Bias: A Beginning
2 " The individual who acts with bias engages with an expectation instead of reality. That expectation is assembled from the artifacts of culture: headlines and history books, myths and statistics, encounters real and imagined, and selective interpretations of reality that confirm prior beliefs. Biased individuals do not see a person. They see a person-shaped daydream. "
3 " Over time, I came to see bias as a kind of soul violence, an attack not just on the material conditions of one’s life—on one’s choices and possibilities—but an assault on one’s sense of self. "
4 " The goals of diversity trainings are generally to reduce discrimination, to increase peoples skills in engaging with people from different groups, and to create more positive interactions in the organization. There’s only one problem: trainings are rarely tested and evaluated in the field. This is a problem because they could have literally ANY effect. "
5 " in the mid-1980s, psychologists were flummoxed by a phenomenon we might call the “prejudice paradox.” On the one hand, White Americans overwhelmingly opposed racial prejudice: when asked, they denied holding racist beliefs. On the other, many still acted in racially discriminatory ways, both in lab settings and in the real world. Prominent psychologists of the era, faced with this contradiction, concluded that these people were hiding their true beliefs in order to protect their image. White people who said they weren’t racist were lying. "
