Defining myself can be very difficult as looking to myself as a human being ongoing continuous changes and progress adapting different mentalities and maturing more and more. However, there are some basic stuff that I feel proud to present myself with. I feel pride in being Egyptian, being my parent’s greatest investment, a bigger brother for my sister, a former athlete, an engineer, a politically active individual, I love teaching stuff to others and helping them within my maximum capacity. What can affects my behavior within different circles is adapting the language of each group and I don’t mean spoken language but the terms used and their general mentality in order not offend any of them and deliver my message clearly.
My identity is my story, my beliefs and qualities and what defines me and makes me who I am; how I tell my story, how someone else tells my story is what defines my identity and how my story is told and from where the story has begun could completely change my identity. An example of identity is the your Name, it could also be one of the things that people could be biased about. There are 3 kinds of areas of bias; First: noticing some differences more than other like gender, color, age and physical disability and stereotyping with particular groups, Second: the way we interpret the world around us like: priming and being influenced without realizing, quick decision making that make us stop scanning or processing and experience and expectations and Third: the way we socialize in groups, in-groups versus out or other groups, how we behave differently towards in-groups members, and view our in-group differently from out-group; which brings us to othering and how othering is not just a problem of prejudice, but it’s a way that leads to the plantation group-based inequality and marginality. It’s a widespread problem in the world, denying the full inclusion or certain groups in society and it begins from the role model, and the higher power, as much your story and identity could be powerful based on your power in the society, also being not included begin by your power in the society or how powerful or role models view you; It is very important to solve the problem of othering, not only using temporarily solutions that won’t last; Solutions must not only improve intergroup relations, but reduce intergroup inequalities and group-based marginality, The solution must Belongingness, inclusiveness, improving the well-being of everyone, encouraging new identities and reframing individual and group identities. We want to avoid anxieties that can be turned into fear and anger or empathy and collective solidarity.
It was a little bit different than my expectations because I haven’t thought before about my preference to the color of skin, I know people with different tones of skin color and I judge more or less based on personality. When it comes to the body type, I may prefer the well-toned and healthy body due to the fact that I spent part of my life dedicated to health, weight lifting and exercising, but I am not biased against Fat. I think that the experience of the IAT is a different experience; It is not the ordinary online test that we would do and it doesn’t judge your personality based on questions that you might answer in a biased way unintentionally, but it judges in a different way.
Of the many biases I occasionally get to see are: discrimination against women’s driving skills, race bias like seeing someone who is white and has narrow eyes and immediately assuming they’re are Chinese when they might not be and last but not least also about women saying “you’re all women, you don’t know what you want exactly, all of you are like this… etc
A case of bias I read recently online is about gender inequality. “A man and a woman switched names at work for a week” “Martin R. Schneider, an editor for the movie-reviewing site Front Row Central based in Philadelphia, realized men and women are treated differently in the workplace after he accidentally signed off on emails using his female co-worker’s signature “
Mr. Schneider thought his colleague Nicole was a little bit slow to get the tasks done than him due to his higher level of experience, until he accidentally switched his signature with Nicole’s and was signing all his emails as Nicole, he found out that clients are being so rude to her and act difficult just because she is a woman they don’t trust her expertise and once he reintroduced himself to the client the issues disappeared so he decided to switch signatures with her for a week and suddenly she was finishing tasks faster than him.
A behavior like this could cause discouragement to Nicole in her work life; it could’ve also lead to her being fired from her job, if it was not for Mr.Schneider realizing the issue.
One of my main bias is discrimination against women’s driving skills; whenever I see someone driving irrationally before seeing who os the person in the car, I assume she is a woman. We are all bias, accidentally we all are putten in a state when we are bias and I try as much as I can to not let this bias behavior control me and get mad immediately whenever I see an irrationality while driving.
References:
https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/video/day-learning-2013-binna-kandola-diffusing-bias
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