The End of Bias: A Beginning

I am quite interested in bias studies. I read Jennifer Eberhardt's great book Biased last year (which Nordell references several times) and was really happy to have discovered an in-depth look at something that has seemed obvious to me all my life but that many people seemingly just don't grasp- we are all extremely biased., and for the most part, we don't even realize it. Nordell's book explored the topic in a somewhat different lense than Eberhardt, which was great, although they do both dedicate quite a lot of time to police bias (rightfully so).

But The End of Bias combines neuroscience, sociology, psychology, gender studies, explorations on race, mindfulness, history, politics, tech, and pop culture to examine the many different avenues that bias can and does affect every single one of us. Nobody's above the law here: you cannot woke yourself into waking up one day without biases. The best we can do is be aware of how our biases affect us and how we are being affected by bias, and try our best to mitigate it. This is probably the only place where I delve from the author- the book is named The End of Bias, but I don't actually think we CAN end bias. We can hopefully end the way that bias creates large societal blind spots that harm others, but some degree of bias will always remain. Nevertheless, I think it should be our goal to try to reduce and examine our own biases as much as we can. This book is a brilliant starting point for people wanting to learn more about the subject. It examines bias against basically everyone but focuses primarily on POC, women, LGBTQ, and children.

I was surprised at the amount of science in this. Studies are referenced quite often, which is always a good sign. There was also a very nuanced chapter about police, which I greatly appreciate. In our current public discourse, police seem to be reduced to “police bad” or “police good” and both of these are ridiculous. Nordell does not give police a free pass in any sense, but she mentions plenty of programs and police officers who are dedicated to changing the way the police operate and see the world. She also shows how officers are primed to expect danger, which can be mitigated in a number of ways. There was a section about a study where cops engaged in mindfulness training that had really interesting results that I hope gets expanded upon.

I would recommend this book to anybody; indeed, I likely will add this to the list of books I recommend regularly. It also gets bonus points for taking time out of its busy schedule to shit all over Twitter, which I didn't think added much to the author's argument, but hey, I am a sucker for hating on Twitter.