Members of Unidos Rhode Island College, the RIC Spanish club, including Heidi Salazar Martinez, middle row, second from left.
Despite our best intentions, we sometimes judge others unfairly, and we all have been judged in return. We have often heard stereotypes about specific groups or communities, but failed to ask the stakeholders about their reality and confront the unspoken assumptions in our beliefs.
Researchers say that implicit bias plays a huge role when it comes to viewing people according to their race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, dialect, accent and so forth.
Two kinds of biases exist, according to Stefan Battle and Warren Miller Jr., associate and assistant professors of social work, respectively, at Rhode Island College. The first is explicit or conscious bias, which means that a person is clear about his or her feelings, attitudes and intentional behaviors toward others. The second is implicit or unconscious bias, which operates outside of the person’s awareness and can be in direct contradiction to a person’s beliefs and values.
“We all have biases, about everything,” says Miller. “We can control the explicit ones, but we cannot control much of the implicit ones. They are unconscious.”
In other words, bias is human. But what is so dangerous about implicit bias, Miller says, is that it seeps into a person’s behavior and remains outside of the person’s full awareness. This kind of bias affects the understanding, actions and judgments of others.
Conscious biases, in their extreme, are characterized by evident negative behaviors that can manifest in physical and verbal harassment or through more subtle means such as exclusion, Battle explains.
The Latino community is often the focus of many implicit and explicit biases. “Culturally we [Latinos] have some idea of how we are perceived in America,” says David Ramirez, assistant professor of Spanish (Latin American literature and culture).
“First, we are perceived as immigrants who do not belong entirely to American society. Second, compared to other communities, we are perceived as less educated. Finally, there is an image of Latinos as members of criminal gangs.”
All of these perceptions continue despite statistical data, says Ramirez. For example, “the number of Latino people who do not want to go to school or who are part of criminal groups is no greater than other communities."
“Latinos experience implicit bias all the time, especially if English is not their first language or regarding the kind of labor they are expected to do,” says Pegah Rahmanian, director of the college’s Unity Center, which explores ideas of identity and its impact on student success.
Heidi Salazar Martinez, a current social work student at Rhode Island College, knows this bias too well. She has experienced it often after moving to the United States.
“At a previous job, I was told by customers and some coworkers that I needed to go back to English class because they couldn’t understand me,” she recalls. “Customers sometimes wanted to speak to the manager. My accent was really thick back then. I was a shift leader and it was hard to move forward from that position.”
It is important for the Latino community to recognize that biased behavior is the result of prejudice, not a personal defect, Ramirez emphasizes. “The tendency is that when someone calls out your accent, Latinos feel bad or devalue themselves. Instead we should accept and understand that we all have an accent, even Americans themselves.”
Stories like Salazar-Martinez’s are common. But Kevin Aldana, a sophomore majoring in computer science with a cybersecurity minor, even experiences this bias within his own community.
“When I go to a place that is Hispanic run, they don’t think that I am Latino. I am actually Puerto Rican, but I am pale with green eyes. So, when I go there with my cousins who look way more ‘Hispanic’ than I do, they get treated differently, like they are family, like they belong in that place. And I feel like I don’t belong there,” Aldana explains. “It kind of sucks because we all speak Spanish. We lived and grew up in the same place. I feel like I am not being treated with the same respect in those places where I should be welcome.”
Ramirez says that even as children, before having self awareness, we show signs of biases that we learn at home. Recognizing and learning about them can help people understand that we are all equal, which will make a difference in how we treat each other.
“We have to undo that narrative, in order to give a different one,” concludes Rahmanian.
For those who are interested in recognizing and understanding their own potential biases, there is an online test called The Implicit Association Test (IAT), which can help people identify attitudes and beliefs about people’s characteristics. 
