Blink!  Overcoming First Impressions

By Pastor Marcia Moret Sietstra

Jan. 14, 2007     Crestwood UCC

Today is, of course, the day before the national holiday on which America observes the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a leader of the non-violent civil rights movement in the United States. 

I was a young girl in the 60’s when King led the way toward ending segregation in the south, but I remember it well enough to recall my own father’s reaction.  He thought Martin Luther King was a trouble-maker who didn’t know his place.  My father was racist.  There is no way to sugar-coat it.  He grew up in a homogeneous, Dutch, white community in Northwest Iowa, so he really only had been exposed to white, European Americans.  His perspective was also shaped by his religion, Protestant Calvinism, a religion that taught a “hierarchy in nature” with males at the top of this hierarchy, specifically Christian males, and more specifically white Christian males at the top.

My father was also a product of the American culture which segregated people on the basis of color, and labeled blacks as intellectually less capable and morally inferior.  Thus all the messages he got from his environment about people of color were negative.  He had little or no knowledge of the great accomplishments of Arab, African or Asian cultures throughout history.  He had little understanding of the genius of

moral giants like the brown-skinned, Indian man named Mahatma Gandhi or the black-skinned South African named Nelson Mandela.  

We have come a long way since the 60’s.  Most of us now understand that one’s skin color does not determine intellectual capability or moral strength.  Most of us don’t consider ourselves racist.  But ask any black person in this country if they are discriminated against on a daily basis and they will almost certainly say “Yes.” I believe much of our racism is unconscious, and today I want to talk to you about that.

Two summers ago I had an eye-opening experience while I was working as the Chaplain Administrator for the UCC at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, a place where I go to enjoy daily lectures and fine arts performances.  I had invited Ron, a delightful black man who works in our national UCC offices in Cleveland, to participate in our UCC program.  Ron is the person who dreamed up the whole “God is still speaking” advertising campaign that you see on our banners and such.  He is gregarious, funny, handsome and charming.  I was his host while he was a guest of the UCC, so we often had meals together.  One day, he and I decided to go to a little restaurant on the grounds for a quick dinner.  I was dressed in blue jeans, a knit UCC shirt, and a Harvard sweatshirt.  He said he needed 10 minutes to change. I said, “You don’t need to change clothes for this little diner—everyone here is on vacation and dresses very casually.”  But he insisted.  Soon he reappeared in khaki dress slacks, a neatly pressed shirt, and a navy blazer.   When I teased him a little about being so dressed up for Chautauqua, he said, “Oh, but I do need to dress up, even if the average Chautauqua vacationer does not.  As a black man, I don’t have the luxury of not worrying about my appearance.” And that began a dinner-length conversation about the overt racism that I had not even noticed during the week we had spent so much time together.  

While I had long been aware of how white the Chautauqua crowd is, I had not noticed that people’s facial expressions changed when they passed Ron on the sidewalk.  I had not seen the way they avoided sitting next to him in lectures, nor the cold stares that seemed to say, “What are YOU doing here?”  Ron spent the evening explaining why he takes such care to be impeccably dressed, even in casual settings, because people already have deeply rooted, negative stereotypes of black men, locked away in their subconscious.  Ron said, “The instant they see me, they assign to me my place and potential.  It’s all about how people assign meaning to me as a black man, that makes it so important how I look.”

He was right of course.   Studies show that we form instant opinions at first glance when we encounter someone new, and most of us don’t even know we are doing it.  As a black man with cultural stereotypes to overcome, being extremely neat and handsomely dressed was one way to help him overcome the disadvantage he was at, from the moment a stranger saw his black skin.   Being blond and fair-skinned already gave me an advantage, because their subconscious appraisal of me was automatically more positive, so I was free to dress more thoughtlessly.     

Shortly after that evening, I read Malcom Gladwell’s book entitled Blink.  In it, he  explains how we make subconscious snap judgments the moment we see a person, literally in the time it takes to blink. Without even knowing it, we allow our subconscious to make a value judgment, based on clues we don’t even realize we have observed, clues that are already attached to meaning.  He calls this snap judgment the “Warren Harding Error” because historians believe it’s what got Warren Harding elected President of the United States.

You see, Warren Harding was a strikingly handsome man. People would see him and they would instantly assume that he would be a great leader. Turns out he was arguably the worst President we have ever elected, although that remains to be seen. The evidence suggested he was going to be a horrible President, but people found his handsomeness and charm so instantly appealing, that this gave him a huge advantage.

The author of the book Blink provides samples of a test he has used with over 100,000 people, called the Implicit Association Test, or the IAT. This test uses a technique that measures the time it takes to sort a list of words into one of two columns. Each column is given two headings. So for instance the first column has the headings “Male or Career” and any words that relate to either of those two headings go in that column.  The other column has the headings “Female or Family”.   Words must then be sorted into the column that has a heading with which you associate the word.  So, e.g., the test-taker is given names like John or Holly and words like capitalist or laundry and asked to quickly put the name or word into the column they associate it with most closely.   They can quickly put John in the “Male or Career” column, and Holly into the “Female or Family” column.  Capitalist goes into the “Male or Career” column and laundry likely goes into the “Female or Family” column.  The test measures the time it takes to sort the terms into the columns.

Now here’s the part that’s important…the test is then taken again with the same four column headings mixed up.  They are rearranged into different pairings so that now the first column is “Male or Family” and the second column’s headings are “Female or Career”.   Suddenly, it is much harder for the test-taker to put words into the column headings they most closely associate with the word.  It’s harder to sort words because they no longer match both headings of a column the way we expect them to.   It shows that our culture has already built into us a subconscious association between “Male and Career” and between “Female and Family”.   When you rearrange those headings to read “Male and Family” and the other one to read “Female and Career” it gets harder to sort the names and words, and the timed test takes longer. 

Here’s the part of the test that is important to my talk today.  The test also uses the headings “European American or Good” in the first column and in the second column, “African American or Bad.”  Again, you have to sort terms into the two columns. The word “crime” for example is easily sorted into the column with the heading “Bad.”  Now when you’re done, you take the test again, but this time the headings are split and rearranged so the first column’s headings are now “European American or Bad” and the second column’s headings are now “African American or Good”.   It takes far longer for the test-taker to sort the words into columns when the headings are paired in unexpected ways.  Even people who believe that they are in no way racist can much more quickly assign words to the first set of headings than they can to the last set of headings.  The word “crime”, e.g, does it go into the column marked European American or Bad, or does the word “crime” go into the column marked African American or Good?  Of course it goes under the heading “Bad,” but it takes you longer to figure this out because the heading “Bad” is now paired with the heading “European American”, and we already subconsciously associate African American with Bad.  Do you see the disadvantage black people have before they even speak?  Before anyone even looks at a resume or application?

Now this presents a real problem for those of us who believe that God loves every person without preference to race or color, and to those who believe we are called by God to love our every neighbor as ourselves.  If our biases are unconscious, i.e. we aren’t even aware that we are thinking about color in negative ways, how on earth are we going to stop doing it? 

The good news is that there are ways to change our subconscious reactions.  The best way to change our subconscious reaction is to expose ourselves to positive associations with people who are a different color from us. For example, by studying the lives of Martin Luther King Jr. or Nelson Mandela we can prime ourselves to make a stronger association between African American and Good. By exposing ourselves to the best of other cultures we can actually reduce our subconscious bias against them. 

Gladwell, the author of the book Blink, proved this in his testing.  He found that no matter how many times a person took the race test, and no matter how hard they tried to respond faster to the unexpected pairings of categories, their score still showed a negative association with African American.  But if the test-taker looked over a series of pictures or positive articles about Dr. King or Nelson Mandela or Colin Powell, then they could much more quickly sort words into columns that paired African American with Good.  Suddenly it wasn’t so hard to associate positive words with African American. 

Gladwell wrote about a student who used to take his race test every day, thinking he would get better at making a positive association with African Americans, but he never did.  Until finally one day, he got a score that showed a positive association.  And he said, “That’s odd.  I’ve never gotten that before.”  And then he figured out why—he was a track and field fan and he’d spent the morning watching the Olympics—sports footage full of positive views of black athletes.  That experience helped him quickly assign positive words to the column labeled African American.

Gladwell says, “If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way—who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites—it requires more than a simple commitment to equality.  It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities [in positive ways] on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by… [unconscious] discomfort.”  (p. 97)

We can altar the way our first impressions bubble up from our unconscious.  Because our first impressions are generated by our experiences and environment, the best way to manage them is to change the experiences and environment that shape us.  That’s why it’s important for us to get involved in positive experiences with people of other races and religions.  I think if my father had known our Sudanese young men, Jacob and Chol, and had seen their courage, resilience, kindness and faithfulness, he would have reacted much differently to the civil rights movement.

Two texts from the Bible come to mind.  Paul wrote in the book of Galatians (3:28):  There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.  And from Ephesians: I beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.  There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling… one God and father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. (4:1-6) 

To shape your unconscious reactions, seek out positive experiences in which you get to spend time with people who are different in color and ethnic background from you—you can read to immigrant elementary students, or volunteer at LSS.   You can read biographies of moral leaders who are not white, like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Desmund Tutu, Nelson Mandela or even the Kurdish warrior Saladin, famous for his merciful acts as a Muslim warrior.

As a church, we can learn about the millions of moderate Muslims who contribute to peace and charity in the world, and that knowledge can help us form more positive images of Muslims, to counteract the pervasive negative ones we are getting from the media today.   These types of efforts will help to wash away some of the negativity that resides in our subconscious because of the culture in which we live. 

They will help us be part of building the kind of unity Jesus modeled in his life, in which he treated all persons, male or female, rich or poor, of any color or ethnic background as equal in the love of God.  May we aspire to do the same.  Amen.