Implicit Bias In The Classroom

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This past Wednesday in class we delved into the topic of implicit bias and how it can affect both our professional and everyday lives. We were prompted to share intimate details about ourselves that I suspect that many of us had never shared before (at least not with other law students). We wrote our thoughts down on index cards, placed them into a bowl, and then our thoughts and feelings were read to the class by another student. The student reading the card was assigned the task of interpreting what the author was trying to convey.
Throughout the entirety of Wednesday’s class, all I could think to myself was that this is not what I expected that we would be doing. As I scanned the room the stunned expressions of my classmates indicated that this was a shared feeling. I fully anticipated a generic conversation where would all acknowledge that subliminal racism is bad and maybe come away with a few exercises that would help us to overcome our biases that would undoubtedly be forgotten in a couple of weeks In the seconds after each prompt that was announced, my mind went blank. I did not know what to write and I spent the majority of the time allotted speculating about what everyone else had written.
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I believe that this was because I was revealing information about myself that prior to Wednesday’s class, I would have never shared with another law student. Even though there was some degree of anonymity, in most cases it was not difficult to which cards belonged to who. Each time I saw my card being drawn from the bowl, I was overcome by a wave of crippling anxiety. I instantly regretted disclosing what I felt to be too much. I wondered how the reader would interpret my card and how the rest of the class would receive what I wrote. Feeling as though no one else in the room would be able to relate to what I’d written sent me into a