Week 11 post 2

 Implicit bias is characterized as the unaware bias that individuals possess, which establishes internal preferences for particular people or groups. Implicit bias impacts everyday actions as well as the serious things such as whom we vote for and how humans react in dangerous situations. People with higher implicit bias against black                 individuals, for precedent, are more likely to assume that black people are violent and therefore these people will act irrationally aggressive towards them. Some days this bias merely appears to be rude, and other days, this causes innocent people to be murdered. Though its everyday effects are highly variant, implicit bias’s potential danger proves how crucial it is to fight it from the inside out. Prejudice is not something we can evade; it is a built-in mechanism that individuals possess to defend themselves from danger and tarnation of reputation. To fight implicit bias, we must learn how to unlearn. The greatest difficulty with this, however, is just getting people to recognize their prejudices. To unlearn our negative implicit bias, we need empathy. Empathy is the single most crucial tool in combating implicit bias because it allows people to understand lives that they have never lived and the effects of history that they have never felt. In a 2008 study, people who documented more frequent interactions between minority groups such as those who belong to LGBTQ+ and BIPOC, these people displayed more agreeable, rational behavior towards these people. This is because as they get to know these people whose identity varies from their own, they can empathize with them, thus decreasing the negative stereotypes they believed that created their implicit bias in the first place.
As society tries to move forward, it is going to become about a race towards empathy, whether people realize it or not. It is going to become a race towards empathy because the happiest, most prosperous countries, have implemented strong social welfare programs that display empathy on a national level, proving how outdated and unfulfilling competitive strictly capitalist societies can be. Frans de Waal and Jeremy Rifkin, both globally accredited for their work pertaining to empathy, claim that empathy engages parts of the brain that are more than a hundred million years old. Both heavily use their analysis to call attention to the political implications of this. If empathy has deep natural roots and is proven to produce happier societies, how can it be logical to hold competitive Darwinism higher? The truth is that this could be widespread knowledge should the richest of the rich not consume the media that so many people consume today.