Speaker 1: Medical City Dallas MedicalCityHospital.com Medical City Dallas MedicalCityHospital.com Medical City Dallas Medical City Dallas Medical City Dallas When you look at who are the kids that are getting excluded, who are the kids that are getting shamed, who are the kids that are getting punished, it's disproportionately children of color. It's disproportionately children who are struggling to belong, who are not feeling connected, or who are made to not feel like they belong because of the differences they have in the way they look, the way they think, the way they feel, the way they believe, the accent they have, the clothes they wear. So when we're growing up, when we're little infants and we're trying to make sense out of the world, as we talked about before, one of the most important aspects of that is making sense out of the relational world. Who are these people that are raising me? And so your brain begins to catalog the language of your caregivers, it catalogs the clothes, the food, the smells, just all of the aspects of your people's culture. And this creates this literally set of memories in your brain, what we call associations, connections. And all parts of your brain, as they're organizing, are influenced by your cultural and developmental experiences with people. The beauty of this is that it creates this worldview that you can then use in your interactions with others. Now, the double-edged sword of this, however, is that those biological mechanisms were evolving in very small groups. And one of the things about our species that this is a really hard thing to think about, but it's true. The major predators of human beings have always been other human beings. And that's still true today. So there's a part of our neurobiology of relationships that is intended to search out and find people that are part of your group, your community, your clan. There are parts of our brain that are always trying to get us to think about, do we belong? Do we fit in? Do they like that? Is that good? And that's very important. But there's also part of our brain that's always searching out for relational signals or cues that suggest that there's others, someone different from our clan. And so when your brain is presented with somebody who has attributes that are very different from what your brain grew up with, the default response of that is to activate your stress response. And as you know, when you activate your stress response, that shuts down the top part of your cortex. And so you become less rational. You become less reflective. You think less about the past. You think less about the future. You sort of focus on the moment. You get more concrete. And this is a core element of what we call implicit bias. So whether you realize it or not, when you are interacting with somebody who's not in your clan, your brain will change the way it processes the information that's coming in. And in some ways, distort it. So this is something that we all have in our brain. And we do it not just with skin color or language or culture. We do it with all kinds of things. People have implicit biases if they grew up in a house where the family values music and music and music and music and there were no athletes. And so they'll have an implicit bias against athletes. And people, if you grew up in a house where everybody is into athletics and they don't know anything about music, you develop an implicit bias about those that play the flute in the band. This is just part of the way the brain works. And if you understand that, you can start to basically erase some of those biases by intentionally spending time with people who are different from you. Who will help you see that there are similarities in the way we think, feel and behave. Even though there are differences in certain aspects of the way we see the world and enjoy the world. Kind of like I was talking about earlier about developing respect. So this double-edged sword is something that we really have to negotiate in a diverse culture. You know, this never used to be a problem in a lot of human living groups because everybody was so homogeneous. I mean, if you grew up in an environment where everybody was the same as you and nobody traveled and there was no interactions with people who had different values, beliefs, religious practices and so forth, this would not have been a big issue. But as the world has grown and grown and grown and humankind has changed, we have so many more cultures and different kinds of world views that are being brought into the same space, into the same communities, into the same classroom. And so we need to figure out how to face head-on our implicit biases about things, about differences, in ways that help us see them and celebrate them rather than be afraid of them. Because in reality, biological systems are healthier when they're diverse. If you know anything about animal ecology or animal behavior, you know that when the ecosystem starts to get more homogeneous, it becomes highly vulnerable. So the most healthy ecosystem in biology is a diverse ecosystem. It's the same thing with human living groups. We are much healthier when we celebrate our diversity and take advantage of the multiple strengths that reside across cultures as opposed to thinking that only one culture, one worldview, one perspective is going to solve every problem at every time in history under every conditions. So diversity is strength, but we really need to be explicit in helping people understand why we have these implicit biases, why they're inevitable, and then how to work around them so that we can grow beyond them.