Activity 1.2 | Intersectionality and privilege

Bias, implicit bias, and the neuroscience of privilege

In Activity 1.1, you read that adrienne maree brown proposed, “What humans all want and need is safety, dignity, and belonging” (Weiss-Berman, 2024). With this in mind, we will explore bias, implicit bias, and the neuroscience of privilege in this activity.

By examining how bias patterns our thoughts and informs our behaviours, we can identify how our biases impact our perception of people who don’t look, think, or act like us as threats to our safety.

From a lens of developmentalism, we can think about bias in much the same way as we might identify schema. The human brain is in an ongoing process of assimilation and accommodation to make sense of the world. Our brains classify and sort information to navigate the world. This is largely innocent when we are identifying and categorizing a grocery list. It becomes more complicated when our brains classify people based on how similar or different people are from us, and it becomes dangerous when we begin classifying people as good, or bad, based on a set of criteria that is largely presumptuous, stereotypical, and unquestioned.

The podcast on this page discusses the work of anti-racism as a form of literacy. Shakil Choudhury explores systemic racism as a system of patterns, arguing that we can all learn to see these patterns, and expose their otherwise invisible structures.

Child care managers and leaders can use this knowledge to examine our own biases, to identify when we default to known patterns in the face of fear, and how we can call ourselves back into the parts of our brain capable of discernment, capable of holding duality, and most-useful for leading us beyond our habits of mind and into the imaginable unknown.

As you listen, remember to stay in your breath and stay curious about the narratives and fears that might surface: 

Listen to the Fierce Compassion Podcast (Choudhury, 2023) and take note of moments that challenge your thinking or reveal assumptions you may hold. Consider how the neuroscience of privilege and the concept of patterned thinking relate to your role as a leader in early childhood education. Where do you notice bias surfacing in your daily practice? How does it influence your decisions? What steps can you take to disrupt these patterns in support of safety, dignity, and belonging for all?

Reference

Choudhury, S. (2023, June 15). Episode 4: The neuroscience of privilege with Shakil Choudhury [Audio podcast episode]. In R. Manning & S. Peyton (Hosts), Fierce Compassion. Antiracist Conversations. https://antiracistconversations.com/fierce-compassion-podcast/

Privilege and Power

Knowing more about how bias and privilege wire our brains, and influence our behaviours, another crucial step towards understanding ourselves and our orientation to the world is to examine our own privilege and power. In this section we will be examining our own identities through a framework of intersectionality.

Kimberlé Crenshaw is a distinguished professor at the Columbia Law School and an advocate for Civil Rights. She coined the term, “intersectionality” as a framework to illuminate and analyze the ways that multiple factors of a person’s identity can overlap and intersect, and inform their likelihood of experiencing either disproportionate disparity or privilege, based on factors beyond their control.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work emerges from the United States, and yet, her framework of intersectionality applies in Canada. 

Weaving back to adrienne maree brown and Baratunde Thurston’s TED Talk, we can see how in both countries “founded through a genocidal, colonial act … it’s normal to live in an extremely violent, extremely unjust world” (TED, 2024, 11:02).

It’s time to say their names.

Spend some time researching the number of Indigenous People who have died in police custody in recent years.

        Keep breathing, and notice the implicit biases that arise.

Reference

Crenshaw, K. (2016, October). The urgency of intersectionality [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality 

Wheel of Power

This work of examining the ongoing impacts of colonial violence is not superfluous. This work is what is a requirement for ethical practices with children and families in BC in the 21st century.

In this next reflective practice, you will work with the framework of intersectionality to identify your power and privilege. This will support you as a child care manager and leader to practice in alignment with the ECEBC Code of Ethics (2021), specifically to “Explore our own perspectives, privileges, biases, and assumptions and how they impact our interactions with children, families, colleagues and community members” (p. 13).

The Canadian government provided the "Wheel of Privilege," a visual tool used to help individuals and groups understand different aspects of identity, such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, ability, and more. Spend some time in each category, identifying your positionality and reflecting on your position of power and privilege in relation to others:

Now, spend time reflecting on the word, power.

• Do you identify as a powerful leader?
• How does your experience of being powerful shift in different social situations?                    

Examine various categories of the wheel of power and privilege. Spend time thinking about different people in your life, with whom you are in caring relationships. How are they situated on this wheel? Use some visual marker to orient these people on this wheel (you might use dots or checkmarks to indicate where another person is situated). After you have located yourself, and others who you care about on this wheel, notice which areas of the wheel are less relative to you and to those whom you care about.

Given what you know about bias, how it forms as a pattern in the brain, and given that there are demographics of people whose experience is removed from your own relationships and ways of relating with the world, what can you discern?

Finally, based on this information:

• What commitments can you make to becoming more informed about a particular group of people?
• What do you need to make this learning possible? 
• Is there anyone that you can learn with?

As a learner, and a leader, how might you make your own learning journey visible so that you role-model opportunities for dismantling personal biases?

Keep in mind, this is not intended as a performative act. In encountering those whom we have positioned as “Others” we risk harming ourselves and others in our missteps. This step is intended to support you in taking a step on your personal journey to “strive toward an anti-racist, anti-oppressive framework from which to base all practice” (Early Childhood Educators of British Columbia, 2021, p. 14).

References

A Sense of Openness

Rukia Monique Rogers is the founder of Highlander School in Atlanta, Georgia. In this video, she talks about how her school is founded on a framework of values that upholds children as citizens, taking their ideas seriously in co-creating more-just worlds. She sees child care as spaces for living into values that exceed the status-quo, that respond to the members of our beloved communities, and that offer us all lived experiences of compassion and kinship that are required for the sustained work of advocacy.

In this video, Rukia Monique Rogers shares stories of practice that include children’s voices, acknowledging their necessary presence in social justice movements in the early years. Rukia Monique Rogers recognizes that children are wired for connection and that we must reflect on how we are all interconnected.

As you watch the video, notice your emotions. What stories invite you to open? A sense of openness can be marked by curiosity, or by having moving emotions. A sense of openness feels like being receptive. What stories make you uncomfortable? A sense of discomfort can be marked by noticing defensiveness, or inability to take in new information. 

In watching the video, practice using some of the tools that you have learned in this course so far: breathe, practice curiosity, exercise compassion. As the British Columbia Early Learning Framework (2019) reminds us:

"Listening or attending to the other person is not always comfortable. The words “attend,” and “tension” share a common root, tendere, which means, “to stretch.” To really attend to another or to pay attention to another person, we must stretch ourselves; we must really strain to listen, to see, to feel, it is not a casual process." (p. 48)

References

Rogers, R. M. (2023, January 31). Our Beloved Community: Supporting Children’s Compassion, Kinship and Activism [Video]. Exchange Press. https://hub.exchangepress.com/video/9395/ 

Calling Yourself In

To begin this activity, spend a moment reflecting on your own child care as a community. 

Would you say the term, “Beloved Community” reflects your child care’s values? And, what does the term “Beloved Community” mean to you?

Rukia Monique Rogers (2023) insists,“Our work was not to place [protest] signs in their hands at two-years of age, but to notice the ways in which they’re eager to be in relationship with each other and to reflect that, to offer that back to them” (11:03). 

• In what ways do you see children, families, and colleagues extending care, empathy, and illuminating our interconnectedness?
• How can you share these stories, and how can you invite a larger dialogue with your learning community by starting with the gifts that children bring?

In this course, we continue to hold duality, seeking new ways to understand ourselves and one another. We reject binary understandings of leadership that insist we have to be either firm or weak. Instead, we look to the gifts that early childhood educators bring, and we look at this incredible responsibility to change, to change systems, and to change ourselves and our relationships within these systems.

Childcare managers and leaders require humility. We have to acknowledge that we are stepping toward an uncertain future. We seek change in the name of co-creating futures in which human rights are upheld for all, regardless of race, age, ability, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, nationality, language, or presentation. This is a world unlike the one we were born into, and the world we inhabit today. We acknowledge that it requires not only love and compassion, but fierce courage.

• Rukia Monique Rogers shares that leaders within the Highlander School commit to year-long inquiries guided by a “Declaration of Intent”. As a child care manager and leader, what question can you carry forward from this course, and into your practice, that will support your ongoing ability to see and respond to the needs of the citizens in your child care, and in your community?

We can create a pedagogy that honours that citizenship, that honours their voice, that honours their kinship with each other and this earth. And it requires love. It requires care, but it requires a lot more than that. It requires us to stand up and take fierce action, to question every decision that we make within a classroom, to question the choices and who holds power. Whose voices are missing from our space (Rogers, 2023, 48:02)?

• What questions will you bring forward from this course to lead your ongoing professional growth and ethical accountability?

Capture your reflections in your journal.