Activity 1.2 | Intersectionality and 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/