Indeed, a classic example of bias is to refuse to discuss race information explicitly in selection deliberations.
If you see people refusing to consider information given to them, it's a signal, and it's implications may be less altruistic than they want you to believe. Perhaps more than they want to believe themselves.
One of the most compelling examples of this I've seen was in a selection board procedure where there were simply no black applicants (from a field of potential applicants roughly 5-7% black). This was at a service academy, the board was selecting for student leadership positions. The board members were senior officers of the military (hate the military all you like, but considered opinions have generally held the military up as a model of integrative practices done right).
After selections were made, the demographics of the selectees and the pool were compared. The glaring absence of blacks was deemed a problem by everyone on the board. In prior boards, the white people on the board would have immediately moved to revote with the explicit intent of elevating more blacks into leadership positions. This was simply not possible, there were no black applicants. A black woman who happened to be on the board (who was highly accomplished) was deeply concerned and moved to reconvene after she could review the entire field of potential black applicants.
A week later the board reconvened and she said she simply could not find a black student she would recommend. The anguish in her face stays with me 15 years later. She felt that the black students who might qualify on other grounds were on shaky academic ground and she felt it was her duty to make sure they had the best possible chance of graduating.
To some extent it is surely a tale of small numbers (higher variance in smaller populations leads to sad stories like this) but if there is a person capable of understanding the problem, I would think a black female computer scientist with a lifetime in government would understand. And she was clearly troubled.
You can easily imagine the other version of this story, where one or a few black students had applied and not been selected. The white majority would have quickly added one or more of them to the student leadership coalition, and the black woman's minority opinion would have been drowned out in a simple majority vote.
What I see now, I think, some years removed, is the routine, callous use of blacks by whites to avoid confronting their racist tendencies in the usual board setting. Indeed, out of the many boards I participated it, it was this one instance where the absence of black students forced everyone to acknowledge the black leader's opinion carried weight.
If you see people refusing to consider information given to them, it's a signal, and it's implications may be less altruistic than they want you to believe. Perhaps more than they want to believe themselves.
One of the most compelling examples of this I've seen was in a selection board procedure where there were simply no black applicants (from a field of potential applicants roughly 5-7% black). This was at a service academy, the board was selecting for student leadership positions. The board members were senior officers of the military (hate the military all you like, but considered opinions have generally held the military up as a model of integrative practices done right).
After selections were made, the demographics of the selectees and the pool were compared. The glaring absence of blacks was deemed a problem by everyone on the board. In prior boards, the white people on the board would have immediately moved to revote with the explicit intent of elevating more blacks into leadership positions. This was simply not possible, there were no black applicants. A black woman who happened to be on the board (who was highly accomplished) was deeply concerned and moved to reconvene after she could review the entire field of potential black applicants.
A week later the board reconvened and she said she simply could not find a black student she would recommend. The anguish in her face stays with me 15 years later. She felt that the black students who might qualify on other grounds were on shaky academic ground and she felt it was her duty to make sure they had the best possible chance of graduating.
To some extent it is surely a tale of small numbers (higher variance in smaller populations leads to sad stories like this) but if there is a person capable of understanding the problem, I would think a black female computer scientist with a lifetime in government would understand. And she was clearly troubled.
You can easily imagine the other version of this story, where one or a few black students had applied and not been selected. The white majority would have quickly added one or more of them to the student leadership coalition, and the black woman's minority opinion would have been drowned out in a simple majority vote.
What I see now, I think, some years removed, is the routine, callous use of blacks by whites to avoid confronting their racist tendencies in the usual board setting. Indeed, out of the many boards I participated it, it was this one instance where the absence of black students forced everyone to acknowledge the black leader's opinion carried weight.