I’ll never forget the cold shock that hit me when the results of the Harvard Implicit Association Test flashed across the screen. I had gone in with such a smug sense of confidence, honestly expecting to be in the tiny percentage of people who registered as neutral or even, dare I hope, pro-people of color. I mean, my entire professional life is steeped in anti-racism work; I chair a program dedicated to Decentering Whiteness in the church, and the people I love and trust most in the world are predominantly people of color. The sheer irony of the outcome - a clear, unconscious preference for my own racial group - was a physical gut punch. It wasn't just a slight leaning; it was a measurable, persistent bias that contradicted every single value I consciously hold. It forced me to realize that being a committed anti-racist isn’t a state of being you achieve; it’s an active, daily maintenance job against a lifetime of cultural programming.
My immediate response was a wave of shame and self-recrimination. How could I possibly be leading this work when my own internal engine was running on bigoted fuel? That’s where the first critical step toward self-compassion had to begin: separating the act from the actor. The test didn’t reveal that I was a malicious person; it revealed that I was a functional product of the society I was born into. It was a societal wound inflicted on me - the normalization of whiteness as the default, the background noise of superiority that seeped in over decades through media, education, and social structures. To hold onto the shame would have been to accept that the bias defined me, rather than recognizing it as a piece of defective software installed by my environment. Giving myself grace to acknowledge, "Yes, this bias lives here, and it’s not my fault it was installed, but it is my responsibility to uninstall it," was the only path forward. That acceptance allowed me to stop fighting the reality of the bias and start fighting its influence.
This new level of self-compassion immediately flowed outward. Before the test, I might have judged others - both white people and people of color - who displayed internalized or implicit biases as either intentionally ignorant or insufficiently committed to the work. Now, when I see bias in others, especially within the church and the Decentering Whiteness program, my first thought is no longer one of condemnation. Instead, I feel deep empathy. If I, with all my conscious commitment and access to resources, still harbor this persistent ghost in the machine, how much more pervasive must it be for everyone else who hasn't had the luxury or necessity of staring it down?
It shifted my entire approach to accountability. The work isn't about shaming people into perfection; it’s about acknowledging that every single one of us is swimming in this contaminated water, and the goal is to continuously cleanse ourselves. This awareness dismantles my own internal arrogance. It keeps me humble in the program I lead because I can truthfully say, "I know exactly how hard this is. I just failed the test myself." My job is not to stand above them as a perfect example, but to stand beside them as a co-conspirator against the forces of internalized white supremacy. That shared vulnerability is what builds real trust and facilitates genuine change.
Ultimately, recognizing this implicit racial bias has turned my compassion into a dynamic force rather than a static emotion. It is a daily commitment to vigilance and repair. It is compassion toward self because I understand that fighting cultural programming is a marathon, not a sprint, and small backslides don't negate the commitment. And it is compassion toward others because I realize their biases, too, are often the unintended, tragic inheritance of a profoundly unjust culture. This awareness doesn't just make me a better anti-racist; it makes me a more grounded, patient, and merciful human being, capable of seeing the system’s imprint on all of us rather than just the individual’s moral failure. My heart is softer now, both for the flawed person looking back in the mirror and for everyone else doing the messy, difficult work of becoming truly free.
