501 Quotes About Bias

The political media is biased, but not toward the Left or Right so much as toward loud, outrageous, colorful, inspirational, confrontational. It is biased toward the political stories and figures who activate our identities, because it is biased toward and dependent on the fraction of the country with the most intense political identities.

Equality says we treat everyone the same, regardless of headwinds or tailwinds. Equity says we give people what they need to have the same access and opportunities as others, taking into account the headwinds they face, which may mean differential treatment for some groups.

Challenge yourself to hear their experience without questioning its expression. Avoid being the tone police.

Demagoguery is powerfully reduced when it stops getting people elected, and that usually happens because of in-group policing. Similarly, when it isn't profitable for a media outlet to engage in demagoguery, it won't, and that happens when its target market declines to put up with it. Individual demagogues are best stopped by in-group condemnation, and particular strains of demagoguery are generally ended by public shaming.

If you are in the sun and I am in the rain, why is it divisive for me to point out this difference? What is really divisive is telling someone who is standing in the rain that it is not raining.

[Walter Lippmann] applied the term “stereotype” to what he called “the pictures in our heads”—impressions that reflect subjective perceptions but stand in for objective reality. The word comes from the old typesetting process, in which a mold of a message is cast on a metal plate and replicated in the printing process again and again—mimicking the unchecked spread of ideas that we only presume to be true. Those ideas then dictate how we interpret what we see.

Blacks routinely get the worst of it in the judicial process, particularly when they are poor...The United States sentencing commission found that blacks get sentences 19% longer than whites do, for the same offense, even after controlling for criminal history and other variables. The darker an African-American's complexion, the longer the sentence, researchers found. Blacks are also more likely to be found guilty and be sentenced to death.

Being a feminist means believing that every woman should be able to use her voice and pursue her potential, and that women and men should all work together to take down the barriers and end the biases that still hold women back.

The syntax of prejudice—threaded into conversation with the perfect pauses and facial expressions—was like ciphers and spy codes. The meaning clear to those it was meant for. To everyone else, it was harmless scribbles. Easy enough to deny.