I remember the first day I entered university, on my very first day of class I remember the instructor of the course asking us to reflect on who I am; to me, it sounds like a very silly question. How would someone find it hard to define who he/she is? However, after thinking for a few minutes I found that describing who I am in a few words is not easy at all, and that is due to not knowing who I am full. However, now I proudly can describe myself as Egyptian Muslim women who have lots of responsibility and duties towards my family, friends, and my community. I also would describe myself as an open book to those who want to look through it meanwhile, secretive and don’t like to express myself publicly. In addition, I would describe myself bias towards gender, family, friends, and behavior.
During our class discussion, I remember the doctor asking us to reflect on when we enter a conference do we go automatically to a certain group of people or we sit anywhere. To me, I automatically feel comfortable sitting next to ladies rather than sitting next to gentlemen that are due to my bias towards gender. However, my bias towards gender doesn’t make me downgrade them, nor treat them differently, nor act weird, but I feel more comfortable and understandable towards ladies than gentleman.
The fact that I know I am biased towards my family and friends makes me stand automatically towards them. However, recently instead of being biased towards them, I decided to stand totally against them and I started to lean more towards the other group of people. I believe this ideology helped me a lot from being slightly fairer to understand my friends and family behavior towards decisions/acts.
Moreover, I am biased towards behavior, as when I talk or to people I look to work with people sharing the same behaviors and the same culture of thinking. I know that this is very difficult to choose people based on their behavior but until now I cannot stop doing that. I don’t judge people based on behavior but I avoid those who are extremely the opposite. I am not saying that my behavior is the correct maybe their behavior is better than mine but I don’t know why I find it difficult to work with people with different behaviors,
I remember when I was a freshman I took with a very expert doctor in the field, however people said he was biased towards girls rather than boys, I said what how and I didn’t believe them. I decided to take this doctor because to me he is the perfect doctor that teaches this course. So, I registered the course and took with him, I never went to his office hours although my colleagues told me to go make the doctor notice who you are making the doctor loves you, and all what I was thinking how do people think that a doctor would change a grade of a students based on whether he loves her/him rather than his/her effort. Thus, I decided I will not go to his office hours and I worked hard on this course I took in the final 97% and my overall was 92.5% where I was 0.5% away from getting A. I didn’t email the doctor to round me up because I believe fair is fair but after the grades were up. I figured out that he rounded the class from 1 to 2 letter grades but he didn’t round me up. So, I was frustrated. I decided to talk to him and I said I heard you rounded the class one-two letter grades up but you didn’t round me. He replied you don’t deserve it. To me, it was my first time feeling how can a person be biased towards a certain group or certain behavior to that extent.
According to both our class discussion and Binna Kandola video on biases, I believe that most of my biases come from my parents as to when I was a child they used to teach me what is right and what is wrong according to their beliefs and cultural norms. In my opinion, I believe that each community or group of people have common biases as each community/group of people work with each other, interact with each other, gets to live with each other’s ideology, etc.
Moreover, when I described myself I said I am Egyptian because I hold Egyptian nationality and Egyptian culture. However, I also believe that I am German although I don’t have anyone of my family German nor do I have a German passport. According to Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local talk I agree that I don’t need to have the nationality to say I am from this country.
I conducted two IAT tests: one on Race (‘Black – White’ IAT), my result was “Your responses suggested a slight automatic preference for African Americans over European Americans.” and the second one was Arab-Muslim (‘Arab Muslim – Other People’ IAT) and my result was “Your responses suggested a slight automatic preference for Arab Muslims over Other People.” I believe doing the test in the first place was something weird and I believe that the results have no significance. My result towards race was favoring African Americans over European American, however, I believe that I don’t have a certain bias towards race and that I treat all races equally. In addition, I only know a few people who are African Americans as most of the people I know are European Americans. So, I believe if I have a certain bias towards race I would be biased towards European American rather than African American. On the other hand, my results toward Arab-Muslim I might have a slight bias towards Arab Muslim however, I believe that this test was not an indicator. As it was asking us names for Arabs and Non-Arabs, but because I am more knowledgable towards Arab’s names it was easier to click on Arabs names rather than Non-Arabs.
To conclude, I believe every human being is biased towards certain thing/s but how we deal with it and get over it is different. I should work more towards my biases and try to balance them. In addition, I need to read more about biases and how I can improve it because I am not knowledgeable about how to improve it.
imanyehia 