What is Bias?
Bias is the unreasonable withholding or withdrawal of trust. Just as dark is the absence of light and cold is the absence of heat, bias is the absence of trust. But bias is not just untrustworthiness, it is an unreasonable lack of trust. Bias is when we treat trustworthy people as untrustworthy, as morally incompetent.
There are two kinds of injustice, Deprivation of Opportunity and Infiltration of Consciousness.
Deprivation is the formal or informal enforcement of unreasonable social expectations.
Infiltration is when victims internalize unreasonable expectations in order to survive.
When people become convinced of their own moral incompetence, discrimination doesn’t even have to occur; victims of Infiltration silence themselves. There has been no #MilitaryToo or #CamoLivesMatter because it is more intuitive to soldiers and veterans to use violence against themselves than to organize for themselves. The Military Improvement Association is a rallying point for rank and file military families and civilian allies to organize for political power and human dignity.
Civil rights are the political expression of human dignity. America has learned, slowly and not without pain, that people are not untrustworthy simply on the basis of such superficial characteristics as sex, color, religion, or gender. By enshrining those painful realizations in law, America continued its slow march toward “liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants.” If slavery is stealing the fruit of someone else’s labor while you watch them starve, then depriving military families of the full benefits of citizenship is an affront to our democracy because it rolls back the 13th Amendment by normalizing involuntary servitude.
