white people, the obvious solution is to change the law. But
unconscious discrimination is a little bit trickier. The voters in
1920 didn’t think they were being suckered by Warren
Harding’s good looks any more than Ayres’s Chicago car dealers
realized how egregiously they were cheating women and
minorities or boards of directors realize how absurdly biased
they are in favor of the tall. If something is happening outside
of awareness, how on earth do you fix it?
The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first
impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious — from
behind a locked door inside of our brain — but just because
something is outside of awareness doesn’t mean it’s outside of
control. It is true, for instance, that you can take the Race IAT
or the Career IAT as many times as you want and try as hard as
you can to respond faster to the more problematic categories,
and it won’t make a whit of difference. But, believe it or not, if,
before you take the IAT, I were to ask you to look over a series
of pictures or articles about people like Martin Luther King or
Nelson Mandela or Colin Powell, your reaction time would
change. Suddenly it won’t seem so hard to associate positive
things with black people. “I had a student who used to take the
IAT every day,” Banaji says. “It was the first thing he did, and