Today I took the Harvard Implicit Bias Test on “race”, an online test that is supposed to determine your beliefs based on your natural reactions. After taking the test, which indicates if you have a bias to a certain race over another, my results were: “Your responses suggested a moderate automatic preference for African Americans over European Americans.” While I definitely don’t disagree, as I feel like I get frustrated and disappointed in my own race often (I am a Caucasian), this was surprising to me. The only reason is because people are generally naturally biased to the group that they identify with, just because they can relate and connect with them more based on culture and history. I was expecting to get results that indicated that I preferred African Americans and European Americans equally, because that’s what I genuinely believe to be my truth. As I mentioned, I don’t entirely disagree with the actual results because I do feel like I view European Americans as colder people generally and even more hateful at times than African Americans. Based on the past and the way Caucasians treat others in our current society, I do end up associating negative words with them over African Americans. When comparing my results with others who took the implicit bias test, I saw that 27% of participants felt moderately biased towards European Americans over African Americans, while only 5% of participants felt the opposite. This was originally shocking to me, but then I took into account that around 76.5% of Americans are Caucasian, according to the United States Census Bureau. This goes to show my original thought is true, which is that people naturally feel more comfortable or more inclined to prefer the group that they belong to due to relatability and experience.

Rule #1 of the 2018 Multicultural Intelligence book breaks down the concept of MQ, or Multicultural Intelligence. The textbook shows that the way to indicate the level of a PR company’s or bosses’ multicultural intelligence is to ask the questions: What percentage of your employees owns a passport and has visited a foreign country in the last three years? How many speak a language in addition to English? Does your company offer diversity training? Do you have a multicultural advertising agency? Personally, if I were working for a PR agency that was closely monitoring their success based off of these questions, I think I would contribute positively to the goal of achieving a high MQ. I have visited a foreign country in the last three years and I know a good amount of Spanish and French. Additionally, I attended a very diverse high school in a very diverse area (10 minutes outside of Philadelphia), and have been exposed to an environment with numerous walks of life interacting and building friendships. This was definitely the moment in my life when I realized different races from your own were not just a concept you read in a textbook– this is real life and they are all around you, wanting and working for the same things as you (in my case, a high school diploma). This has also been so eye opening for me, as when I entered college I encountered so many people that went to a primarily white high school, who were not used to seeing different races in their educational space. It makes me appreciate my experience at my high school so much more because I got to see what the real world is actually like in just one building at the age of 15, which not many people can say. Some improvements I would make would be to travel to more foreign environments instead of just interacting with people from different cultures in an environment I am used to. I feel that traveling and immersing myself in their culture and trying to learn their language is the best way to raise my multicultural intelligence.