Bias By Us: How Not Knowing That We Don't Know Causes Known Harm

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Dannys

,

Marilyn Harrington

,

Russ Bennett

, and many others for tuning into my live video with

Pedro Senhorinha Silva

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Summary

Pedro Senhorinha Silva recounts how his Cape Verdean heritage, Black identity, and Portuguese name made him an outsider in the U.S. South, revealing how racial, ethnic, and national labels intertwine to maintain white‑supremacist hierarchies and sow division within the African diaspora.

• Silva describes being taunted with “Go back to Mexico,” illustrating how ignorance weaponizes xenophobia against anyone who fails to fit rigid racial boxes.

• He explains how white institutions often elevate immigrant Blacks over African Americans to fracture potential multiracial, working‑class solidarity.

• Neuroscience insights show bias originates in the amygdala’s survival reflex and can be rewired only through sustained cross‑cultural exposure and critical self‑reflection.

• Personal anecdotes—from school forms offering only “Black” or “White” to strategic pranks that expose double standards—demonstrate how racist norms police public space.

• Both host and guest emphasize that dismantling bias is a prerequisite to confronting larger structural injustices, urging readers to seek curiosity over fear.

From a progressive vantage, the dialogue underscores that liberation depends on rejecting any “get‑out‑of‑Blackness‑free card,” building solidarity across the diaspora, and pairing individual empathy with systemic reform so that shared humanity outweighs the narrow privileges white supremacy doles out to keep workers divided.

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Pedro Senhorinha Silva’s conversation with Politics Done Right does more than recount personal slights; it exposes a structural labyrinth that traps individuals inside artificial categories and pits members of the same African diaspora against one another. In narrating playground chants of “Pedro, go back to Mexico,” Silva illustrates an old American reflex: when the dominant culture cannot place Blackness inside its rigid boxes, it retreats to xenophobic caricature. The result is a cruelty that pares identity down to skin tone, surname, or accent and then weaponizes those fragments to police the boundaries of belonging. Silva’s essay, “Bias By Us: How Not Knowing That We Don't Know Causes Known Harm,” and interview insist that this policing—whether it springs from white supremacy, intracommunity colorism, or immigrant respectability politics—remains a learned, not innate, response. Because it is learned, it can be unlearned; because it is structured, it can be dismantled.

That claim finds empirical support in the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling project “The Bias Inside Us,” which opens with the blunt reminder: “If you’re human, you’re biased.” Drawing on cognitive science, the exhibition demonstrates that bias forms through ordinary neurological shortcuts, then hardens into social hierarchy unless people actively disrupt it. Community dialogue, the curators maintain, can “help individuals understand and counter their implicit bias and help communities thrive through conversation and greater understanding.” Silva’s life mirrors the exhibit’s thesis: encounters with students who reduced him to a caricature shrank his classmates’ moral imaginations—and, by extension, their world.

Neuroscience explains why those assumptions feel so automatic. The amygdala—the fight‑or‑flight alarm bell—reaches functional maturity before birth, while the prefrontal cortex, which governs executive reasoning, continues wiring itself through a person’s mid‑twenties. During adolescence, the brain “rewires itself… especially in the prefrontal cortex,” priming individuals to entrench reflexive fears or replace them with more nuanced judgments. When children are marinated in media portraying darker skin as dangerous and accents as alien, the amygdala stores that fear. Only sustained, diverse experiences give the prefrontal cortex enough counter‑evidence to override the false alarm. Silva’s strategy—forcing onlookers to confront their discomfort when he spoke in a made‑up language or clutched his bag in mock alarm—breaks the feedback loop that bias depends on: familiarity breeds empathy, but shock can jolt prejudice into self‑awareness.