Shedding Light on Institutional Bias: The Jackson, MS.

Like many of you, I have been following the news of the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi with sadness. Over 150,000 people in Jackson, which is over 80% Black, are currently without safe access to drinking water. If this is not our current reality, it is horrifying to imagine… and yet, so many of us among our inescapable network of mutuality do not have to imagine it, because it is their reality. 

It is so easy to read stories like this and think: what could any individual do? What could I possibly have to offer amid such a world?

I’d like to offer two pieces of wisdom in this moment.

First, the Talmud teaches us: "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

Whenever we feel daunted by enormity, we can take this as a signal that now might be a good time to employ our PRISM toolkit. Tools like mindfulness and perspective-taking are an excellent first step in preventing the feeling of information overload or overwhelm that might come with learning more about stories that horrify us. 

How, though, might it look to do justly now? This leads us to the second piece of wisdom I’d offer you today. Many of our students have found that learning more about the operations of how this works can be helpful in the face of overwhelm. Sometimes, overwhelm shows up in our body when we don’t have the tools to understand and make meaning of a thing. In order to feel empowered to make social change, we have to understand what faces us.

Understanding Institutional Bias

In our flagship course, Breaking Racial Bias, we conceptualize three types of bias: internalized, interpersonal, and institutional – each with their own levers and manifestations. For most of us, institutional bias is the type that is most likely to elicit those feelings of shutting down in the face of too much and overwhelm. Even if we understand the language of race and antiracism, if we lack a nuanced understand of how bias works, we may find ourselves struggling to make meaning of information overload.

So today, I’d like to offer a theoretical understanding of exactly how these factors contributed to what is currently happening in Jackson, MS. My hope is that being able to understand vocabulary and a conceptual framework to what you’re reading about will help you to take the first step – learning – in our Learn/Develop/Propel framework.

Institutional bias has a number of manifestations, or ways it shows up in our society. One of these is through service delivery: when people-oriented institutions allow bias to seep into the ways that they provide services on behalf of others. In the example that the Jackson water crisis illuminates, we see this playing out by way of substantial municipal underinvestment in an 80%+ Black community. NPR reports that this issue is not sudden or unexpected: “At the root of the challenges in Jackson are decades of underinvestment in a sprawling water system made up of roughly 1,500 miles of water mains, some of which are over 100 years old.” 

Once you understand service delivery as an integral part of institutional bias, you understand a mechanism that explains how entire communities, like Jackson, MS, or Flint, MI, can get “left behind” from a structural standpoint, even if there are no individual “bad actors” consciously planning to do so.

In fact, there are many good actors in Jackson, organizing mutual aid projects as we speak. Which leads us to the most important piece: understanding how this mechanism can also provide insight into how we might respond to this news. 

Understanding service delivery as a manifestation of institutional bias highlights the importance of both institutions, which organize to provide services on a community level, and individuals who ultimately make up institutions. It helps us understand how institutions can fail to do good even when no individual within them acts badly – which, in turn, helps us understand the critical importance of educating and empowering individuals to actively do good within their institutions. Finally, it helps us understand that before any institution can be a part of social change, its individual members must have walked through the Learn/Develop/Propel framework in order to act, together, toward progress.

We know that this can be daunting. Now is also the time to remember that ultimately, we build communities because we do not have to – indeed, we cannot – do this work alone. I encourage you to spend time processing in your own communities. In addition, we’re happy to be part of your community. As you prioritize your own healing in pursuit of your antiracism journey, we invite you to learn in community with us by registering for our Breaking Bias Summit, or become a part of our Breaking Racial Bias program.

Wherever you are in the world, I offer you a wish of loving-kindness: may you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you live with ease.