Resources: Project Implicit is a free and anonymous test developed at Harvard University that helps individuals identify their own biases. Please click here to take the test.
As members of the drinking water sector, we hold an important role in protecting the health of our communities. In order to fully perform our jobs, it is crucial for us to understand the implications of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) on our work. This article will review implicit bias, its potential effects on our ability to protect public health, and tools to evaluate our own biases.
What is implicit bias?
The Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition’s Glossary of Equity and Inclusion Terms describes implicit bias as an “attitude or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions. People are usually unaware of their own biases because they operate at the subconscious level.” Our implicit biases can affect the way we treat people, the way we perform our jobs, and the way we engage with the world.
How does implicit bias affect our ability to protect public health?
Our implicit biases can lead us to think and act with a deficit mindset where we believe that “an individual’s deficiencies are solely determined by their cultural background and/or their own actions and behavior. When we are in this mindset, we can fail to recognize how the norms of a dominant group place barriers to success for oppressed groups because of their varied life experiences. Deficit mindset is often used in the context of the education system to describe when academic deficiencies in students of color are blamed on the students themselves or their communities rather than structural inequities.” (Adapted from Dismantling Deficit Thinking by Chelsea Heinbach, Brittany Paloma Fielder, Rosan Mitola and Emily Pattni).
How does deficit mindset play out in the work we do in the water sector?
It could look like regulators unfairly blaming underserved communities for their non-compliance on lack of attention or ignorance. These judgements omit the overarching structural barriers to success. Deficit mindset could also look like a drinking water operator or administrator failing to post a public notice or distribute important information about their water because they do not trust their customers to read or understand the documents. No matter the context, a deficit mindset does not take into account the full picture of societal and structural inequities. These assumptions of a personal or cultural flaw lead us to ignore deeper roots of issues and could potentially affect the way we treat people that are different from ourselves and result in a failure to protect the public health of those individuals and communities.
How are communities’ access to safe drinking water affected by inequity and implicit bias?
As members of the drinking water sector, we have a certain amount of power. Power in this case is defined as “our ability, as individuals and as communities, to produce an intended effect. Power manifests itself in both positive and negative ways and shows up formally and informally.” Our intended effect is to protect the public health of all Coloradoans by providing safe drinking water. We hold specific roles in our industry that give us the ability to produce this intended effect: operators, scientists, administrators, regulators, teachers, decision makers, board members, managers, and enforcers. If we allow our implicit biases to go unchecked, they begin to affect the way in which we are meeting our common goal of protecting public health by providing safe drinking water. This can have the negative effect of prioritizing the health of some groups of people over others.
Two reports released in 2019 give us some insight into the effects of the systematic and individual manifestations of our implicit biases:
1. Closing the Water Gap in the United States was published in November 2019 and co-authored by Dig Deep and U.S. Water alliance. Here are some of the key findings:
- Race is still the strongest determinant of access to safe drinking water.
- More than 2 million people in the U.S and Puerto Rico do not have access to water and basic indoor plumbing.
- Latino and African American households are twice as likely as white households to lack indoor plumbing. Native Americans are 19 times more likely to lack indoor plumbing.
- To move these 2 million people out of the water gap will require:
- Partnership between water providers, governments, communities, and community organizations
- Flexible funding methods to fund infrastructure projects
2. Watered Down Justice was published in September of 2019 and co-authored by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Coming Clean, and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance (EJHA). Here are some of the key findings from the report:
- NRDC, EJHA, and Coming Clean conducted an analysis of the approximately 50,000 active community water systems in the country and sociodemographic factors such as race and income.
- The data from June 1, 2016, to May 31, 2019, included nearly 200,000 violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act, the federal law.
- Drinking water systems that constantly violated the law for years were 40 percent more likely to occur in places with higher percentages of residents who were people of color.
- All levels of government have failed to invest and enact policies to protect underserved populations. This segregation and discrimination has led to aging, underdeveloped, and underfunded water infrastructure in water systems serving populations of color and low-income communities.
- Nearly 130 million people in the U.S. got their drinking water from systems that violated federal law during the time period reviewed in this report.
- Small systems (those that serve less than 3,300 people) were responsible for more than 80% of all violations. The EPA has noted many small systems are “likely to serve low-income, vulnerable populations.”
- Dysfunction of the drinking water law leaves millions nationwide potentially exposed to unsafe water, whether it’s because some dangerous contaminants are not regulated or because some systems simply do not report any data at all.
Below is a statement from the CDPHE Office of Health Equity:
“The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment acknowledges that long-standing systemic racism, including economic and environmental injustice, has created conditions that negatively affect marginalized communities, particularly people of color. These conditions, which limit opportunities for optimal health and influence individual behaviors, are critical predictors of health outcomes. To realize a future where all Coloradans can thrive, we must be leaders in undoing policies and practices that have contributed to these inequities”.
What can we do to keep our implicit biases from affecting our ability to protect the public health of all Coloradans?
The first step of keeping our implicit biases from affecting our work is to identify our own personal biases. This is a process of soul searching and looking objectively at our own behaviors. By removing judgment of ourselves we can see our actions, attitudes, and behaviors more clearly. This allows us to understand how our biases take root in our lives. A great tool to start the process of identifying personal biases is Project Implicit. Project Implicit is a free and anonymous test developed at Harvard University that helps individuals identify their own biases. Please click here to take the test. Additionally, working to better understand issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion can help us understand why this work is so important and how we can manifest the principles in our personal and professional lives.
