RACE & EQUAL HUMANITY • BELIEF • COURAGE & CHANGE
Learning to Unlearn
Sometimes what looks like stubbornness is fear of what we might lose if we admit we were wrong.
I was thinking about racism and the way old ideas manage to survive, even after people insist they are not racist anymore, and one phrase kept coming back to me: learning to unlearn. Because sometimes what looks like stubbornness is actually fear.
Not always. Some people know exactly what they believe and do not want to change it. Some people benefit from the way things are. Some people are simply hateful. We should not turn every act of racism into a misunderstanding and excuse the harm.
But I also think there are people holding on to old ideas because letting go feels like losing something much bigger than an argument. Maybe it means admitting that something your parents taught you was wrong. Maybe the history you learned in school was incomplete. Maybe somebody you respected said things you now realize were racist. Maybe a joke you laughed at was not harmless. Maybe the neighborhood your family warned you about was not dangerous for the reasons you were told. Maybe the people you learned to fear were never the problem.
That can shake more than an opinion. It can shake your picture of your family, your country and even yourself. And I think that is where stubbornness, fear and loss can get tangled together. Changing my mind may mean admitting that I treated somebody unfairly or repeated something harmful. It may mean reconsidering how I voted, hired, rented, taught or judged. That can be uncomfortable without making change a weakness.
No. I think refusing to look is the weaker choice. Ignorance is not the same thing as stupidity. We are all ignorant about something. It simply means there is something we do not know. None of us arrives in the world already understanding race, history, class, religion, gender, politics and every other complicated thing human beings have managed to build around themselves.
We learn. And that is exactly why racism is not only a question of who openly hates whom. Research on racial socialization shows that young people learn beliefs about race from families, peers, media and the world around them. A review first released online in 2024 describes those influences directly. Children are not raised in a vacuum. They notice who lives where, who is shown as dangerous, who is shown as successful, which groups appear in the news and what adults say or do not say about race.
One observational study of 646 White children between four and eight years old found an association worth examining. It did not establish that one explanation alone caused bias. Children who saw more racial inequality around them were more likely to show anti-Black bias when they explained those inequalities as coming from something inherent in the people themselves. Children who understood that outside conditions could produce inequality showed more egalitarian attitudes.
In Regular Joe language: children see differences and try to explain them. If nobody helps them understand how history, opportunity and institutions can shape those differences, they can come up with a much uglier explanation on their own.
That matters because adults do the same thing. We see a poor neighborhood and decide the people must be lazy. We see a higher arrest rate and decide the group must be more criminal. We hear somebody speak differently and decide they are less educated. We see somebody angry and decide they are dangerous. After enough repetition, an assumption can stop feeling like an assumption. It starts feeling like common sense.
That is the dangerous part. The hardest things to unlearn are often the things we do not remember learning. Nobody may have sat you down at the kitchen table and said, “Here is what you should believe about Black people.” It can happen through a thousand smaller lessons. A warning. A joke. A television character. A missing chapter in a history book. Who your parents trusted. Who they crossed the street to avoid. Which neighborhood they called “good.” Which person got described as “articulate” as though that were surprising.
Eventually those pieces can become a picture. Then somebody comes along years later and tells you the picture may be wrong. That can feel like loss. But losing an idea that was never true is not the same thing as losing yourself.
That is where strength comes in. Strength is not defending everything you have ever believed just because you have believed it for a long time. Strength is being able to look at new information without treating it as an attack on your identity.
And courage is the next step. Courage says: if I know better now, I have to do something with that knowledge. That might mean changing the way you speak. It might mean questioning a family story. It might mean reading the history you were never taught. It might mean admitting that something you once defended was wrong. It might mean noticing how you react to a Black person before you have enough information to judge them. It might mean listening without immediately preparing your defense.
None of that requires hating yourself. That is another place where I think we have made this conversation harder than it needs to be. If the only choices we offer people are “you are a good person who has never absorbed a racist idea” or “you are a racist and therefore a terrible person,” a lot of people are going to spend their energy proving they belong in the first category.
That does not teach anybody much. A better question might be: What did I learn, where did I learn it, and does the evidence still support it?
The science is not telling us that prejudice disappears because somebody attends one workshop or reads one article. A major review of prejudice-reduction research found that many quick, light-touch interventions have uncertain long-term effects. Later reviews identify evidence for meaningful contact and, in some organizational settings, changes to procedures and exposure to other people’s experiences. These results depend on the intervention and setting; they are not a guarantee that any training works.
That is useful because it keeps us from turning “unlearning” into another feel-good slogan. You do not undo generations of racial thinking with one diversity seminar. And racism is not only inside people's heads. Rules, procedures and institutions matter too. A person can sincerely believe they are fair while participating in a system that produces unequal treatment. So this is not simply about fixing attitudes and declaring victory.
It is about being willing to examine both the belief and the machinery around it. Stubbornness, fear and loss can keep us defending what feels familiar. Ignorance can explain what we did not know. Strength and courage matter when we know enough to reconsider it and change how we act.
Not because somebody shamed you into it. Not because you are responsible for everything people who look like you ever did. Not because you need to spend the rest of your life apologizing. Because truth should matter more than comfort.
Who is missing? Sometimes it is the person who was harmed by an assumption nobody thought was worth examining. Sometimes it is the child learning what race means from adults who insist race is never discussed in their home while teaching it in a hundred other ways. And sometimes the missing person is the adult who might actually change if we gave them room to say, without humiliation, “I learned that wrong.”
There has to be room for that sentence. Otherwise, what exactly are we asking people to do? Learning to unlearn does not mean erasing where you came from. It means deciding that inheritance alone is not enough reason to keep carrying something.
We inherit property. We inherit traditions. We inherit recipes, religions, stories, fears and explanations. Some of them are beautiful. Some of them kept people alive. Some of them are simply wrong. Growing up means learning the difference.
And maybe racial progress depends partly on whether enough of us are strong enough to admit that something can feel familiar, normal and deeply rooted and still need to be left behind. That is not weakness. That is what courage looks like when nobody is handing out medals for it.
Choose one assumption you repeat about another group. Write down where it came from, check it against credible evidence and the experiences of people affected, and change one decision you control. If you hire, rent, teach or supervise, examine the rule as well as your reaction. A private realization matters more when it changes how somebody is treated.
Ally = Action. 🪑
Receipts
1. Annual Review of Psychology, Racial Socialization in the United States
Review of family, peer, media and environmental influences on racial learning
2. PNAS, Developmental origins of anti-Black bias in White children in the United States
Observational study of 646 White children ages four through eight
3. Annual Review of Psychology, Prejudice Reduction: Progress and Challenges
Review of 418 experiments reported in 309 manuscripts
4. Human Resource Management Review, interventions against bias and discrimination in organizations
Systematic review of organizational interventions
5. Evaluation and Program Planning, Following the science to understand how to reduce prejudice
Review drawing on 2,515 peer-reviewed studies included in thirteen meta-analyses and systematic reviews
Verification and evidence notice
Verified research: Racial beliefs develop through multiple influences, including families, peers, media and observed social conditions. The cited child study reports associations and does not establish one universal cause of bias.
Limits: Evidence does not show that one workshop, conversation or personal realization eliminates prejudice. Intervention results depend on design and setting, and changing individual attitudes does not by itself repair discriminatory institutions.
Editorial interpretation: The argument that strength can include reconsidering an inherited belief is opinion grounded in the cited evidence, not a scientific finding about every person.