Bentley Gibson had magical powers as a princess from another planet.
At least, that’s how the 5-year-old Black girl presented herself to a sea of White classmates in White Plains, N.Y. on the first day of school. She sensed that they seemed to regard her as different, and make-believe was her mechanism for coping with the racial tension and subtle prejudice she would encounter not only during that school year but well into the future.
In college, she developed a passion for researching and studying implicit racial biases, the subconscious and unconscious prejudices and negative stereotypes that everyone has and that often lead to inaccurate assumptions about and discriminatory treatment of other people.
Today, Dr. Gibson is founder and chief executive officer of The Bias Adjuster consultancy, and a sought-after trainer on the topic of implicit racial bias who uses creative, research-based strategies to help educational institutions and other groups understand and address an issue that has become a national topic in discussions about race and equity.
“I’m in the trenches with this stuff,” said Gibson, an assistant professor of psychology at Georgia Highlands College. “You’re not going to get rid of implicit bias in everybody, but there is research out there that shows that eliminating it can be done. Attitudes and behaviors can be changed if people get the right strategies. A lot of strategies being used now are not research-based. That’s why it keeps happening over and over and over. We repeat the cycle over and over.”
Gibson said she has seen improvements in attitudes of participants immediately after her trainings. She conducts pre-testing and post-testing, and during sessions introduces participants – who typically are skeptical – to historical and modern information that often is new to them. She trains people of various ages and racial backgrounds who tend to – unknowingly – possess similar pro-white and anti-Black implicit biases.
Her passion and perspective are informed by a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Spelman College, a master’s and a doctoral degree in cognition and developmental psychology from Emory University, parents who experienced Jim Crow and a father who was the first Black student to graduate from his integrated high school and is extremely perceptive of racial bias.
