#implicit bias

Yall will write these long horny posts and always make sure to use “small, tiny” and other descriptors, and don’t get me started on using “pink” to describe EVERYTHING!

Black men if you want to vent your rage at a violent apathetic and IRRESPONSIBLE portrayal of the black man as a monster in film...

Backrooms is your movie , not Is God Is.

Is God Is has black men who are sympathetic.

Is God Is has black men who aid the black women on their journey (albeit begrudgingly)

Is God Is has more than one black person in it (and more than one black man) 🙄

Is God Is has black women who are also villains

Is God Is was made by a black woman with an entirely black cast for black people.

I haven't looked up the creators of Backrooms yet, but I'd bet serious money it was an assortment of white guys.

⚠️Spoiler warning for this fuckass movie (like the whole ending I don't give a shit) ⚠️

My friend told me after we left that based on the YouTube property and the game the original monster was called the LifeForm and it was a bunch of wires

IN THE MOVIE IT'S LITERALLY A GIANT PEOPLE EATING PUPPET VERSION OF CHIWETEL EJGIFOR!!

IT'S HIS WHOLE FUCKING FACE!!!

Oh and also they make the BLACK MAN become randomly cannibalistic?!! And the only person we see him attempt to eat is surprise A WHITE MAN! (or like a stuffing version of him.. y'all I don't fucking know) White people literally have a history of eating US not the other way around who wrote this shit?!!!!!

Also I shit you not the entire climax of this movie revolves around a giant man-eating pirate puppet thing (with a white man underneath btw) that has CHIWETEL EJGIFOR'S (a black man) FACE

trying to eat a white woman................

WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUCK?!!!!

Oh and the lesson the black man learns is that he was destined to be a miserable person because he hurts people didn't want to change (he's also a divorcee with a white wife....I don't need to say anything).

And the white woman gives up on him (she's his therapist) and learns she can't save everybody

😤

Listen ,

Is God Is tells the REAL experiences that black women have within our community while also not absolving the community (including other black women) of its tendency to protect and coddle abusers who hurt our community. It's trying to actually start a conversation, not demonize.

Backrooms is a fantasy psychological thriller that puts white men's evil and irrational fears (based on their own made up fucking narratives usually reflecting their own history) about black men on a fifty foot screen. Every harmful stereotype and every disturbing distortion is done purely for shock value and a dollar.

All for a "and the cycle will just continue 😵‍💫" ass ending.

I'm so glad I didn't pay for this shit.

I feel dirty

I didn’t hear one lie…….

Conformity bias is a type of implicit bias in which you align your beliefs with those of a group, often without first evaluating them yourself. So if all of your friends hate someone, you’re more likely to hate them yourself, even if you have no idea why or wouldn’t ordinarily find their transgressions to be that bad.

This is obviously super common within fandoms. All your mutuals hate one guy, they tell you consistently about all the things they hate about them, and without realizing what you’re doing, you might just follow suit. We all do it to some extent, because we’re naturally social creatures, and fitting in is one of the ways we connect with people.

And sure. It’s just fandom, it’s just celebrities, it’s just the internet. But making a habit of not examining your implicit biases and not thinking critically about them can have genuine negative impacts on your real life.

As someone who's working on their TADC reimagining, I found myself easily falling into the same writing troubles of the show.

Centering the main storylines around the men, a lack of exploration of interpersonal relationships outside of my favorite characters, Queenie and Ribbit still only being angst bait until recently, and prioritizing an overarching plot instead of filler too.

I just point this out because as easy as it is to acknowledge and critique the show's implicit bias towards its female, POC characters, and preference for dramatic themes; it is just as easy to reaffirm that biases in your own work, notably if you aren't as critical and self-aware of your rewrites compared to the show.

so this actually touches on something I've been talking about for a while: implicit bias

I was first introduced to this concept of the separation of hemispheres & how that impacts your cognition specifically, in an intro psych class a few years ago. this particular professor had a lot of experience with stroke victims and deficits neurocognitive, and naturally, being that I'm at a private university where non-standard curriculum is the norm more often than not, about half of this intro psychology class was about neuroscience and neurocognitive deficits (and how that relates to psychology).

we think about our conscious brains as being the Thing that drives all of our brain's machinery, at least as far as non-automatic processes. we can recognize that there are parts of the brain that do things to maintain our bodily functions that are not under our control (like your heart beating, breathing while you're asleep, most reflexes, etc.), but we ultimately believe that anything we use thoughts to dictate are things that are under our conscious control (and therefore our willpower can be used against them, if desired). and, to some degree, this isn't particularly false in most cases. it's true that you need to tell your brain to grab the glass of water and drink from it. it's true that you can think. it's true that words coming from your mouth first went through some degree of conscious awareness, assuming you're neurotypical. on a functional level, it is true insofar as you need it to be true. it is often beneficial to think this way, for most people.

however, it's still ultimately false in the vast majority of cases, even if some benefits arise from this framework. there is a middle grey zone that operates somewhere between your conscious awareness and your automatic functions. it is moldable and trainable (such as with muscle memory and working to deconstruct harmful biases), at least some of the time. it is both a supportive structure for your psyche, as well as an intellectual highway for your higher thought processes. it allows for the efficiency in learning and knowledge-making and connection-finding endeavors often unique to human cognitive capabilities, while also providing the organization needed to not go insane or become nonfunctional due to information overload. mania and psychosis are actually a very good example of what happens when some of these organizational systems are disrupted, as the supportive boxes used to categorize things in the mind end up left open, like a kitchen with all cabinets open, suddenly exposed to the objects and concepts inside of them, avaliable to link up with one another ⁽¹⁾.

in situations where this structure is fragmented or disturbed, such as in strokes and hemisphere-separating surgeries⁽²⁾, you start to see where and how some of these middle-zone cognitive functions appear.

in strokes, there are multiple types of cognitive deficits relating to loss of language ability (I'm not going to get into all of the various types of aphasia and what they all mean, but the graph below does a pretty decent job at summarizing the specifics in case you want to learn more). namely, you have multiple categories of potential disrupted functioning (which can occur separately or together, and to varying degrees of dysfunction): a) the physical ability to get words to come out of your mouth (motor function; can you tell your brain to move your muscles), b) can you understand words being spoken towards you (and if so, how well? maybe you can only understand simple grammatical structures but not complex sentences, or maybe you have the same ability to understand language as prior to the stroke), c) can you understand your own emotions and feelings and desires and needs, d) can you translate those feelings into language (and if so, how well), and many others

this is to say, there are types of aphasia where you are perfectly cognitively aware in the same way as you were prior to having a stroke--you understand what the people around you are saying, you understand your own thoughts, you still have an internal monolog (assuming you had one before)--but you can't get your body to speak. you are effectively a mind inside in a body. which, tbf, there are plenty of non-verbal individuals with very full lives & I'm not saying this is a doomed sentence or anything, but I think "mind inside in a body" conveys it better than I could otherwise.

there are also types of aphasia where you retain the ability to think and you retain your intellectual capacities, but you struggle to actually put words to your thoughts. you have the same emotions and concepts, but attempts to connect the dots between feelings of love and saying "I love you" results in a 404 error. it just won't happen no matter how hard you try to will it. often, though, it's not entirely destroyed, so people with this type of aphasia end up linking to nearby concepts instead, in some attempt to communicate. this can sometimes result in them being mistaken for the word salad phenomenon of psychiatric disorders, or assumed that the things they're saying are meaningless and that they don't know what is going on around them.

for example, they might know that they're thirsty. they want to ask their caretaker to get them a glass of water, but every time they try to form the words, it just doesn't work out. they end up just repeating the words "river" "ocean" "creek". all bodies of water. they may even have more complicated sentence structures, but it still may sound contextually nonsensical if you aren't aware that this person is trying to communicate with you.

so, when talking about things like implicit bias, being able to recognize these interwoven mechanisms exist, unknown to our conscious mind, is incredibly important to getting a grasp on what truly drives things like prejudice. we think we are in control of all of our thoughts. but, like in the video, we too confabulate explanations for things that we are processing on some other plane of awareness (yet cannot directly access). we just don't have the hard evidence of something like a sheet of paper saying "get me a glass of water". and we fully believe the explanations our brains have given us! our prejudices are a way of our brains trying to make meaning from external stimuli. we see the Black person walking down the street. we do not see the mental stickynote with "Black people are inherently violent and dangerous and threatening, you are in danger", but we still feel it, and we confabulate "that person looks suspicious. no no no, not because they're Black. but because they're walking weirdly and they look suspicious and like they have bad intentions. this isn't anything to do with their Blackness. I'm not racist". we create explanations that work around our morals and still allow prejudice to operate, just putting different labels to it and finding ways of escaping cognitive dissonance.

when I talk about the ways some trans people end up mentally seeing transmascs as pericis women (and using the same prejudiced schemas that are used for that group within society), this is precisely what I mean. those people are very convinced that they're not doing that. they've created elaborate theories specifically to justify against such a thing. and yet, the underlying frameworks expose what's going on. they will repeat misogynistic rhetoric (that, in any other situation, they themselves would recognize at basic misogyny 101) towards transmascs, and not seemingly ever towards pericis men, and be mostly unaware that they're doing it. they don't see the sticky note that says "this person you are talking to is a woman, and women are inferior and dumb and hysterical". trying to convince them that the sticky note exists is nearly impossible. and yet, everybody else impacted by that sticky note... can see the sticky note. in fact, it's almost a neon flashing sign. but they are both unaware and unwilling to consider anything else that may be driving their actions.