All the discussion about race swirling around the presidential campaign motivated me to do one of the online tests on implicit bias being conducted by Project Implicit, a multi-discipline scientific study. The one I did studied both preference in the presidential election and preference between black and white, and rated each preference as slight, moderate, or strong.

It will surprise no one who knows me to find that I showed a strong preference for Barack Obama: I began supporting him early in the Democratic primaries, and was excited by both his attitude and his qualifications. But I also showed a moderate preference for black people.

Here’s what makes that surprising: I’m white.

I was very pleased to discover that I didn’t harbor unconscious negative ideas about black people, espcially since my conscious attitudes are positve. But it did surprise me to find that I not only had a preference, but that it was rather strong. Ideally I’d be neutral on issues of race, but I suspect most of us lean one way or another, given the history of race relations in the US.

Since I assume most people’s bias is for people like themselves, I spent some time pondering what happened to my unconscious.

It certainly wasn’t the society I grew up in. I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement, and went to segregated schools until I was a senior in high school – Alvin, Texas, took a long time to get around to following Brown v. Board of Education. Our neighborhood gas station had three restrooms for customers: men, women, and colored. But, being white, I learned more about the real racism out there from watching the horrific incidents in Mississippi and Alabama and Boston than I did in my own back yard.

I did have the good fortune to have parents who taught me that racism was wrong, so my conscious attitude on the subject was formed early on. But for a number of years I didn’t have a lot of contact with African Americans, much less black people from other countries. I went to the University of Texas at a time when it was very white; my law school class of 500 people included three African Americans. When I worked for legal services in Wichita Falls, Texas, in the late 1970s, we hired one black lawyer and doubled the number of African American lawyers in a town with over a hundred lawyers.

Then I moved to Washington, D.C., and my environment changed. I ended up living in a predominantly black neighborhood for over 20 years. For about ten years, I worked for a nonprofit law firm where most of the employees – and virtually all the clients – were black. My bosses were black; when I became executive director, most of my board was black. I spent a lot of time at meetings as the only white person in the room.

Washington has a majority black population, including a lot of people who immigrated from Africa or the Caribbean, as well as a lot of native-born black people whose family histories include slavery and the Jim Crow south. The local politicians are black, and many of them traced their political roots to the Civil Rights Movement. And while Marion Barry became a national joke, living and working in Washington I knew the black politicians who worked against him.

I suspect the cumulative effect of those years in Washington probably affected my unconscious mind as well as my conscious. I had a lot of ordinary everyday contact with lots of different black people. Some of them became friends; some of them I didn’t like at all; most were people I exchanged a friendly word with when I saw them in the street.

That is, I think my surroundings affected my unconscious attitudes. That’s speculation, of course; I don’t have a baseline test to compare. But it makes sense to me.

Based on my experience, a good argument can be made for increasing diversity in our society. The more contact people of different races, class backgrounds, ethnicities, and genders have with each other, the more they are likely to see each other as just human beings – unconsciously, as well as consciously. Perhaps the scientists doing the implicit studies can find a way to study whether regular contact affects unconscious attitudes.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll go try the implicit study on gender.