Can people overcome hard-wired reactions? Kristof discusses the difficulty in doing this in his May 7, 2015 column. “[The brain] categorizes people by race in the first one-fifth second after seeing a face. Brain scans show that even when people are told to sort people by gender, the brain still groups people by race.” One strategy to combat the unconscious bias against African Americans, he states, is seeing images of heroic African Americans, which argues for a serious look and revision of school curricula and media images.
