Several times over the course of her campaign and again during Monday night’s debate, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton blamed “implicit bias” for America’s current state of racial unrest.
Clinton only recently latched onto the term, but one of her biggest donors — left-wing financier George Soros — has for years used his non-profit organization to push into the political mainstream the idea that uncured “implicit bias” causes various societal ills.
Internal documents from Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) say the term is meant to serve as a foundation from which to overhaul anti-discrimination laws, in order to make it easier to file racial discrimination lawsuits.
If elected, Clinton has promised federal funding for training local police against “implicit bias.” Such training, she says, is needed to improve relationships between minority communities and law enforcement.
Responding to a question at Monday night’s debate from moderator Lester Holt about whether she believes “police are implicitly biased against black people,” Clinton answered: “Lester, I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police.”
“I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other, and therefore, I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about, ‘why am I feeling this way?'”
She went on to promise federal funding “to help us deal with implicit bias by retraining a lot of our police officers.”
Clinton has said similar things throughout her campaign. (RELATED: Soros Gives $6 Million To Save Hillary On Eve Of Iowa)
“Maybe I can, by speaking directly to white people, say, ‘Look, this is not who we are,'” she said last week. “We’ve got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias.”
In an interview with MSNBC in July, Clinton said Americans “have to be honest, all of us, in facing implicit bias that all of us, unfortunately, may still have.” Her interviewer that day: Lester Holt.
“We all have implicit biases,” Clinton said in April while at a roundtable on gun violence. “What we need to do is be more honest about that and surface them. Because today, most people believe that they don’t have those biases.”
While Clinton appears to have only started regularly (if at all) using the term in public this election cycle, OSF has been working for almost a decade to place the term into the political mainstream, including recent efforts to shape a “racial narrative” around implicit bias.
In 2009, OSF sank $125,000 into the Equal Justice Society’s Dismantling Intent project.
Internal OSF documents reveal the reason why: “To challenge current U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence requiring proof of discriminatory intent in race discrimination claims.”
Leaked internal Open Society Foundations documents, via DCLeaks.com
In order to do this, “EJS has focused on redefining the legal understanding of race discrimination and how it operates.”
“In the coming year EJS will continue to conduct litigation training, provide amicus support for litigators, and produce educational briefs on implicit bias and structural racism to seed content for legal arguments, opinions and policies,” the OSF document notes.
Leaked internal Open Society Foundations documents, via DCLeaks.com
More recently, OSF has worked to create a “racial narrative” centering around implicit bias.
A briefing book for the organization’s September 2014 board meeting explains the group’s efforts to shape the national narrative about race.
“The way we discuss race affects our ability to address racism. The current public discourse reinforces harmful stereotypes, and fails to acknowledge the continuing impact of explicit and implicit bias on opportunity,” the book states. “U.S. Programs promotes work that documents these distortions and actively counteracts them.”
The book also notes OSF’s work to change the national narrative on black youth away from the “school-to-prison pipeline.” OSF concedes the term is “useful as an advocacy tool” but claims the term “may serve to perpetuate implicit biases against, and low expectations of, communities of color.”
Similarly, a briefing book prepared for board members at OSF’s February 2016 board meeting states, “Much of our 2015 racial narrative work focused on the role of ‘othering’ and implicit bias as a vehicle for limiting opportunities for immigrants and communities of color.” (RELATED: Leaked Board Documents: Soros Organization Tried To Influence Supreme Court Ruling On Illegal Immigration)
Leaked internal Open Society Foundations documents, via DCLeaks.com
Implicit bias, the briefing book says, “impacts everyday interactions, which reinforce or exacerbate already existing inequalities within and across systems. As such, implicit bias is a form of othering that motivates the micro-aggressions and disparate treatment of an outsider group.”
In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in Texas Dept. of Housing v. Inclusive Communities Project that discriminatory intent is not required per se for a successful racial discrimination lawsuit.
Justice Kennedy authored the Court opinion, noting the importance of combating “unconscious prejudices.”
“Recognition of disparate impact liability under the FHA also plays a role in uncovering discriminatory intent: It permits plaintiffs to counteract unconscious prejudices and disguised animus that escape easy classification as disparate treatment,” Kennedy wrote.
The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to The Daily Caller’s request for comment.
