In neoliberal multiculturalism that upholds the underlying structure of white supremacy, terms like "unconscious bias" have become commonplace in diversity trainings, corporate HR policies, and even casual conversations about equity. But what if the very language we use to discuss unconscious bias is itself a mechanism designed to preserve the status quo? Far from being a neutral descriptor, the phrase "unconscious bias" serves as a linguistic structure that diffuses responsibility, minimizes systemic harm, and ultimately reinforces white supremacy, power imbalances, and mechanisms of control.
Drawing on the culture-centered approach (CCA) to communication, this analysis examines how "unconscious bias" discourse operates through what we might call communicative erasure—the systematic silencing of marginalized voices while centering elite narratives that preserve structural inequalities. The CCA directs our attention to the voices absent from mainstream discussions of bias: those of communities experiencing racism as lived, structural violence rather than individual psychological quirks. By centering these subaltern voices and examining how power shapes whose knowledge counts, we can reveal how "unconscious bias" functions as what the CCA terms a communicative inequality—a discursive formation that determines who can speak, what can be said, and whose explanations of racism are legitimized.
Unpacking the Term Through Subaltern Voices: What Communities Say About "Unconscious Bias"
The culture-centered approach insists we begin not with expert definitions but with how marginalized communities themselves understand and name their experiences. When we listen to Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities—rather than to corporate diversity consultants or academic psychologists—we hear a fundamentally different story about bias.
Community members experiencing racism rarely describe it as "unconscious." They speak instead of deliberate exclusion, structural barriers, and predictable patterns of discrimination that follow the fault lines of historical oppression. As one participant in a CCA study on racism in health care articulated: "They know exactly what they're doing. They just know they can get away with it by saying they didn't mean to."
This gap between elite discourse (which frames bias as unconscious) and subaltern knowledge (which recognizes intentionality and structure) reveals what the CCA identifies as epistemic violence—the systematic dismissal of marginalized communities' explanations of their own oppression in favor of frameworks that serve power. When psychologists like Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald popularized "unconscious bias" through implicit association tests, they created what the CCA terms an expert-driven narrative that displaced community voices. The language of implicit bias became institutionalized not because communities experiencing racism found it useful, but because it served institutional needs to appear progressive while avoiding structural accountability.
The CCA framework reveals how this linguistic displacement operates as communicative marginalization. Communities' analyses of racism as systematic, intentional, and structural are delegitimized as "angry," "divisive," or "unscientific," while expert frameworks that individualize and depoliticize racism gain currency precisely because they don't threaten existing power arrangements. This is not accidental but reflects what the CCA identifies as the structural basis of voice—whose knowledge is heard depends on who controls the resources, platforms, and institutions that amplify certain voices while silencing others.
The CCA framework reveals how this linguistic displacement operates as communicative marginalization. Communities' analyses of racism as systematic, intentional, and structural are delegitimized as "angry," "divisive," or "unscientific," while expert frameworks that individualize and depoliticize racism gain currency precisely because they don't threaten existing power arrangements. This is not accidental but reflects what the CCA identifies as the structural basis of voice—whose knowledge is heard depends on who controls the resources, platforms, and institutions that amplify certain voices while silencing others.
Structural Silencing: How "Unconscious Bias" Erases Historical Agency
The culture-centered approach insists that we cannot understand contemporary communicative practices without examining their roots in colonial and white supremacist structures. The discourse of "unconscious bias" emerges from and reproduces what the CCA terms epistemic colonialism—the imposition of Western psychological frameworks that erase non-Western ways of knowing and obscure the deliberate architecture of oppression.
Indigenous scholars and communities, for instance, have long documented how colonialism was a conscious project of dispossession, not an unconscious bias. Treaties were deliberately broken. Children were intentionally removed to residential schools to "kill the Indian, save the man." Land was systematically stolen through legal mechanisms designed for that purpose. When contemporary institutions deploy "unconscious bias" language to discuss ongoing settler colonialism, they engage in what the CCA identifies as structural erasure—making invisible the intentional, organized systems of violence that created and maintain white supremacy.
Consider corporate diversity initiatives through a CCA lens. When companies like Google or Starbucks implement "unconscious bias training" after racial profiling scandals, they are not addressing community concerns but managing legitimacy crises that threaten profit. The CCA's analysis of culture as resource reveals how corporations extract the language of antiracism (diversity, inclusion, unconscious bias) while evacuating its transformative content. Studies showing these trainings rarely produce lasting change confirm what a CCA analysis would predict: interventions designed to protect institutional legitimacy rather than respond to community voice cannot generate structural transformation.
The CCA framework exposes this as communicative appropriation—elite institutions co-opt the language of justice while maintaining the very structures communities identify as oppressive. Employees are offered self-reflection exercises while algorithms perpetuating racial discrimination in hiring remain unchanged. Pay gaps persist. Promotion tracks continue favoring those who embody white, masculine, able-bodied norms. The "unconscious bias" frame enables what the CCA terms dialogic closure—authentic dialogue with marginalized communities is foreclosed because institutions claim to have already "addressed" bias through trainings that never engaged community voice in the first place.
Culture as Site of Struggle: Contesting the "Unconscious" Frame
The culture-centered approach understands culture not as static tradition but as an ongoing site of struggle where meanings are contested and power relations are negotiated. The widespread adoption of "unconscious bias" language represents one outcome of such struggle—but it is not the only possible outcome, nor an inevitable one.
Marginalized communities have consistently articulated alternative frameworks that maintain the connection between individual acts and structural systems. Terms like "internalized racism," "structural complicity," and "white supremacy culture" emerge from community organizing and activist scholarship rooted in lived experience. These phrases refuse the individualization and depoliticization that "unconscious bias" enables. They insist on what the CCA calls structural listening—hearing how individual experiences are patterned by and reflective of broader systems of oppression.
When a Black person describes being followed in a store, a CCA approach centers their structural analysis: this is not one employee's unconscious bias but a predictable manifestation of anti-Black racism embedded in surveillance practices, policing, and capitalist relations that position Black people as threats to property. The community voice identifies pattern, not accident; system, not individual failure.
The CCA's emphasis on agency is crucial here. Communities experiencing oppression are not passive victims awaiting expert intervention but active knowledge producers who have developed sophisticated analyses of how power operates. Black feminist traditions articulated intersectionality. Indigenous communities theorized settler colonialism. Dalit movements exposed Brahmanical supremacy. These frameworks emerged from collective struggle, not university laboratories, yet are systematically marginalized in favor of depoliticized expert discourses like "unconscious bias."
Co-construction of Meaning: How Power Shapes Whose Language Prevails
The CCA's concept of co-construction recognizes that meanings are produced through interaction between communities and structures. However, this co-construction occurs under profoundly unequal conditions where structural power determines whose meanings become institutionalized.
"Unconscious bias" achieved dominance not through democratic dialogue but through what the CCA identifies as elite capture of meaning-making. Corporations, universities, and government agencies adopted this language because it served their interests: appearing responsive to racism while avoiding the structural transformations communities demand. The widespread institutionalization of "unconscious bias training" represents what the CCA terms structure-driven communication—communicative practices shaped by and reproducing existing power relations rather than emerging from community voice and need.
Consider media coverage of police violence through this lens. When outlets describe officers' actions as stemming from "implicit bias" rather than the structural racism of policing institutions descended from slave patrols, they engage in what the CCA calls discursive violence—using language that obscures the systematic nature of state violence against Black communities. This isn't journalistic neutrality but a communicative choice that centers the presumed innocence of white officers over the structural knowledge of communities experiencing police violence.
The CCA framework reveals this as part of broader communicative inequalities where elite institutions control platforms, resources, and gatekeeping mechanisms that determine which explanations of racism circulate widely and which are marginalized. Community voices insisting on the intentionality and structural nature of racism are dismissed as "biased" or "political" while frameworks that protect white innocence are positioned as "objective" or "scientific."
Toward Culture-Centered Praxis: Centering Community Voice and Structural Transformation
The culture-centered approach offers not just critique but praxis—theory connected to liberatory action grounded in community solidarity. A CCA framework for addressing racism would look fundamentally different from unconscious bias training because it would begin with centering subaltern voices rather than expert frameworks.
This means:
Opening communicative spaces where communities experiencing racism can name their oppression on their own terms, without translation into depoliticized language that serves institutional legitimacy needs. When community members identify patterns of intentional exclusion, structural barriers, or systematic discrimination, those analyses must be taken as authoritative knowledge, not reframed through "unconscious bias" that invalidates lived experience.
Structural listening that hears individual experiences as connected to broader systems. When a person of color is told they're "articulate," a CCA approach recognizes this as manifesting the white supremacist structure that positions whiteness as the linguistic norm—not one individual's unconscious slip but a predictable enactment of a racist system.
Interrogating whose voice is absent from dominant discourses. Who benefits when racism is framed as unconscious rather than structural? Whose knowledge is erased when psychological explanations replace community analyses of deliberate oppression? The CCA insists we examine how power shapes which voices are heard and which are silenced.
Building solidarity across differences while recognizing how systems of oppression intersect. A CCA framework understands that white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and settler colonialism are co-constitutive structures that require collective resistance. This means centering the voices of those experiencing overlapping oppressions—Black women, Indigenous people with disabilities, trans people of color—rather than allowing elite institutions to dictate terms of struggle.
Demanding structural transformation rather than individual self-reflection. The CCA's emphasis on structure means recognizing that unconscious bias training cannot dismantle racism because racism is not primarily a psychological problem but a structure of resource distribution, institutional power, and communicative inequality. Real change requires redistributing resources, transforming institutions, and shifting who controls meaning-making.
As Audre Lorde insisted, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." A culture-centered approach reveals "unconscious bias" as one of those tools—a linguistic structure that serves power by obscuring structure itself. By centering community voice, interrogating structural silencing, and building solidarity for transformation, we can develop communicative practices that expose rather than protect white supremacy.
Conclusion: From Communicative Inequality to Collective Liberation
The language of unconscious bias operates as what the culture-centered approach identifies as communicative infrastructure of oppression—a discursive formation that maintains structural inequality by controlling how racism can be named, who can name it, and what solutions are imaginable. By diffusing responsibility, individualizing structural problems, and silencing community knowledge, "unconscious bias" protects the very systems it claims to address.
A culture-centered praxis demands we replace this language with frameworks that emerge from and center marginalized communities' own analyses of their oppression. Terms like "structural racism," "white supremacy culture," and "systemic complicity" maintain the crucial connection between individual acts and broader systems. They refuse to let institutions off the hook by claiming unconsciousness. They insist on community voice as authoritative knowledge.
This is not merely semantic. How we name oppression shapes what resistance becomes possible. When we recognize "unconscious bias" as a tool for maintaining rather than dismantling white supremacy, we can build communicative practices grounded in subaltern voice, structural analysis, and collective liberation. We can create spaces where communities experiencing oppression name their realities without translation into language that serves power. We can demand transformations that redistribute resources and restructure institutions rather than offering awareness without accountability.
The culture-centered approach calls us to ask: Whose voices are centered? Whose knowledge counts? Who benefits from this way of talking about racism? And most importantly: What would communication look like if designed not to protect elite legitimacy but to advance community liberation?
This analysis draws on the culture-centered approach to communication developed through decades of community-engaged scholarship. For deeper engagement, explore works centering marginalized voices in theorizing their own oppression and resistance.