Brooklyn Women’s Bar Association hosts CLE on implicit bias

January 14, 2019 By Rob Abruzzese Brooklyn Daily Eagle

The Brooklyn Women’s Bar Association held a CLE event in Civil Court on Thursday where Hon. Joanne Quinones and Betsey Jean-Jacques led a discussion on implicit bias. Pictured from left: Betsey Jean-Jacques, Hon. Carolyn Walker-Diallo, Carrie Anne Cavallo, Hon. Cheryl J. Gonzales and Hon. Joanne Quinones. Eagle photos by Rob Abruzzese

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The Brooklyn Women’s Bar Association hosted a continuing legal education lecture on implicit bias with Acting Supreme Court Justice Joanne Quinones and well-known law secretary Betsey Jean-Jacques at the Civil Court last Thursday.

Hon. Cheryl J. Gonzales and Hon. Carolyn Walker-Diallo, who was recently appointed as supervising judge of the Kings County Civil Court, lent their courtrooms to the BWBA. The CLE, which was titled, “Implicit Bias: What Is It? Do I Have It? Can I Get Rid of It?” lasted about an hour.

“It’s important that everyone knows that Justice Quinones has received numerous awards and accolades including the Judith S. Kaye Access to Justice Award and the Amy Wren Award from the Brooklyn Women’s Bar Association,” said Carrie Anne Cavallo, president of the BWBA. “Betsey Jean-Jacques is the principal law clerk to Hon. Francois Rivera. She previously worked as an associate attorney in the Mental Hygiene Legal Services, Appellate Division, Second Department.

“These two gave this same presentation to the State Women’s Bar Association and did such a fabulous job that we invited them here to give it again,” Cavallo continued.

Justice Quinones and Jean-Jacques led the event more as a discussion with the BWBA members in attendance than a straight lecture. They often posed questions to people and discussed their answers before sharing their own expertise on the subject.

“Implicit bias is an automatic and involuntary attitude about color, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, language, culture, etc., that affect a person’s actions and decisions in an unconscious way,” Judge Quinones explained. “These actions and stereotypes are fostered by our environment, our education, our friends, our family, the news and play a role in the connections, associations and the evaluations we make about people.”

The judge stressed that everyone, including herself, has certain unconscious biases. She explained that the point is to pretend that they don’t exist, but to try to understand them and how they can play a role in shaping our actions.

“As a woman, a person of color, I’d like to think that I’m immune to implicit bias and that I’m fair and unbiased in all I say or do, but implicit biases are unconscious attitudes that just sort of creep up on you,” Justice Quinones said. “They’re not politically correct, or that anything we’d be bold enough to share in public.”

As Jean-Jacques pointed out, implicit bias isn’t simple, either.

“One of the things that we want to think about is that it’s not just whether it’s white or black,” Jean-Jacques said. “Sometimes it’s your profession vs. the other persons. It’s mental illness versus no mental illness or degree versus no degree.”

Justice Quinones and Jean-Jacques explained that implicit bias impacts so many aspects of life, including job recruitment, which employee gets certain assignments and who gets promoted. It is imperative for people to take these potential biases into account when making decisions, she said.

“We need these trainings to have open discussions and learn about how we can get rid of this bias that is in us,” Jean-Jacques said. “We also need to improve professional pipelines. There are a lot of committees in bar associations or in the courthouse. How do we improve the networks? Not just to ensure they’re diverse racially, but also by gender and sexual orientation.

We need to look within ourselves to decide how we can foster that. How can we step outside of our comfort zone?”