A while ago I wrote about Challenging Unconscious Bias in the Therapy Room. At the end I listed some of my favourite resources for widening understanding and experience of difference. They are far from comprehensive, and may well reflect my own unconscious biases – please let me know what’s missing, and share your own favourites!

I also run my own Unconscious Bias Training course for professionals.

To begin to look at your biases and explore your advantages, as well as the Harvard Implicit Association Test, there is:

• This Australian site for therapists exploring their privilege.
• This awesome piece about unpacking white privilege by Peggy McIntosh.
• Noam Chomsky: The responsibility of privilege a talk about economic privilege
• How to talk to people about privilege
• How to be an ally

Some eye-opening online articles:

• The history of attitudes to disabled people
• Which countries have the most women in parliament?
• Sexism in science means men more likely to get hired
• Young Black people in London are 3 times more likely to be unemployed than young white men.
• Race and class in the suffragette movement
• Cruel inequalities of a life ruled by postcode lottery
• Black Americans suffer most from racial trauma, but few counselors are trained to treat it
• Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases

Some important online videos:

• Kimberlé Crenshaw: The urgency of intersectionality – Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, a way of looking at how social injustice issues overlap
• The Danger of a Single Story – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi
• Stella Young: I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much
• Brown, trans, queer, Muslim and proud | Sabah Choudrey
• The propaganda of “British Values” is a distortion of history
• A short film about Indian Hijras
• Debunking the Gandhi Myth: Arundhati Roy
• This eye-opening video about the bystander effect
• Jane Elliot’s brown eyes/ blue eyes experiment

Websites to browse or follow on social media:

• Everyday Feminism– covers a variety of intersecting issues, not just feminism
• Black Girl Dangerous
• My Genderation
• Rubyetc – award-winning comic about mental illness

Amazing People

On top of the people featured in the above articles and videos, here are some other people worth learning more about – and some surprising things still to learn about people we think we may already know.

• Akala
• Bayard Rustin
• Maya Angelou
• Laverne Cox
• Janet Mock
• Freddie Mercury
• Alice Walker
• Harvey Milk
• Sara Ahmed
• James Baldwin
• James Barry
• Lili Elbe
• Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Riviera
• Nicola Field
• Darcus Howe
• Brenda Howard

Must-see films:

• I, Daniel Blake
• Two Spirits: A short documentary about what it means to be Two-Spirit in LGBTQ Native American communities

Must-read Books:

• Feminism is For Everyone by Bell Hooks
• Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine