Pedro Senhorinha Silva, a black writer/author, discusses a bias that occurs not only among American and foreign-born blacks but also within the country itself.
Bias By Us
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Summary
Pedro Senhorinha Silva recounts how his Cape Verdean heritage, Black identity, and Portuguese name made him an outsider in the U.S. South, revealing how racial, ethnic, and national labels intertwine to maintain white‑supremacist hierarchies and sow division within the African diaspora.
- Silva describes being taunted with “Go back to Mexico,” illustrating how ignorance weaponizes xenophobia against anyone who fails to fit rigid racial boxes.
- He explains how white institutions often elevate immigrant Blacks over African Americans to fracture potential multiracial, working‑class solidarity.
- Neuroscience insights show bias originates in the amygdala’s survival reflex and can be rewired only through sustained cross‑cultural exposure and critical self‑reflection.
- Personal anecdotes—from school forms offering only “Black” or “White” to strategic pranks that expose double standards—demonstrate how racist norms police public space.
- Both host and guest emphasize that dismantling bias is a prerequisite to confronting larger structural injustices, urging readers to seek curiosity over fear.
From a progressive vantage, the dialogue underscores that liberation depends on rejecting any “get‑out‑of‑Blackness‑free card,” building solidarity across the diaspora, and pairing individual empathy with systemic reform so that shared humanity outweighs the narrow privileges white supremacy doles out to keep workers divided.
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Pedro Senhorinha Silva’s conversation with Politics Done Right does more than recount personal slights; it exposes a structural labyrinth that traps individuals inside artificial categories and pits members of the same African diaspora against one another. In narrating playground chants of “Pedro, go back to Mexico,” Silva illustrates an old American reflex: when the dominant culture cannot place Blackness inside its rigid boxes, it retreats to xenophobic caricature. The result is a cruelty that pares identity down to skin tone, surname, or accent and then weaponizes those fragments to police the boundaries of belonging. Silva’s essay and interview insist that this policing—whether it springs from white supremacy, intracommunity colorism, or immigrant respectability politics—remains a learned, not innate, response. Because it is learned, it can be unlearned; because it is structured, it can be dismantled.
That claim finds empirical support in the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling project “The Bias Inside Us,” which opens with the blunt reminder: “If you’re human, you’re biased.” Drawing on cognitive science, the exhibition demonstrates that bias forms through ordinary neurological shortcuts, then hardens into social hierarchy unless people actively disrupt it. Community dialogue, the curators maintain, can “help individuals understand and counter their implicit bias and help communities thrive through conversation and greater understanding.” Silva’s life mirrors the exhibit’s thesis: encounters with students who reduced him to a caricature shrank his classmates’ moral imaginations—and, by extension, their world.
Neuroscience explains why those assumptions feel so automatic. The amygdala—the fight‑or‑flight alarm bell—reaches functional maturity before birth, while the prefrontal cortex, which governs executive reasoning, continues wiring itself through a person’s mid‑twenties. During adolescence, the brain “rewires itself… especially in the prefrontal cortex,” priming individuals to entrench reflexive fears or replace them with more nuanced judgments. When children are marinated in media portraying darker skin as dangerous and accents as alien, the amygdala stores that fear. Only sustained, diverse experiences give the prefrontal cortex enough counter‑evidence to override the false alarm. Silva’s strategy—forcing onlookers to confront their discomfort when he spoke in a made‑up language or clutched his bag in mock alarm—breaks the feedback loop that bias depends on: familiarity breeds empathy, but shock can jolt prejudice into self‑awareness.
Colorism compounds the problem. A 2021 Pew Research Center survey showed that 59 percent of Latinos with darker skin reported discrimination from other Latinos, underscoring how colonial hierarchies outlast empire and migrate with people. Silva describes a similar calculus inside Black America: immigrants are sometimes cast as “better” than African‑Americans precisely because white institutions view immigrant Blackness as less politically threatening. Elites then deploy select immigrant success stories as proof that systemic racism is individual failure. The immigrant who takes the bait may enjoy fleeting privilege, but the ruse ultimately fortifies the very caste system that marginalizes everyone without proximity to whiteness. In that sense, bias is not merely interpersonal error; it is the software that keeps an unequal operating system running.
Progressives must therefore treat bias reduction as integral to economic and political liberation. When foreign‑born Blacks distance themselves from descendants of enslaved Americans—or when lighter‑skinned Afro‑Latinos deride darker cousins—they fracture the coalition required to challenge corporate exploitation, voter suppression, and austerity economics. American history offers cautionary tales: Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 temporarily united poor Europeans and Africans against the planter class, prompting elites to codify racial slavery precisely to prevent future class solidarity. Today’s voter‑ID laws and union‑busting tactics rely on the same divide‑and‑conquer logic. As Silva argues, refusing the “get‑out‑of‑Blackness‑free card” is an act of resistance because it denies capital the wedge it needs.
Yet solidarity cannot rest on moral exhortation alone; it demands institutional change. Expanding multicultural curricula, funding community media, and preserving initiatives like The Bias Inside Us exhibit give citizens the cognitive tools to override fear with curiosity. Federally, Congress could revive elements of the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation agenda—first championed by Rep. Barbara Lee—to support local dialogues and reparative justice programs. Universities should pair diversity scholarships with courses on diasporic history so that Afro‑Latinx, Cape Verdean, and African‑American students see their stories as interlocking chapters of the same struggle. Employers can audit promotion and pay data by race and nativity to expose “paper‑pass‑as‑white” incentives that penalize candor about identity.
Those reforms will matter only if individuals practice the vulnerability that both the host and Silva model. The host speaks openly about shedding the homophobia and sexism he absorbed in childhood in Panama, showing that personal transformation is both possible and contagious. Neuroscientist P. Read Montague notes that the brain’s plasticity allows new moral habits to overwrite old ones, provided exposure is repeated and emotionally salient, precisely the conditions set by deliberate, cross‑cultural friendship. In other words, liberation begins in the psyche but culminates in policy; neither arena suffices alone.
Silva closes by urging readers to “experience the fullness of this life.” That fullness lies beyond the boundaries bias erects: accent, zip code, complexion, pronoun. Dismantling those fences will not end capitalism’s predation or patriarchy’s grip, but it removes the blindfold that lets oppression hide in plain sight. When people know that they do not know—and care enough to learn—they transform private epiphanies into public power. The progressive project, then, is not merely to expose bias but to convert awareness into solidarity, and solidarity into structural change.
