For 16 years, Supreme Court Justice Alan Page led the court’s Racial Fairness Committee, helping to implement a series of reforms meant to eliminate bias in the legal system.
The reforms they oversaw did a lot of good, he said Thursday, and there’s no question that “justice for all” has come a long way since the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, “when people wore their biases on their sleeves.”
But bias lingers in places hard for committees to reach: in the hearts of men and women of good character, people who don’t speak or act with explicit bias, but who fail on closer examination to treat everyone equally. The former Minnesota Viking and Pro Football hall of famer and his Page Education Foundation are hosting a seminar Friday morning aimed at helping people in the legal community recognize and eliminate bias in their work.
We know bias lingers because the Minnesota court system now tracks racial data, Page said, and the numbers show that people of color are treated differently than white people, “and differently not in a good way.”
“It’s not like all the people in the system are there trying to be discriminatory,” Page said. “It’s the built-in biases. We spend a lot of time trying to make sure that everything we do is color-blind, but making bias harder to detect is not the same as making it go away.”
Despite years of reform, Page said the data show that people of color are more likely than white people to be arrested for similar behaviors. Once arrested, they’re more likely to be charged and to be given higher bail amounts and longer sentences.
Page, the first African American on the Minnesota Supreme Court, said one solution would be to get more people of color working in the legal field. The education foundation he and his wife set up in 1988 is doing its part by helping young people of color get into college. Page retired from the Minnesota Supreme Court in 2015.
An alumna of the Page Education Foundation will be co-presenting with Page on Friday. Dr. Artika Tyner, associate vice president for diversity and inclusion at the University of St. Thomas, will talk about how to recognize implicit bias and how to deal with it.
Page said he is looking forward to learning something from Tyner himself. He said that, like everyone else, he has implicit bias, too.
“Absolutely. You know, we’re all human beings,” Page said. “The question isn’t do we have it. We all do. The question is how we deal with it.”
The Justice Alan Page Elimination of Bias Continuing Legal Education Seminar will take place 9-11 a.m. Friday at the Loews Hotel, 601 First Ave. N. in Minneapolis. A limited number of tickets, $150, will be available at the 8 a.m. registration (followed by a pre-seminar breakfast and reception).
For more information, go to page-ed.org.
