Oh my goodness - I had no idea about this: "The trick is to cultivate enough self-awareness to know when you are being biased" I teach a course on anthropology to high schoolers and we do a huge unit on race and we get to a point where I explain that it is human nature to put things into categories and that is why we stereotype. But, yes, we all do it- there is no need to beat yourself up about it - but when you meet a person from a certain group that you may stereotype, just say oh, wait, I just have to look at the individual and get to know this person. Throw those stereotypes out and ignore them. I take in my hand a bunch of random pencils, various colors, shapes, broken, etc and show how we just say they are pencils - we don't take each one out and say oh, here is a red pencil, here is a chewed pencil, here is one w/o an eraser, etc. It's such an easy visual and makes the point that we'd drive ourselves crazy if we didn't categorize and stereotype, but we can see the individual pencil or person quite clearly.