When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I pulled a book from my parents' bookshelf called Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. That book changed me. It's the true story of a white journalist who medically darkened his skin and traveled through the Jim Crow South in the late 1950s to experience firsthand what it was like to be Black in America. The raw cruelty and constant dehumanization he encountered were eye-opening—and devastating. What struck me most was how dramatically people's treatment of him changed based solely on his appearance. It wasn't about anything he said or did—it was about what people thought they saw. That was my first deep lesson in unconscious bias. Reading Black Like Me as a white young woman cracked open my worldview. I realized how much I took for granted—things like safety, dignity, and being seen as fully human. Griffin's willingness to put himself in harm's way to expose racial injustice made a lifelong impression on me, and planted the seeds for a personal commitment to empathy, equity, and speaking up. We must recognize unconscious bias in ourselves because if we don't, we become complicit in systems of inequality—often without even realizing it. Unacknowledged bias leads to snap judgments, unfair assumptions, and missed opportunities to connect as human beings. When we confront it honestly within ourselves, we gain the power to change—not just our own thinking, but the world around us. Awareness is the first step toward justice.