Bias has to be taught. If you hear your parents downgrading women or people of different backgrounds, why, you are going to do that.

The remark frames prejudice not as an innate human trait but as a learned behavior transmitted through everyday social modeling—especially within families. By pointing to children overhearing parents “downgrading” women or people from different backgrounds, Bush emphasizes how casual disparagement normalizes hierarchy and exclusion, which children then replicate. The quote also implies an ethical responsibility: adults shape the moral environment in which young people form assumptions about gender and difference. In a broader civic sense, it suggests that reducing bias requires changing social cues and language in homes and communities, not only passing laws or issuing public condemnations.