How Mindfulness Can Help You Break Your Unconscious Biases

The global anti-racism uprisings have ignited a much-needed reckoning among many mindfulness practitioners about what they can do to address systemic racism. For me, the most powerful response is to transform our own biases as an extension of our mindfulness practice.

Try it now: when you read the word “bias,” is there a feeling that arises in the mind or body? For most, the feeling is negative, as if we’re uncomfortable, confused, or tight. The mind is playing defense. I’m not biased. I’m not a racist.

Yet countless studies show that all of us, regardless of our background, carry biases within us. How could we not? Most of us grew up in a society that conditions our minds to value a certain kind of human being as more beautiful, desirable, civilized, and worthy of respect. And that human almost always looks white, light-skinned, or European. 40 percent of Americans and 85 percent of humanity are people of color – but for a minute, reflect on all of the books you’ve ever read; the musicians you’ve admired; the celebrities you’ve obsessed over; and the movies you’ve watched. What percentage of them reflect the diversity of hues and experiences that make up the American and global human story? 

This is the nature of unconscious bias – how our brains have been wired to associate positive attributes with whiteness and negative ones with being non-white. These associations are what impact our day-to-day decision-making.

Unconscious bias differs from conscious bias because we are aware of the latter. For example, I do not like insects. I'm very conscious of that belief.

Now, we may consciously believe that Black and white people are equal. Yet, years of our mind’s conditioning prevents us from matching these conscious beliefs with our behaviors. 

Peter Drucker famously said, “if you can measure it, you can manage it.” Luckily for us, in 1994 scientists invented an instrument called the Implicit Association Test or the IAT that measures the strength of people’s unconscious associations. Millions have taken it. I like to think of the IAT as a matching game. For example, on the Race IAT, people are asked to match two sets of concepts – pleasant/unpleasant words and Black/white faces – by pressing “E” and “I” as quickly as possible. On the backend, the instrument captures the number of errors people make when the concepts are paired – e.g., white/pleasant and Black/unpleasant versus white/unpleasant and Black/pleasant – and their response lag time at the micro-second level.

In an ideal world, there would be no difference. People would match concepts in the appropriate category. In reality, 75% of Americans have an easier time associating pleasant words with white faces and unpleasant words with Black faces. This includes a majority of people of color.

Donald Hebb called this process “neurons that fire together, wire together.” If for decades, our brains - including those of Black people - have been fed dehumanizing, negative portrayals of Black people, that’s how our brains have become wired, regardless of our conscious intentions. This is why I define unconscious bias as learned habits of thought that distort how we perceive, reason, remember, and make decisions.

Unconscious bias affects everything. How doctors believe or disbelieve their patients’ reports of pain. How police officers assess risk. How judges sentence defendants. How hiring managers assess competence. And how engineers design facial recognition algorithms.

However, the science of neuroplasticity shows us that just as bias is a learned habit, it can be unlearned, and we can learn new habits.

Let’s try another thought experiment. Notice the first image your mind generates as you read the following words: Scientist; Yoga teacher; Lawyer; Criminal.

If the image was a person, notice the person’s race, ethnicity, gender, age, height. There’s no shame in this game. What’s being revealed is not your personal character, but the associations that you learned, or absorbed, from your surroundings.

This is where mindfulness can help us. Mindfulness is merely the act of noticing whatever arises without judgment, whether it's a body sensation, emotion, feeling, or thought. I believe that mindfulness is the revolutionary tool we need to break unconscious bias and address systemic racism.

The more we become aware of our associations, the more we’ll be able to dissociate those associations from influencing our words and actions. 

As a queer immigrant of color, mindfulness also helped me become more patient and compassionate. I was raised in New York City to Indian parents, yet one of the first questions I get asked, particularly by white people, is “Where are you from?” “Brooklyn,” I’d say. But often that’s not what they want to know. 

For years, I perceived this as othering. Words and actions that ranged from physical violence for “looking like Osama” to being called “a strange man” in my doctor’s office hurt me greatly, driving me to depression, even to a suicide attempt in my twenties. Yet the breakthrough came when I stopped believing other people’s ideas of me. This was the gift of mindfulness.

For the past decade, I’ve taught over 16,000 people to use mindfulness to see and break their own biases. Through this work, I’ve come to appreciate Dr. King’s prophetic prescription – “Our goal is to build a beloved community. This will require a qualitative shift in our hearts, and a qualitative shift in our lives.”

Mindfulness helped me make those shifts – first for myself then for groups that my mind had othered – differently abled, the formerly incarcerated, houseless people. This is a daily moment-to-moment practice of presence that is held in a container of compassion and kindness. And I falter. Often. In those moments, I return to my mindfulness practice and ask – what am I believing right now? Then, I begin again. These are the qualitative and quantitative shifts all of us need in our hearts and minds. Shifts that will allow us to move beyond ideas of one another to the presence of one another, the real people.