Race, bias and mindfulness — In the heart of government — London
Thoughts on Rhonda Magee’s talk on Social-Identity Bias — a Mindfulness Initiative event, Westminster, 5th Dec, 2017.
Mindful of my promise to write something for the Mindfulness and Social Change Network, I did take lots of notes but this morning they just seem like meaningless symbols on a piece of paper. You know the story, I’m sure. Maybe now even it’s the “I want to know the story, story”. So I decided to write a story instead.
I was unbuckling my belt to place it in a red tray. “Hello Mark.” It was Stephen. Was the colour chosen to match the red box I wonder? Maybe not. I’m sure the Chancellor doesn’t need to go through the airport style security to get into the Palace of Westminster.
Humans can organise themselves in large groups and work together to build pyramids and supply chains to fill supermarket shelves. Cultures can create a sense of identity across millions, even billions of people. Symbols of identity enable us our to organise ourselves, which is the secret of our success — and could also be the seeds of our destruction.
The standard bearer leads the charge. He carries the most powerful weapon. He is cut down first but there is always another to take his place. The culture, which creates the organisational system of the conqueror displaces that of the vanquished. So it is, in our history.
Our ability to organise ourselves is limited only by our ability to share these symbols and the technology we have developed. There has been no time in history that we can communicate with so many and so, no time in history where we have such means to share symbols and work together.
On the one hand, these conditions are creating the causes of stress that are creating the need for emotional regulation — something mindfulness can do for us — but there’s room for vision here too. What could happen if we manage to create shared symbols that brought humanity together into one great family?
Coming from a council estate, Steven wasn’t sure he was supposed to be wandering around the corridors of power. “No, they are just alleys.” Neo-gothic, oak panels, red and the kind of gold flocked wallpaper you used to get in pubs. Definitely not Habitat, or even IKEA for that matter. “It’s not grandeur it’s the tasteless expression of Victorian imperial Identity,” I said.
An African American woman talking about mindfulness, social-identity bias in Committee Room 10. What’s not to get excited about? Stephen had got the train from Cardiff in the morning. It was the first of these mindfulness events he’d come to at the Palace of Westminster. It was my first time too. I said I just wanted to keep my head down as the anger I experience at this kind of exposure to The Mindfulness Movement was just not good for me or much help in what I wanted to achieve. It’s all about power and skill — I know that but still it takes more than knowing it to keep a cool head — there’s a point where you just have to accept who you are and work with that.
“It’s better to be a free man for a day than a slave for a thousand years.”
Stephen said his strategy was to become an anthropological observer. I wonder if that’s a kind of mindfulness? Whatever it is, we need that too, that’s for sure!
Rhonda told the story — from “paying attention on purpose in a particular way in the present moment” to breaking the cycle of the abuse of power with mindfulness. (Hope I haven’t missed anything out!).
Could mindfulness be used as a prophylactic to toxic effects of negative stereotyping? It’s all about how the human mind identifies with kin. We need to know who to trust and who we can collaborate with. We need to share a story with others but there is a dark side: how the human mind identifies others.
We create categories to know who is who. As nice middle class liberals [not me! Or am I just kidding myself?], we may be aware of these categories and do our best to be politically correct but there is still an unconscious process of bias going on, as John Lydon put it with Public Image Ltd.
“Standing around
All the right people
Crawling
Tennis on Tuesday
The ladder is long
It is your nature”
We can consciously work hard at being politically correct. We can be conscious of the categories we use to define ourselves and others but there is always a “Blind Spot” [1]. We just can’t help being nepotistic but we can be aware of it and maybe change may follow. The big question is: does mindfulness have some kind of pro-social imapct? More research needed…
Harvard psychologists and authors of the book, Blind Spot, have developed a test for subconscious identity bias, which they’ve called the Implicit Association Test or IAT. Researchers, Lueke and Gibson, have tested effects of short mindfulness meditations with this tool and, surprise, surprise, they found it works![2] Rhonda also mentioned the work of Johan Galtung, who talks about things like Structural Violence and Structural Bias Inequity [3] suggesting mindfulness could be used not just to reduce race discrimination but could also therefore reduce social violence.
So that’s a nice story and a very much close to why I’m interested in mindfulness and why there is even a Mindfulness and Social Change Network at all but I wonder why you are you reading this?
Professor Rhonda Magee is a world-leading academic and mindfulness teacher based at the University of San Francisco, and former visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Creator of the ColorInsight training, she is a thought leader on the role of awareness practices in education, law and the work of social justice. She is a frequent collaborator, co-presenter and practice leader with Jon Kabat Zinn [Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at University of Massachusetts/UMASS Centre for Mindfulness].
At the meeting hosted by the Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group, Professor Magee has kindly agreed to share aspects of her work and field questions from those interested in the role of mindfulness and compassion in minimising social-identity-based bias.
OK, the big deal [at least from my point of view] is that this talk was taking place at all and that the The Mindfulness Movement is now mature enough to take a look in the mirror — just with one eye half open to start with anyway. This is why both Steven and I had broken our self-imposed exile to come and watch the show, sitting in Committee Room 10, with our backs to the great, green, greasy Thamespopo River at Westminster.
Things got interesting towards the end of the questions and answers session. Cath opened things up with her question. The trouble is, I had a memory “white out” as my adrenals started to pump fight or flight hormones into my bloodstream. I do remember Rhonda saying something about a committee in the UMASS Centre for Mindfulness that was looking into finding new ways of teaching mindfulness — but they were struggling to get out of the “white middle class” box.
They know it’s not just an “us and them” thing — bias. They (UMASS Centre for Mindfulness) know we are biased too but they’re not quite sure what to do about it— even with the help of an African American Woman Professor.
I put my hand up. I couldn’t think of how to put what I wanted into a question — that is unmindful me. I just blurted out: “It’s the neo-liberal self looking for a solution to a problem constructed by the neo-liberal self — not just mindfulness in the workplace. It’s all a neo-liberal construction; mindfulness in the workplace, therapy and even Western Buddhism” [or something like that].
Rachel followed up commenting on how adaptation had been prevented. I wish I could remember more. Maybe you were there? Maybe you can help?
I’m left with that awfulness of the intonation and creepy feeling I get when listening to a guided loving-kindness (metta) practice. That hypnotic voice combined with the preacher. No! Anger feels good. The worst thing is to repress emotions. Not only does it do me harm, it cuts me off and makes me a slave — I know I’m not going to get lynched, and I am very grateful for that — but I’m still angry that I get excluded for expressing ideas that threaten the status quo.
The challenge is not to use “compassion” as a form of opium — it’s creating a culture that knows how to transform anger into prosocial action. To do this, we need a new “mindfulness” story and just maybe Rhonda is helping us to write that story.
References:
1 Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People, Mahzarin Banaji, Anthony Greenwald, 2013.
2 Adam Lueke and Bryan Gibson, Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Age and Race Bias, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2014
3 Johan Galtung, Violence, Peace and Peace Research, Journal of Peace Research, 1969
