It was a lovely day in Berkeley when Gibor Basri decided to clean out the flowerpots on his second floor balcony, which overlooks a quiet tree-lined street not far from the University of California, where Basri works. Suddenly, two police cars pulled up, and a knot of officers ran into his yard, guns drawn and pointed. When Basri’s wife Jessica opened the door, they said they would rush her to safety because a “hot prowl”—a burglary in action—was in progress. She looked up. “Oh, that’s my husband.”

An astrophysicist, Gibor Basri claims Jamaican and Iraqi heritage and has dark skin. Jessica Broitman, who works as a psychoanalyst, is white. The two have been married for more than 40 years, have a grown son, and chose Berkeley as their home partly because of its reputation for diversity and a liberal attitude. But when someone driving by spotted a dark-skinned man on a porch in a good neighborhood, bias reared its ugly head. They called 911.

The police were quite embarrassed and apologetic, says Jessica. But they had been alerted that something strange was going on. “Yeah,” she shot back, “Something strange was happening, all right. It’s very unusual when my husband does any household chores. Really!”

“We are social creatures and need to be in relationship with others. Yet we find ways to deny our interconnectedness and marginalize each other. ”

john a. powell, researcher and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley

“A lot of people think about black teens and poor black people as victims of bias, but it’s everywhere,” says Basri. Ironically, in addition to his work as a professor, Basri is also the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion at the University of California, Berkeley, where one of his goals has been to increase the number of African-American students and faculty at the university and to make the campus a more welcoming place for them. “It is hard for someone who has not experienced a sense of pervasive negative stereotyping based on appearance alone to appreciate how incredibly wearing it can be,” says Basri.

Continuar leyendo

And of course it gets worse. A nine-month stretch from late 2014 to mid-2015 saw the following events: the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; the police choking death of Eric Garner on Staten Island; the death of Freddie Gray following harsh treatment while in police custody and the subsequent rioting that rocked Baltimore; and the video showing white fraternity members from The University of Oklahoma singing a racist chant on a school bus. In light of these, bias has become a critically important topic. In unprecedented remarks following the first two incidents and the ensuing protests, FBI Director James B. Comey acknowledged the “widespread existence of unconscious bias.” He said, “There is a disconnect between police agencies and many citizens—predominantly in communities of color. We simply must find ways to see each other more clearly.”

Whether it’s called unconscious bias, implicit bias, or “gut instinct,” bias influences the way every one of us sees and treats other people every day. It’s well-documented that gender equality in the workplace is deeply affected by bias. It’s what makes the world of scientific research and the tech industry run on man power. It’s one reason why orchestras used to be overwhelmingly male.

“We are social creatures and need to be in relationship with others,” says john a. powell, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a prominent researcher on race and human society. “Yet we have ways of denying our interconnectedness, different ways of marginalizing each other. A lot of times we do things we aren’t consciously aware of. It causes suffering all around,” adds powell, author of Racing to Justice. “Perhaps most damaging of all, bias can be internalized and make the subjects feel and perform as if the biases about them are true, both on tests and in the workplace, studies by Claude Steele have shown. It’s what he calls ‘stereotype threat.’”

Part of Our Makeup

Though bias seems like bad news all around, it’s a basic human trait. It’s part of our wiring for survival, explains psychiatrist and professor Daniel Siegel, codirector of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center. Bias helped early humans evaluate strangers quickly and determine who belonged in the cave and who didn’t. Those who made the right call went on to survive and reproduce, and so the trait was passed along. A cave dweller who guessed wrong might be killed.

“The human brain has been called an ‘anticipation machine,’” says Siegel. “It learns from the past to anticipate the future. Past experiences become perceptual filters that shape how you actually see or hear or understand what’s going on in the present moment.” Often this goes on beneath awareness.

“Some would say you are on automatic, you don’t do this on purpose,” says Siegel. “But at its farthest reach, bias may lead humans to systematically destroy people in the outgroup.” The Holocaust and other genocides reveal this extreme, says Siegel, when the compassion circuitry turns off. Bias can be reinforced by what Siegel calls “priming.” If the fear of death is present, we are primed to treat people in the outgroup with more hostility, people in our ingroup with more kindness. The point is not to get rid of bias altogether—an impossible mission—but to get to know what biases we hold, acknowledge the damaging aspects, and learn to see, and do, things differently. Sometimes there is a practical fix. Once a bias in favor of male musicians was identified, for instance, some orchestras solved the problem by having musicians audition behind a screen, so all that was known of them was the sound coming from their instruments.

In other cases, getting beyond bias—as much as we can—involves getting acquainted with what’s inside our brains. “Mindfulness in general allows a person to become more aware of what is arising, and to embrace it for what it is,” says Siegel. “It’s an excellent strategy for recognizing and softening the harmful effects of unconscious bias—that and learning to be at ease with uncertainty. “For the human brain, being uncertain can often be interpreted as danger,” says Siegel. “With mindfulness training, the brain can learn to rest in uncertainty without freaking out.”

At a recent conference on bringing mindfulness into schools at the University of California, San Diego, a systems change consultant who focuses on equity issues, Sheryl Petty, formerly of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, talked about how ingrained habits of bias can be in societies. She went on to say how as a meditation practitioner she appreciates how mindfulness can help us get past minimizing differences to accepting, adapting to, and integrating differences into our life and worldview (referring to stages on intercultural development models developed by Milton Bennett and Mitchell Hammer). But, she pointed out, there’s lots of work to be done. The people who have specialized in equity issues and diversity training over many decades have deepened our understanding of the historical, systemic factors that cause us to treat people unequally. But they “often may not know or say much about inner work and awareness practices, like mindfulness, and their role in systemic change.” Conversely, mindfulness teachers focusing on bias are not as steeped as they could be in an understanding of the systemic factors and might gloss them over. It would be great, she suggests, if these two groups started talking to each other.

We Do Not Know

Breaking through bias is possible when we truly open ourselves to someone else’s experience, says Vinny Ferraro, who runs mindfulness programs for youth and adults. Ferraro, who looks you in the eye, talks straight, and radiates compassion, grew up on the streets selling drugs. His father was incarcerated, his mother died young, and he himself was locked up and suffered from addiction before reversing his trajectory with the help of meditation. Now both a practitioner and highly respected teacher of mindfulness, Ferraro says, “The beginning of the conversation is if we can imagine at least for a minute that we do not know what is going on for other people, to suspend our belief that our truth is the only/whole truth, and to realize that all beings see through a lens of their own conditioning. Or, as the saying goes, ‘The only way illusion works is if we mistake it for reality.’”