A ROOM WITH A POINT OF VIEW
IMAGINE A WORLD SUCH AS THIS
Bias can’t be transformed by words or reason alone. Bias is based in emotions, it results from habits of the mind. Image credit: MONIS YOUZAFZAI on Unsplash.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
There’s bias, and then there’s unconscious bias. The first variety is more easily identifiable and most of us would likely claim that we are free of it.
The second is harder to identify and to prove. It is insidious, showing up in interactions where one can then claim they were just kidding, that the other is thin-skinned. However, bias affects not only the one at the receiving end, it changes the biased person, too.
The good news is that the change is not irrevocable.
Anu Gupta has written a book on it, starting from a place of hope.
Imagine a world where all human beings can truly belong, just as they are, and unleash their full potential.
Educator, lawyer, scientist, meditation teacher and the founder and CEO of Be More with Anu, Gupta starts by inviting readers to take deep breaths and reflect on how they feel about bias in their society. And then to write down their thoughts either in a journal, or in the space he provides in his book.
A book I have permission to scribble in – how often do I receive a gift like that! But I digress.
Bias can’t be transformed by words or reason alone, Gupta writes. Bias is based in emotions, it results from habits of the mind.
Science shows that it takes up to eight weeks of practice to create new habits or break old ones. This applies to bias, too. We’ve not made much progress in this area, writes Gupta, not because of lack of commitment but because “we’ve not been warned of or prepared for the very painful nature of this work”.
Guided by his personal experience with bias, he takes this seriously and his work is trauma-informed and shame-free. While encouraging readers to be intentional about breaking bias, he urges them to be kind to themselves should they forget. This helps one stay the course.
He shares his own story. And it’s brutal.
Moving from Chandni Chowk in Delhi – where he was not to mingle with the poor because they were dirty – to America as a child when his parents immigrated in the mid-1990s, he came up against bias of all kinds. Now he was the one other kids weren’t friendly with.
He was an immigrant, brown, and as was obvious to other kids, gay.
As a 12-year-old, he writes, he changed everything he could about himself. “I altered the way I looked. I watched how I walked, how I carried my body, the pitch of my voice, how I moved my hands so they wouldn’t be perceived as feminine. I lost my Indian accent. I spoke in a deeper tone without any inflections and I even went by the name Andy to distance myself from my Indian heritage. My young mind didn’t comprehend how destructive this all was because it was in survival mode.”
And then, in 2009, a few days before his 24th birthday, he found himself on the ledge of his 18th-floor apartment window, about to jump off.
Gupta fell back into his apartment “through an inexplicable moment of grace” and has, since then, devoted his time to developing frameworks to help others heal.
He uses his two sources of learning and healing – ancient Buddhist wisdom and modern Western sciences, and dips into Hindu practices, as well as Indigenous beliefs. He quotes “wisdom keepers” like Vivekananda, Paramahansa Yogananda, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama and David Suzuki.
And on the other side of the divide, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus. At school we learned that he formalized binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. But not that he also named four varieties or races of humans based on location and physical features: European white, American reddish, Asian tawny, and African black. “He then went on to assign aesthetic, moral and intellectual stereotypes to each group as inherent,” reveals Gupta. “Hiding his exclusion consciousness and entitlement behind science...”
Under Temperament, Linnaeus lists Americanus as being unyielding, cheerful, free; Europaeus as light, wise, inventor; Aisaticus as stern, haughty and greedy; and Africanus as sly, sluggish and neglectful.
I stopped at this section feeling sick and horrified. Why don’t more of us know about this?
Gupta lists the causes and conditions of bias, or how we learn bias: Stories, policies, social contact, education and media. How we receive cues from our surroundings and our loved ones about various human secondary identities. He illustrates this point with a discussion he had with his father who believed that certain people are marginalized based on genetics. Not to justify or defend his father’s views, but to underscore how he came by them.
He shares a simple prayer – what he calls well-wishes – for self.
May I be happy.
May I be healthy.
May I be safe.
May I live with ease.
And then asks readers to direct this to a loved one.
May you be happy... And then extend it to others outside of your intimate circle. A store clerk, maybe a driver on the road. And finally, to all beings.
May we be happy.
May we be healthy.
May we be safe.
May we live with ease.
A beautiful way to expand our circle. And another step towards breaking bias, I think, as how could you be biased towards someone you are wishing well for?
We’re not born with biases, Gupta reiterates, biases are learned. To illustrate his point, he writes about a riddle you may have heard as a child. A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies at the scene and the son is rushed to hospital where the surgeon looks at the boy and says, “I cannot operate on this boy, he is my son.” How can this be?
Breaking Bias by Anu Gupta is published by Hay House, $35.99.
When he shared this with his mother, she asked if it was a typo. She went through various possibilities, that the father had not really died, or his ghost was in the operating room. Until it clicked.
She took her hands to her face to cover the shame and embarrassment she felt. My mother, who is a surgeon, had not imagined the surgeon in the riddle being a woman.
He cites the example of Nobel laureate and English biochemist Tim Hunt who said, “Let me tell you my trouble with girls...Three things happen when they are in the lab... You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry.”
He said this at the World Conference of Science Journalists. In 2012.
In his foreword to Breaking Bias, the Dalai Lama wrote that he hopes “this book will help people to come closer to one another through breaking biases on the basis of secondary differences like race, religion, rich or poor that divide us”.
Imagine such a world. A world without bias.