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How Mindfulness Can Defeat Racial Bias

Year: 2016

There might be a solution to implicit racial bias, argues Rhonda Magee: cultivating moment-to-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings, and surroundings. As most of us know from simple, everyday experience, none of us is actually blind to race or color. In fact, research confirms common disconnects between explicit and implicit cognition around race and color. Even if we try to act adopt a colorblind view in the world, it doesn’t work because our brains don’t actually work that way. Indeed, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dissonance results from implicit and explicit efforts to comply with social norms against recognizing race and color.  Despite professing to be more or less colorblind, social psychologists have found that when confronted with a racial Other, anxieties cause us to, for example, arrange seats farther apart than we might otherwise, to over-anticipate disagreement and conflict, to avoid potentially charged topics that actually lead to enhanced understanding. Professing to be colorblind amidst all such evidence to the contrary has been deemed by some to be a new form of racism—colorblind racism.