This week Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder.
I heard a story on the radio today that led with something like this: “A flood of police departments have tried things like implicit bias training...but those efforts have largely been unsuccessful.”
Statistics over the last five years bear this out. In armed confrontations, police kill 2.6 times more Black people than white people. The number is even higher for Hispanics. And in unarmed situations, police kill three times as many Black people. A small but significant decrease in killings has happened for white people over those five years. Not for people of color.
Anyone who knows anything about mindfulness won’t be too surprised that implicit bias training isn’t having an immediate effect. Not because those programs aren’t well-intentioned and well-designed. And not because the officers who so bravely serve their communities want to be racist (I hope). It’s because the very nature of an implicit bias is that it’s baked into the core of how our mind works. You can’t just decide to change it and then -- poof! -- all better.
Go ahead -- take a well-reputed test of implicit bias for yourself and see how you do. We all have implicit biases, whether they’re about race, gender, sexuality, age, or something else.
In your mindfulness practice, how many times (or years!) have you worked on self-doubt or anger or anxiety and then found yourself succumbing to those feelings again? This is a never-ending process of challenging yourself and accepting backslides as part of the growth.
If the movies and cop shows you’ve been watching since childhood tend to represent rough inner city neighborhoods populated by people of color, or black men in violent situations, it’s going to take some time to unlearn those associations. More importantly, it’s going to take some higher level thinking -- not the sort of thinking that happens by instinct.
The issue is that our implicit bias often kicks in specifically during situations when we aren’t afforded the time or calm to really dig into our thought process or assumptions. When we’re acting out of fear or anger -- two emotions that likely run high in police encounters -- we’re acting from the reptilian core of our brain: our amygdala. For good evolutionary reasons, we’re programmed to act instinctively -- not with deliberate thought -- when fear and anger get involved. Fight or flee.
This is not an excuse for Derek Chauvin. At some point in those 9 minutes and 29 seconds, he likely could have disengaged from his amygdala.
What I’m saying, though, is that it will take time, persistence, and resilience to counter implicit bias.
As part of the interview I heard on the radio, the expert being interviewed said that “we don’t know how to teach people to employ strategies that will -- in any lasting, long-term way -- help them to overcome biases.”
While it may be true that a two-hour workshop on implicit bias won’t do it, it IS true that mindfulness practice reduces implicit bias. A new study even showed that simply thinking about cooperation with an out-group can make you less prejudiced toward them. We don’t know how lasting this impact can be, but it stands to reason that if a little practice can elicit a little response, we should definitely look into what a lot of practice can do.
I’m not saying that mindfulness training is the solution to systemic racism. Individuals, and even individual police departments, can’t solve a problem that’s so deeply embedded in our worldview. But it’s a start, and at this point, it might just be the best start we have.
Here are a few more resources for fighting implicit bias and integrating this work into our teaching:
1. The Implicit Bias test mentioned above, from Project Implicit at Harvard University
2. Understanding Implicit Bias: What Educators Should Know, by Cheryl Staats
3. Strategies and Resources from Brown University
4. Resources on culturally relevant pedagogy, by KIPP
And here’s a meditation to help you with that work.
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