How Anu Gupta is Using Mindfulness to Break Racial Bias, Open Minds, and Inspire Radical Empathy
By Stacey Lindsay
It seems impossible to identify a part of life not impacted by bias. But after talking to Anu Gupta, it feels totally possible to create a future free from it.
“Just imagine being in a world where wherever we are, we feel a sense of belonging,” says Gupta, a scientist, educator, and lawyer. “We don't have to feel afraid because of the way we look or our accent or the way we dress. We just belong because we're human beings.”
Gupta is determined to embolden inclusivity, a desire that seems to have been fostered by his worldliness. He was born in Delhi, India where he spent the first decade of his life before moving with his family to New York City. He began his career working in global human rights and economic development in Myanmar, Malaysia, and other areas throughout the global south, before he attended law school in the States. As his work continued to expand, so did his experience witnessing preconceived tendencies and how they can cause great ill. “I would go to the prison system and I would see everyone there was black or brown, and they were there for petty offenses,” he says. “I was like, why is this happening?”
The question both haunted and fueled Gupta. He continuously got the same answer from his professors and peers: The reason is racism. Gupta found the answer to be unsatisfactory, he says. He wanted to get more granular; to understand the root causes of racial and gender disparities. Why are they perpetuated? How do they impact our decisions? And—most importantly—how can we unlearn them?
For the past fifteen years, Gupta has unpacked the nuances of bias. He and his team have merged neuroscience and social psychology to develop tools that help people break free from the mental templates that fuel biased narratives and ideologies. The culmination of these efforts launched recently as BE MORE with Anu, an accessible, multi-tiered program for “breaking biases and unlocking your potential.”
The work is as fascinating as it is tangible. And as Gupta helps us see, it is hopeful. That is because it is paving the way toward a world filled with true equity and true belonging.
A Conversation with Anu Gupta
How do you define bias?
The way I think about bias is there's two types: There's conscious biases and unconscious biases.
Conscious biases are things that are known beliefs and attitudes that we have. Those are conscious so we can't beat around it because people actually believe something.
Unconscious biases are the more insidious of the two types of biases, because most of us hold egalitarian values. We believe that all people are equal regardless of their gender identity, sexual orientation, racial ethnic background, yet our behaviors oftentimes don’t match those values that we hold consciously. That’s the nature of unconscious bias. It is learned habits of thought that distort how we perceive, reason, remember, and make decisions.
What is an example of unconscious biases?
I’ll give you a few examples. One is what can happen in an interview situation when an employer is looking at candidates. If someone happens to be different from them, whether it's because of their color or gender, they might ask questions about those aspects of things that have nothing to do with the talent and the competencies for the position. Because—and sometimes it's not out of ill will—they are trying to build some sort of intimacy with people because that's what they've learned; that asking people about their culture is palatable to build intimacy, but those things can actually be unskillful and unwholesome in terms of creating disparities.
More challenging examples are in healthcare. Doctors and nurses, because of how these habits have been learned, oftentimes associate darker skin with a lower threshold for pain or having less sensitive nerve endings. That is then directly correlated with the type of diagnosis and treatment that people of color, particularly darker skin people, are given.
This also holds true for gender identity and other forms of identities that humans hold that are more salient, that are visible. In a classroom, you could have two kids: one that is black, one that is not black. They are just being kids, but the black kid is five times more likely to be disciplined and thought of as a culprit child or a difficult child.
How can we start to notice these systemic biases in our language and in our seemingly innocuous day-to-day actions? For instance, the word “minority” is used often to define a group, or groups of people, but the word can mean less than or inferior. How did that word gain traction in the lexicon?
I, too, am not the biggest fan of this word. The history behind that word is really legal. The Supreme Court Justices and our legislators have used that word to dance around saying things as they are: people of color or black or Asian or women, for example. They were so afraid of saying those words, so they used the word “minority.” And that word basically percolated into the investment field and business field. But if you think about the term itself, no one is a minority. We're all people. And also, people of color are 40 percent of the country, and 80 percent of the world. How is that a minority? These terms then begin to fall apart.
These are systemic issues. It's really about perception. And even the perception that created these terms were based on this idea that there is a dominant group, which is a majority, which is considered right, and a non-dominant group, which is a minority, which needs some sort of help. That is what we all need to really think about transforming in our hearts and minds before we can actually create social change around that.
In creating these transformations, what are the ways that we can start to take notice of biases that are implicit?
That is the cool thing about the science. It has been about twenty-five years since the first instrument that measured unconscious bias was created. It's called the Implicit Association Test. I love this quote from Peter Drucker, who's the grandfather of management consulting: "If you could measure it, you can manage it."
We now have tools that can measure the strength of people's associations based on different concepts, whether it's gender or race or age or size or height or ethnicities—you name it. There are nineteen different tests that were created at Harvard and have since been used in over 2,000 studies, from criminal justice, to healthcare, to employment, to education, to really show that it's actually unconscious bias that plays the biggest role in discriminatory behavior, as well as creating inequalities in our society.
So, because of that science, and because we have an instrument to measure it, we have then developed tools to manage it. At our company, BE MORE with Anu, we’ve built a whole host of interventions that are rooted in mindfulness to really help people retrain the mind. Because we know where people are starting out, because we can measure the strength of those unconscious associations and biases, we can then begin to help them to rewire the brain. That's the magic of neuroplasticity. A lot of that research comes from addiction research. Research in mindfulness has shown that eight weeks of daily practice can help people overcome addiction, whether it's to food or alcohol or other forms of substances and dependencies.
Similarly, if we apply that same logic and those same tools to how we think, we can begin to shift that ourselves. This is what a lot of the research on growth mindset is about. So just as we do that for ourselves, in terms of unleashing our own full potential, we can do that to actually build connections with others. The toolkit that we've created to do that is called PRISM, which is an acronym for five tools: perspective-taking, prosocial behaviors, individuation, stereotype replacement, and mindfulness. And mindfulness really is the bedrock of all of these tools.
We’d like to talk more about the programs you recently released: BE MORE with Anu. Where did this start?
It started almost seven years ago. As someone who had studied the science, I knew we had all the information we needed to know about everything about why these disparities exist, and how they impact behavior. And also, we had the tools that we need to actually break them and transform them. But how do we bring it to the end user?"
We created programming, and we started with healthcare because the urgency of bias and its impacts, particularly on healthcare disparities, was so apparent and something that no professional in healthcare of any reputation would disagree with. They said, "Yes, this exists." So, we had a willing group of people that actually wanted to do something about it.
From there, we realized that there are a lot of other constraints, including time. Whether they're doctors—or, beyond healthcare—engineers, corporate professionals, teachers, they can't do a full-day or multiple-day training. So, we started with this program called Breaking Bias Online for people that are not in healthcare, and then Breaking Bias in Healthcare. They're both similar in their structure, but one is tailored to healthcare and the other one is tailored to any professional. They're sixty minutes, and we've used a lot of meeting tools of adult learning to break it down in micro-videos and game-based learning and assessments to really get people to understand unconscious bias: what it is, how it is, and its financial and social implications.
The second half of the program is about actually practicing the PRISM tools. I could talk about what PRISM is just as I can describe what an orange tastes like using words—but you won't really know what it is until you actually eat it. That’s what we want to give people: the tastes of the tool itself.
What are your aspirations for these tools?
They are really the beginning of the journey. It is more about the way we think about our aspiration as a whole: to address and transform the root causes of racial and gender disparities within our lifetime. And in order to do that, we've created what we call the Be More Journey. This is a three-stage journey, which consists of learn, develop, and propel. Each of these steps and stages have competencies associated with them. For the introductory programs, it's really focusing on four competencies: awareness, comprehension, curiosity, and optimism. That is part of the learn stage.
After people complete this and they're still interested in more programming, then they can go on to our more in-depth programs like Breaking Racial Bias, which is what we're going to launch this fall. It'll be a four-week program and there'll be weekly lessons, weekly community discussions, as well as daily practices. And that's going to be all ten of our competencies that we'll be measuring. Some of those other competencies include empathy and compassion, skillful communication, empowerment, collective identity, social cohesion, wellbeing. If you think about it, all of those things actually impact the way we interact with each other. The less we take care of ourselves, the more irritable we are when we're with other people. Wellbeing is a huge component of that.
What are some of the biggest challenges around this work?
Lack of empathy. Empathy isn't something you're born with. Empathy is a skill we can cultivate. This is where the science around this is just so exciting. There's an entire department at Stanford Medical School that's committed to studying compassion and empathy and altruism.
For me, these are not lofty, soft things. Coming from the legal background and business background, people think about these things as soft skills. But actually, we know that these are not soft skills, these are essential skills. You can have all the hard skills around coding and working, creating financial projections, and other things, but if you don't have these essential skills you can't get stuff done, because you're working with humans. We’re not robots.
And that's another paradigm shift that we're going through, particularly as more and more people are entering various industries. Because of our history, most professionals could only be straight white men—for the most part—before the seventies. And since then, that's why we've had to create a lot of commissions and agencies to ensure there's anti-discrimination, so all people—a hundred percent of our population—can actually be part of the labor market. And as we're doing that, we have to also be mindful of how we operate as a human species.
You use the word "belong" in describing your program. That is a word that echoes a desire to build empathy and compassion. How does that word connect to your greater mission?
If you think about the vision that we're holding with our movement, it's really a movement of people. We're training people, and then we're bringing them into a movement and giving them the tools to really advance equity and belonging in our world by addressing the root causes of racial and gender disparities.
Just imagine being in a world where wherever we are, we feel a sense of belonging. We don't want to feel afraid because of the way we look or our accent or the way we dress. We just belong because we're human beings. And we're on this earth. It's the same organism. Again, biologically, genetically, you talk about those things. We're the same exact organism, yet we haven't reached that point where we can feel that sense of safety. And more importantly, belonging, even in our own city sometimes, even in our families. And that's the aspiration we're holding.
Are you optimistic we'll get there?
Yes, of course. We've come so far. We're living through some really tumultuous times right now, of course, because of the pandemic and the civil unrest and the protests. Yet, all those things have always been happening. It's just that it wasn't in our public consciousness. If you think about a whole host of other epidemics that have been spreading and pandemics and other things, we, as a species have survived. This is just another cycle.
I think we'll certainly get there. And, from a perspective of our conscious evolution as human beings, this is part of that. What’s required now is for us to show up and be willing to do the work together.
To learn more about Anu Gupta and the BE MORE movement, visit: bemorewithanu.com.
——
At The Conscious Investor, it is our goal to shed light on topics that we find interesting, inspirational, and educational. Therefore, this article is strictly for inspirational and informational purposes only. It is in no way intended to substitute for professional investment advice, professional financial advice, or general counsel. To the extent that an article features the insight, opinions, or advice of an expert or company, the expressed views are those of the cited person or company and do not necessarily represent The Conscious Investor and its employees or affiliates.