How Mindfulness Can Defeat Racial Bias

I found this article to be fascinating and helpful...

How Mindfulness Can Defeat Racial Bias

An excerpt:

Is there a solution? Research shows that mindfulness practices help us focus, give us greater control over our emotions, and increase our capacity to think clearly and act with purpose. Might mindfulness assist police and other public servants in minimizing the mistaken judgments that lead to such harms? Might they help the rest of us—professors and deliverymen alike—minimize our biases as well?

In a word, yes. The good news is that mindfulness and related practices do assist in increasing focus and raising awareness, and have been shown to assist in minimizing bias. While the research is ongoing, studies are beginning to show that mindfulness meditation and compassion practices serve as potent aids in the work of decreasing bias.

When we consider these new findings along with some of the already proven benefits of mindfulness, and combine them with teachings about contemporary forms of racism, the outlines of an effective set of new mindfulness-based interventions—for police, doctors, educators, and the full range of others—have already begun to emerge. I call these Mindfulness-Based ColorInsight Practices.

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