Welcome to the second article of our series on mindfulness for racial healing by Tovi Scruggs-Hussein. You can read the first article of the series here.
If you have questions please send them to yourwords@mindful.org and we may include them in a future Q&A article with Tovi’s response.
In my first year as a teacher, I distinctly remember the moment I looked around my classroom on the first day of school, as all teachers do to assess their circumstance, and remember what I told myself about what I saw. There were lots of Brown and Black students, a few White students and one Asian student. I remember thinking, this Asian student’s not gonna need any of my help. He’s gonna be just fine. My body language gave away my thinking as I literally turned my body away from him. I remember looking at the White students and the feeling I had about them was simply neutral, because I knew the system was designed for them, and thought they were also going to be just fine. Then, I looked at my Black and Brown students and thought, Huh, they’re probably going to need more of my attention.
When I was in school as a young girl, I attended school with lots of White and Asian children, and in all of the classes that I was struggling in, Asian students seemed to do really well. They performed the way I wished I could. I noticed this as it happened throughout elementary school, middle school, high school, and university. All this led to when I became a teacher and my biases were positive about the Asian students, fairly positive around White students, and negative about my Black and Brown students—accepting the all-too-traditional narrative of Black and Brown students in our schools. Of course, it was help I was more than willing to give them, and that too was a part of my bias.
We come to understand not only what is happening in our outer landscape, but also our inner landscape, and in the case of bias, they are both important, as we have to illuminate it before we can interrupt it.
Because of our biases, we often favor our in-group, even if the bias we hold isn’t completely positive. The connection and the socialization of the in-group, in this case, added an extra layer of care. It’s also important to add that the societal narrative fueled my bias so strongly that I had to use self-talk and rationality that acknowledged that I was not any different than my Black high-school students; I was a good student and was college-going. They were too. The traditional narrative caused me to “other” them—all due to bias. So, while bias can work in favor of our in-group, it can also work against our in-group and result in internalized oppression (a recognized understanding in which an oppressed group accepts the methods and incorporates the oppressive message of the oppressing group against their own best interest.)
My conditioning and lived experience through birth and my identity, through my education, through societal conditioning, lent to the bias I held.
We’re All Biased
We all go through a conditioning process as we grow up and this is where we develop our biases. All humans go through this and anyone who tries to tell you that they don’t have biases hasn’t spent much time learning about them or examining their own beliefs and conditioning through self-exploration.
A few years after I had this experience with my first classroom of students, after cultivating a mindfulness practice of deep meditation every day, I became fully aware of how the biases I had were not conducive to teaching all students equally. I knew that if this was happening to me, it had to be happening to other teachers, and though it is embarrassing—and even shame-inducing—to think I was unaware of my biases, I now share this story to teach about the power of bias