How Can Mindfulness Improve Race Relations?

A friend was recently telling me about a leadership conference she attended, which included a session called, “Mindfulness and Race Relations.”

“Lots of people wanted to be part of the session,” she said. “But they were having a hard time making the connection between mindfulness and race relations — or even relationships with other people at all.” They saw mindfulness, she told me, as something solitary and esoteric.

So let’s break it down like this:

1) Awareness of unconscious biases

Foremost, through mindfulness and meditation, we develop the art of noticing — and part of that is noticing who we are. From a place of detachment, we notice our patterns, our reactions, our triggers. And guess what, lurking amidst all of that are our unconscious biases. And that’s ok! We were all born into a word of biases, so to assume that we wouldn’t pick any of them up is asking a lot of ourselves. The more important thing is to have the intention to change — to see our biases for what they are, and to longer accept them as truth.

The other day, I came across these words that sum it up: what isn’t noticed, can’t be changed.

2) More compassion toward others

There seems to be a lot of fear these days that if people spend so much time noticing themselves, they’ll become narcissistic or self-obsessed. But I’d be interested if that actually holds up. Has anybody, anywhere ever become more narcissistic as a result of a meditation practice? I’d love to see the data on that.

On the contrary, here’s actually how meditation can help us become more compassionate toward others:

• it helps us slow down, become more patient and less likely to fly off the handle;
• as we observe ourselves less judgmentally, we become less judgmental of others;
• and our practice opens us up to experiencing the vast space of consciousness that connects us all (bare with me here), which gives way to the realization that we are actually more alike than we are different.

This latter point is perhaps one of the most profound aspects of meditation and brings us straight to the heart of Buddhism (although meditation is not just for Buddhists!): that everyone is basically just like me, they want to be happy and free of suffering. That means everyone. All the people who annoy us, who don’t look like us, who live very far away in countries we can’t pronounce, etc… You get the idea. In that sense, meditation decreases the sense of “otherness” that is so pervasive in our modern world.

And for anyone who really wants to ensure that their meditation is compassion focused, the metta practice, or loving kindness, can be used just for that purpose. In this meditation, we are particularly called to focus on a person we find hard to like or respect, and wish them happiness through a repeated mantra. “May you be happy, may you have peace, may you have joy” — or some iteration thereof. And what happens is exactly what you might expect: we change and (often) the relationship changes.

So there you have it: how mindfulness and meditation can improve race relations. But actually, how they can improve all relations.