One of the first things I always ask anyone when we begin a conversation about BE MORE with Anu’s trainings is: what have you tried so far? What have you liked? What haven’t you liked?
The number one answer is that learning about bias is not actionable. It feels overwhelming, and it seems like there isn’t a place to start.
I understand that. Learning about anything painful without also learning about its salve is antithetical to what we want as humans. So today I thought I’d build on having written before about how we heal from internalized bias, and delve into what it will look like to move on from institutionalized bias.
Building Blocks of Bias
To begin this conversation, let’s acknowledge that there are multiple levels of bias, and that they build on each other, in much the same way that individuals organize themselves into communities and societies. In light of this, it’s helpful to review internalized bias before we begin a deep dive into institutionalized bias.
Recall that internalized biases concern how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive others are perceiving us. These ideas, concepts, emotions, and notions are biases that we have about our own self-concept and our relationship with ourselves.
Recall, too, that because internalized bias concerns self-perception, one of the most powerful tools we can enlist as we break it is mindfulness, which concerns present-moment awareness of one’s experience.
A takeaway from our analysis of internalized bias is that mindfulness is a powerful tool because truth is a powerful antidote to bias, and mindfulness engenders truth. This will be a powerful concept in our exploration of institutionalized bias, too.
(Hopefully that quick recap was enough to jog your memory; if not, a full overview of how we can heal from internalized bias is here!)
Anu at the Berlin Wall
What is Institutionalized Bias?
It might seem intuitive by now, then, that we can define institutionalized bias as the way perceptions, or misperceptions to be more exact, shared by people with authority and influence become policies that create costs and inequity. That is: institutionalized bias is the aggregate of internalized and interpersonal biases of individual humans with authority and/or influence.
As an example, we can look at what unfolded in the Montana State Legislature in April 2023, when Zooey Zephyr, a trans representative, was formally censured and banned from speaking on the floor. The shared perception among the majority of those in power around her was that her gender identity doesn’t exist – and therefore, without empathy or recognition of her humanity, it was possible to misgender her, prevent her from speaking on the House floor, and ultimately take away the voice of her 11,000 constituents. This is institutionalized bias in action because no single person is responsible for this grave injustice. It was a result of a shared agreement of many people with authority and power, i.e. the plurality of Montana legislature.
Importantly, then, we come to the most important “definition” of all with respect to institutionalized bias: what do we do about it? What’s the goal?
The goal of breaking institutionalized bias is to create not just inclusion and equity, but true belonging. The pathway to that is revealed by the work of dozens of truth & reconciliation scholars:
- Defining the truth
- Reckoning with what has been revealed as the truth
- Repairing the harm that was done
- Reconciliation
This is the work of truth & reconciliation – and, indeed, of breaking institutionalized bias. (For more on truth & reconciliation, reference this paper I wrote back in 2011 after an extensive study of the role of law in creating, sustaining, and exacerbating race-based inequalities in the US: Realizing the Constitutional Promise: Initiating Transition in America to Overcome the Legacy of White Supremacy.)
Anu with Van Jones, Rev. Jacqui Lewis, Genesis Be, Aunjunue Ellis, Trabian Shorters, and Gabe Brodbar after a panel at NYU Law on Overcoming White Supremacy
Organizing to Break Institutionalized Bias
In my overview of healing from internalized bias, I asked (and answered) what is the salve? One of the biggest differences between internalized and institutionalized bias is that as we heal from internalized bias, we can walk the path of developing the salve largely on our own. This is why, in the piece about internalized bias, this question marked the closing of the article.
When healing from institutionalized bias, we must go even farther. Using tools of mindfulness and the rest of the PRISM toolkit to develop an understanding of truth is critical here, just as it was in healing from internalized bias. Yet institutionalized bias requires us to go beyond truth and into reconciliation – which is work we must do collectively.
To truly address institutionalized bias, we need a shift in heart to take place amongst people making decisions (e.g. in schools, hospitals, corporations, and governments). So what could these shifts look like? I can offer two strategies:
Vetting
Implementing a system of vetting which prevents people who hold racist, sexist, or otherwise abusive or dehumanizing beliefs from holding roles of authority and influence, such as public office, is one strategy to mitigate institutionalized bias.
I have written about vetting as a strategy to decrease racial bias before, and about how deeply I believe that a compassionate and authentic offer of rehabilitation, combined with a system that offers its constituents true accountability, is one of the most promising ideas we have at our disposal to break institutionalized bias.
Vetting allows for the opportunity to define standards for what we will and will not accept as a Beloved Community. Sometimes, we’re not able to change people in power in a timeframe that allows for the safety and just treatment of those their power affects. In this case, the ability to remove people in power whose views cause harm is an important tool to build an environment free from bias.
That said, I also want to introduce the idea that vetting need not be solely an external system for accountability. One of the most influential things that leaders and people in power can do is to engage regularly in a process of self-vetting, and to share this process with their followers, employees, mentees, and other stakeholders within their sphere of influence.
Doing this introduces a powerful level of transparency and commitment to justice that will ultimately begin to shift the culture around leaders who commit to it.
The organizing done around the fall of the Berlin Wall reminds us that creating a movement is the key to institutional change.
Creating a movement
By now, you’re probably beginning to realize that these “shifts in culture” are the keys to breaking institutionalized bias. Indeed, the shining examples we have in American culture of working together to break institutionalized bias have come from individuals who’ve built movements.
For example, the #NoDAPL protests around the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock coalesced a movement to push back against the majority-held misperceptions that:
1) Land is a thing to be exploited, rather than a living, breathing, entity, and
2) Our indigenous brothers, sisters, and siblings are savages, or nuisances, rather than fellow humans who share a deep connection with the land, particularly in places that have been colonized and settled on the lands their ancestors stewarded for tens of thousands of years.
The #NoDAPL movement gave us a lens through which to focus efforts to transform these perceptions, and to break the institutional and historic ways of relegating indigenous people to second-class citizenship.
Similarly, we’ve seen movements within communities to apply the same principles of truth and reconciliation we spoke about earlier. I’ve been honored and privileged to share space with TaWanda Stallworth and Sean Shultz, mayor of Carlisle, PA, doing this important work, and there are similar examples all across the world. Every single one of them started with an individual, or a group of individuals, who engaged in the work to break internalized and interpersonal bias, and who then worked with their communities to begin the work of breaking institutionalized bias.
Anu with TaWanda Stallworth and Sean Shultz, mayor of Carlisle, PA
A Focus on Transformation
My word of caution to you as you read this article is to guard against being caught up in focusing on languaging and re-languaging the movement. When we focus on getting exactly the right language (a phenomenon I see often as a DEIB practitioner… or wait, is it DEI? Or JEDI? Or EI&D?), we take away our brain’s valuable ability and capacity to focus on transformation.
Breaking institutionalized bias transforms the intention with which we show up. For example, institutions might ask themselves:
- What is it that we want to feel within institutions?
- What is it that we want the people we serve to feel?
As leaders, be honest and ruthless about getting to the bottom of these questions. “Justice” is not a feeling. “Equity” is not a feeling. As a leader, it may be that your power rests in naming and fully exploring these intentions. For example, here’s some of what we might be trying to express when we say we want people to “feel justice”:
- We want the people we serve to feel healing.
- We want the people we serve to feel repair.
- We want the people we serve to feel kindness.
- We want the people we serve to feel compassion.
- We want the people we serve to feel safety.
- We want the people we serve to feel love.
It may feel like a scary, or even dangerous, culture shift to use words like “love” or “healing” in your strategic plan. Yet if this is what’s meant, this is what the language should say. Otherwise, we will be stuck forever in these “re-languaging” loops – you can go back and forth for years between “justice”, “equity”, and “inclusion”, and none of them will ever feel right if what you mean is “love”.
Putting an emphasis on the intention with which we show up, and moving from our heads to our hearts to ask what the beloved community should feel like, is a wonderful way to use mindfulness and embodiment principles to focus on transformation.
Next Steps in Breaking Institutionalized Bias
In closing, I want to share two things. First, this content is overwhelming. I know it is. Whatever reactions it engenders in you, I want to invite you to feel it, fully, and in your body. Be a scientist of your experience: notice the discomfort. Notice what arises.
Next, I want to share with you, with compassion, that this work is difficult for everyone. It is normal and natural not to know where to start as a leader, having read all of the above and thinking what now? The dominant narratives of our world have not created a culture designed to equip us to break bias – Audre Lorde’s famous words come to mind that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
bell hooks' words remind us that just as institutionalized bias is collective... so, too, will be the healing from it.
That said, generations of elders and ancestors before us have done this work for decades. We know how to break bias. We have the tools. I invite you, if you’re reading this with a sense of heaviness, or even shame: reach out to us. We’d love to partner with you to begin this work in your organization – shame-free, and with empathy, psychological safety, and compassion at the core.
Remember: institutions are made up of people. All that’s needed for this work to begin is qualitative and quantitative shifts in the hearts and minds of those in power. If that’s you, give us a call: we’d love to walk with you along your breaking bias journey.
