"Meditation and Bias: Using Mindfulness to Help Reduce Discrimination"
Prominent mindfulness teachers have offered ideas for ways that mindfulness can help support antiracist work; some of these teachers have spoken in our Mindfulness Program here at CLS.
The aim of this session is to introduce briefly some promising empirical research finding that mindfulness and other forms of meditation have debiasing effects with regard to race and other axes of discrimination. For instance, one study finds that one 10-minute mindfulness meditation makes experimental participants less racially biased in their behavior in a trust game (Lueke and Gibson 2016). This research is still early and small-scale -- and individually targeted interventions can only do so much without large-scale structural change -- and so the aim here is not to assume that this research is correct or that mindfulness is a panacea, but to consider together what this research suggests about the possibilities and limits of mindfulness and other forms of meditation.
In the session, we will discuss these issues and practice meditation together. We look forward to seeing you there.
Professor Emens will lead the session, and Brandon Holt (CLS '24) will serve as host. Please RSVP here for the Zoom link.
Elizabeth Emens writes and teaches on disability law, family law, anti-discrimination law, contracts law, and law and sexuality. In addition to her scholarly work, Professor Emens teaches a practicum on lawyer leadership as part of the Law School’s Davis Polk Leadership Initiative. She also directs the Columbia Law School Mindfulness Program, which offers weekly secular meditation sessions for the Law School community.
Brandon Holt is a first year J.D. Candidate at Columbia Law School. At Columbia, he is involved in the Black Law Students Association, Business & Law Association, and OutLaws. Brandon's legal interest is in corporate transactional law. Prior to Columbia, Brandon spent six years working in financial services and technology.
