Breaking Bias

For readers of Caste, Sapiens, and The Dawn of Everything, a page-turning deep-dive into how bias is learned—plus a strikingly original and highly effective set of tools to un-learn it. Imagine a world without bias. A world where all human beings can truly be just as they are and unleash their full potential. Take a moment to imagine how you feel in such a world—not what you think about it, or whether you believe it's possible, but how you feel. This is the proposition that opens Breaking Bias. It’s your invitation to embark on a journey that will radically change your experience and show you how you, in turn, can help reshape our world. Drawing on two decades of original research and experience training thousands of students, Anu Gupta, a lawyer, scientist, and educator whose work focuses on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, has written a comprehensive and compellingly readable guide for anyone who wants to understand and unlearn conscious and unconscious biases. Whether you're a teacher or student, engineer or creative, parent or grandparent, this book will train you to become more aware of and transform bias in your daily life and within you—especially beliefs and perceptions you may hold about yourself and others. Blending ancient Buddhist wisdom with modern scientific evidence, Anu takes us on a deep-time journey to explore human identities and identity-based biases and to recognize that breaking bias is the key to unlocking multiple crises in our world—from racism, sexism, classism, and other -isms to burnout, loneliness, and climate change. Then he offers his signature PRISM toolkit—a science-backed, somatically informed set of contemplative tools—to help us dismantle learned bias within ourselves and in the world around us, moment by moment, with probing questions and writing prompts throughout the book that invite us to put these tools to use right from the start. Breaking Bias is one of the few books that go beyond examining the history of bias to offer actual training in how to reduce bias, and it’s the only one written by an author with Anu's unique intersectional identities: a gay brown immigrant with Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu roots who is also an American lawyer and scholar of bias with lived experiences that span the globe. This is a book with the potential to transform the way we think and the way we live.