MOCA TALKS with Anu Gupta – Rethinking Race and Belonging in Asian America

$10 General Admission | $5 Student & Senior | Free for MOCA Members

The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) invites you to a special conversation with author and lawyer Anu Gupta, moderated by author Katie Gee Salisbury, that explores the social and historical origins of racial thinking and the subtle ways bias is learned, reinforced, and carried through our bodies and institutions. MOCA’s special exhibition hapa.me serves as a point of departure for a broader discussion about what it means to live beyond single race categories, and how multiracial experiences complicate fixed ideas of identity, belonging, and visibility.

Drawing on insights from Gupta’s book , the discussion will examine the global contexts in which racial hierarchies emerged and how contemporary debates around diversity and belonging are unfolding across workplaces, cultural spaces, and public life. The evening will also consider cross-racial connections and shared struggles, particularly in the context of Black History Month.

Together, Gupta and Salisbury invite audiences to reflect on mixed race and multiracial identity within Asian America, engage with the roots of bias within ourselves and our institutions, and imagine a future grounded in understanding, connection, and shared humanity. Following the conversation, guests are warmly invited to stay for a book signing with Gupta. A newly released paperback edition of Breaking Bias will be available for purchase.

About Anu Gupta

Anu Gupta is an award-winning author, speaker, lawyer, and meditation expert working at the intersection of neuroscience, technology, contemplative practice, and social entrepreneurship. He is the author of Breaking Bias, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, which offers a science-backed approach to reducing bias and building belonging. Through his company, Be More with Anu, he has trained more than 100,000 professionals across sectors, including leaders at Google, HSBC, and the American Medical Association. Anu has spoken at global forums such as TED, SXSW, and the Dubai Future Forum, and his work has been featured in outlets including TIME, Fast Company, and Vogue Business. Trained at NYU Law and the University of Cambridge, Anu brings analytical rigor and spiritual depth to his work, helping leaders cultivate the inner capacities needed to navigate complexity and build futures where all beings belong. Learn more: bemorewithanu.com | @anuguptany

About Katie Gee Salisbury

Katie Gee Salisbury is the author of Not Your China Doll, a new biography of Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Believer, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in 2021 and gave the TED Talk “As American as Chop Suey.” She also writes the newsletter Half-Caste Woman. A fifth-generation Chinese American who hails from Southern California, she now lives in Brooklyn.

About Breaking Bias: Where Stereotypes and Prejudices Come From—and the Science-Backed Method to Unravel Them

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.

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