The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness
By Rhonda V. Magee and Jon Kabat-Zinn
3/5
()
About this ebook
In a society where unconscious bias, microaggressions, institutionalized racism, and systemic injustices are so deeply ingrained, healing is an ongoing process. When conflict and division are everyday realities, our instincts tell us to close ranks, to find the safety of those like us, and to blame others. This book profoundly shows that in order to have the difficult conversations required for working toward racial justice, inner work is essential. Through the practice of embodied mindfulness--paying attention to our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations in an open, nonjudgmental way--we increase our emotional resilience, recognize our own biases, and become less reactive when triggered.
As Sharon Salzberg, New York Times-bestselling author of Real Happiness writes, “Rhonda Magee is a significant new voice I've wanted to hear for a long time—a voice both unabashedly powerful and deeply loving in looking at race and racism.” Magee shows that embodied mindfulness calms our fears and helps us to exercise self-compassion. These practices help us to slow down and reflect on microaggressions--to hold them with some objectivity and distance--rather than bury unpleasant experiences so they have a cumulative effect over time. Magee helps us develop the capacity to address the fears and anxieties that would otherwise lead us to re-create patterns of separation and division.
It is only by healing from injustices and dissolving our personal barriers to connection that we develop the ability to view others with compassion and to live in community with people of vastly different backgrounds and viewpoints. Incorporating mindfulness exercises, research, and Magee's hard-won insights, The Inner Work of Racial Justice offers a road map to a more peaceful world.
Related to The Inner Work of Racial Justice
Related ebooks
How to Change the World: The Path of Global Ascension Through Consciousness Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Nagarjuna, Nondualism and the Nature of Nothing Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSensitive Is the New Strong: The Power of Empaths in an Increasingly Harsh World Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5THE DANGER OF KNOWLEDGE Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI’m Not Dead…Yet: How I turned my misfortunes into strengths Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDis-Solving Conflict from Within: An Inner Path for Conflict Transformation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Potenzial Human: Kaleidoscope Human 3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReframing Poverty: New Thinking and Feeling about Humanity's Greatest Challenge Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Wisdom of The Guardian [The Best of the Guardian Code] Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEvolving Times Learn 2 Love 2 Live Together: The Civilized Choice A Frank Discussion on cultivating healthy relationships Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Hidden Saviour Deep Within You Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCyclicality Of Causality: Book Of Life-Utility Ideas Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHow to See Yourself As You Really Are Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Civilised Beginning: The Human Social Journey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRemarks On Existential Nihilism: Labelling, Narcissism and Existential Maturity Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSeeing Gender: An Illustrated Guide to Identity and Expression Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5More Together Than Alone: Discovering the Power and Spirit of Community in Our Lives and in the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Radical Rest: Notes on Burnout, Healing and Hopeful Futures Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThey Are The Gender They Are - Understanding your loved one’s gender: The Spectrum's Voice, #3 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLittle Book of Listening: Listening as a Radical Act of Love, Justice, Healing, and Transformation Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Gentle Art of Blessing: A Simple Practice That Will Transform You and Your World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Me, Myself, and I the Human Case of Mistaken Identity Series: Book 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChoosing New Paths Forward: Book 1 - Shifting Our Relationship with Trauma Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMusings of a Mad Scientist: Second Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsField Guide to a New Species: A New, Sustainable Way to Be Human Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMore Over: Finding Your Worth Beneath Excess Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsToward a More Loving and Caring World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrom Anxiety To Connection Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInequality Tension and Conflict Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Meditation and Stress Management For You
Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better (updated with two new chapters) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Don't Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Winning the War in Your Mind Workbook: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Laziness Does Not Exist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Winning the War in Your Mind: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mindful As F*ck: 100 Simple Exercises to Let That Sh*t Go! Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Undistracted: Capture Your Purpose. Rediscover Your Joy. Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind: Dealing with Your House's Dirty Little Secrets Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unfuck Your Anxiety: Using Science to Rewire Your Anxious Brain Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silva Mind Control Method Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Tarot Book You'll Ever Need: A Modern Guide to the Cards, Spreads, and Secrets of Tarot Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Overthinking Cure: How to Stay in the Present, Shake Negativity, and Stop Your Stress and Anxiety Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stop People Pleasing: Be Assertive, Stop Caring What Others Think, Beat Your Guilt, & Stop Being a Pushover Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Breath as Prayer: Calm Your Anxiety, Focus Your Mind, and Renew Your Soul Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Inner Work of Racial Justice
5 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Inner Work of Racial Justice - Rhonda V. Magee
INTRODUCTION
It’s 6 a.m. on a cold morning in San Francisco, and I’ve been standing on the curb for a few minutes more than I’d like. The Uber I had called to get me to the airport for a short flight to Southern California is late. I’ve got a day of challenging conversations ahead of me, and I am feeling both exhausted and more than a little nervous. Waiting for the Uber is not putting me at ease.
For days, I have been preparing to present a speech on contemporary barriers to inclusion, and to facilitate a conversation about building community, on a college campus roiled by recent racist incidents. This could turn out to be a fiasco, and there is only one way that I know to complete my preparations for the work ahead.
I take a deep, slow breath in and a long breath out. I feel the ground beneath my feet and begin to regain a sense that the resources I draw on are not merely in my head. They are in my bones; they are who I am. In those few moments, I’ve come back home. Within minutes, I am in the Uber. As I settle in, I am feeling supported by the knowledge that whatever the day brings, I can drop anchor and tap into this inner ground, this deeper well within, through mindfulness meditation.
People often ask me how I came to the practice of mindfulness—which, at its simplest, is paying attention to life as it unfolds, grounded in the body and breath, and allowing that awareness to settle the mind, increase presence and consciousness of interconnectedness with others. I came to meditation for one reason: I needed deep healing.
I was born in 1967 in the small city of Kinston, North Carolina—an increasingly segregated town thirty miles and a wide cultural gulf from the coast, where tobacco farming, furniture making, and a quiet strain of white supremacy had long framed the way of life. The main road through the black part of town has since been renamed Martin Luther King Boulevard, but those seeking to use this street to leave the city were met, at least for a period of time, with an almost literal dead end. In an effort to keep tourists from venturing into the neighborhood deemed least camera-ready, the city had simply decided to wall it off. And even when the physical barriers were eventually removed, other barriers to residents moving on to greater opportunities remained very much in place.
My childhood home still sits in the heart of Kinston, on the other side of the wall that once existed. It is part of a racially segregated subsidized housing community called Simon Bright. To me, it had been an apartment, but to others, it was the Projects.
My mother had made our home pretty as best she could—with white vinyl pillows, a black vinyl couch and chair, and a carpet woven in red and black. After the little rental on Desmond Street where we lived before the divorce, this was home.
Despite being born into a family traumatized by many things—including the legacies and ongoing dynamics of racial and economic subordination, my father’s military service during the Vietnam War, and his subsequent alcoholism and tendency toward domestic violence—I knew from a very young age that there was something more to life. Even as my family struggled to get enough food to eat each week and put up with the tacit assumptions of others that we would always be members of a servant class, I knew that this was not who we were. And even when my mother’s second marriage left me vulnerable to my stepfather’s repeated molestations and abuse, I held on to the belief that I would one day be free.
Indeed, as I grew into adulthood, I somehow knew my worth was not measured by the gaze of white people, or those who had internalized prejudices against people like me. And I knew that, despite the history that met me at every turn, life was meant to be lived joyfully. Seeing the realities of my family’s situation fully might have been cause for bitterness, but for me, it was not. I saw how my grandmother’s religious commitments steeped her in a larger, more hopeful view of herself and of the world, even as her life options were mostly limited to the sort of labor—tobacco picking, housekeeping—that would have been hers in a slave society. I saw how my mother, despite the many disappointments and abuses she had experienced across a lifetime of similarly restricted options for livelihood—shirt factory worker, nurse’s aide—tended to lead with optimism and to give people the benefit of the doubt. And I loved the black experiences into which I had been born and all that they had given to the world—especially the many models of people struggling against injustice for ourselves and for beloved communities everywhere, all the while maintaining loving, praising hearts.
These things, together with the unexpected gift of mindfulness meditation teachings and practices originally from Asia, have helped me to tame and clarify my own often-troubled mind. And notably, they have also opened me to the possibility that we can transform the world.
My meditation practice began in fits and starts supported mostly by books, without producing any signs of great promise at first. I would sit down in my apartment alone, close my eyes, take a few deep breaths, and try to keep my attention on the flow of my breath, in and out. Immediately, my mind would wander or I’d feel bored. Sometimes, I would feel a bit defeated and stop trying for a while. I would remind myself that each instance of failure
—each moment in which I realized my mind had wandered and intentionally tried to bring it back—was a moment of the very mindfulness that I’d been seeking. And so I’d begin again. And again I would find it hard to do! Indeed, in those early days, I would often find myself just sitting there for a few minutes, mostly lost in my usual repetitive and unhelpful thoughts.
Even though I definitely was not a natural at it, I usually did feel a bit clearer after trying to practice mindfulness. So I kept trying—not every day at first, but often enough that I began to see some differences in my overall outlook and in how I handled life’s challenges. Still, the fact is that I had mixed feelings about committing to a regular practice. None of the people who seemed confident that meditation could help make me saner looked like me or came from a background like mine. After many years of struggling to develop a practice on my own, I was invited to join a group of lawyers who regularly met and meditated under the guidance of Norman Fischer, a former presiding monk at the San Francisco Zen Center. This helped settle me into a regular practice and an appreciation for a community of support for doing so.
By this point, I had quit my job practicing insurance law at a corporate law firm in order to teach law, a move that I had long dreamed of making. I taught Torts (personal injury law), as well as courses on race in American legal history, and contemporary issues in race and law. My work required me to keep turning again and again toward suffering around racism—what we call, somewhat antiseptically, discrimination.
Many evenings, I went home feeling sad and dissatisfied. As my years in the classroom stacked one upon the other, I found myself tilting toward depression. I was also frustrated by the extent to which my students seemed to suffer as they studied in traditional ways—reading, researching, arguing, writing, and delivering formal presentations about some of the most difficult issues of our time. I knew that the work was worthwhile. But it sure seemed to be hard on all of us.
During my darkest hours, I thought of those in my family who had not had my chances for success. I thought of my Grandma Nan—whom we called GranNan—and the way that she had centered her life in spiritual practice and a deep sense of purpose—the very thing I most wanted for myself and, if possible, for my students. Yet since I had never encountered a professor who explicitly strove to blend inner work—mindfulness, awareness, and compassion practices—with the subject matter that he or she taught, I felt somewhat despondent.
By grace, I found a good therapist. She said something that would change my life’s course forever: You can always leave your job as a tenured professor at a university in a city that many people would kill to live in. That option is there for you at any time. But what if, before doing that, you really explored how you might bring all of yourself, including your commitment to inner work and deepening awareness, into your work in law?
And so, with the support of my meditating lawyers group, I began to do just that. Eventually, I met Jon Kabat-Zinn and learned more about his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course. Hearing in him a language that I knew would work in law, I deepened my commitment to bringing mindfulness more fully into every aspect of my life. I saw that if I was going to continue to walk the path I’d begun—building bridges between communities traditionally seen as different—I would have to find a way to deal with regular indignities without going crazy or suffering further damage to myself and others. We were all suffering, after all. Even those who acted out the most extreme forms of violence, I sensed, had themselves suffered in some way. How could this not be so if they could so easily harm others? And so I deepened my commitment to sticking with myself and with others through the challenges of being vulnerable and opening my heart.
It had taken years for me to settle into a set of daily mindfulness practices, an array of supports that suited my needs. But as I practiced, again and again, I found a measure of peace. My heartbeat slowed, and my nervous system calmed me, breath after breath, as I developed the capacity to hold suffering more effectively. Meditation became a steadfast support for the everyday work of wading into the often murky and treacherous waters of having conversations about race with people I did not know well, and the sometimes murkier waters arising in such conversations with people I knew like family.
I came to see how these practices were crucial to the work of creating spaces in which people from a wide variety of backgrounds could sit together and talk about histories that we often do not discuss. For one, the practices help in the delicate work of tending to wounds that have not yet healed. In my classes, we would sit in reflection on the pain caused by racism, by one group after another against one group after another. Over time, we could see how fear, greed, miseducation, and the desire to be seen and appreciated were important drivers of all of this pain. We could see this and not become embittered, and we were not repeating the pattern. With the support of the practices, we were becoming whole.
It became clear to me that we could do a better job of working through race issues with the support of awareness and compassion practices. In all of this, something my GranNan used to tell me reverberated in my mind and felt more poignantly true each time I sat with others in their pain and vulnerability, listening with compassion: we are all one family who have forgotten who we are.
Through personal mindfulness practices, we can begin to ground, heal, and ultimately transform our sense of self, no longer clinging too tightly to a narrow and isolated sense of I,
me,
my wounds,
and the collective pain-stories of my people.
We can begin to be able to infuse our experience of ourselves in culture, community, and context with a sense of the valid, often painful experiences of others. And as we take in more of the whole, we grow.
The practices in this book can help us to process the pain and confusion that arise when we push ourselves or are pushed by others outside of our racial-identity comfort zones. These practices build the resilience we need to stay in the conversations and to deepen community when the going gets tough. In this book, I tell stories about people from a range of backgrounds who have used these practices to think differently about race and racism, and to work for justice,
a word that I define here as love in action for the alleviation of suffering.
Justice begins with our awareness of the present moment, extends through caring for ourselves, and shows up in the love we bring to our interactions with others and our responses to the social challenges of our time.
This book is composed of five parts. In Part One: Grounding,
we examine how race and racism shape our life chances, relationships, and points of view. We also explore the core mindfulness practices that ground us in awareness, insight, and resilience. Part Two: Seeing
spotlights in more vivid detail how contemporary racism lives in us, in our relationships, and in our communities. We expand our awareness of racism by considering its personal, interpersonal, and systemic dimensions, and we practice deepening awareness through mindfulness. In Part Three: Being,
we allow ourselves to be with the difficult thoughts, emotions, and sensations that arise when we become more aware of racism. Through the practices of mindfulness and compassion, we soften the sense of a separate self and create the capacity for healing. Eventually we notice and begin practicing being with the ease and even the joy that arise as we re-create integrated communities together. In Part Four: Doing,
we consider what it takes to deepen racial justice work. This requires not only engaging in mindfulness practice, but also studying our histories and exploring concepts like white fragility,
while working with our communities to engage in transformative social change. Because conflicts will inevitably arise, we also examine skills for sustaining racial justice work and developing resilient relationships and organizations. Finally, in Part Five: Liberating,
we examine the fruits of our mindfulness practice as we experience social change and transformed lives.
Because there are so many rivers of pain joining and forming the ocean of racial suffering in our times, personal awareness practices are essential for racial justice work. In order for real change to occur, we must be able to examine our own experiences, discover the situated
nature of our perspectives, and understand the ways in which race and racism are mere cultural constructions. It may be helpful for you to read this book alongside others so you can share different points of view and support one another in the meditation practices. As you’ll see from my story and those of others you’ll meet here, healing takes place in community. By experiencing new ways of looking at race, we can grow in our capacity to be with one another in ways that promote healing and make real our common humanity and radical interconnectedness. And this will set us on the path toward acting with others for justice—in solidarity with those suffering the most—with humility, kindness, and the capacity to keep growing and rowing on.
I hope that in this book, you will find support for living with your eyes wide open to the role of race in your life and in the lives of others. I hope that you will find guidance for working toward justice for all, through grounded, public-facing, radical compassion—the kind that touches everyone and all things, leaving no one and nothing out. May we form a vast ocean of healing to meet the suffering, one that refuses no river and renews us all. When things get hard along the way—as they will—may the practices, stories, and insights in this book be a reliable and lifelong source of support.
PART ONE
Grounding
Deep mindfulness arises from a view of our radical interconnectedness, that which links us each and all in our particular pain and possibility to earth, fire, wind, water, and space.
Be like the ocean
that refuses no river.
—BABA MANDAZA KANDEMWA
CHAPTER ONE
PAUSING AND RECKONING
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
—REVEREND DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.¹
But race is the child of racism, not the father.
—TA-NEHISI COATES²
The Weight of Our Racial Experience
In June 1984—twenty-one years after Dr. King bellowed the above words across the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and dropped his hope-drenched dream into our collective consciousness—I was perhaps the most hopeful sixteen-year-old girl in all of Hampton, Virginia.
Because despite a childhood that had often been a painful one, I had reached that moment when the dreams that had gotten me through it were actually starting to come true.
College—my passport to freedom—was just around the corner. And for the very first time, I was in love. His name was Jake. Yes, at that moment, there was more right than wrong in my world.
Which is why what Jake told me just days before I was to leave Hampton for a summer university course hit me so hard.
My dad just kicked me out of the house,
Jake told me over the phone.
"He did what? Why?!" I said this, knowing what would come next.
"You know why. . . . I told you how he is. It’s because of us. He said no son of his is going be dating some black girl. . . ."
Oh, did I fail to mention that Jake and I had been raised in a world in which he was considered white,
and I, black
?
(Micro reflection: Had you already made assumptions about Jake’s race? Was the question forming in your mind? Either way, congratulate yourself: you’ve just brought awareness to some of the ways that your brain does race
—i.e., the way that you make race-based assumptions and fill in the blanks as you go when reading stories, names, résumés, and so on).³
Jake had used the word black when he might have used some other. I knew that his father’s way was something he was actively resisting. We were on the same side in this, and that meant everything.
But even with Jake’s support, I still remember the pain that gripped me that afternoon, on hearing that my race—this category created by others that did not and could not capture much of who I really was—had made me unacceptable to my true love’s family.
My race had made me the Other.
I had known that this might happen when we started dating, of course. But that did not make it any less devastating.
And I remember learning something more—that my being a black girl
had not only made me unacceptable to Jake’s working-class Virginia family, but had made me so unacceptable that they were willing to throw their own, reportedly beloved son out of their home and onto the streets like garbage.
It hit me hard that this notion that they had about me—or more accurately, about people supposedly like me, as they had never actually met me—had made me so unacceptable that they were willing to hurt their own son, and thereby themselves, and all to teach him, me, and anyone around us a multifaceted lesson.
It was a lesson about what must never come of his having been the first generation in his family to attend a racially integrated school in the South: as a white man, Jake must not come to see black people as equally deserving of dignity, inclusion, and love.
It was a lesson about who they—Jake’s parents—took themselves to be: people profoundly and pervasively white
in the American South in the twentieth century. They may not have had college educations, or achieved greatness in the eyes of the world beyond their hometown. But what they had inherited—the cultural, sometimes economic, and psychic value of whiteness—meant something and was in a way defined by their willingness to reject me, to reject this thing called blackness. Whiteness was more valuable than the safety of their own flesh and blood.
Despite my being an A student, a model leader who would soon be named Teenager of the Year in our town, I was not good enough to be associated with them. This hurt me badly. Yet I was clearly not the only one suffering. To this day, I cannot imagine how Jake must have felt to learn the limits of his father’s love. The pain we both experienced in those moments has faded over the many years. But for me, its clarifying lessons remain. What happened to me and Jake taught me a lot about racism.
Racism is a complex of behavior and explanatory stories that enable some human beings to assert power over other human beings. Though it can seem natural or simply biological, it is not. Racism depends on the social construction of what sociologists have come to refer to as racialized
bodies, which is to say, the idea and practice of people being assigned racial labels that, as we have been trained to understand, sit in a relative hierarchy of worth in relationship to other racial labels. We often refer to people as white, black, or some other race, without thinking twice about it, as if race is a part of the natural order of things. But race is a matter of social imagination and construction, of perceptions shaped by a given context. Someone who might be considered too white
in the Caribbean might be considered unequivocally black
in the United States. Throughout this book, I will use the same shorthand (black, white, Asian, Latino, and so on), but what I really mean is how a person has been racialized in the place and time in which he/she exists. Racism operates in obvious and nonobvious ways that render the target of the behavior vulnerable, by degrees, to disrespect, disadvantage, harm, or even death. Racism, in my view, is not limited to individual bad actions based on intent to harm others, nor is it limited to those individuals who consciously endorse beliefs about the inferiority of others (although such actions and beliefs would certainly fall under the definition I use here). Racism encompasses both explicit and implicit beliefs and acts that justify the assertion of power—individually, collectively, or systemically—against racially maligned people and their white allies, so as to minimize their freedom, access to resources, and sense of value in the world.
So how does the definition of racism provided above apply to the conduct of Jake’s father? The behavior was the act of throwing Jake out of the house. The explanatory story was this: because no son of his was going to be dating some black girl. The power was that possessed by Jake’s father—a white man who had complete control over Jake’s access to safe lodging, and denied Jake that access and safety as a punishment. And because this left both Jake and me vulnerable to heartbreak and physical distress, Jake’s father had asserted his power over both of us. Thus, Jake’s father’s reaction was an act of racism.
In witnessing and reflecting on the actions of Jake’s father, I learned a hard but important lesson about race and racism in America: despite all of our own triumphant experiences in finally desegregating Virginia’s public schools in the late 1970s and early ’80s, white supremacy—the dominant culture’s deep-seated belief that white is above black in the hierarchy of all things—had not gone away.
We had not sung it away in the integrated
basement of the Bethel Free Will Baptist Church, whose buses entered our neighborhood every summer Sunday morning, picked up brown-skinned kids by twos and threes, and hauled us across town to a pristine sanctuary where we sat alongside white kids and sang, as loudly as we could, Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world!
—before being bused right back across town to our very separate and unequal homes.
No, white supremacy and racism were alive and well in hearts and minds, behind neatly trimmed yards and around the cul-de-sacs of city and suburb alike. They had not gone away, as we were given to believe, simply because the adults around us—especially the white adults, the ones in charge at our integrated
schools—had stopped talking about them in public. And they had not gone away simply because we had been taught, under a twisted interpretation of Dr. King’s inspiring words, to be color-blind
—i.e., never to acknowledge, discuss, or respond to racism’s continued existence and vitality, and instead, to pretend that none of us even see
race.
What I learned was that the centuries-long war to end the policies and practices of white supremacy, to encourage a realignment of our allegiances in favor of common ground rather than our racialized identities and so-called affinity groups, had not ended. The battle over the degree to which black people and other nonwhites should be included in, or excluded from, the so-called American body politic had not been won by the civil rights movement after all.
As I came to see, we had only settled into an uneasy truce.
All it would take to inspire a new skirmish in this war would be what my romance with Jake represented: evidence that two people who had been racialized differently had, in fact, judged each other by character and not color, and for a moment, at least, found one another worthy of love.
And, as I would learn much later, all it would take to rekindle the full-out war would be the unexpected rise, through this quietly smoldering landscape, of the walking embodiment of the threat to white supremacy posed by the gains of the civil rights movement: a president of mixed racial and cultural heritage named Barack Hussein Obama.
In 2019, there are people who are surprised to see evidence of this ongoing war of inclusion/exclusion. They are shocked by its especially antiblack character and its virulently anti-immigrant themes. They are incredulous that the legal, political, and cultural changes that have taken place since the mid-twentieth century to shift the United States toward inclusive democracy have also engendered deep resentment among those racialized white.
But I am not surprised. I lived through the clarifying summer of 1984, and have been awake to the slippery yet ever-present nature of racism ever since. I have seen how readily it can be put into service to deem certain people unlovable, to raise questions about our common humanity, and even to cut ties with one’s own kith and kin.
What I learned that summer inspired in me a desire truly to understand race and racism in our everyday lives and to see them for what they are: deep and pervasive cultural conditioning for grouping others into categories and placing them at enough distance to render their suffering less visible, for obscuring our intertwined destinies, and for turning us against one another rather than toward one another when we suffer in common.
In short, what I learned that summer inspired my life’s work: dissolving the lies that racism whispers about who we really are, and doing whatever I can to reduce the terrible harm it causes us all.
Practicing The Pause
You have just read a reflection on an experience of race in American life, an example of what I call a Race Story.
For just a moment now, let us stop.
Take a moment to check in with yourself. What was it like for you to read these words? What thoughts are coming up for you? What do you feel in your body now? What emotions do you feel as you consider what you just read? And again: Where in your body are you feeling these emotions, sensing the thoughts, questions, and other reactions you’re noticing now?
Throughout this book, you will be asked to stop and reflect like this. This is an embodied practice that I call The Pause.
The Pause is an aspect of the practice of mindfulness meditation that can lead you to the experience of body-based mindfulness. What is mindfulness? It is simply paying attention, on purpose, with the attitude of friendly, open, nonjudgmental curiosity, and a willingness to accept (at least for now!) what arises.
Over the course of this book, you will be exploring and deepening the practice of mindfulness, which can be hugely important for understanding our experiences around race and identity. Mindfulness is essential to developing the capacity to respond, rather than simply react as if on autopilot, to what we experience.
To practice The Pause, you simply stop what you are doing and intentionally bring your awareness to the experience of the present moment. This is the first step in engaging in mindfulness practice.
Pausing and intentionally directing attention to particular focal points in your experience help you more routinely to focus your attention at will, clarify the mind, de-stress, and minimize any trauma-based reactions in the body.
Just for a minute, turn your attention to the sensations of breathing in and out and rest here. As you do so, notice: What thoughts are in your mind right now? See if you can release those thoughts. Practice letting them be for the moment, just as they are. It may help to imagine them as leaves falling gently from a tree, or as clouds crossing a blue sky. It may help to think of the out-breath—here and throughout the practices described in this book—as a micro practice of letting go, of coming home to the resources of peace within you.
As you bring your attention back to the sensations of breathing, what do you notice? Settle into the experience of breathing and sitting, noticing your feet on the floor, your buttocks in the chair. Feel the support that exists for you in the body and the breath at this very moment.
Now allow yourself to explore any emotions or other bodily sensations arising—the sense of I like this,
or "I don’t like this." Open up to what your body is telling you in this moment. Try not to judge your feelings and sensations. Be as specific as you can about what you notice. Most important: as much as possible, be kind to yourself.
Later, we will look at research suggesting the value of such mindful reflection—particularly as a means of developing the embodied emotional intelligence, self-regulation, and overall resilience required to work through the challenges of examining racism in our lives. But for now, see if you can just allow yourself to get to know what is arising in you in this very moment. As you bring this Pause to a close, sense the ground beneath you as you breathe in and out. Settle into the support of this breath, this connection with the earth, this deepening grounding in awareness.
Finally, if you can, take a few minutes to write about what has come up for you during your Pause. This is especially important if you experienced strong emotions, or if some of your own memories or Race Stories emerged from their buried places. In my own experience, and as research has shown, even short periods of writing about emotionally difficult events in our past can assist us in deep healing.⁴
As you continue reading, engage in the loving awareness practice of The Pause whenever you need additional support.
CHAPTER TWO
SITTING WITH COMPASSIONATE RACIAL AWARENESS
Biologically speaking, we are programmed toward being tribal as a means of survival. We literally have to transcend an aspect of our own biology.
—REVEREND ANGEL KYODO WILLIAMS¹
Population geneticists agree that all of us are literally one human family. What would our world be like if everyone acted on this truth?
—SHARON SALZBERG²
Mindfulness of the Racialized Self
What we call the self is shaped by the cultures in which we live. And because race is a cultural feature of societies built on racism, notions of self include notions of race. The racialized self is produced by and helps reproduce racism in our cultures. Mindfulness helps us understand and expand our notions of self. And yet, talking about race and racism and examining these through the lens of mindfulness is uncommon. This is not to say that it is not being done at all. But many practitioners of mindfulness have been taught, whether explicitly or implicitly, that looking at racism and exploring efforts to address it—or to otherwise engage in talk of justice
or politics
—go against the core commitments of mindfulness. This may be a consequence of two factors.
The first has to do with the social locations of those who have brought mindfulness into the mainstream. Many of the teachers from Asia, to whom we owe most Western mindfulness practices, lived in cultures where racial difference has not been the dominant mode of oppression. And on top of that, most of the Western teachers of mindfulness are white in white-dominated cultures. As a result, they have had to work harder to see their own race and racism in the world, and to break the cultural norms against doing so.
The second has to do with the fact that Western notions of social justice are not reflected in contemplative traditions, at least not in the same manner or to the same degree.
Contemplating Racial Justice
So let’s pause together and reflect: What is racial justice?
The heart of what I mean by racial justice is guided, first, by Dr. King’s notion of justice—power correcting everything which stands against love.
Racial justice, then, is about taking actions against racism and in favor of liberation, inspired by love of all humanity, including actions at the personal, interpersonal, and collective levels.
Why might it be appropriate to consider engaging in racial justice as an aspect of living mindfully?
The short and simple answer is that racial justice, like compassion, is just one form of an ethically grounded, mindful response to suffering in our lives. Moreover, mindful racial justice seeks to alleviate not merely isolated incidents of racial suffering, but all suffering