Ruth King - Mindful of Race

For Barbara,

My beloved, my teacher, my friend

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Racism Is a Heart Disease, and Its Curable!

S omething alarming happens when we think or hear the word racism. Something deep within us is awakened into fear. All of us, regardless of our race and our experience of race, get triggered, and more than the moment is at play. That word picks at an existential scabsome level of dis-ease at the mere insinuation of the word, some itch that we cant seem to scratch, or some fear we believe will harm us. This activation happens to all of us.

Regardless of how we look on the outside, we turn into frightened combatants and suit up for war. The heart quakes, and the mind narrows to its smallest, tightest placesurvival. Whether or not were conscious of it, we all tend to go to our weapons of choiceaggression, distraction, denial, doubt, worry, depression, or indifference. By virtue of a number of intersecting factors, including race, we carry with us varying levels of power to execute our desired outcome or to disguise our discomfort. Tension heightens, and the stress can feel intolerableeven life threatening. And for too many of us, such fear is not unfounded.

Some of us do not acknowledge that we are racial beings within the human race, nor do we recognize how or understand why our instinct as members of racial groups is to fear, hurt, or harm other races, including our own. And we dont know how to face into and own what we have co-created as humans. But each of us can and must ask ourselves two questions: Why are matters of race still of concern across the nation and throughout the world? And what does this have to do with me?

In the West, we live within a racial context of hatred and harm. Whether subtle or openly cruel, whether out of innocence or ignorance, the generational and often unconscious conditioning that has bred social and systemic norms of racial dominance, subordination, and separation, nuanced in every aspect of our day-to-day lives, is tightly sewn into the fabric of our society.

Im writing this book in the year of the grand opening of the historic National Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian on the Washington Mall. Several months after it opened, a noose was found in front of a display titled, Democracy Abroad. Injustice at Home. Im writing on the fifteenth anniversary of the September 11 extremist attack on US soil. This same year, voters in Great Britain approved the Brexit referendum to exit the European Union, a decision driven not only by fear of being overrun by immigrants but also by a fear that globalization will undo long-established ways of life. The stunning Brexit vote was 52 percent to 48 percent.

Im writing in the year Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States, is ending his presidency, after enduring eight years of a horrific racist and obstructionist Republican Congress and Senate that, from the onset, proclaimed to ensure that Obama would fail and be a one-term president. Throughout his two-term presidency, blatant racism and relentless questioning and resistance to his leadership became the norm, all under the guise of governance.

I am writing in the heat of a human rights protest in the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, where I live, after a police officer killed Keith Lamont Scott, a forty-three-year-old African American father of seven, who was in his car waiting to pick up his daughter from school. According to the Huffington Post, police killed more than 250 black people in 2016. Thats about twenty-one black bodies per month or five per week.

In 2016, Republican candidate Donald Trumpwho ran a racially charged and divisive presidential campaign of hate, fear, and prideful disrespect of women and dark-skinned bodies and immigrantswon the electoral vote. Now, in this era of Donald Trump, overt racism has been made entirely okay again in the halls of power. In the month following Trumps election, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups and other extremist activity throughout the United States, reported 1,094 bias-related incidents across the nation.

As I write, Charlottesville, Virginia, has become ground zero for the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who are protesting the city councils decision to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. This rally was considered the prerequisite of an alt-right march to be held a few weeks later. Alt-right marches are spreading across the nation and are not even denounced inside the Trump White House.

The long-standing demonization and criminalization of blacks and dark-skin bodies still occupy the psyches of the white peoplemostly white men and the women who support themwho hold power in most US institutions.

On June 17, 2015, twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof, a white male and Confederate loyalist, was welcomed into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown historic Charleston, South Carolina one of the oldest black churches in the United States and a site for community and civil rights organizing. Within an hour of being welcomed, during prayer, Roof gunned down and killed nine African Americans. The timing of these murders has significant historical relevance. In 1822, Denmark Vesey was suspected of planning a slave rebellion to take place in Charleston at midnight on June 16, 1822. When white citizens suspected this rebellion, thirty-five black people, including the church founder, were hanged, and the church was burned down. The Charleston church shooting on June 17, 2015, occurred on the 193rd anniversary of this uprising.

The morning Roof was arrestedsixteen hours after being on the run and after admitting that he had hoped to ignite a race warRoof complained of being hungry. John Ledford, a white police officer in Shelby, North Carolina, brought Roof food from Burger King and reported, He was very quiet, very calm.... He was not problematic. Not problematic?! This is how racism works. A white man admits he wants to incite a race war, yet he is not problematic. A bit crazy, dont you think?

Im writing this book at an intense time of global and civil wars: Wars against other nations and within nations. Wars against races, religions, and cultures. Greed wars on the youth, the elders, and the mentally and physically ill. Wars against the poor, against immigrants, against gays and transgendered people, and against women and girls. Im writing at a time when the need for reform of criminal justice, economic justice, immigrant justice, LGBTQIA rights, and childrens rightsto name a fewis clear. Race and racism are roots to these concerns. I am writing at a time of global fearpeople fearing each other and the systems within which we exist. A time when greed is altering the planet that once sustained us, and the planet is revolting, as are its people, against exploitation and corruption.

The worlds heart is on fire, and race is at its core. Whats happening in the world today is the result of past actions. The bitter racial seeds from past beliefs and actions are blooming all around us, reflecting not only a division of the races that is rooted in ignorance and hate but also, and more sorely, a division of heart.

Racism is a heart disease. How we think and respond is at the core of racial suffering and racial healing. If we cannot think clearly and respond wisely, we will continue to damage the worlds heart.

For well over twenty years, Ive coached leaders and teams in cultivating cultures that are inclusive, creative, productive, and respectful. I was trained professionally in clinical psychology, organizational development, and diversity consulting, and this background supports me in seeing patterns of racial ignorance and distress that get in the way of us coexisting as humans. This background alone, however, while it brought awareness and understanding, did not transform my relationship to racial distress. The best tool I know of to transform our relationship to racial suffering is mindfulness meditation. For more than twenty years, that practice has supported me in experiencing racial distress without warring against it.