Dismantling Racism with Meditation: White Ally Training
HumanAdminMarch 15, 2017
118 W 22nd St
6th Floor, New York
New York 10011
Do you want to learn more about what you can do to end racism? Do you want to learn how to engage meditation in racial justice work? Rather than serving as a tool for escaping or ignoring difficulty, meditation can serve as a practical tool for addressing social problems like racism directly.
This workshop is about working within a safe community to develop a gentle and non-judgmental approach to addressing racism, racial conditioning, and the need for racial healing. Workshop participants will learn how meditation can help us understand and eradicate racism by:
● Examining our thoughts as they pertain to race and racism;
● Creating space for insight about race and racism to emerge;
● Working with the difficult emotions that can arise when we talk about race and racism
● Developing the compassion we will need to address racism on a systemic basis.
Participants will leave with clear ideas about concrete steps they can take in their own lives to tackle race and racism.
Please note: This workshop is intended for people who are perceived as white, from any spiritual background (or none at all). No prior experience with meditation is necessary.
Here is some additional information on why this particular class is structured in this way:
- It is very common in racially mixed groups for white people to inadvertently say things that cause harm to global majority people. We want to avoid causing harm.
- Many white people are confused about race and racism and are afraid to speak up or ask questions. We often hold back because we don’t want to offend people. This workshop is an opportunity to create a space in which white people can speak our minds, ask questions, and get clarification without offending global majority people.
- This is our work. Global majority people are exhausted not only from racism itself, but from having to educate us about it. This is an opportunity for white people to step up, live with integrity, and take some of the burden off of global majority people.
Kara Dansky is the creator of Ending Racism: Meditation, Compassion, Action – a unique course designed to help white people use meditation as a tool for dismantling racism. Dansky is the founder and Managing Director of One Thousand Arms, a change-making organization that works with white people to dismantle racism. She is a certified meditation instructor through Shambhala International who has used meditation to examine her own racial conditioning. Previously, she was a Special Advisor at the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice in New York, Senior Advisor at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security, Senior Counsel at the ACLU, Executive Director at the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, and Staff Attorney at Society of Counsel Representing Accused Persons. Kara received her J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and her B.A. from the Johns Hopkins University (both cum laude).
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