Unraveling Racism - How Real Conversation Creates Change

David Campt cried.

In the final moments of his all day White allies workshop at The Unity Center in San Diego, David’s throat caught. Unable to speak, he turned to look up at the slide on the screen – an old black and white image of James Reeb. It was all just too much – the grief, the loss, the hope, the courage, and the promise. Reeb was a White Unitarian minister so committed to the Civil Rights movement that he drove down to Selma, Alabama in 1965 to help register African Americans to vote. He was beaten to death by segregationists. White ally work is hard. Sometimes it’s very hard. But if Reverend Reeb can give his life, we can learn to navigate an awkward conversation.

As students of New Thought we are keenly aware that we do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are, and that any real or meaningful spiritual transformation begins with a courageous act of introspection and house cleaning. Most of us have spent decades plumbing the depths of our own minds, rooting out error, and recalibrating the very mental processes by which we construct our realities. And yet the work is unfinished.

Focusing on the Racism Skeptic

There’s a shift happening in the American zeitgeist, and it has been a long time coming. Throughout our cultural discourse brave people are daring to peel back the layers of shame and denial that hide from us the last frontier of our awakening. It’s time. It’s time to finally put the issue of racism and implicit bias front and center in our New Thought work.

The good news is that there is a growing body of resources to help us accomplish this sacred work. At the forefront of this movement is Dr. David Campt.

I met David for lunch at a waterfront restaurant in San Diego. On the road half of every month, David travels the country offering lectures and workshops centered around his White Allies Toolkit, a training program designed to help progressive White people learn how to have transformative conversations with their White racism skeptic friends, colleagues, and relatives.

So what’s a racism skeptic?

55% of White Americans can be described as racism skeptics. They believe that racism is no longer a significant problem. They believe that White people are just as likely to suffer from discrimination as people of color. They’re tired of talking about race. They say things like, “I don’t see color.” They think the only racists left are those guys carrying Tiki torches at Klan rallies. But White racism skeptics are everywhere – they’re teachers, principals, police officers, mayors, ministers, and parents – and the narrative they share holds center stage in our political and media environment.

So how do we begin? That’s the question that haunted Rev. Wendy Craig-Purcell of The Unity Center in San Diego. After deep, open, and heartfelt conversations with the African American and White members of her congregation, Wendy began to carve a path out of the wilderness. Built around Dr. Campt’s White Ally Toolkit, Wendy created a curriculum that began the great unlearning. In our White allies groups we read Debby Irving’s Waking Up White, we watched Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13^th, we shared numerous other articles, videos, and resources. And we sat in a circle and began to open up about what it means to be White.

It was a dizzying ride, filling in all the gaps of our incomplete education – the truth about slavery, black codes, Jim Crow, work gangs, lynchings, sundown towns, voter suppression, inequities in the GI Bill, redlining, the criminalization of color, disparities in crack and powdered cocaine sentencing, mass incarceration, and the insidious presence of implicit bias in all of us – and all of it missing from the official history we teach our children and tell ourselves. It isn’t easy learning that so many of our American institutions were intentionally engineered by White supremacists generations ago to shore up their own power and deny it to others. And that as White people, we have unwittingly benefitted from this unearned privilege our whole lives. But this is where the work begins – with honest truth-telling. But now what? How can we entice racism skeptics into this broadening understanding?

The R.A.C.E. Method

Dr. David Campt

Dr. David Campt’s White Ally Toolkit training program evolved out of his many years of expert work as a dialogue coach and corporate trainer. In the late nineties, Ph.D. fresh in hand, David worked for the Clinton White House. From there he began to design and implement dialogue training that led to numerous consulting jobs across the public and private sector. But after the 2016 Presidential election he was led to devote his now seasoned professional expertise to the project of healing the racial and ideological divides that threaten the unity of our nation.

David calls his work the R.A.C.E. method.

As we initiate conversations with our racism skeptic friends, relatives, and co-workers, the first step is to reflect. What do I need to do to remain in an open and empathetic listening mode? How can I avoid falling into the old habits of argument, judgement, and condemnation?

The second step is to ask. What are some key questions I can ask to draw them out? How can I gently guide them to talk not about their beliefs and opinions, but about the personal experiences that led to those opinions? If they tell you that “Racism isn’t a serious problem anymore. We even had a black President” ask them, “Oh that’s interesting – tell me about an experience in your own life that makes you to think that?” They might tell you a story about how integrated and diverse their workplace is.

The third step is to connect. Here we tell a story that aligns with and supports the story they just shared. Tell them that you notice it too, that there’s a lot more diversity in the workplace than there used to be. There has been a lot of progress. That’s a point upon which you can both agree.

Finally it’s time for the fourth step, to expand. Now that you’ve connected and found common ground, gently nudge them just a little bit further. Help them see, preferably with a personal story instead of a sermon, that racial discrimination against people of color is still very real. You might offer an anecdote where your own implicit bias reared its ugly head. With any luck your confession will nudge them toward the recognition and acknowledgement of their own implicit bias. I know it seems small, but it’s actually huge. When a racism skeptic comes to see implicit bias within themselves, their whole edifice begins to crumble.

As Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

We’ve argued, we’ve preached, we’ve scolded, we’ve marched – and yet the problem of racism persists. In fact it seems to be getting worse. Maybe it’s time for a new approach. Maybe it’s time for empathy-based dialogue with our ideological opponents. No one’s saying this is going to be easy. But the stakes are high. If we are serious about awakening ourselves, and contributing to an awakening world, it is essential that we break our silence about the wounds that still scar the American heart.

Becoming a White Ally

As we finished our lunch I asked David, “So what happened at the end of the workshop the other day? When you showed us that picture of James Reeb and the other White martyrs of the Civil Rights movement, and you choked up. After all these years, and after all this work, what about that moment stopped you in your tracks?”

He looked up from his plate and spoke very slowly. “I think I’m moved most by the tragedy of all the lost opportunities for love and connection.”

So many of us have seen our families, friends, neighborhoods, and faith communities ripped apart along partisan and ideological lines. So many of us have given up.

“It’s really hard to empathize and connect with someone who says a bunch of racist stuff, or who believes that racism isn’t even a problem,” I said. “Every fiber of my being just wants to walk away.”

 “You think having a conversation is hard?” David asked. “I’ll tell you what’s hard. Sitting down at a White’s only lunch counter and being arrested, that’s hard. Getting your bones broken by state troopers, that’s hard. Getting killed by Klansmen, that’s hard. If James Reeb can die, you can have a conversation with your cousin Brad.”

Being a White ally means becoming willing to wield our privilege as a force for good. It means coming out of our denial and apathy and taking action. White people have the power, and the moral obligation, to undo the structural racism built into our consciousness and our institutions. My black friend Robyn put it best. Pointing to herself she said, “We can’t do this. You have to do it.” She was right. White people have to do it. It’s the only way to finally unravel the stranglehold racism still has on the unrealized promise of America.

[This feature was originally published in the February 2020 issue of Science of Mind Magazine and is reproduced here with permission.]

Living With Hate

Imagine waking up every morning knowing that there are people who hate you and want you dead just because you exist. Imagine if the most beloved elements of your family’s culture were held up to ridicule – evidence of your inferiority. Imagine internalizing all of this from the moment of your birth – knowing you were the other, that you don’t belong, that you are less.

            Imagine living with hate.

            As a straight white male, it’s all I can do – imagine it. Through no effort of my own I was granted access to the inner circle. It’s a shameful “achievement” because it isn’t an achievement at all – it’s a genetic accident.

            White, patriarchal supremacy is nothing new. It’s woven into the fabric of the United States of America. Our founding institutions and documents explicitly enshrined racial and sexist hegemony. They were crafted at a time when the ownership and denigration of entire categories of human beings was moral and divinely authorized. The twin Original Sins of Native American genocide and African American slavery have yet to be fully acknowledged, repaired, and atoned for. Even Thomas Jefferson’s beloved Declaration of Independence refers to Native Americans as “savages.”

            To stand on the ground at Monticello, Jefferson’s mountain top home in Virginia, and to walk Mulberry Row where the slave quarters stood, is to feel in your bones the race hatred in the bones of this nation.

            White supremacy is the shadow side of freedom. Proclaiming that whites are superior to others, no matter how repugnant, is protected free speech. But no right is absolute. The law distinguishes between protected free speech and incitement, the latter being illegal. If your speech is explicitly designed to move others to harmful action, your speech is not protected free speech. It’s illegal to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Therefore, a Nazi flag is not protected free speech – it’s incitement. It’s a call to action. It’s a war flag that exhorts all who salute it to discrimination, mass deportation, and genocide. Nazi flags are illegal in Germany and France. In other European countries, hate group insignia face additional restrictions. There are no monuments to Adolf Hitler in Germany or anywhere in Europe – just monuments to his millions of victims.

            What are the causes of racism and wholesale denigration of selected groups? This is where it gets complicated. But we have to talk about it. It’s not enough to mouth platitudes like “racism is bad,” or “don’t be a racist,” or my least favorite, “I don’t see color.”  If racism is the enemy, we cannot defeat it until we understand it.

            It’s popular to hold to the view that racism is learned, not innate. In other words, the thinking goes, we are born as pure non-racists. Then, as children, we are taught to hate. Last month when Heather Heyer was killed by an American Nazi in Charlottesville, Virginia President Obama wrote the most popular Tweet in Twitter history – it was retweeted millions of times. Quoting Nelson Mandela he wrote, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion…” Then there’s the classic and oft-cited song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” from the musical “South Pacific” – “You’ve got to taught/To hate and fear/You’ve got to be taught/From year to year/It’s got to be drummed/In your dear little ear/You’ve got to be carefully taught…”

            The assertion that racism is a learned trait has merit. Cultural indoctrination is a major influence in the formation of racist consciousness. No one disputes that. And to that same extent, learned racism can be mollified by changing the narrative and teaching people how to think differently. We’re trying to do that. But it isn’t working – at least, not fast enough. But racism has another cause – a cause not enough of us are talking about or even acknowledging.

            A quick survey of evolutionary biology reveals the crucial missing piece. Among all species, humans included, it was evolutionarily advantageous to fear outsiders. Within the tribal clan a certain amount of trust was warranted. But outsiders were eyed warily, especially if they looked different from us. We see this in simian studies, as well as across all species. Why would human animals be any different? In other words, the brain is hard-wired to be biased. Our survival depended on it.

            If part of our fear of others is innate, concretized by millennia of selective adaptation, then it turns out Rogers and Hammerstein, Nelson Mandela, and Barack Obama are wrong (and you have no idea how much it pains me to say this). Well, they’re only half right anyway.

            Here’s another way to frame it. Racist consciousness is a lower-order cognitive mode that we must unlearn. It is our default setting, and it’s time for a re-set. We have to undo the very structures of thought. In Buddhist terms, we have to awaken from the illusion of separateness. Despite what the processes of evolution and selective adaptation have built into the structures of consciousness, and despite the reinforcement racist consciousness receives via acculturation, it’s time to shine a light on the dark, hidden, unconscious tendencies that drive us and realize instead that we are not defined by the color of our skin, the shapes of our faces, the languages we speak, our religious beliefs, our culture of origin, our sexual orientation, or any of the other differentiations that masks our unity. We have to unlearn this maladaptation before it kills us.

            It’s time to find a middle ground between the naturalist argument (that racism is built in), and the indoctrination argument (that it’s purely taught). It’s never either/or. It’s always both/and.

            The solution begins with an acknowledgement of unconscious bias. If you don’t admit you have it, it owns and controls you. The second step is acknowledging privilege – we all have it in one form or another. You have genetic, inherent, or behavior advantages you did not earn – tallness, an aptitude for language, mathematical ability, gender, ethnicity, youth, right-handedness, heterosexuality, and so on. These “privileges” don’t make you better than anybody else, nor do they make you bad. Simply acknowledge your privilege and begin to wield it in the service of the good. Both of these steps awaken our empathy.  Imagine keenly and deeply what it feels like to wake up every morning knowing that there are legions of people in your community who wish you were dead, who define you as aberrant and inferior, and who quietly and sometimes not so quietly despise you. Until you feel the suffering of others, none of any of this can be repaired. Until we hear the pain, we cannot heal the pain.

            You might wonder – how can we live with hate? Well look around. We're doing it. And it isn't working. So many of our wounds are self-inflicted. Life is hard enough. It's time to stop hurting ourselves. It's time to turn instead toward one another, take off our masks, and feel our fears withering in the dawning light of the beloved community.