Speaking Out While Speaking In: Transforming Intergroup Dialogues With Mindfulness-Based Antiracist Practices

• In Event: Exploring the Possibilities of an Embodied Dialogic Praxis for Personal Transformation and Collective Liberation

Abstract

As a co-facilitator for the Intergroup Dialogue Program’s (IGD) course, Dialogue on Race and Ethnicity, at a private East Coast university, my role is to help undergraduate students grapple with the complex emotions that King (2018) describes as a manifestation of participating in conversations on race, oppression, and identity. Within the IGD classroom, we implement a research-based curriculum designed to promote “consciousness raising, building relationships across differences and conflicts, and strengthening individual and collective capacities to promote social justice” (Zúñiga, Nagda, Chesler, & Cytron-Walker, 2007, p. 9). This duality between understanding one’s situatedness in a powerful historical system and recognizing one’s peers’ contributions to and victimization by institutional forces is foundational to the coalition-building necessary for collective societal liberation. However, IGD lacks specific mindful scaffolds to further extend such transformative external dialogues into the personal realm, overlooking the opportunity to guide participants into dialogues with their own selves. Recognizing that mindfulness has often been used as an extension of white supremacist, ableist, Western, settler-colonial ideology, I speak to an intentionally infusion of the Intergroup Dialogue model with an anti-racist, trauma-informed, mindfulness-based framework rooted in a problematizing and anti-oppression reimagining of Kramer’s (2003) Insight Dialogue guidelines. Referencing mindfulness-based dialogic frameworks (King, 2018, Magee, 2019, williams, 2016), the intersections of my own mindfulness practice and my gender transition experience, facilitation anecdotes, and student reflections, I find non-judgmental, present-moment awareness to be a powerful framework for challenging personal and relational connections to, internalizations of, and impacts by systems of privilege and oppression. Believing that this practice must always be situated within the interconnected landscape of systemic injustice, I hope we can meet the objectives of critical dialogic pedagogy and simultaneously seek a coalition-based liberation that acknowledges that, for many, the “way out” has always been “in” (Hanh, 2001).

Author

• Jersey Cosantino, Syracuse University