Awakening to Whiteness Six-Meeting Curriculum
June 8, Orientation: About the Program
June 22, Meeting 1: Why are We Here, and Personal Experience with Race
We open the series with some materials and exercises to help frame the journey ahead. We hope to motivate and sustain your commitment to this work and place you in the good company of other white people who are turning toward racial suffering with wisdom, compassion and the resolve to co-create its end.
July 27, Meeting 2: Historical Racism
This session brings us some of the stories, perspectives and dimensions on the construction of race, revealing a complicated and painful history many of us were not taught in school. It is important to appreciate the history of racial minorities in the United States is also a history of courage and resistance. Bryan Stevenson’s interview is a very helpful container for WHY we need to look at our painful history.
August 31, Meeting 3: Institutional / Structural Racism
These materials can help us find ways of seeing beyond individual racism, to see structural or systemic racism. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Beverly Daniel Tatum are important voices in this discussion. Take a couple of hours each week to digest, feel free to reach out to your groups.
September 21, Meeting 4: White Privilege and White Fragility
One characteristic of white privilege is denial of its contemporary, active and influential existence. With practice, we begin seeing ways white privilege manifests and operates, both internally and externally.
October 26, Meeting 5: Applying Our Spiritual Practice
What are ways that our practice can help carry us forward, individually and together? How might Buddhist practices and social and racial justice movements merge, inform, and infuse each other?
November 30, Meeting 6: Going Forth
These readings and videos point to some ways to step forward, interact, have difficult conversations, and see ourselves progressing toward awakening within systems of white supremacy. “Now what do we do?” is a question we hope we can answer together!