books heather has such an engaging way of speaking and living in her passionate vigilance for overcoming racism at all levels with all sizes and kinds of groups like all of us on our own journey heather continues to expand and share her knowledge her experience her scholarly she consults on a broad spectrum of race and racism including right privilege  racism lives in our bodies and the environment heather has many life experiences that you can read in your program from colleges and universities across the nation she has served on the advice report of the white privilege conference since two thousand and twelve and also advises other boards heather is a dynamic and powerful a conference keynoter and presenter we are so very pleased to welcome as our final keynote for this year's theme vigilance now dr heather hackman privilege to be your friend it really is and i'm deeply grateful to be here i want to think for the invitation and to be honest i was a bit hesitant because i've already spoken at this conference i think it was about six years ago and so i felt a little weird about doing it again nevertheless nevertheless i am really grateful to be invited and to have some time together with all of you this morning so i'd like to start this session together the way i start all trainings and talks in you know large groups of people can get a little interesting it can get a little interesting and so i'm going to start this session with a ground in the ground and so i rarely get a chair which i feed at the florida to tell you the truth so do whatever you gotta do but the point of this first move is to just sink into your space if you're standing just sink into your feet if you're sitting sink into that contact point your feet the back of your legs and then sit is upright as you're comfortable and able to do and it's important when we grounded before meetings before classes before trainings or for whatever you're doing make sure we don't slide into this able list framework of what grounding in looks like what a normal body should be able to do it cetera so we're not trying to reinforce a woman's i'm in the process of getting us here so we need to be careful so sit as upright as you're comfortable and able realizing that we're all very different bodies that were to look and feel different from and then close your eyes or cast her gaze to a neutral site usually the back of the chair is fine the goal here is no visual distractions no visual distractions but i also w acknowledge that it can be difficult for some folks given so many things that have happened in our lives to close our eyes in a public space and so that's cool if you can close your eyes please do if it's trickier challenging than just cast your gaze to that neutral and then begin to breathe as deeply as you are comfortable and able again we have very different bodies so this is going to look and feel differently for all of us who breathes deeply as you are comfortable in eve and i'm going to ask you to place your full field of attention on the felt sense the physical sensation of air coming in and out of your know in and out of your nose don't tell a story about that don't tell yourself breathing all don't do that just and what is the importance of grounding in we have conversations about racial justice with the importance of grounding in we have conversations about vigilance and the first point here is that there's a connection of course between the body and the mind and obviously it's the west who has decided to separate these things in the first place right these are not separate things but the west has said i think therefore i am going i'm just ahead you know and that's kind of and why people are like that's a great idea i like that list so why people are totally into that why people are totally into that and so and so we need to recognize is that the mind in the body do have profound connections to each other of course and so why would we have all these stress related illnesses if we don't have a connection between the mind in the body but the body can also affect the mind into as we relax the body as we brown the body in we actually relax and ground the mind in as well and that's important for racial justice conversations it's important for the conversation i want to have today about why white people leave and how do we can how can we stay it's important because we don't just need open minds around race we need something minds and an open mind implies that i will open my mind up and add some additional new thoughts to it but it doesn't actually imply that i will remove the old ideas i have to see what i'm saying and so there's no guarantee that an open mind is actually going to have me on earth the trope of race or the misunderstandings of racism or the ways that white privilege or supremacy in the white imperial gays affect my life there's no guarantee that an open mind will look at that but a simple mind gives us a better chance of doing a simple pliable squishy three and a half pound plane like that what we're going for that's what you want and so we ground  itching for you that we're not itching to second to go also you're like why am i doing this and then you want to sneeze and you're like i better not it's all quiet here i can't sneeze and i'm going to sneeze i'm sure you're having a horrible sixty seconds it's a mess right and so we've got this chatter of a committee in our head yammer yammer yammer i've got fifteen people up here there are ten of them are doing something else right now you know and so on but as i begin to focus on what's called the physical anchor i actually start to interrupt the chatter i begin to build  muscle of interrupting the chatter in my head and it's incredibly important because there is a four century tired old story about race in this country that if i can build the muscle of interrupting my own chatter i then have a better opportunity a better chance a greater likelihood of interrupting the chatter of the racial narrative as it shapes my actions as it shapes our lives as a kind of influences the way we interact with each other i have a better chance of interrupting that story if i learn how to interrupt my own the third reason is that this is our place of action we can learn from the past we can plan for the future but the only place i can act from in is right now life is only available to me now my place of power is now you can get a little holding the power and now like you get all do all of that that's totally fine but now is where it's at now is where it's at and so if i'm not in this moment my opportunity to be vigilant around racial justice my chance to really pay attention to what's going on for me is diminished because i'm not even here i'm not here and the opposite is true as well when we're not present we make a lot of mistakes we make a lot of mistakes so we could you know it wasn't a year it was a week and a half ago yes it feels like a year ago but a week and a half ago i was training doing a session in a conference here in the twin cities and we were at tables we were like half an hour had already gone by a person walks in and he tries to sit in the back all by himself i said i'd met him before said dave wanted to come sit with us and then he makes some kind of snarky sexist comment it was supposed to be a joke but there was nothing joking about it right as he's coming to sit by a colleague of his and that's the person that he made this funny joke about and the whole room was like oh man i was on cool what are you doing that's not even funny but dave did that in part i want to say i want to say dave's probably a good guy but he did it improper because he wasn't paying attention he wasn't paying attention he was me mindful of fact he walked in half an hour later it was a be mindful of the ways his interactions were affecting other people he was not paying attention and because he wasn't here something like that seems funny but when i'm really present i stand a greater chance of catching those things because before they come flying out of my so being here is my place of action when i'm not here i make a lot of mistakes we also grounding because it speaks truth to our connection and so the electromagnetic signature of my nervous system extends about three feet off my body and you know what's of communities around the world have known this for a long time that science has just discovered this we've just discovered and i love the language of discovery i'm  i went to the science museum with my friend marie and her daughters a while back and i'd slowly get down on the whole thing i was like i can stay and i you know i had such a good time so so i'm a science geek and yet i'm always disappointed with west science is discovered something in so our r e m field they sense three feet off our bodies and so if you're sitting within six feet of someone you're interacting with them the technical term for that is you're picking up on their juju that's what you're doing  complicated description of that is you're picking up on that and so here's why this matters because i work a lot with educators and i have a lot of white liberal educators who what comes out of their mouth is a commitment to racial justice but what's coming out of their body is not that and so something's gone down i was a white teacher so who did this and i asked the student how did you do that and the student quote says no no i didn't do that and i say ok with my words but my entire department says do i think you did do that but because i can't catch you i'm not going to let this go any farther because i don't know for sure i'm not going to say anything else but i'm going to let you know i think you're lying and so for it and you know year after year after year day after day after day of that for students of color they know not to trust what white teachers say about oh no we're all say it but that's what i feel and think and you're going to pick up on it so we have to be attentive to the stuff that we're putting out there we have to pay attention i'm not saying i'm great at that but we have to pay attention and the last piece is that it is a radical act to be  it really is a radical act to be embodied it's a pushback against systems of of dominance and power and privilege it's a push back to say that the system controls controls controls and it seeks to colonize our very selves which is a much of what i'm going to be talking about today and so to say to stay in a super wired in the dominant racial structure i know you run the system i know you run the society i know you hold power here but i'm drawing a line right that you cannot have me as a radical act as a radical and so i understand that this is not easy to do to ground and get our bodies but it's much of what i'll be talking about today in front of the struggle that in particular for white people and so there's a lot of reasons t bit of an individual ice thing and we've got to try to move away from that individual act and so we're going to do something that's called a sound and a sound and it helps us move from that eye to the we had to do so we did a ground in now we're going to do a sound in and i'm not sure how it will go with a group of this size but we're going to see and so will do this because while change does require individual folks choosing to act the change that we in this room seek can't happen without a connection to the we without collective connected work so for another sixty seconds i'm going to ask us as a whole group to sound so you're going to sing a note you're going to hum a tune you're going to share a call you don't need to be able to carry  tune you don't even need a rule that sound good this is not about judgment it's simply about hearing each other in this space it's about collectively contributing a sound a harmony a note to an ensemble that is much larger and stronger than we are by ourselves so oppression thrives in isolation liberation lives and breathes in the collective so let your sound whatever it is the from a place of love of justice of compassion of heart of  and so even if your voice is trembling a little because you don't like to raise it too much even if it's tight because you recall oil from anything touchy feely even if you're overwhelmed right now you can be totally overwhelmed by the desire to stay quiet because you fear that if you let just one sound out your heart will absolutely burst in just might release it all all those reservations are understood they're all cool no problem still just give it a try and we're only going to do it for a minute and so i have a chime in here when you hear the chime begin to bring it down and here's how we'll start we'll start with one deep breath and as we exhale we're just going to sound in together ok and so in and no particular sound doesn't matter let let we ground in because we live in a society that makes it almost impossible to be fully present in the moment where and we sounded because systems of race racism and whiteness feed on isolation said another way we grounded and sound in so we can stay how can we stay and i want to focus on this because i think that identifying or in identifying some of the deeper reasons that we as white people leave we have a better chance of staying we have a better chance of actually being vigilant in our racial justice work the trick here is that i'm a multi generational white us are wanting to talk about whiteness at a conference about racial justice and it runs the risk of making it all about white people again all about enough about me what do you think about me me me me me me and so i see that tension i know that tension i want to respect that tension and so my hope is that this conversation doesn't serve to center whiteness and instead shines light on this question of why do white people leave how can we stay and offer some ideas for change and i say this not because i think white people are more important i say because it's white people's lack of action and change that is holding this up we are not achieving racial justice for lack of commitment of native people peoples of color we are here we are apple we're at we're in this racialized moment in two thousand and fifteen because white people have not woken up i don't mean like i learned something new i'm talking about a real awakening i'm talking about the kind of way what's happening here the kind of shift that makes us change our lives and deep in fundamental ways that's what's required that's what has yet to happen and i'm wondering why is that why is that so i was supposed to be sharing the stage with another speaker  because of a range of issues and i'm here by myself and that's weird right because if you look at the program there's a lot of folks of color on panels and connected but here i am as a white person i've got all of this time to myself and so i want to acknowledge that that was never the intention of the so while i was loves that racial justice does not so the committee members in my head that are tied to racial justice they want to have a conversation of the heart while the white ones want to lecture from the head my racial justice committee members want to expose myself and whiteness in general in the service of being more honest and building more relationships and serving the greater good the white ones are cotton facile notions of wanting to be liked respected seen as someone who understands this content whiteness wants me to say sit stay safe with what i know and racial justice as lean into what i do not have a feeling other white folks can perhaps relate to this we want to open our hearts we want to be more visible but there is always something holding us back and that something is what i want to talk about today and the truth is i feel awkward about talking about quote why white people leave and how do we stay because it's not a subject i feel incredibly well versed in nor is it something i can even trust my own perceptions about i'm not sure i fully know why white people leave and how we can stay and my doubts stems from the fact that after several years of doing this work i'm still challenge by the temptations and traps of whiteness and its pull to isolate and to leave layer after layer i wrestle with it daily and if you're in my life you know that to be true and i'm still trying to figure it out but here's what more so that i'm trying to figure it out i'm still trying to understand the difference between doing racial justice work and so i can tell you that i'm good at the former i deeply want and desire the latter and the latter is a conversation of the heart it's a conversation of the hard questions in the hard question that i tend to grapple with is this if i desperately want a society rooted in racial justice why do i not always live like that why do i not always act like that what is getting in the way if i want that why don't i live it to the extent and the degree and consistency that i want to live it and so in trying to answer this question for myself i'm going to tell you just a little bit about how i got here because it might shed some light for you on what gets in the way for me and it might help us understand as a collective what gets in the way for all of us regardless of our our racial identity so i was born in michigan that's me three months ago pensive and contemplative i am at three months i'm already thinking hard about something and i don't know what it is but i'm thinking hard about it so i was born in michigan or sadly i grew up in las vegas  not not a city known for its exceptional social justice agenda and to say that i that's not on the better what happens in vegas stays in vegas vegas and we really care about racism that's not what we do we do right and to say that i did not like las vegas would be an understatement and as soon as i could leave there i did i did quite well in high school and i looked really good on paper and great grades a p classes good s a t s scores bubble blah all in all it was assumed i was a well educated person who would go on to be successful in the world what was on paper however belied my social reality more specifically i knew a lot about science and i knew nothing about race majoring in biology premed i went to college in los angeles a horrible place a i don't know where l a went there it is l a a horrible place to know nothing about race a horrible place in a nothing about race and in no time at all i was being confronted quite regularly on any number of absurd comments stemming from my substantial and one particular moment i was in a first year seminar and i was sitting at a table is kind of a long table there's about twelve or fifteen of us at that table the professor was sitting over at the end i don't remember his name but he was a white dude from here part of the side  yellow stripes were so i do remember that they were sitting in these rolling chairs and i have no idea what we were talking about but some comic came up and i went and i said some horrible racist thing and the whole room got quiet and my committee was busy doing something else and they're like wait what's happening and that in so what happened was this moment of silence and then my peers were like like thank you and they just absolutely tore me apart person after it was like racial justice tag team or something is like w w i look over to the professor expecting him to help me and he kind of rolls away from the table as if to say you know the way they did they did and so i was horribly embarrassed i was absolutely mortified by that one would think that this horribly embarrassing moment would be sufficient to get me to change but that is a misunderstanding of how deep my race is socialization went you see i was taught racism on some of the most basic levels that we can be who was a pretty angry guy and he had a hard time managing his anger and as a result he often took it out on my mother and me i was only child at the time and one weekend day i was in the carport with him and he said a racist comment joke something like that not really understanding it i nonetheless went along with it and he praised me for it and i couldn't get a kind word out of this guy i could not get a kind word man but he praised me for that and i did not know at the time what i was trading on in that interaction but i did know that if i went along with what he said about people of color his anger and rage at me abated and i'm not saying i'm proud of this choice but today i understand it and what i understand is that my physical and emotional safety started to become tied at least in part to my participation in racism and my defense of and my loyalty to my physical and emotional years i washed my mother locked car doors in quote unquote dangerous neighborhoods in the middle of the day i saw my father my other family members talk about court and quote bad piece places to live mostly p r c native places and i experienced other family members tell me i should not play with children of color because those people are a bad influence layer after layer i was shown from every direction that the most moral most honest most safe most a lot of people were white this did not land in my head this is important it didn't land in my head it landed in my body it landed in my spirit none of these messages could possibly be countered by one embarrassing moment my first year in college because they weren't rooted in my mind they were rooted in my body they were rooted in my spirit my physical safety and my moral wellbeing were tied to whiteness precisely because they were threatened i was told by blackness and brownness over time without me knowing it i began to feel that my very life depended on me going along with this system of racial oppression and so quickly finished my story because that's what i want to kind of get to my software year or so there's a stage i was first at this kind of unconscious conscious or unconscious racism my sophomore year i went into this stage of don't call me racist and that was me showing up at campus events with no intention to change anything whatsoever and so desmond tutu was speaking on campus i showed up i waved to everybody i was oh you know i wanted to be seen i wanted everybody to see me there but i had no intention of internal change and that's what happens when white people make tokenized gestures there's no intention for us to change our lives we're just showing up and getting credit and so no way for our work and from there i went to this stage of saving people of color of native peoples and it's horribly condescending and it keeps the problem in this really individualize way it turned essential ises the problem of race racism and whiteness in the bodies of the communities of native people and people of color and totally ignores the fact that there is a system and i made mistake after mistake after mistake around this i got confronted again and again and again and that helped me move to the place of anti racism where i moved from the individual to the system i could see the system i could see what was going on but i was just one bubble off plumb in anti racism which is why i don't do anti racism work i do racial justice work because i was just a little bit removed from that experience anti racism replies i'm going to end racism and try to help commutes of color in native communities and it leaves me just a little bit away from me being in the problem and so i would show up at events and have the right signs at us fish and leave racial justice on my family and race and i had the right buttons and all the right stuff going on and i would have native people people of color and white folks who are far that's almost what you said just a second ago why are you hiring lou here i want to know why you're here i want to know what's in it for you and what was hard for me as i did not understand that question not only did i not have an answer i actually didn't but nevertheless the important point is i'm still standing safely on the shore that my life has not been inconvenienced it has not changed nothing about the privileges and opportunities i have of change and so the difference between anti racism and racial justice is we kick off our shoes we swim out to the boat we get in the boat we start to row alongside native people and people of color row as if our lives depended on it because in that moment we realize finally that they actually do stick a flag in and say i've just discovered a boat and more recently with the black live matter movement of course don't start giving feedback to people of color native people about how to run the boat don't do that don't do that with some grease and some humility and some commitment just let's just get in the boat and row right just row just be part of just joining this thing just join this movement in earnest in earnest so most white folks including liberals and many who describe themselves as progressive actually do want racial justice and here's the catch but only so long as it takes nothing away from us so long as my life is undisturbed so as long as you don't touch my stuff and that of course is not racial justice racial justice as i said is about getting in the boat it's about staying in the boat is about not only understanding white privilege and much more about knowing what it means for me as a white person why am i in the boat what does it mean for me and to a lack of knowledge of how deep whiteness actually goes in me and in other white folks in this country is a huge huge misstep and it's responsible for so much of our lack of vigilance as white people and so why do we leave how do we stay let's i has to act on three levels the mind the body the spirit and i know again that the separation of these is a western phenomenon but i'm putting it up here not because it's true but because it's the lens through which the west has in acted this colonial process and in the conversations with some of the folks from the conference while all of these three things are happening i was asked to focus a little bit more on the body in this talk and so that's what i'm going to do fortunately many racial justice advocates answer the question of wh white folks leave and how can we get them to stay with a focus on just one of these the mind their idea is that white folks are just miseducated which is true that's true and if we educate them will come around which in part is true and it's in part only because it's one part of three but it's not the whole story right it can't possibly be the whole story because of colonization and racism and race racism and whiteness happens on three levels then we have to deal colonize on all three levels anything less is incomplete and will make it difficult for white folks to show up and stay and so i'm trying to address this my colleague susan raff no and i spent six years designing delivering redesigning redeliver and delivering again redesigning this workshop called white people can't fully show up when it gets hard and instead of going to the head susan and i chose to look at the body we considered things like the role of trauma and what keeps white people stuck we dug into the ways that white people get triggered and let go of racial justice work or act in racist ways to spite ourselves and so we learned a lot in those sessions i think the participants did too i don't know as it was very intense as you can imagine we learned a great deal in those sessions but one of the interesting things that i took out of it one of the most powerful things actually was this idea and it showed up in so many of those white folks it was experiences in that workshop and that's the idea that if people of color in native peoples gain real power in this country it will surely lead to the annihilation of white people now hear what i'm saying i'm not talking about systems will change if that happens or structures of racial oppression will change i'm not saying that what we saw coming out of the bodies of these white people and to be honest they were happy to be rid of it in so many ways was this buried notion that racial justice and power to people of color meant their annihilation not change not justice annihilation and it's not true of course but it proved to be a notion held in the bodies of so many of those white racial justice at advocates that were in those and we know what it was about the body because they were shocked to see it and for many it was this really kind of profound revelation profound but not surprising because the racialized system in this country could not have held on this long and in this way merely by miss educating white people it had to find something deeper it had to tap into something more primal and so what it did slowly but powerfully over for centuries is trick our bodies into believing this  and the problem is why people don't have unless we're in multi racial settings we don't have a counter racial narrative that ways that native peoples and so many communities of color have a counter racial narrative where the dominant society says you're this thing but their own communities say yeah that's a bunch of crap we're not that thing white people here you're this thing and those people are that thing we want to have any counter narrative so we say okeydokey and we just sign up for it we're not all right got it got it and so part of what we signed up for again as white people is this belief that power power that is held by native people and people of color again is going to lead to our and dilation it is a myth but it's a powerful powerful miss and how did it get there it got there because we brought race into our bodies race was not just a concept it was something that lead into our souls it got into our bodies and we carry it out in our bodies the story of race the narrative of just race not racism and whiteness even just race so this practice something for a moment if you get back into that ground in position if you will and the people in the lobby who are eating and drinking you've got to stop for a minute you got to stop  life you know they just show biz a pound cake and i'm out there i don't know what's going on and so we're just going to kind of breathe for a second and i want you to take just a minute to ponder this question i'll ask you to chat with your neighbor when we're done so so let's come back let's come back so here's what susan and i shared in that workshop we talked a little bit again as i said about our bodies and paying attention to how race is in our bodies in our bodies our bodies are amazing and over their long evolution they have carried with them a beautiful lion i fight to create a moment where i can again leave my point is to leave the goal is to leave and so let's say i can't fight oh i'm overwhelmed then i go into this thing freeze which is you can call it playing dead so i just kind of play dead but i'm not really dead what i'm doing is i'm waiting for a moment to do what leave leave leave leave and so the lines about to do what it does and then another line like hey ira can i have some of that was like get away all and so in that moment i sense the lines lack of attention and i'm when i'm out of there i leave and if i can't do any of that then the nervous system is give me a really beautiful gift and it shuts down so i don't actually feel myself being eaten by this line and so this is a really basic response super helpful with lions like incredibly helpful when there's lions around very useful very useful so what has happened with respect to race and why people in this country is that the system of racial oppression has essentially hijacked the survival responses of white people as to make it seem as if people of color native people and even racial justice as a whole is a threat to our very lives just like that line white people have been socialize or tricked into having what feel like fight or flight response is to people of color specifically to black and brown men in this way are racism and whiteness is not oppressive they're just a natural response to an obvious threat that's one reason why the notion of quote what a reasonable person should do quote should never be admissible in court as a defense of a white person's racism racism does seem reasonable to white people because we have been taught to assign threat to people of color and native people so if you ask what a reasonable person would do a reasonable white person would engage in racism that's how that system works so how else how else could two different experts think that the murder of tamir rice was a reasonable response how else could you get there logic has long since been left behind right it is clearly something else operating there because we know if it had been a white twelve year old boy that never would have happened again this is not merely a cognitive reaction it's a powerfully visceral response and operates so quickly and on such a base level that white people have a hard time even identifying it for example when a white woman is walking down the street in a black man approaches to think of her crossing the street and her arm movement toward her bag is merely the result of her mind being corrupted by racial narratives that is an incomplete read of that moment with that woman is doing is responding to endless socialization that says he is a deep threat and her body gets tricked into this flight fight response for centuries people of color native peoples have been presented as less than human and a threat to white civility white society white humanity and our white bodies have responded as if this but that's an easy example so let me give you different one this time imagine racial justice organizing meeting where people of color native people in the room are expressing pain and anger and frustration with the white people in the group for their lack of vigilance voices are raised bodies are animated confrontation is palpable how many times have you seen white folks in these moments either get up to leave fight back and defend themselves or suggest that people of color native people should stop yelling sit there quietly hoping to not be called out so they can eventually leave without attention or simply shut down and have no emotional response at all these white people would not be in that group if they weren't interested and committed to racial justice but something else is operating there that makes it difficult for them to stay strong and be vigilant at the end of the meeting many of them leave in shame because they know the most associated society in all of human and indeed it has to be how else could we have enacted such extraordinary violence and disruption around the world how else could we have engaged in genocide and colonization and institution of slavery how else could we have done what we have done without being dissociated or in a smaller example for a white family to go to church in the morning and a lynching in the afternoon requires dissociation well follows then is making the dehumanizing nature of this dissociation seem normal and even admirable it's often called being rational logical or an income by emotion what would spock do but in truth dismissal of so much of what makes us human is detrimental not just to ourselves but it is deadly to native people and people the more rational rational reasonable stoic and logical a white person is the better our white person we are for example whiteness loves it when white people respond to people of color pain by saying you're so angry so emotional so irrational to be dismissive of what comes from the heart what is revealed through the vulnerability of emotion is a standard practice of being white over time our widebodies begin to lose touch with our feelings in the capacity to respond with empathy care and kindness the dissociation makes us hard and detached in the face of racial oppression and racialized violence and this ironically this leads to the final move that whiteness exacts on the bodies of white people to simply detach from others altogether in particular rugged individualism is used to hide the profound loss of human connection to self and others because i agree with it because it's the quintessential example of why bodies being individual independent alone we are not connected and therefore we are not at all bound to anyone else ultimately your fate  own and so what does all this get us for the system of racial oppression has an entire population of white people to varying degrees of course for knowledge actually the same but has so many of us disconnected from ourselves from each other and from any of the physical markers that would tell us when something is truly wrong and in its place we're responding to physical markers that perceive a threat where there actually is none so we're responding to stuff that doesn't really exist and we're missing the things that do exist in this way our bodies serve as tools for the system of racial oppression is tony he quotes in his book between the world and me and if you've not read this book i strongly recommend you do read it between the world  me he describes his body is not being his own the truth for white people is that our bodies are ultimately not our own either to be sure we get extraordinary privilege as a result of being white but the progress that is paid for that is the capacity to be fully human jack jackie about a lore and her book the birth of a white nation in the back she's got some pictures of lynchings from the south and so referring to those pictures of various scenes of lynching in the back of this book the result of this price we pay the result of whiteness the result of dissociation dehumanization and disconnection is nothing short of barbaric and it is our white legacy and so what can we do what can we do how can we reclaim this how can we reclaim this so that white people stay well the good news is that there actually are ways to address this there are ways to decolonized the body importantly though that does not mean lure and do talks with endless data and a sort of self affirming cynicism about whiteness but when i try to actually feel them at that conference or on that stage i can't find the they're angry they're guarded they're hiding behind the words of the intellect and the ability to write lots of books with pithy titles but the heart and the emotion and the body seems to still be have them driving while under the influence of whiteness and so over the years i've come to not trust those white speakers for the same reason to tell you the truth that i do not always trust myself if i cannot in body racial justice more fully each day than it is right to wonder about my capacity to actually be and so instead of book groups and doing something what do we do with the first step is to even realize that this is happening just realizing this is happened once we do there are countless tools and modalities out there for getting touch getting in touch with one's physical self and rian having our bodies in ways that are tied to our beliefs and racial justice many of those body workers and healers are in this room with us today because i've seen you sitting here finding someone who can do the work of reconnection and body centered healing even if it's not explicitly about whiteness is a powerful challenge to race racism and whiteness and so whatever you can do tomorrow to inhabit your body more to come home to yourself to heal that separation that in itself begins to push against race racism this and i don't say this lightly because i know from personal experience how hard this is it's uncomfortable it's perhaps even scary the body has memory i was on the table with a body worker just last week and she commented to me about what she was e u you know like there you are in me in me not cognitively but ushering kind of pulling up this response of pride and ego and resistance and not wanting to be seen right and so i noticed it and i got to notice it this time without giving in to it because the truth is i do carry a sadness i carry a sadness about these issues a sadness about what we're doing to the world and each other a sadness about how often i fail to live up to my own deeply held values and beliefs but i cannot have liberation without fully inhabiting this space and that means being willing to take a look to lean in to approach this with an open and so let me say again i know this is not easy work for any of us there are generations of stories written into an on to our skin and yet what other choice is there except to go into it i've been told that the only way out is through and so what would happen if we as white people lay down the guilt to lay down the shame and replace them with curiosity grief and humility be curious about what has happened here feel the grief and join in the calling and the deep feelings and do so with humility not with a sense of i now have all the answers but with a sense of i really don't know what to do next can we do it together and the answer if we do it that way is that our humanity returns not all at once there i tell you everything that we have auction off to whiteness we actually get back via the process of coming into our bodies and making amends the integrity we lost by not speaking up the compromising of our values for going along all of it over time and with work starts to heal and we reclaim our bodies and this inevitably leads to a reconnection of the head and the body we almost re associate if you will we really associate we get back into our bodies which affords us the opportunity to plug back into our emotions re humanize ourselves and this is this could be completely overwhelming if you're used to being the instantly at some point they just burst into tears these white people and what's happening to them is they are feeling it's like the sun coming out from the clouds after a long long period of rain and so from here we can with others white people and people of color native communities are separated for a reason the connections that are made the ways our bodies interact with each other has this pesky habit of sabotaging colonisation when we laugh together break bread together share our lives with each other when we fall in love we are taking steps against the ways that bodies have been colonized now please don't here this is some sort of colorblind political notion that we can just date our way to racial justice right and say i'm not saying that nor my saying the notion of i have two black friends is any kind of viable solution to racism either where i'm talking about a real deep honest and transparent relationships the kind that have an effect on us at levels that cannot be seen but surely felt i'm talking about the kind of connection that lifts the scales from the perspectives of white folks and allows us to perceive the truth of race in this country which in turn allows us to truly be seen and isn't that what we all to you want to be understood and we want to be moment just a few minutes left so let me share just a couple other thoughts if so why do we leave and how do we stay there's a third element i haven't talked about and you'll notice that i spent most of the time on the body  again when i was chatting with folks from the conference they wanted some conversation about the body and i wanted to honor that intent and so i chose to spend most of the time that but before i close let me say at least a few words about this third dimension and some things i've noticed with colonizing the spirit is that this racial oppressed racially oppressive system seeks to crush any sense of hope for change co opt core values for the use of whiteness and expunge that eat those of love from our daily lives t hopelessness we often get tricked into collusion because it seems that this is an intractable system and that's a lie of course but in a society that is often spiritually starved it's a readily digestible and when i do i'm left hanging on to believe that can never really  feed at the white privilege conference to me washington and i are hoping to be able to do a pre conference institute a daylong thing entitled racial justice as a spiritual imperative and while using the term spiritual very broadly we are hoping to have a conversation where we encourage racial justice activists and educators to unabashedly connect our hopeful selves to the promise of racial justice and i'm excited for this session because in my work with communities of faith i've seen exactly this process happen white folks who are longtime members of those congregation approach others in the church and say that this racial justice work has been live in their spiritual lives in ways they have not felt in a very long time and that's because there is hope in racial justice there is a sense of possibility and there is a promise for a just tomorrow and if we tie whatever you call spiritual selves if we tie that to this racial justice endeavor we drop a taproot into the ground that will bend but never ever break and i think the same is true for our beliefs and values in this society vigilance of the spirit means that we do not see the moral ground to why we have the moral high ground here we are on the right side of history and i refuse to rock back on my heels and explain why racial justice is important and why i wanted to why it's one of my core values instead iraq forward and i ask how is a lack of racial justice morally right i make those advocating against racial justice in our society explain to how racial oppression is viable i'm not going to explain to you why justice is right you need to explain to me why violence is right for what i know is that to take this moral high ground and to keep it is to not let our values and beliefs be co opted so easily and so consistently by a system that promises safety but delivers nothing but fear division and and so why people we've got  reclaim those values reclaim them not in the name of buttressing white privilege of white supremacy but in the name of liberty and in the end when i push back on this system what is ultimately returned is my capacity to win i wanted to read an excerpt from bel must think like oh that's the one word woman over there going like you know so i'll close with this by this point you are likely a bit overwhelmed someone nicknamed me and training a while back fire hose and that's because i'm like ok you know what i'm out of there and so i get that i get and you might be wondering why in work earth did they ask this woman to come speak and i sometimes feel that way as well but what's important to note is that i'm not talking about a static condition of this colonizing the mind colonizing the body and this i'm not raising these issues because they're something that can't be changed on the contrary i'm talking about this because it can be but unless we acknowledge it or diagnose it if you will we we will see that change it won't happen and so i tend to think of this diagnosis as the full arsenal of whiteness and how it seeks to dominate the lives of white people and ensure that we will never be able to get in the boat we will never have fully authentic and transparent lives with native peoples and peoples of color that we will never live racially just lives and a diagnosis is just that though the greater question is how white people respond more to the point what we do in these three areas to be vigilant and to stay as i mentioned earlier i would like to move from doing racial justice work to living a racially just life and for me that feels more like an invitation than an actual tuition it's an invitation to build the world that i think we all see a world that is healed and forgiven and bound together in love that's deeply compassionate a world that is made amends and sought to set right what has been wrong for so long and you will hear people say that world is not possible do not believe them do not give in to that idea that world is possible i know it like i know like i know my heart absolutely knows that you do and as we walk this road as we do this work together we must remember that we have to stay together