Anti-Racism: a Learning Guide

Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist "spirituality" based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.

The Racial Healing Handbook offers practical tools to help you navigate daily and past experiences of racism, challenge internalized negative messages and privileges, and handle feelings of stress and shame. You'll also learn to develop a profound racial consciousness and conscientiousness, and heal from grief and trauma. Most importantly, you'll discover the building blocks to creating a community of healing in a world still filled with racial microaggressions and discrimination. This book is not just about ending racial harm--it is about racial liberation.

Addressing the intersectionality of race and the US criminal justice system, social activist Fania E. Davis explores how restorative justice has the capacity to disrupt patterns of mass incarceration through effective, equitable, and transformative approaches. Eager to break the still-pervasive, centuries-long cycles of racial prejudice and trauma in America, Davis unites the racial justice and restorative justice movements, aspiring to increase awareness of deep-seated problems as well as positive action toward change. Davis highlights real restorative justice initiatives that function from a racial justice perspective; these programs are utilized in schools, justice systems, and communities, intentionally seeking to ameliorate racial disparities and systemic inequities.

This analysis by an Indigenous feminist scholar challenges the United Nations-based human rights agendas and colonial theory that until now have shaped Indigenous models of self-determination. Gender inequality and gender violence, Dian Million argues, are critically important elements in the process of self-determination. Million contends that nation-state relations are influenced by a theory of trauma ascendant with the rise of neoliberalism. Such use of trauma theory regarding human rights corresponds to a therapeutic narrative by Western governments negotiating with Indigenous nations as they seek self-determination. Focusing on Canada and drawing comparisons with the United States and Australia, Million brings a genealogical understanding of trauma against a historical filter.

Law professor and mindfulness practitioner Rhonda Magee shows that the work of racial justice begins with ourselves. When conflict and division are everyday realities, our instincts tell us to close ranks, to find the safety of our own tribe, and to blame others. The practice of mindfulness--paying attention to our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations in an open, nonjudgmental way--increases our emotional resilience, giving us the space to become less reactive and to choose how we respond to injustice. For victims of injustice, mindfulness calms our fears and helps us to exercise self-compassion. Magee shows us how to slow down and reflect on microaggressions--to hold them with some objectivity and distance--rather than bury unpleasant experiences so they have a cumulative effect over time. She helps us develop the capacity to address the fears and anxieties that would otherwise lead us to re-create patterns of separation and division.

Socially Engaged Buddhism is an introduction to the contemporary movement of Buddhists, East and West, who actively engage with the problems of the world--social, political, economic, and environmental--on the basis of Buddhist ideas, values, and spirituality. Sallie B. King, one of North America's foremost experts on the subject, identifies in accessible language the philosophical and ethical thinking behind the movement and examines how key principles such as karma, the Four Noble Truths, interdependence, non-harmfulness, and non-judgmentalism relate to social engagement.

From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a continuum: that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating. This deep, brave, and bold work reveals how punishment replaces personal and collective self-criticism, and shows why difference is so often used to justify cruelty and shunning. Rooting the problem of escalation in negative group relationships, Schulman illuminates the ways in which cliques, communities, families, and religious, racial, and national groups bond through the refusal to change their self-concept.

In a revolutionary departure from everything we've been told about body-positivity, The Body Is Not an Apology founder Sonya Renee Taylor explicitly makes the connection between radical self-acceptance and social justice. Systems of oppression thrive off of our inability to make peace with bodies and difference. When we develop the ability to honor difference and radically accept ourselves, we have the capacity and desire to apply those skills to the larger world. Radical self love not only dismantles shame and self loathing in us, but has the power to dismantle global systems of injustice, because when we make true peace with our bodies, only then do we have the capacity to truly make peace with the bodies of the others. The purpose of this book is to get us to stop treating our bodies like cars, to stop acting as if our minds are not part of our bodies. Reading this book will move us beyond these fraught and compartmentalized lives, where we easily forget that we are whole humans having whole human experiences in our bodies.