Antidotes to White Fragility
Reckoning with the current impact of racism, colonialism, and the history of white supremacy is big. As a white person, you may feel numb, or so upset that you loose track of your own innate goodness.
In our work together, I invite you to cultivate your capacity to hold what is hard without collapsing into it, to acknowledge social truths and personal habits without taking it as a personal attack, to take action rather than feel bad, and to explore your own history, ancestry and cultural, origins as a way to feel more whole.
I encourage a somatic approach to understanding and undermining patterns of white supremacy, because our body’s responses are so honest; it can get our intellect to step back a bit in order to feel and know more deeply what’s happening and what needs to change.
My Master’s Thesis focuses on how to develop antidotes to white fragility in racial justice education spaces, with the goal of furthering movement work. This thesis is cited in many racial justice courses around the world! Read it for free, and please cite if you share it forward.
I have offered workshop curriculum based on this thesis research, in collaboration with the White Noise Collective, Showing Up For Racial Justice Bay Area, The Psychotherapy Institute, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute Level 1 Assistants Training, and many others.
Currently, I am part of the Radicle Root Collective, a multiracial consulting group dedicated to organizational transformation around decolonization and anti-racism efforts that center perspectives of BIPOC staff and participants.
My work with white clients often centers around bolstering a sense of innate goodness and one’s personal conviction around acting to end injustice.
We address patterns of reactivity (e.g. feelings of shame, numbness, people pleasing, anxiety, irritation and behaviors that emerge from those feelings) in relation to race/whiteness. Together we explore how these patterns emerge in your relationships, and then support you to transform habitual patterns into less fragile, more centered and active responses.
My work with BIPOC clients often centers cultivation of resourcing practices including deepening connections within BIPOC communities and with nature, while holding an intergenerational lens and acknowledgement of current and ancestral traumas as they manifest in day to day life.
I encourage BIPOC clients to source additional forms of healing (drumming, herbal work, song, the gym, other creative outlets…whatever feels nourishing for you) in BIPOC only spaces.