Workshop | The Racist Mind: Using Mindfulness to Interrupt White Supremacy

We tend to see white supremacists as a separate breed from the rest of us. The fact is that all people, no matter their racial identity, internalize forms of white supremacy. This workshop explores the process of that internalization and how its presence in our brains finds a wide variety of harmful manifestations, from implicit bias and micro-aggressions to hate crimes and racial terrorism. By using a mindfulness approach, we will explore the way racism causes trauma and how to interrupt racism in ourselves and in the racially charged interactions we encounter. The goal of the workshop is to move from harm to healing in our racial lives.

Resource(s):

🔗 Racist Mind Workshop Resources

Randall Blazak has been the chair of Oregon’s Coalition Against Hate Crimes since 2002 and is a globally recognized expert on bias crimes and extremism. Blazak earned his PhD at Emory University in 1995 after completing an extensive field study of racist skinheads that included undercover observations and interviews across the world. He became a tenured sociology professor at Portland State University and currently teaches sociology classes at the University of Oregon and Portland Community College. He serves as the vice-chair of Oregon’s Department of Justice Steering Committee on Bias Crimes and Incidents and is currently a subject matter expert on a federally funded grant to develop community based responses to violent extremism.

Read more about Randall and his work at www.randyblazak.com