The biggest step for me in approaching the Sacred Work of Anti-Racism was to realise that it applies to me at all. It was so easy for me, as a nice liberal white person, to think “I don’t hold racist views: I did that two-day Equal Opportunities training at work fifteen years ago and I read the Guardian. Job done.” It was a shock – a really horrible shock – to realise that actually, I do hold racist views. Not consciously of course.

But I grew up, and you grew up and we all grew up, more or less, in a stew of racist ideology and practice that taught us from a very young indeed that being white is better than being black.

And those ideas and tropes that I absorbed growing up in the 1970s are still there, lurking. And they still do harm. They harm me because the unconscious conditioned belief that “white is better” collaborates with the ego belief that “I am separate” and if I am separate I had better be better, or I might not be anything.

In this way, my internalised racism wounds my soul. And they harm you, if you are racialised as black, because while I remain unconscious of the racism lurking within me, I don’t notice as it slips out, like a hidden knife, and wounds you. But you notice. And I don’t notice how holding myself better and separate I cut myself off from you, and in doing so, I cut myself off from God. And if you are racialised as white, my unconscious racism reinforces yours and allows us both to go on causing mayhem while pretending it has nothing to do with us.  

The terrible realisation that racism lives and thrives within me and that it causes me to cause real harm to you is a constant motivator. It demands that I take action to excavate the monster within me and to cut off all its tentacles in the world. The Anti-Racism Reading Group is one small way to keep on excavating. It helps us keep on searching out those slimy conditioned beliefs and unconscious assumptions and bringing them up to be spoken and shared, to be wept over and laughed at and to shrivel up, like vampires at dawn, in the power of Conscious awareness.  

Our next meeting will be at 10:15 am on Thursday 6th June. 

• Link: Join Zoom Meeting
• Meeting ID: 950 891 4495
• Passcode: vision

~ Written by OneSpirit Tutor and Interfaith Minister, Sarah MacDonald. Learn more about Sarah and her work here.