Disrupting White Mindfulness: Race and Racism in the Wellbeing Industry

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Disrupting White Mindfulness offers a timely commentary on the dominant narratives that shape the mindfulness industry - whiteness, postracialism and neoliberalism. Its positioning as apolitical forges institutions that fit comfortably into increasingly divided societies. The race-gender profile of these institutions reveals a White, middle-class profile of decision-makers, educators and staff that is mirrored in its audiences. Mechanisms that recycle the industrys whiteness include corporatist pedagogies, edicts of authority, disengagement with difference and inappropriate uses of mindfulness that distance People of the Global Majority. A growing emergent movement focused on a justice-infused mindfulness and liberatory wellbeing decolonises mindfulness and de-centres whiteness. Its premise in indigenous, global South, queer knowledges leverages difference to produce multiple solutions focused on liberation. There is room for White Mindfulness to change.

Reviews

Karelse delivers a cracking Black Feminist call to decolonise Wellbeing with her forensic expos of the darkside of the White Mindfulness industry and its colonial co-option of Eastern teachings for Western gain.
Professor Heidi Safia Mirza UCL University of London, author of Race, Gender and Educational Desire

Disrupting White Mindfulness offers a generous and critical lens of exploration helping to free the ancient practice of mindfulness from systems of dominance, restoring the practice back to its original project of liberation for all who seek it.
Lama Rod Owens, author of Love and Rage and co-author of Radical Dharma

Karelse importantly invites the mindful to reimagine their communities, untethering themselves from the de facto white, colonial cultures that undergird and infuse their most popular forms. She instead encourages others to imagine along with her how such practices can be used to foster a more inclusive and just world through intrapersonal and collective reflection, new forms of community building, and action.
Jamie Kucinskas, Associate Professor of Sociology, Hamilton College, NY, author, The Mindful Elite: Mobilising from the Inside Out, and Situating spirituality: Context, Practice, Power

Author Bio

Cathy-Mae Karelse is an independent scholar and transformation leader