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Recognizing white privilege begins with truly understanding the term itself.

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In elementary school, my teacher made me pick cotton. She brought each student their own plant, and her goal was to make us understand how hard cotton is to pick. It has only been a couple of years since I began to tell this story in public. I kept it a secret for a couple of reasons. First, as a small child, I trusted my teacher and did not allow myself to believe that she would cause me or any other students harm. Second, after some years passed, I was ashamed that it had taken me this long to understand the impact of what happened.

I understand now that this experience is the reason why I later learned to hate family tree assignments, especially those that included pictures. How do you explain to your classmates and your teacher that your family is not missing, but the assignment will always be incomplete because you don't know their names or have pictures of them?

Michael Dumas, an assistant professor in the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Education and African American Studies department, describes school as a particularly harmful place for Black students in the article "'Losing an Arm': Schooling as a Site of Black Suffering." He notes that this suffering is the kind that "we have been least willing or able to acknowledge or give voice to."

My story and many others like it are examples of school-based racial trauma-a type of physical or emotional injury uniquely impacting Black and Brown children in school spaces. As I reflected on my own experience, I wondered whether what happened to me is still occurring in schools. And, if so, what does this mean?

Racial Trauma as Curriculum Violence

I started conducting research to find out. Every level of education has been affected by the presence of racial trauma. K-12, private, public, parochial and higher education institutions are reporting racist incidents that include the isolation, bullying, taunting, stalking, intimidation and physical assault of Black and Brown students. Although identifying these types of harm is important in capturing a realistic landscape of what school is like for many students, it leaves out what is often a more subtle aspect of racial trauma: curriculum violence.

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In elementary school, my teacher made me pick cotton. She brought each student their own plant, and her goal was to make us understand how hard cotton is to pick. It has only been a couple of years since I began to tell this story in public.

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The original piece and therefore this website builds on the work of many people, including (but not limited to) Andrea Ayvazian, Bree Carlson, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Eli Dueker, Nancy Emond, Kenneth Jones, Jonn Lunsford, Joan Olsson, David Rogers, James Williams, Sally Yee, as well as the work of Grassroots Leadership, Equity Institute Inc, the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, the Challenging White Supremacy workshop, the Lillie Allen Institute, the Western States Center, and the contributions of hundreds of participants in the DR process. As noted elsewhere, any wisdom you find here is credit to all those who informed and influenced

Sharon Martinas, who at the time was facilitating the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, suggested I add the antidotes. The characteristics marked with an asterisk* indicate those that Daniel Buford, who at the time was a lead trainer with the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, ​asked I credit to him when the original article was written.

​the original article and this website. Any fault or shortcoming is mine.

The original article offered this Partial Bibliography:
Notes from People's Institute for Survival and Beyond Workshop, Oakland, CA, spring 1999. Notes from Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, San Francisco, CA, spring 1999. Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? NY: HarperCollins, 1997. Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words. NY: Context Books, 2000. Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism. PA: New Society Publishers, 1996. Anne Wilson Schaef, Living in Process. NY: Ballantine, 1998. For complete bibliography, see complete workbook for dRwork's Dismantling Racism process (2016).

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Sometime in the late 1990s, I arrived home after a particularly frustrating consultation with an organization I was working with at the time. In a flurry of exasperation, I sat down at my computer...

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Are you thinking of implementing mindfulness, breathing, yoga or other wellness-focused social-emotional learning in your classroom? These practices can be powerful ways to develop self-awareness and wellness tools for life, but beware: these practices can also be unhelpful or even harmful, too. As with any new practice, we educators should think critically about mindfulness, breathing, yoga, or wellness practices before implementing them. Here are some of my favorite resources to help with this critical analysis:

First, read Paul Gorski's piece on Equity Detours and check that you're not using social-emotional learning as a racial equity detour.

Next, Christina Torres on how mindfulness won't save us, but fixing the system will. We need to balance supporting kids to cope with addressing the conditions that require them to cope in the first place.

When offering students wellness strategies, we need to make sure we're not just forcing students to use strategies that work for us. Here's a piece from me on self-determination and SEL.

Turning to mindfulness specifically, it's important to understand that mindfulness activities can actually be triggering for trauma-affected students. Read more from Katrina Schwartz here.

Speaking of which, this is a fascinating piece on why "take a deep breath" isn't always good advice.

We should also consider the question "who gets to be well?," posed by Dr. Angela Rose Black. She created Mindfulness for the People to center the voices and experiences of People of Color in the mindfulness movement and this interview with her is a great read.

If you have additional resources or insights to share, please leave a comment!
This post is a write-up of a Twitter thread - you can find the original here.
Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

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Resource Round-Up: Mindfulness in Schools

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Are you thinking of implementing mindfulness, breathing, yoga or other wellness-focused social-emotional learning in your classroom? These practices can be powerful ways to develop self-awareness and wellness tools for life, but beware: these practices can also be unhelpful or even harmful, too. As with any new practice, we educators should think critically about mindfulness, breathing,...