“My Response to Racism is Anger”: A “Mindful” Approach to Mindfulness

Abstract

The current political climate has revived mindfulness as a rhetoric to establish relationality between the self and the other at a time when concerns around racialized exclusion have exploded on the political horizon. By focusing on the call for papers for the 2018 WSCA conference, I track how the discipline has largely approached mindfulness as a deracialized (inter)subjective practice. In its place, I offer anger as theorized by Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde as an articulation of mindfulness that is not only more in line with the original Buddhist conception of the term but also meets the demands of social justice.

Keywords:

• Anger
• Appropriation
• Mindfulness
• Racism
• Women of Color

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I draw my understanding of racialization from Jasbir Puar (2017), who defines it as “a figure for specific social formations and processes that are not necessarily or only tied to what has been historically theorized as ‘race.’” (p. xii).

2. The full call for papers can be accessed from the 2017 conference program booklet available at https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.westcomm.org/resource/resmgr/programs/2017Program.pdf.