Not having any other clues, I began with prayer, and as prayer will do, it worked. Every day when I sat down for my morning meditation, I prayed for every vestige of racism to be uprooted from my being, and lo and behold, all kinds of unconscious stuff began to bubble up to the surface as I sat in a meditative state, all of it supremely embarrassing. Get out of here—I thought that? I believed that? And how could I possibly have imagined that? Whoever said that the truth will set you free, but first it will embarrass you, was exactly right.
Eventually, I learned other practices for uprooting White racism from its unconscious hidey-holes, and after trying them all out on myself and a brave friend and finding them good, I thought I could design a workshop, to pass these wonderful healing practices along. But then the facilitator of a workshop about how to design and put on workshops told me, “You have to do a needs assessment! You have to know what are the needs of your constituency, and you have to do a needs assessment!” So I went away and thought about that, and soon came to the conclusion that in all likelihood the greatest need of the constituency for a workshop about spiritual healing of White racism was the need to be perceived as not needing this workshop.
Which explains why a lot of questions and objections that our beloved fellow human beings are so prone to raise are taking up such a large chunk of this book.
I had thought that the Sufi order I belonged to would be the perfect laboratory for healing White racism, because it was such a very White group, but there seemed to be some confusion about “sensitivity training,” and enthusiasm for exploring healing was not in large supply. I wound up developing the workshop by myself, and offered it once, for free. Four people showed up, all of them friends of mine who wanted to give me moral support. And although I had said over and over, “It’s healing! It’s supposed to make you feel better!”, some of them were surprised that it actually did make them feel better, and that it wasn’t a “heavy-duty encounter-group thing,” as one of them put it. They did feel better, and they found it tremendously helpful in their daily lives. They talked it up in our spiritual circles. It went nowhere.
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