Religious educators resisting white fragility: Lessons from mystics

paper presentation to the AD Pro SeminarUniversity of St. Michael’s College30 September 2016

a word about my contexts…

basic outline of paper

• begins with a broad definition of “mystic”

• draws on the frame of one contemporary mystic (Bryan Stevenson)

• describes white fragility as a habitus

• offers strategies for resisting that formation

a mystic is someone who lives life through a “transfigured perception of the ordinary” that draws them into deep communion with all of Creation

four elements for transformative change

• getting proximate

• changing the narratives

• finding what sustains resilience and hope

• embracing discomfort

Stevenson

(1) getting proximate

habitus of white fragility

“White people in North America live in a social environment that protects and insulates them from race-based stress. This insulated environment of racial protection builds White expectations for racial comfort while at the same time lowering the ability to tolerate racial stress, leading to what I refer to as White Fragility. White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate White racial equilibrium.” (DiAngelo, 2011, 1)

(2) changing the narratives

Willie James Jennings’ question: “Why is racial belonging more decisive for Christians, than Christian belonging? Why does race animate our sense of belonging much more powerfully and tangibly than the Christian faith that so many of us share and confess?”

Jennings’ lecture

his answer requires us to retrieve a profoundly different epistemology, a deeply relational understanding of knowing in the intimate grasp of God — indeed, a “transfigured perception of the ordinary”

(3) resilience and hope

hope grows through communion, through a “transfigured perception of the ordinary” — a way of knowing that draws on far more than narrow cognitive reasoning, and is deeply relational

“It is as if there is a hidden glory radiating from each person which will reveal itself only to those who have been able to focus outward and wait in generosity, thus allowing their own hidden glory – hidden especially from themselves – to pour forth. Even as the observing I/eye is elided, the glory pours through…” (Ross, 2014, 224)

“This is the peace that characterizes the person who has re-centered in the deep mind, so that the two ways of knowing, which are interdependent, flow together as they are designed to do in an integrated way of knowing, the whole being more than the sum of its parts. Peace in this context is not an affect but rather a way of being in the world.” (Ross, 2014, 196).

(4) embracing discomfort

“Life inside this new space, then, carries uneasiness and even a discomfort as those within it attempt to negotiate powerful cultural claims of kinship. It is in the face of these tensions that Paul’s declarations of a new citizenship (Eph 2:19) indicate profound risk taking for anyone who wishes to claim identity in the new space, that is, to claim being Christian” (Jennings, 2011, 273)

empathy, not just sympathy

ways to do this…

paper draft available here: https://www.academia.edu/27756283/White_religious_educators_resisting_white_fragility_Lessons_from_mystics