ABOUT RADICAL INCLUSION PRACTICE©
Get Real About Race And Gender
GET REAL: HEAL YOUR DIVIDED SELF
To be effective in the world, you’ve got to know who you are, and who you aren’t. You’ve got to understand who you believe you are, who you actually are, and how to live, learn, and grow in that shifting gap.
Radical Inclusion Practice© challenges the stories and histories of race and gender that divide us from ourselves even before they divide us from one another.
This transformative process helps us discover our unconscious biases and teaches us how to harness and heal our fractured personal, social, and civic identities. Be the change? Yes! But WHO are you going to BE when you ACT?
Begin your practice now with my programs designed for individuals and groups
GET REAL: WRESTLE WITH THE GAP BETWEEN WHO YOU BELIEVE YOURSELF TO BE - AND WHO YOU ACTUALLY ARE
Radical Inclusion Practice© explores our relationship with some of the most fraught and potentially healing dynamics of modern life: our own race, gender, personal identity, family identity – and who we believe the “other” to be.
Many of us are still working deeply with our family history, childhood wounds, and the themes of our lineage. Are still growing ourselves up. Learning to foster loving relationships. Starting to speak out. All essential personal work.
And we are also individuals who live in societies. Race and gender shape us and our civic behaviors in ways just as profound as our family dynamics.
I am passionate about Radical Inclusion Practice©. Not because I expect it to yield easy answers, but because I know that a safe, supportive space can deliver the healing nutrients required to cultivate fresh vision, open-heartedness, and transformation.
Radical Inclusion Practice© begins by asking us to turn around and inquire within. Because until enough of us have a change of heart and are resilient enough to respond rather than react to the realities of race and gender, our society’s institutional and legal protections will continue to miss the mark.
We want to get out there and meet this moment. At the same time, we may have limited experience of working productively together across differences. We may lack a skill set that is up to the task at hand.
We may feel overwhelmed with the size of the problems and wonder “what’s mine to do?” and what next step to take.
Getting real about race and gender begins with getting real with ourselves. Preparing ourselves so we can show up to do the work that is needed. Begin to open our eyes, minds, hearts, and wills. To change our own behaviors. And do so with honesty and enormous kindness for ourselves.
GET REAL: YOU WORK THE RADICAL INCLUSION PRACTICE, AND THE PRACTICE WORKS YOU
Radical Inclusion Practice© offers enormous kindness. It invites us to slow down.
To temper both our messianic tendencies and our learned helplessness.
To ask ourselves new questions.
What have I not-seen about myself?
What have I not-felt?
What assumptions and beliefs have I not-questioned?
These unquestioned assumptions mask our Rules for Living
Each time we notice what we have not-seen, we see more of reality.
Each time we feel what we have not-felt, we presence more of our humanity.
Each time we examine an unquestioned assumption or belief, we free ourselves to act from a broader understanding of life.
This is the WHO you can BE when you ACT. When you are in practice.
Our Rules for Living – for appearance and behavior – embedded in each of our stories give them great power over us.
As we begin to notice and name these rules, we begin to see how we were rewarded for following them. Rewarded with safety and belonging: security. Or, if we questioned, bent, stretched, or broke these rules, we were instead likely to have been ignored, shamed, accused/tried/prosecuted: unsafe.
The Rules for Living embedded in our stories are our internal equivalents of the laws, policies, procedures, and organizational hierarchies that limit access and advancement. That dispense and withhold incentives and opportunities from people whose appearance and behaviors do not conform to White standards.
What White People Learn
The “White Rules”
At the knees of our mothers and in the institutions of our fathers, we learn the “white” rules when we are very young.
Don’t walk like that.
Don’t talk like that.
Don’t play with that toy.
Don’t invite that kid.
Don’t listen to that music.
Don’t dance like that.
Don’t act like them.
Sometimes the “White rules” are taught with a look, sometimes with the back of a hand. Sometimes they are reinforced with words—matter-of-fact, loving, or harsh.
Then we enter school, study history, and are indoctrinated with a collective sense of who “we” are. We’re taught that “white rules” are true for all people, all places, and all circumstances. The “white rules” — rule! The “white rules” become the dominant distorted lens through which we see the world.
Sometimes the “white rules” are perpetuated out of arrogance or ignorance, and sometimes out of spite. But most often, the “white rules” are taught out of fear.
There is such a rightness to the “White rules”!
They affirm that there is an order in the universe.
They safeguard our privilege, our place, and our personal identity.
What Black and Brown People Learn
The “Black & Brown Rules”
In the eyes of our mothers and in the physical and psychological prisons of our fathers, we learn the “black and brown” rules when we are very young.
Be prepared to always have to prove yourself.
Be prepared to be silenced or rendered invisible.
Be prepared to be twice as good to get half as far.
Be prepared to be anxious or hyper-vigilant about the safety of your family and friends.
Be prepared to receive unequal justice.
Be prepared to have legitimate emotions or demands misinterpreted as “anger” or “radicalism.”
Be prepared to experience higher levels of chronic stress, depression, and illness, and to have your healthcare professionals (if you are fortunate enough to have any) dismiss your symptoms.
Be prepared to accept that it’s your job to make white people feel comfortable.
Be prepared to be the spokesperson for your race.
What exhausting burdens of proof define daily life for Black and Brown people under White Rules.
Such profound vigilance and effort to manage the fears and biases of White people.
Radical Inclusion Practice© frees us to bring our most discerning, authentic, and still-imperfect selves to forge a just world for everyone. It is this WHO that we can choose to cultivate as we act to heal the divisions in our increasingly urgent and polarized world. As we embrace Radical Inclusion Practice©, we can free ourselves to navigate, speak out, and lead in our increasingly polarized world without feeding the divide.
From the founding of our nation, “We the people” meant white-men-only. Rules of the dominant culture: White. Rules of the dominant gender: male. To this day, America still favors the rights and privileges of white men who continue to dictate what societal norms and success look like – including standards of appearance, dress, language, values, authority, power, and the accumulation of wealth enshrined in policies and laws.
Professional women have learned to “dress for success” if success is what they want. People of color “adopt white body language and speech,” if access is what they want. White men continue to experience a double advantage, while Black women continue to experience double jeopardy.
White people see ourselves first as individuals while we see people of color first as members of a group, indistinguishable from one another and rarely identified as individuals.
A person of color who enters a public space—a workplace, a school, a restaurant, a sidewalk, a parking lot—is seen first as a group member and after that, maybe as an individual. Consequently, white people often “mistake” people of color for “the help” in professional, retail, and recreational settings, and as “dangerous” when encountered on an otherwise deserted street. A white male professional believes he is complimenting his black female colleague when he remarks, “you are so articulate!”
This is why black individuals walking while black, driving while black, or shopping while black, face risks ranging from frustration and discomfort to embarrassment and harassment to physical injury and death.
In the face of an unending stream of micro-and macro-aggressions, inner work for a person of color must center around fortifying individual agency and dignity while accelerating radical self-care and resilience.
Inner work for a white person begins by seeing ourselves as members of the dominant cultural group, and not only as individuals. If we continue to avert our gaze from this truth, we deny others their humanity. And consequently, we remain divided against ourselves.
A white man must see and wrestle with his dual advantages of race and gender. A white woman must see and wrestle with her experiences of white-skin advantage on the one hand, and gender disadvantage on the other.
While the difficulties, gifts, and developmental tasks of inner work are very different for white people and people of color, for binary and non-binary-gendered people, for men and women, for any dominant group and its marginalized partner-in-conflict, the same healing tools are useful.
We each, with our combination of identities, have our own inner work to do to come into our full, imperfect, unique, and interconnected humanity.
Then engage together as whole human beings whose differences are precious and potent with co-creative power, “solutions” we cannot begin to envision from our wounded, polarized present.
THE TIME FOR RADICAL INCLUSION PRACTICE© IS NOW
Our own calling – to a moral life, to personal growth, to spiritual evolution – meets the world’s great need for justice. Right now.
So in these times of spiking pandemic numbers, disrupted systems of all kinds, politicized chaos, and policing brutality: choose to dedicate some of your precious bandwidth to this inner work:
PRACTICE BEING THE CHANGE IN THE WORLD THAT YOU WANT TO SEE.
FREE 30 MIN CONSULT:
6 ONE-HOUR SESSIONS EVERY 2 WEEKS FOR 12 WEEKS
Sessions are available by phone, Zoom, or in my Baltimore office.
EXCHANGE: $130 PER SESSION
10% discount for single payment option
5% discount for 2 payment option
I welcome this half hour as an opportunity for us to get to know one other, to explore the intention, context, and desired outcome for your group’s work, and the focus and language that will make for a meaningful and useful workshop experience. We will also discuss, as needed, the pros and cons of meeting in affinity groups by race or gender identity/expression.
2 HOUR INTRODUCTION SESSION to Radical Inclusion at your venue in the Baltimore metro area or online via Zoom. Minimum 8 participants
EXCHANGE: $40 per person
CLICK HERE TO SET UP YOUR FREE 30 MIN CONSULT
GET REAL WITH EMBODIED PRACTICE: BEGIN THE DIFFICULT WORK OF HEALING THE RACIAL AND GENDER DIVIDES IN OUR FAMILIES, COMMUNITIES, AND WORKPLACES
Explore Differences in Power: Racial and Gender Conflicts Are Rarely Between Equals
From the founding of our nation, “We the people” meant white-men-only. Rules of the dominant culture: White. Rules of the dominant gender: male. To this day, America still favors the rights and privileges of white men who continue to dictate what societal norms and success look like: including standards of appearance, dress, language, values, authority, power, and the accumulation of wealth enshrined in policies and laws.
Professional women have learned to “dress for success” if success is what they want. People of color “adopt white body language and speech,” if access is what they want. White men continue to experience a double advantage, while Black women continue to experience double jeopardy.
Explore Differences in Perception: The Individual Vs. The Group
White people see ourselves first as individuals while we see people of color first as members of a group, indistinguishable from one another and rarely identified as individuals.
A person of color who enters a public space—a workplace, a school, a restaurant, a sidewalk, a parking lot—is seen first as a group member and after that, maybe as an individual. Consequently, white people often “mistake” people of color for “the help” in professional, retail, and recreational settings, and as “dangerous” when encountered on an otherwise deserted street. A white male professional believes he is complimenting his black female colleague when he remarks, “you are so articulate!”
This is why black individuals walking while black, driving while black, or shopping while black, face risks ranging from frustration and discomfort to embarrassment and harassment to physical injury and death.
Honor Differences In Inner Work: The Black, Brown, and White Of It
In the face of an unending stream of micro-and macro-aggressions, inner work for a person of color must center around fortifying individual agency and dignity while accelerating radical self-care and resilience.
Inner work for a white person begins by seeing ourselves as members of the dominant cultural group, and not only as individuals. If we continue to avert our gaze from this truth, we deny others their humanity. And consequently, we remain divided against ourselves.
A white man must see and wrestle with his dual advantages of race and gender. A white woman must see and wrestle with her experiences of white-skin advantage on the one hand, and gender disadvantage on the other.
White, Black, Man, Woman: Real Lives, Not Labels Engage in your particular journey of wholeness-making
While the difficulties, gifts, and developmental tasks of inner work are very different for white people and people of color, for binary and non-binary-gendered people, for men and women, for any dominant group and its marginalized partner-in-conflict, the same healing tools are useful.
We each, with our combination of identities, have our own inner work to do to come into our full, imperfect, unique, and interconnected humanity.
Then engage together as whole human beings whose differences are precious and potent with co-creative power, “solutions” we cannot begin to envision from our wounded, polarized present.
As human beings who are white. . .
- We want to face our ignorance and examine our assumptions and beliefs.
- We want to engage with people who are different from us and break out of our silos.
- We want to go deep in conversations and face our fear of being vulnerable learners who will make mistakes.
- We want to see ourselves more clearly and face our guilt and shame in the mirror of our privilege.
We want to bring about conciliation, transformation, and social justice, but in today’s politically polarized climate, we question — “How can I be useful?”
As human beings who are people of color. . .
- We want to be treated with unconditional human respect and freed from the unconscious bias of others.
- We want to send our family members out the door in the morning without worrying whether we will see them again.
- We want to move through our daily activities without anyone following us, calling the police, or interrogating us about if we “belong here.”
- We want to be liberated from the psychic exhaustion that accompanies silent erasure, daily micro-aggressions, escalating threats to our emotional, psychological, and physical safety, and the burden of educating white people about non-white people.
We want the master key to unlock the invisible chains of systemic racism and racial terrorism.
Reviews For Radical Inclusion Practice©
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