The Emotional Work of Antiracism

How Our Feelings Can Help Us Create A More Just World

This course is full; thank you for your interest! We’ll be running this course again later this year.

Confronting or enduring racism and inequality can bring up powerful emotions such as shame, rage, panic, hatred, grief, and despair. And since most of us don’t know how to work with even one of these emotions, it’s not surprising that this emotional cascade can exhaust or overwhelm us.

However, these emotions are not the enemy; instead, they’re a vital part of everything we are, and they’re the raw material we need if we want to build an antiracist society.

On the exhaustion side, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx people, Indigenous people, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, elders, religious minorities, and marginalized people in any social structure do a tremendous amount of unpaid emotion work in order to navigate unequal, unjust, or prejudiced environments: they learn how to manage their own emotions and behaviors in order to soothe or appease the emotions of others. This emotion work can be exhausting – especially because it’s unpaid and unrecognized, yet required if people are to survive in a system of White supremacy.

But we can learn how to recognize and support this emotion work.

On the overwhelm side, something new is happening in this time of upheaval: dominant-group people who are at the top of social structures (whether they meant to be or not) are now seeing the injustice, inequality, racism, sexism, ableism, and ageism that our cultures are built upon – and they’re feeling powerful emotions that they may not know how to work with … yet.

In response, some people are fighting, avoiding, downplaying, or being overwhelmed by shame, grief, anger, hatred, fear, depression, or panic, and they’re losing their way. This does not need to happen!

We can learn how to work brilliantly with our emotions.

Emotions are a vital part of everything we are: every relationship; every dream; every failure; every triumph; every act of violence; and every act of love. When we know how to work with our emotions, we can face and heal the most pressing problems in our troubled world and join with others to build a more just, loving, and inclusive community.

An invitation to explore emotion work, inclusion, and antiracism

Join us in working directly with the power in our emotions so that we can challenge and transform racism and inequality — and build a community of justice and healing. Through body-based practices, emotional integration practices, conversation, and exploration, we’ll learn how to work with deep emotions (instead of being exhausted or overwhelmed by them) so that we can apply their unique genius to transforming and healing the deep injustices of our world.

We’ll also bring emotion work out of the shadows; we’ll name the emotions we’re working with and learn about the essential forms of genius each emotion is bringing to us – and we’ll create a community where your emotion work will be recognized, welcomed, and respected as work.

Join us as we seek to challenge oppression and injustice by using our emotions and empathy as catalysts to transform our world.

In this 6-week online course, we’ll explore:

• Individual and cultural emotional responses to racism and antiracism
• Specific healing practices to help you access the genius in your deep emotions
• The unequal emotion work we expect from people in marginalized and non-dominant groups
• The unexpected (and crucial) forms of emotion work that people in dominant groups are having to learn
• The empathic damage that dominance hierarchies do to people at every level, and how to heal it
• Communication practices to support empathy when you and others are overwhelmed
• Strategies for building antiracist systems individually, culturally, and politically

Course Details

Length of Course: 6 Weeks

Dates: Sunday, February 28th to Saturday, April 3rd, 2021

Price: $275.00

Learning & Interaction Structure: Online curriculum, forum discussions, audio files, course PDFs, and weekly webinars using the Zoom video conferencing program.

Live Zoom Webinar Discussions: These weekly 90-minute sessions will be held every Sunday (and one Saturday) from 12:30 to 2pm Pacific Time (these sessions will be recorded if you cannot attend).

Zoom Webinar Dates and Times: Sundays at 12:30 to 2:00pm Pacific Time: February 28th, March 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th, and one Saturday, April 3rd at 12:30 to 2:00pm Pacific Time.

Time Commitment: You’ll read the course curriculum and interact in the forum on your own schedule, and you’ll meet with your instructors and your classmates for 90-minutes on Zoom each week (plan for a minimum of 3 hours per week).

This Course is Suitable For: Everyone interested in deepening the emotional skills and communication skills that support justice, equality, inclusion, and antiracism work.