Transformative Empathy to Challenge Supremacy: Creating a Multicultural Democracy in Schools and Organizations
What does it take to prepare the body to design for equity?
What does it take to prepare the body to live in a multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic democracy?
One of the transformative and catalytic moves when designing for equity is to consciously prepare the body to see, feel, perceive injustice, and then act. This is the ongoing conversation between the world that we want. It's not the world that our eyes can see. It's the world that our hearts and bodies recognize.
We hold into our expression of what the world will look like when it embodies the multicultural, multiracial democracy:
Imagine a world where everyone in America learns and works in a place that acknowledges their racial identity, prepares them to lead and participate in our economy and democracy with dignity and respect, and repairs and restores relationships that keep us divided.
Imagine a world where leaders in America co-design and co-create bespoke and equitable learning experiences with their communities.
Imagine an ecosystem where networks of leaders support each other in designing innovative and equitable learning cultures and schools that enable every child to develop and share their gifts.
Imagine a national ecosystem with certified leaders who can lead across lines of difference and private and public spaces designed to heal, restore, and scale equitable policies and practices.
When this world is modeled in schools and organizations, we challenge supremacy in thought and action. However, we must first explore how power and supremacy work and what stands in the way.
Since DEI work has gained prominence in organizational strategy and SEL work has begun to grow roots in school practice, the work is often characterized as mindset work. But we rarely talk about how to change minds and open hearts. Creating awareness alone may open people's eyes but not change their minds. We know that facts and exposure neither change hearts nor minds, but what does?
Changing our minds often requires us to understand our minds, how they work, what it takes to change, and how to recognize when change occurs. More experienced practitioners will add the heart to that idea and note that the purpose of the work is to change both hearts and minds. However, our pedagogical methods and techniques often fail to do so. Not because we do not care or have not invested the time or money. Some of us try, and resources have been allocated—both time and money have been dedicated to the organization workstream, but what if the failure to get traction in changing minds is not about resource allocation or commitment but how we characterize our experience and resolve to change it? To change the mind with reason is a Sisyphean exercise at best. Not because of our lack of composure regarding our circumstances but because we have yet to interrogate the thought processes that created the circumstance.
Supremacist Beliefs, Thoughts, and Actions
Too often, conversations about body supremacy are reduced to assessing “good individuals” vs. the “oppressed group.” This pattern is observable across all lines of oppression and body supremacy, whether race, gender, class, or heteronormativity. The “good individuals” try to avoid linguistic landmines when engaging in conversation, and in the minds of the “oppressed group,” they will never fully understand their shared experience. This pattern must be interrupted to move closer to the experience of a multicultural, multiracial democracy. But supremacy lives as the bedrock of the thought pattern that generated the opposition. When we think we are the thoughts of our minds, then different opinions and perspectives are not only seen as diverse ideas, they can be experienced as mortal threats to the self.
Before silent fragility mutes dialogue, accumulated and shared trauma suffocates hope and strangles imagination—the notion that we all have been taught to prioritize getting ahead over getting together creates the insatiable need to accumulate and hoard power in all its dimensions and forms. Moreover, the belief in getting ahead of each other assumes that some people are better and more deserving than others, making the ground fertile for exploiting people, land, and other living beings.
The belief of getting together assumes that no human is dismissible, no living being is unclean, and all living beings, seen and unseen, are worthy, righteous, and deserving of life. When we believe this, we no longer tolerate suffering and needless violence. We do not strangle children by hoarding opportunities. We do not exploit and poison our common and shared land.
We seem to have plenty of data and stories that tell and retell the impact of supremacy, whether it's racial supremacy and its segregation and violence against bodies or anthropocentrism and its technologies of industrialism and its effects on the environment. At the root, the thought system is all the same. Supremacy is a thought system that assumes fragmentation, needing, and feeding on distance. Before, it was a belief system that said one person or group of people was better than another. Before, it was a social system propped up by asymmetrical resource patterns, theft, segregation, and gerrymandering; it was a thought system that declared difference and authority belonged to only a few at the expense of others. They decided to write or author the stories for others and use violence and distance to keep the pen. When we expand our discourse to identify supremacy themes, we make the resilience of social hierarchies and false supremacy visible in the current story. Supremacy over others assumes that one identity is the sole author of the story. Subscribers to supremacy believe they have the authority to write the story. It is a mind trick whose deceit lives in its inherent intelligence hierarchy.
Supremacy is a thought system of the mind that assumes fragmentation. It is a way of thinking that biases differences over commonality. It cannot exist when systems are biased toward union, coming together, and similarity. Therefore, this thought system threatens a multicultural and multiracial democracy.
This is challenging. Changing beliefs is hard work. We usually see the mind and what it accumulates as protection against supremacist beliefs. However, there might be other ways of knowing and parts of the body holding wisdom, insights, and perspective that allow us to see and think about the world differently. We might have to look in different directions to dissolve the paradox of supremacy and oppression and unify our collective consciousness.
What if it's the actual part of the body that eludes our grasp? What if the solution is not just the heart and mind but a pathway that connects both organs of perception? What if there is something about knowledge in our bodies that we are completely ignoring? We may be looking in the wrong place for the correct answer. Or worse yet, looking at both in isolation, ignoring the pathway and relationship of connection. In Ruth King's Mindful of Race, she notes that "Racism is a heart disease. How we think and respond is at the core of racial suffering and racial healing. If we cannot think clearly and respond wisely, we will continue to damage the worlds' heart." (King, 6) But where do we get the mental and emotional space for more wisdom? How do we prepare ourselves and our bodies for wiser responses?
Preparing the Body for a Wiser Response
Preparing the body for a wise response requires more than intellect and mental faculties. Systems of oppression are deeply rooted in our physical bodies and how others interpret them. They are so salient that they change as life changes. The melanin in our skin changes our life chances and health outcomes. Our gender expressions create or limit free movement and voice in our schools and community. Our speech patterns become proxies for wealth and intelligence. These characteristics are all perceived by the eyes or ears. In other words, we make sense of them in our minds. These become the lines of our identities. Too often, given the histories of oppression and our narrative inheritance, the thought processes and ways of thinking only make sense to those who share the same story. They become more visible and singular when in diverse communities. Seeing and respecting the multiplicity of stories is the first step in radical inclusion. Writing a new story together, however, requires us to see that our stories are not different at all.
Seeing this way requires opening the heart, mind, and body. Our senses and intellect are necessary, but alone are insufficient. But this is not a new insight. At the turn of the last century, philosopher George Gurdjieff thought humans could not accurately perceive reality without a unified consciousness. He suggested that humans are considered three-brained—the mind and the intellectual center, the heart and the emotional center, and the body the movement center. All three of these brains must work together to live and come alive. We are not just our ideas or our minds. Simply living this reduction alone is supremacy at work. But it stands to reason that if a person is conditioned to seek out and privilege expertise, knowledge, and insight from only one part of the Public Body, similar conditioning would extend to our private bodies. Transforming how and where we seek wisdom, expertise, and insights is one of the keys to transformative empathy.
Transformative empathy is doing the personal, internal work to unify individuals' collective ways of knowing within themselves and interdependently with others. When racism and oppression take our breath away, our brains and hearts become disconnected. Surviving the theft leaves us in distress and traumatized at best. And while we do the work of rebuilding and redesigning externally, we must also have practices and ways to help us study, observe, and transform ourselves. Without personal work, we may reproduce supremacy in our thoughts, responses, and designs. Low-stakes ways to see and interrogate our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in stressful situations and remind ourselves that we are physically safe are necessary for learning and instruction. Because our minds are conditioned for this world, we must also have time and space to develop other ways of knowing that can lovingly challenge our conditioned minds.
This is where yoga and the meditation it creates hold incredible promise as an instrument to strengthen, reconnect, and reveal the intelligence in our bodies, open our hearts, and change our minds. We need practice and new instruction to regain and enhance our breath and the truest sense of ourselves and our identities. When we can control and manage our breathing, a mechanism that is experienced and assumed to be automatic and involuntary, we realize that our minds can drive even the most involuntary processes of the body. Managing our breathing means we can learn to control our reactions and responses. We can know and practice wiser responses. Supremacy and how it manifests in ourselves through our reactions, speech patterns, responses, and designs can be interrupted when we learn to use the wisdom and intelligence in our bodies. The ability to slow our breath in distress emerges as a superpower that allows us to observe ourselves and others, our thoughts and reactions, and respond wiser.
Creating a multicultural, multiracial democracy will not occur with a closed achievement gap with children of color having accumulated as much knowledge as white children or poor children having as much knowledge as wealthy children. Creating spaces for humans to develop intellectually is essential. Pouring more into our minds without integrating other ways of knowing and thinking will only reproduce the current world. It alone is insufficient. The multicultural, multiracial democracy is the world of the adjacent possible. We need conversion and conversation about the ways of knowing that will create and develop the knowledge centers, perception centers, and literacies that can challenge and heal our minds and bodies.
To heal the mind, we must be able to see it and observe the messages and sensations it creates and interprets. Performing asana regularly directs the body to move in different, unconditioned ways. When the body is put in various positions, the mind tries to make sense of it. Too often, the practice of radical inclusion and multicultural democracy creates sensations that the mind quickly interprets as fear and danger rather than healing and restoration. Moving our organizations closer and closer to being multicultural and multiracial will require safe spaces to practice observing ourselves and the narratives we create about ourselves and others when we are most fragile and placed in unfamiliar relationships and positions. Everyone needs a studio and practice that develops the faculties of the mind, heart, and body together. We all deserve the chance and choice, especially the marginalized groups of the current order, to observe the self and ideas that emerge from stressful situations that are not life-threatening but life-giving and life-healing.
A multicultural, multiracial democracy will require new social contracts that will ask all of us to move differently. It will force us to our edge and create discomfort. For some of us, our most challenging posture may come across the dimensions of race. For others, the most challenging posture will reveal itself along the dimensions of gender expression. Still, others may have to learn to balance the impact of our elitism and modern conveniences on the lives of our fellow humans living far away. When we are serious about creating a multicultural, multiracial society, we will see learning standards designed to teach young people to get together to get ahead. We would see instruction designed to create more competitive workers and unify and elevate individual and collective consciousness. We would teach students that opening their hearts is a physical exercise, an emotional experience, and a euphemism for being kind. We could reimagine a definition of our progress to include elevating our collective consciousness and how we treat each other and ourselves.
Transformative empathy is not conditional or a transaction. It's not a "you change first, then I will change" experience. Supremacy lives in this economy of the transaction, but transformative empathy is held in the economy of grace. Necessary for equity-centered design and designing for inclusion, it's the intentional practice of knowing that we all are on our journey to self-realization and developing our ways of knowing. It is a design requirement for multicultural and multiracial democracy and how it is embodied in schools and organizations. It reminds us that to change the world; we change ourselves. The heart's whisper, shoulder’s chip, leg’s nervous tap, and stomach’s churn remind us that the designer herself is the first person to heal on the design journey.
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