Dr. Kamilah Majied: One of the challenges associated with white privilege, one of the limitations of white privilege, is the cultural self-absorption that is sticks white people in. One of the ways that I help people to step out of it, is they use contemplative practices to check in about it, and just began the interior work of looking at, okay, what is my relationality with various people of the global majority? What’s my relationality with people of Asian heritage, African heritage, Latinx heritage, indigenous heritage.And if there is no relationality, what's that about? And what is my psychology about in reference to those persons? Because knowing that is information for your life, right? It's not an act of charity or an act of altruism towards anyone else, it's a part of one's own self-actualization to explore that.

Voices of Esalen: That was Kamilah Majied, as she opened our dialogue on addressing racism as part of self-actualization. I'm Sam Stern. Welcome to Voices of Esalen. Today I'd like to share with you some personal thoughts in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent cultural uprisings in our nation. I and all the other members of the small team who produced Voices of Esalen are dedicated to diversifying the voices who represent our show.

We're making a purposeful stance at this moment to dedicate a significant portion of upcoming programming to exploring issues of systemic racism, power, and entrenched privilege with the goal of cultural healing and cross-cultural understanding. To this end, you will hear more from people of color, particularly black speakers and leaders.

Our guest today is Dr. Kamilah Majied, mental health therapist, professor, and internationally engaged consultant on social justice and inclusive contemplative pedagogy. The practice of Buddhism spurred a curiosity for Dr. Majied about the causes of unhappiness, particularly unhappiness as created by social oppression.

A professor of social work, she is skilled in using Buddhist and contemplative practices to help people heal from racism, sexism, homophobia, and other types of oppression to reclaim joy in their lives. Together we spoke about privilege and some of the limitations that it imposes, the various blind spots built into the human potential movement, and how not to get stuck in guilt and shame while grappling with the challenge of confronting racism.

I completely enjoyed and benefited from this conversation with Dr. Kamilah Majied.

Dr. Kamilah Majied, thank you so much for joining us today on Voices of Esalen.

Dr. Kamilah Majied: I’m delighted to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

VOE: You bring a lens of social justice to the practice of many therapies, including mindfulness and mental health therapies. I wanted to ask you today, what do you find particularly advantageous about this framework? In other words, what are we missing when we approach health practices without taking into account elements like race and privilege?

Dr. Majied: If you think about mental health as being a sense of clarity about one's own interior life and behavioral health, about being about one's capacity to relate well interpersonally, then not knowing who we are, with reference to how our lives are shaped by oppression and privilege dynamics limits our capacity to heal parts of ourselves that we might not even know are injured.

Self-knowledge is a part of the process of self-actualization, and self knowledge is certainly the goal of meditative and contemplative practices, as it is the goal of any kind of therapeutic mental health therapy. Self-knowledge is not complete without an understanding of how oppression and privilege dynamics shape one's psychology and one's cognition, one's inner life, or one’s relationships with other.

For example, if you think about it, in terms of sexism, like, you can consider how women, as women, we haven't had a chance to look at, well, how have some of the sexist messages of the world, or even of my family, … how have those shaped my psychology, my view of myself? If I've never asked myself the question, then I don't know the answer, and if I don't ask myself the question, how has sexism shaped how I relate to men in relationships, in professional relationships, and personal relationships; if I've never asked that question, then I don't know the answer. There's a whole piece of self-knowledge that is important in terms of understanding how all oppression dynamics and all privilege dynamics, including those related to racism, impact both our interior process and that relational process. Does that makes sense?

VOE: Yes. I think it does. Are the people who are practicing contemplative practices with you open to understanding how, like, for example, their privilege might play into their experience of the world?‍

Dr. Majied: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And honestly, even beyond, I'll say that, I think, even beyond, people who necessarily thought they were open to it, when they realized that privilege as I talk about it is not “all good,” really want to learn more about how to divest themselves of some of the blockages that privileged creates to knowing both oneself and the world more fully.

So if you can think of privilege as like blinders that we have on, it’s a privilege not to have to see things, not to have to know certain things, not to have to experience certain things — so for example, people who grew up without economic wealth and economic resources know a lot of things about the reality of the world that people who have a lot of economic privilege don't know. And so in one way, it's a privilege to have the wealth, but in another way, it's a limitation, in that you don't have a clear picture of what the majority of the world looks like if your life is spent in extreme wealth, and you don't have the resourcefulness and some of the other skills and aspects of your own self that you could develop if you were able to step outside the privilege and experience the world in more ways than the privilege often allows.

Every type of privilege is also a type of limitation. And for that reason, people are very eager to, once people can see it in that framework, they're eager to step out of it, as the limitation that it is, and to think about what it would be like to relate to the world and to help build a world where the privileges that all human beings should have are accessible and where the privileges that no human being should have are eliminated.

VOE: I really liked that. Yeah. So the privileges, seeing the privileges as as being limitations as well, and really taking that in. Thank you. ‍

Dr. Majied: Sure. Absolutely.

VOE: You are trained at helping people transform oppressive patterns via experiences like wonder, awe and humor. I was interested in that because in some senses that aligns you with some of the cornerstones of the human potential movement, which was extremely influential at Esalen, and its mission. Abraham Maslow created this hierarchy of needs, but of course it had no mention of class and no mention of race and no awareness around the privilege that you speak of. So I wanted to ask how does the transformative work that you do, address the issues such as this?‍

Dr. Majied: The self-actualization that Maslow talks about is, in my estimation, not possible without this more full capacity for an insight into one's own self.  Maslow and lots of other folks who contributed to the human potential movement had a lot of valuable insights — and they had a lot of privilege that put some limitations around their insight. You know what I mean?

If you think about Freud and all the critique that Freud has gotten from women — it's a hundred percent accurate for the most part, in terms of, Freud's brilliant — and here's all the things Freud couldn't  see because of male privilege, and the male lens.

Expanding the lens to include the perspective of people who are not white is really important. The majority of the world's population is not of European descent, a.k.a. white: the majority of the world's population are Asian, Latinx, Indigenous and African heritage.

If we're only understanding human potential and self-actualization from the perspective of white people, then we're not even understanding the potential of white people.

There's just a huge opportunity for us to step into who advanced the knowledge of human potential by expanding what thought leaders contribute and to make sure that our conceptualization of human potential is not just something that's articulated to us by a few good white men.

So having a lens, first of all, expanding the lens to include the perspective of people who are not white is really important as just a general correction and piece of clarity for the entire world. Most people who have heard me speak have heard me use the term people of the global majority. The term people of the global majority was coined by Dr. Barbara Love, professor emeritus from Amherst. And one of the things that I like to bring that term forward to folks in contemplative circles and education circles, one of the reasons I emphasize that term, as opposed to using the term people of color, is to highlight the fact that the majority of the world's population is not of European descent. And that's an important shift in the lens.‍

VOE: That was great. Yeah. I'm so appreciative that we're having this conversation. Cause it's such an important blind spot. I’ve had so many conversations around human potential and have never, not once, spoken about diversity or about the, the presence of, as you say, the global majority.

Dr. Majied: People of the global majority people of African Latinx and Indigenous and Asian heritage have had to understand a lot about the psychology of white people in order to survive white supremacy. But the inverse is not true. W.e.B. Dubois, who is a major thought leader, a pioneering American thought leader, talked about this role, this double consciousness: that African-Americans, because of the subjugation of African people in America, have always had to have this dual consciousness where we were aware of our own interior lives and interior processes. I'm aware, my ancestors were aware of their full humanity. They knew that they were humans, that they were not slaves, that they were not 3/5 humans. They knew that they had, they had their thoughts, they had feelings, they knew themselves to be fully human and they also knew and were able to step inside the consciousness of people who were trafficking them, and knew what needed to be said to help that person maintain their sense of self, in order to keep them their own self-space. So as it's replicated in what we can see a lot of black parents talking to their children now saying: okay, you're amazing. You're wonderful. You're talented, you're free. You have full autonomy. And you know that to be true, and you still have to really subjugate yourself and be very, not assert any of those rights, if you are ever engaged with a white police officer.

So what, what black people have always had to cultivate from a very young age is an awareness of how we're in privileged dynamics and an awareness of what's needed to keep people in power feeling at ease enough for them to be safe — and that's an awful thing to have to negotiate. And one of the things that grows out of having to negotiate it is an awareness of how your words impact and actions may be impacting other people.

There's a million unfortunate things about that, but one of the many unfortunate things about that is that white people don't have that same opportunity, and don't regularly assess, how am I presenting? How am I considering what is going on in the interior life of the African heritage or Latinx or Indigenous person that I'm interfacing with?

One of the challenges associated with white privilege, one of the limitations of white privilege, is the cultural self-absorption that it sticks white people in. One of the ways that I help people to step out of it is to use contemplative practices to check in about it at different points in the day. And just begin the interior work of looking at, okay, what is my relationality with various people of the global majority? What's my relationality with people of Asian heritage, African heritage, Latinx heritage, Indigenous heritage. And if there is no relationality, what's that about? And what is my psychology about in reference to those persons?

Because knowing that is information for your life, right? It's not necessarily an act of charity or an act of altruism towards anyone else. It's just, it's an act of, it's a part of one's own self-actualization to explore that and then to consider, what would it be like to be more engaged in the world?

Particularly a world that is dominated, that it has the majority of population, who are not white. So if I'm cutting myself off from engaging at my full potential with the majority of the world, that's a significant limitation that I'm allowing white privilege to have over my life.

VOE: Wow. This is huge. Thank you. Thank you. I'm really…Yeah, this is amazing. I love the point that you're making that it’s not an act of altruism to consider the year relationality here — this is a way to self-actualization, to a deeper kind of connection with self.

So what is it like to speak about race and privilege to a largely white or largely privileged audience? What are the impediments to understanding that first come up for a listenership that might not fully apprehend their own privilege within a culture built on systemic racism?‍

Dr. Majied: I’ll answer the second question first, in terms of, what do I think the impediments are for the listenership?

I think the first impediment is the emotional and psychological resistance, what we in the mental health profession call resistance. And it's just the little psychic tug we feel when it comes to looking at anything that's difficult or not fun, or that doesn't look like fun to look at the outset.

Resistance happens in the therapeutic context. Therapy is all about resistance: people negotiating resistance and us not wanting to turn towards the more painful aspects of ourselves. So I think one of the impediments that people who are beginning to look at and think about racism face is just their own resistance.

And that shows up as lots of things: that shows up as apathy and indifference, and, “Oh, I just want to do something more fun than this,” and that's the part of us that doesn't want do the work of transmuting the painful into growth, that doesn't want to navigate the growth process.

And so that's part of it. And sometimes it comes out as a little or big sense of guilt or shame. For a lot of white people, turning towards racism and looking at it just produces a lot of guilt and shame. And because of that, that’s the reason that I really encourage people to not get stuck there, because if you're stuck there, then again, that's the blockage from self-actualization, because guilt and shame are paralytics. You can't really grow from there.

You have to move through them. They are prompts to look at places where you might take responsibility and do things differently in your life, as opposed to places to just give into despair or indifference about. And so I think those are challenges. I think learning from people that the global majority, learning from black people, learning from Latinx people, learning from Indigenous people and learning from Asian heritage people is sometimes new, and that alone can be an impediment to consider, because how many black teachers have you had? Because of the way racism operates, there's a very subtle message that white people are just more knowledgeable. It's subtle now in some ways, but in lots of ways, it's not that subtle.

I was listening to someone talk about what they had and hadn't learned in school and how they had never learned about the Tulsa massacre until the Watchman came out and how they were a history major, and an American history major. So it's this place where the education has been so led by white people and excluded information about people of the global majority. But just the process of learning from a person who is not white, it involves waking up to, can I even listen here, right? That there might be some barriers to even listening well and absorbing the information well and valuing the information.

Because a lot of what we have been taught to value is what comes to us from “a few good white men.” Or a few good white women. We haven't necessarily been taught to value what's taught to us by people of the global majority in general, and especially women of the global majority.

So I think those are some of the impediments to understanding — all of those might be impediments to understanding for the listenership. That said, though, I am continually impressed and not even impressed, I'm just, I continue to be pleased with how naturally people open to it, because nobody wants to be stuck in guilt or shame or apathy or indifference or whatever — nobody wants to be stuck in anything. So all I have to do is make the invitation and what I do in the workshops that I lead is, I'm making the invitation, I don't say, this is what you have to do. You have to do this.

I said, try this. Try this on as an affirmation. Try this on as a meditation. Or, How about we explore this question? And when you do it, people just open, because there is as much as various natural resistance, there is also a natural human inclination towards growth. And as much as that petulant child in us wants to shut down and do nothing,  that same child is also curious, and it wants to find out and see if it can do more.

So as soon as I create the space for that in my workshops, with that curious child we were at one years old or two years old, when we wanted to be with all kinds of people, with all kinds of variations, and we didn't know that girls weren't supposed to do certain things with girls, and boys didn't do certain things with boys, and we didn't know any of that stuff.

We saw humans a certain way. There's a part of us that wants to get back to that clarity of vision that we had about all humans being good, and to be able to actually operationalize that as adults. So with all the impediments that exist, I find that my listenership, my students in every realm, whether I'm teaching faculty or whether I'm teaching meditation practitioners or whether I'm teaching activists, that everybody wants to open and access that joyful curiosity and connection and deepen that sense of wonder at our profound interdependence and our profound, natural inclination to support one another. Everybody wants to get that back. So despite the impediments, we get it done. And I'm always happy to see it.

VOE: Do you have optimism around this particular moment? Do you believe it might represent a sea change? And we're seeing that the dawning of a new era of consciousness around race-class privilege, diversity and equality, or did you, or do you feel it's more of a discrete moment?

Dr. Majied: I think you could probably tell a little bit from my overall tone that I am an eternal optimist. I'm optimistic, I have resilience, optimism, and I teach a lot about resilience and optimism and how we make our optimism resilient. And it, again, it's cultivating a capacity, and it’s a portal. A portal to self-actualization is cultivating that resilient optimism because you're able to, from that perspective, see opportunities in every crisis.

So both the pandemic — the dual pandemics of racism and COVID-19, the dual and interrelated pandemics — we don't have time to talk about it today, but I'll be leading some sessions on how they are related, what's the relationship between these? They're not just co-advising they're also related. Einstein talks about this. Albert Einstein talked about racism as a disease in 1946. He was just one of many people who used this model, that disease model, to describe the pathology of racism and the way that it has infected, not just systems, but people’s personal psychology and relationality.

Yes, this is a wonderful opportunity, because it is so painful. And it is so clear. And it's clear to folks who even had so much privilege that they couldn't see it before now. Certainly it's been clear to people who don't have privilege, and who've been experiencing anti-black racism and particularly anti-black violence since … I mean, anti-black violence is the root, it’s the foundation of the American Republic. The country is founded on anti-black racism. There's a wonderful article that won the Pulitzer prize, the 2020 Pulitzer prize. It's part of the New York Times Magazine 1619 series, a Nicole Hannah Jones article entitled “America Was Not a Democracy Until African-Americans Made it One.” I think that's the title. It talks about how the country was built on both an ideal and a lie. It was built on this ideal of liberty and it was a built on this lie of liberty and equality. The violence and brutality against African Americans was very much a foundation of the country, from the kidnapping and enslavement and centuries of torture and forced sexual trafficking — that all of that is what the country is founded on.

So people are finally having to say, this isn't just about police violence in a few random bad apples. It's about the fact that everything that is “owned” in this country was, in terms of land, was stolen from native American people and was developed by people who were themselves stolen and trafficked.

And to just turn towards that as a truth and say, okay, that is the truth, and to think about what's my personal relationality with that truth. How do I benefit from it? How has my family over the generations that we've been an American citizens, how has my family grown and benefited from the enslavement, from Jim Crow, from the disenfranchising of black people,  what's my relationality to it? And what do I want my relationality to be like going forward? I think we're at a moment where people are kind of finally facing who, what America really is and how it got started and what needs to happen in order for it to repay its karmic debt to cleanse its karmic stains. And that happens on lots of levels: that happens on the intra-psychic interrupt, intrapersonal level, on the interpersonal level, certainly on systemic and social levels.

VOE: Well, Dr. Kamilah Majied, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we close our conversation, I was wondering if you'd be willing to share how people could find out more about you and more about the work that you offer.

Dr. Majied: Absolutely. Well, if you have a question and you are interested in perhaps having a workshop or a dialogue with your community, whether it's a school or a business or an educational institution, if you'd like to have me help you all facilitate a dialogue around any of the topics that we've talked about today, including how contemplative practices, resource the work of doing this, cause it's hard stuff to look at, and it's hard stuff to talk about, and that's why the meditative practices are so useful.

So if you're interested in having some kind of workshop like that, then just feel free to reach out to me directly by kamilahmajied@yahoo.com and then, I've got some number of events planned.

I'm also on Facebook as Kamilah Majied. And that's another way to find out some of the things that I'm doing.

VOE: Thank you so much.

Dr. Majied: It's been a pleasure. I really enjoyed talking with you.

VOE: Thank you for listening to Voices of Esalen. No portion of this podcast may be duplicated or distributed without Dr. Majied’s written permission. Today's show is produced in conjunction with Cheryl Franzel, Terry Gilbey, Tanja Roos, Michelle Broderick, Greg Archer, Shannon Hudson, and Kelly McKay. Our theme music is by Nico Holman. You can find all of our podcasts on your favorite podcast player as well as at Esalen.org. The Esalen Institute is a nonprofit organization. Our show is made possible by your contributions.‍