Disrupting White Mindfulness: Race and Racism in the Wellbeing Industry

Disrupting White Mindfulness offers a timely commentary on the dominant narratives and norms that shape the Mindfulness Industry. Mindfulness is now common throughout the West, but this book reveals how the industry is infused with whiteness and late capitalism. ‘Karelse delivers a cracking Black Feminist call to decolonise “Wellbeing” with her forensic exposé of the dark side of the White Mindfulness industry and its colonial co-option of Eastern teachings for Western gain.’Heidi Safia Mirza, Emeritus Professor, University College London‘Disrupting White Mindfulness offers a generous and critical lens of exploration, helping to free the ancient practice of mindfulness from systems of dominance, restoring the practice back to its original project of liberation for all who seek it.’ Lama Rod Owens, author of Love and Rage and co-author of Radical DharmaMindfulness is now everywhere in the West. Over the last four decades, the movement has exploded in the US and UK, and is now found everywhere from boardrooms and bedrooms to schools, prisons and hospitals. Yet popular mindfulness is infused in whiteness and late capitalism. This book reveals how its easy fit in Western society replicates existing social norms and dominant narratives: an essentially White Mindfulness reflects racialised institutional profiles and a largely White, middle-class audience. Taking a critical look at this lucrative industry, Disrupting White Mindfulness explores the influences of neoliberalism and postracialism, and the invisible force of whiteness that marginalises and excludes People of the Global Majority from meaningful leadership and decision-making. Engaging with decolonising initiatives rooted in embodied justice, Disrupting White Mindfulness offers a path and an invitation for a radically transformed mindfulness, one which moves away from whiteness to embrace solutions built on difference and on indigenous, queer, and global South perspectives. Disrupting white mindfulness presents a thought-provoking critique of the prevailing narratives that shape the mindfulness industry, namely whiteness, postracialism and neoliberalism.The industry presents itself as ‘apolitical’, but this only serves to create institutions that fit comfortably into our increasingly divided societies. The White, middle-class profile of decision-makers, educators and staff is mirrored in its audiences, and the industry’s whiteness is endlessly recycled through corporate pedagogies, edicts of authority, disengagement with difference and inappropriate uses of mindfulness that distance People of the Global Majority.At the same time, an emergent movement focused on a justice-infused mindfulness and liberatory well-being is decolonising mindfulness and decentring whiteness. Rooted in indigenous, global South, queer knowledges, this movement leverages difference to produce new possibilities for liberation. As this book shows, there is room for White Mindfulness to change.