Disrupting White Mindfulness

Race and Racism in the Wellbeing Industry

Cathy-Mae Karelse

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781526162069
• eBook ISBN: 9781526162052
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Disrupting White Mindfulness offers a timely commentary on the dominant narratives that shape the mindfulness industry - whiteness, postracialism and neoliberalism. Its positioning as 'apolitical' forges institutions that fit comfortably into increasingly divided societies. The race-gender profile of these institutions reveals a White, middle-class profile of decision-makers, educators and staff that is mirrored in its audiences. Mechanisms that recycle the industry's whiteness include corporatist pedagogies, edicts of authority, disengagement with difference and inappropriate uses of mindfulness that distance People of the Global Majority. A growing emergent movement focused on a justice-infused mindfulness and liberatory wellbeing decolonises mindfulness and de-centres whiteness. Its premise in indigenous, global South, queer knowledges leverages difference to produce multiple solutions focused on liberation. There is room for White Mindfulness to change.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: encountering the world of White Mindfulness
• Part I: The roots of exclusion and Othering
• Part II: Wrapping mindfulness in whiteness
• Part III: Embodying justice, changing worlds
• Conclusion: embodied liberation and worldmaking
• References
• Index