Practice Plenary - Defunding Mindfulness: While We Were Sitting on Our Cushions, a New World Order Was Being Ushered In

On May 25, 2020, the world watched as White police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, a Black man, who had been arrested for allegedly using a counterfeit bill. Floyd was forced to the ground, face down, handcuffed, and was begging for his life saying “I can't breathe” and calling for his mother, while Chauvin knelt on his neck for nearly 9 minutes before he died. On May 26, 2020, demonstrations began to protest Floyd's murder and the murder of other Black people and people of color by the police. The protests have transformed into direct action to topple systemic racism and white supremacy. Racist monuments and statues of white supremacists have been torn down or removed; the Confederate flag is now longer allowed in car racing sports or in the U.S. military; the names of white supremacist leaders and donors are being removed from school and university buildings; and professional sports teams have begun reversing their opposition to players, such as Colin Kaepernick, who kneel during the U.S. national anthem to bring calls to stop the murder of Black people and police brutality. 

Meanwhile, where has the mindfulness movement been in this revolution? What have we done to directly confront systemic racism, white supremacy, and colonization? Should we defund the present mindfulness movement and declare it another pillar of white supremacy? Should we fiercely interrogate the value of concepts such as compassion, self-awareness, and the right intention? In this time in history we are in a period of decolonization, in what Dr. Franz Fanon, the French West Indian psychiatrist, termed "A Dying Colonialism." In his ground-breaking book, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon declared that decolonization must always be a violent phenomenon because "resisting a colonizing power using only politics will not work." How can we become allies in breaking down the icons, structures, and processes of settler colonialism and systemic racism? And, it is possible to envision a new mindfulness, a decolonized mindfulness?