Feeling Ourselves, De-Centering Whiteness

You know it’s there, even when you can’t see it, you can still sense it. It promises freedom, but delivers isolation, fear, and competition. When the dream is over, but we can’t wake up, how do we shake the hold of whiteness? Dr. Sy is sitting with her own felt sense of whiteness. Rooting in the writings of her co-authors of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation and centering in a daily practice for noticing how centering whiteness in our lives, relationships, and ideas of liberation is keeping us from feeling connected to ourselves, our planet, and each other she is offering reflection on feeling ourselves and de-centering whiteness.

The cost for this talk is $10 for the General Public and $20 for Patrons who wish to pay-it-forward. We ask that Groups and Meditation Centers to please pay within the $40-$60 range.

Because we are committed to making this talk accessible to all, there is also a 25% discount option. To request this discount or a further scholarship, write to [email protected].

Schedule
7:00pm ET - Welcome & guided meditation
7:25pm ET - Dharma talk
7:55pm ET - Q&A with teacher
8:00pm ET - Announcements

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Jasmine Syedullah is a black feminist political theorist of abolition, as well as co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation (North Atlantic Books, 2016). She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vassar College. Her current research intervenes in the field of political theory to ask how the carceral logics of modern freedom are challenged by captive black women's demands for abolition. She roots her black feminist theory of abolition in the nineteenth century writings of antislavery abolitionist Harriet Jacobs, namely the implications of her initial escape from slavery documented in her 1861 slave narrative to the tiny garret space she refers to as her “loophole of retreat.” With Jacobs as its foundation, her current book project, If Home Were a Loophole: Fugitives of Domestic Violence and the Unfinished Work of Abolition brings nineteenth together with twentieth century abolitionist struggles against slavery and incarceration to better understand how women's defense against the surveillance, policing, detention, criminalization, and punishment of everyday practices of self-making pose challenges to the kinds of relationships to racial capitalism by which they are bound. Syedullah holds a PhD in Politics with a designated emphasis in Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness from University of California Santa Cruz and a B.A. from Brown University in Religious Studies with a focus in Buddhist Philosophy.