How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy

By Roxy Manning PhD and Kit Miller

Utilizing Dr. Martin Luther King's Beloved Community framework, activists will be empowered to create change and equity through fierce yet compassionate dialogue against racism and systematic white supremacy.

Can a person be both fierce and compassionate at once? Directly challenge racist speech or actions without seeking to humiliate the other person? Interrupt hateful or habitual forms of discrimination in new ways that foster deeper change? Dr. Roxy Manning believes it's possible—and you can learn how.

In this book, Dr. Manning provides a new way to conceive of antiracist conversations, along with the practical tools and frameworks that make them possible. Her work is grounded in the idea of Beloved Community, as articulated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a goal to aspire to and even experience now, in the present, when we refuse to give up on the possibility of human connection within ourselves, with potential allies, and with those whose words and actions create harm. This book fuels courage and provides tools to confront everyday forms of racism. It walks the reader through an effective, efficient model of dialogue that utilizes concepts of nonviolent communication and helps normalize talking about racism instead of treating it like a "third rail," strictly avoided or touched at one's peril.

Readers will

• Be empowered to identify what kind of antiracist conversation they want to have-for example, do they only want to be heard, or do they want to negotiate a change in policy?
• Learn how to engage in antiracist conversations whether they are the Actor (person who says or does something racist), the Receiver (the target of racism), or the Bystander.
• Learn how to notice the underlying needs and values that motivate all human actions and how those values can open up pathways to transformation.

Examples of antiracist conversations highlight different ways to initiate dialogue, raise awareness, speak one's truth, and make clear, doable requests or demands for change.

Drawing on her experience as a clinical psychologist, a nonviolent communication practitioner, and an Afro-Caribbean immigrant, Dr. Manning provides a model of antiracist dialogue with practical applications for individuals and organizations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781523003754

Roxy Manning PhD

Roxy Manning is a clinical psychologist and certified Center for Nonviolent Communication trainer. Since 2004 she has operated a private consulting business and regularly holds international workshops and intensives centered around nonviolent communication and social change issues. She has served as executive director of Bay Area Nonviolent Communication and focuses her outside efforts on working with the homeless population of San Francisco.

Book preview

Cover: How to Have Antiracist Conversations: Embracing Our Full Humanity to Challenge White Supremacy

How to Have ANTIRACIST CONVERSATIONS

HOW TO HAVE ANTI RACIST CONVERSATIONS

EMBRACING OUR FULL HUMANITY

TO CHALLENGE WHITE SUPREMACY

ROXY MANNING, PHD

How to Have Antiracist Conversations

Copyright © 2023 by Roxy Manning

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Ordering information for print editions

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Individual sales. Berrett-Koehler publications are available through most bookstores. They can also be ordered directly from Berrett-Koehler: Tel: [phone]; Fax: [phone]; bkconnection.com

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Distributed to the US trade and internationally by Penguin Random House Publisher Services.

Berrett-Koehler and the BK logo are registered trademarks of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

First Edition

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Manning, Roxy, author.

Title: How to have antiracist conversations : embracing our full humanity to challenge white supremacy / Roxy Manning, PhD.

Description: First edition. | Oakland, CA : Berrett-Koehler Publishers, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023006194 (print) | LCCN 2023006195 (ebook) | ISBN 9781523003730 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781523003747 (pdf) | ISBN 9781523003754 (epub) | ISBN 9781523003761 (audio)

Subjects: LCSH: Antiracism. | Racism. | Nonviolence. | Race relations.

Classification: LCC HT1563 .M2363 2023 (print) | LCC HT1563 (ebook) | DDC 305.8—dc23/eng/20230313

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006194

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006195

2023–1

Book producer and designer: BookMatters

Cover designer: Susan Malikowski, DesignLeaf Studio

Cover illustration: Mireille van Bremen (The Visual Mediator) and Roxy Manning

Author photo: Matt Wong

For my parents, Lois and Milton,

and all the parents who dream of a better future

For my children, Theodore, Anika, and Micah,

and all the children for whom we dream

For all who work for Beloved Community

CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY KIT MILLER

Introduction

1 What’s the Point? Dialogue for Beloved Community

2 White Supremacy Ideology as a Block to Dialogue

3 Choosing Beloved Community

4 Bias: Distortions That Disconnect

5 Opening to Authentic Dialogue

6 Bringing Nonviolent Communication into Authentic Dialogue

7 The Authentic Dialogue Framework

8 Microaggressions

9 Rising to the Challenge

10 Paving the Path

APPENDIX

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FOREWORD

I am honored to offer these words in celebration of Dr. Roxy Manning’s years of dedicated effort, modeling, and teaching that have led to the book you hold in your hands. As a friend, former colleague, and occasional collaborator of Dr. Manning, I notice what in Buddhism is called mudita, or vicarious joy, picturing people of all races benefiting from this beautiful effort. As a practitioner of nonviolence, restorative justice, and antiracism, I rejoice in the support you will receive, especially at work and in community life.

Group work is necessary. Group work can be especially powerful when the lived experiences of members differ significantly from one another. It can take you places. The better you are at navigating and working together, the more adventures you can go on. In the best case scenario, group work can bring you into what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called Beloved Community. Beloved Community offers a sense of dynamic belonging. It’s a vision of a world or society or even a circle of coworkers where everyone knows they matter and are valued. It is not without conflict, divergence, or differences. Beloved Community arises when we value one another and resolve conflicts with respect. Trust builds, and trust is perhaps the major protective factor in and ingredient for transformational work.

I have had the privilege of time with Dr. Manning in numerous settings for more than fifteen years. As you will discover, she communicates, and teaches others to communicate, with surgical precision and with empathy. In this book, as she has done in hundreds of workshops and retreats, Dr. Manning offers specific support to Global Majority people to speak their truth. She offers coaching and concrete strategies throughout. She models through sharing stories of her lived experiences that are painful to read for their impact and important to share for all of us on the collective journey of learning to transform, rather than transmit, harm.

Dr. Manning extends new skills to white people like me who were not raised to understand, or even perceive, the grinding, systemic harm of racism. For white readers this book will expand capacity in communication, in conflicts, and in holding systems perspectives. The approaches she shares offer ways to dissolve the shame that blocks action. These capacities matter, as many times I have observed white individuals, including leaders at every level, enact this dynamic: What often amazes me about white folks—including myself—is how easily we become paralyzed when it comes to anti-racism work. In almost every other area of life, if we faced some kind of problem, we’d talk to others and make a plan to try to address it. In anti-racism work, however, we seem to freeze and get easily confused. Yet so much is available to us.*

Dr. Manning’s work is an important resource now available to all of us. Keep it close, as a blueprint for co-creating a world that works for all.

—Kit Miller, Director Emerit

M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence

---

*M. Boucher, Behavior Modification Experiments in Resisting White Supremacy in Clinical Practice, in K. Hardy, ed., The Enduring, Invisible and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2022), 499.

Introduction

You’ve picked up a book that has already sparked debate. Why talk about being ‘antiracist’? asked some liberal (often white) people when they learned of the topic. "Instead of talking about what we don’t want—racism—we should be talking about what we do want—a just, equitable world where everyone can thrive." And some of my activist friends (often those who identify as part of the Global Majority) also protested.¹ How can you talk about Beloved Community and shared human needs in the face of outright racism and inequity? they asked. They worried the focus on reaching for our shared humanity was just another way of saying, I don’t see race—we’re all human. This line of race-blind thinking, another form of racism, harmfully sidelines the specific needs, concerns, and experiences of Global Majority people.

As I listened to these concerns, I gained more clarity about why I needed to write this book. At one point or another in my own journey, I agreed fully with each of these positions. Indeed, I still do to some extent. I’m a Black Caribbean immigrant. I’m aware (now) that my experience as an immigrant reflects just one slice of the many ways that the belief in white supremacy has impacted Black people cross the diaspora. My understanding of race has necessarily been impacted by my identity. Yet even as I come from a country where Black people were also enslaved and seen as second-class citizens for so long, our experience was different than the experience of Black people in the United States.

In my country, for example, the first prime minister after independence from Britain was a Black man, forty-seven years before the United States had a Black head of state. One can infer from that simple fact the vastly different opportunities and sense of possibility Black people in most countries across the diaspora might experience, compared with those in the United States. When I came to the United States, I had that sense of hope, of endless possibility. After all, my parents chose to emigrate here because of the belief that the educational and vocational opportunities that would be available to their children would be limitless. I can’t imagine many Black Americans at the time (let alone today) held that view.

Seven years old when I arrived in the United States, I began to engage with the complexities of race in the United States and how I fit in as Black immigrant only after many years. As a child living in Harlem, New York, I attended some schools where Black people were 95 percent of the student population and others where Black people were about 5 percent. Throughout my entire educational career, I told myself, "I don’t know how to fit in. I’m too Caribbean for the US-born Black students at my elementary school, and too Black and too Caribbean for the white and Asian students at my middle and high schools." I always assumed there was something I should be doing differently to fit in. Each time I experienced discrimination, exclusion, and outright racism, I felt that it must have been my own fault.

Since I couldn’t see how cultural racism was impacting me, I couldn’t free myself from the responsibility I felt to fully embody the American Dream. It was the land of opportunity, wasn’t it, with advancement limited only by my effort and persistence. I, like all the immigrants I met, trusted that narrative, not seeing how it was steeped in the values of white supremacy culture. I worried that my failures would be seen as further proof of the inferiority of Black people. You can imagine my surprise, my outrage, my despair, when I finally began to have a glimmer of this larger force—a belief in white supremacy—and how it shapes all our lives. The emergence of white supremacy as a cultural belief system was driven by capitalistic motivations to elevate whiteness in order to justify the exploitation and enslavement of the lands and people in the Americas—Indigenous/First Nation peoples and people of African descent forcibly brought from their land—and of Indigenous people and their lands worldwide.

What could I do with that new knowledge? As an outsider in both communities—the Black Harlem community of my childhood and the white and Asian communities of my adolescence—it was not easy for me to summarily reject one group or the other, as I saw others do. I had found small pockets of friends, all of whom held different identities from me, as I moved through the various communities of my childhood. In elementary school I was befriended by a girl who, having a larger framed body and a mother who was a paraplegic, was also seen as an outsider. In middle and high school I found refuge in four close friends who were also outside the popular crowd—an immigrant from China and one from the Dominican Republic, a white boy who was gay, and a white girl from a fiercely liberal family.

My burgeoning awareness of white supremacy culture as a teenager coincided with my awareness of all the various ways patriarchy and heteronormativity worked to elevate some people and demote others. I wanted to be free of it all, but I also wanted freedom for my friends, since I could see how they too were not served by the systems in which we found ourselves. Relatively early in my life, I began to yearn for a community that embraced us all, one in which we could all thrive, a community that treasured our uniqueness and supported and valued all of us equally. Without yet knowing of the concept as used by Martin Luther King Jr., what I wanted was Beloved Community.

As I entered adulthood, I wrestled with my intersecting identities. Despite doing all the things that society values—earning my PhD, getting married, having children, and so on—I wasn’t happy. The more that I achieved, the greater the risk was that someone would decide that I actually didn’t belong. My harsh self-judgments, which contained many of the toxic messages of white supremacy culture, functioned as the whip that kept me in line and kept me doing the things I was told I should do. But even though I was fine with being my own harshest critic, I knew I didn’t want to act that way toward others. So when someone did anything that I perceived as racist or typical of white supremacy culture, I would seesaw wildly between two possible responses: either harshly condemn and shame them (as shame was such an effective motivator for me to change my behavior) or embrace them with empathy and openhearted curiosity (which is the way I so wished that I was responded to). Most times, I ended up silent. I didn’t know how to show up and advocate for myself while holding that intention of care and compassion toward the other person. I wanted Beloved Community, but at that time I could only imagine a community that worked for me or worked for the other, not one that truly worked for everyone.

In my early thirties, shortly after earning my doctorate in clinical psychology, my dissertation adviser told me about Nonviolent Communication, both as a communication model and a way of thinking about human relations grounded in the belief that all human behavior is motivated by the same universal, essential needs. I had never heard about it. After raving about how much Nonviolent Communication had changed her life, she encouraged me to study it since I was so disconnected from my needs. My adviser never said how the ideas embedded in Nonviolent Communication would help me, and not knowing what she was talking about, I nodded politely as I thought of all the things I needed to do as a mother of two children under three. When she offered to send me to the very next intensive training on Nonviolent Communication, a training that happened to be in Argentina, I perked up. I was delighted by the possibility of going to Argentina, if only for the break from parenting.

At that Nonviolent Communication training and subsequent ones, things began to click. I realized how much I had indeed learned to prioritize other people’s well-being and other people’s comfort, no matter the cost to myself. I began to understand how my fierce self-judgment had been an attempt to protect myself from shock by preempting the onslaught of negative messages that were directed my way whenever I deviated from society’s expectations. Understanding this allowed me to hold even the cruelest parts of myself with self-compassion and understanding. Soon I was able to start bringing curiosity and compassion to even the aspects of my behavior that caused me the most harm. This work helped me find a way past the dilemma in which I had been stuck: the either/or seesaw of silence I mentioned earlier. I didn’t have to choose between myself and other people any longer. Instead, I saw the power and freedom I gained when I identified both my needs and the needs of others, then persevered in dialogues to find new ways of engaging with each other. While a perfect solution could not always be found, I discovered that even the attempt to find solutions helped to heal the wounds of exclusion that so many of us have.

The development of my capacity to compassionately acknowledge what I needed helped me realize that my past emphasis on prioritizing the well-being of others, especially at cost to myself, was a manifestation of white supremacy culture. White supremacy culture values the well-being of white people above that of anyone else. At white supremacy culture’s worst manifestation, Black people’s lives, well-being, and humanity are completely devalued. Black death, in this cultural system, is acceptable when it benefits white people and white profit. Although the chattel enslavement of Black people that was one goal of the proponents of white supremacy ideology is no longer legal in the United States, the culture and institutions that created this value system still pervade our society today. So many Global Majority people have internalized the message that their path to a safe and comfortable life requires them to accept any indignity and keep white people happy, no matter the cost to themselves. We display this belief in so many ways (e.g., working twice as hard for half as much pay, giving up our culture, and assimilating to keep white people comfortable).

I believed I could only receive acceptance if I stayed silent and always forgave or empathized, even when I had experienced significant harm. Sitting in this revelation of my own behavior, I finally understood why so many Global Majority people so fiercely reject the request to empathize with white people’s expressions of shame and guilt. Many people push back against concepts like Beloved Community and Nonviolent Communication, believing it asks us to care for the well-being of people who will never care for ours. When we ourselves are in need, the idea of doing even more labor to care for white people can feel like an untenable continuation of white supremacy culture’s rules. When will we be the ones receiving care? Why is it that a white person’s shame gets more attention than a Global Majority person’s oppression?

As much as I resonated with this line of thinking, I also saw the trap within it. White supremacy culture forces us to disregard our very human connection, to see people in categories. It tries to force us into one of two roles—either the perpetual caretaker or the angry protester. Combining the visions of Beloved Community and Nonviolent Communication, however, I hope for a different path. When we reject the either/ or dichotomy, showing up with our full power to advocate for our own needs while caring for each person’s humanity, determined to exclude no one, we can work together to create truly transformative