Misunderstandings of the mind
Having Racist Thoughts Doesn’t Make You a Racist
Thoughts are the past, awareness is the present, actions are the future
For many years I never considered myself a racist.
I convinced myself that I was a pure soul with no prejudice toward anybody, and it stayed that way until I started meditating a lot.
I grew up in the North of England in the seventies and eighties. It was a genuinely racist place. While my parents weren’t particularly racist, they still made ‘remarks’. The other adults in my life and classmates were more openly racist.
Back then, racism was very open.
When watching the football, I heard the monkey chants when players like John Barnes got the ball. Sometimes I joined in like a delusional little fucker. I didn’t know what it meant as I was too young to understand.
I just mimicked the adults around me. What was their excuse?
As a white person growing up in this time, I am forced to acknowledge my own racism rather than deny it.
As a small child of the ‘internet-less’ generation, I learned by observing the television shows of the time as well as the remarks and actions of the adults around me.
That is how prejudice reproduces itself.
It is a legacy passed down from one generation to the next. The children watch the adults and subconsciously mimic them.
This type of upbringing does not leave you unmarked.
Even today, I find myself trying to prove my non-racism when I am dealing with a person that isn’t white. I watch myself treating non-white people in an excessively positive way and then subtly congratulating myself mentally for doing so.
It took me a while to notice this was a racist pattern.
I wanted to be a person that didn’t care about race. But, still, I noticed a black person in a room much more than a white person.
I wondered why I had these racist tendencies despite my desperate desire to be the ‘all-inclusive superhero’.
I see this struggle in white people all of the time.
They have these racist mental events, and battle against them in some inner struggle that comes from not understanding the mind.
Struggling against these thoughts doesn’t make them disappear, and yet, identifying with them deepens their power and sustains their existence.
So what to do then?
To be free, we have to understand them.
Our thoughts are the past. Our actions are the future.
Have you ever noticed you don’t choose the thoughts that come into your mind?
If you fancy a cup of coffee, you don’t have a previous thought that says:
Now I will think, ‘I fancy a cup of coffee’.
You don’t have a choice in the matter. A particular circumstance arises — such as the smell of coffee — and the thought comes up by itself.
Yet we still identify with it as if it was our choice to have it.
One time we were racists. That racism was probably subtle and a product of our childhood learning for many of us. Still, we said and thought racist things no matter how harmless we thought they were.
Now, our thoughts echo that racism.
In our confusion, we think we are still racist because our thoughts are still racist. But that’s not necessarily true.
If we identify with thought, we might hate ourselves because the thoughts that arise spontaneously in our minds are racist. This situation is both confusing and useless because a person never changes through battling their thoughts.
- In the realm of meditation, a person should only observe a thought. They should never indulge or suppress that thought.
- In the realm of meditation, thoughts are revealed to be the echo of past actions. They do not create new actions if we just leave them alone.
But in the realm of confused mind, we don’t see thought as the echo of the past. We see it as ourselves in the present. So our thoughts do create actions that create habits and thus condition the thoughts of the future.
Some people call this karma. I call it common sense.
In meditation, turn off the whale noises, ditch the kaftan, uncross your legs.
- Sit at the bus stop and watch the thoughts. Don’t follow them thinking they are you. To do so will see you trapped in the karmic spider’s web.
- Don’t suppress them thinking ‘I hate myself’
- Don’t identify with them at all.
- Understand thought to be the echo of the past. You can release it through pure observance.
Racist thoughts may arise, sexist thoughts may arise, perverted thoughts may arise.
That’s okay. Don’t follow them. Don’t suppress them. Since to do so will only nurture them.
Let them arise and dissolve without your involvement, and you will gradually become free of the past and the future.
Some people might cringe at the title of this article
Some might even make comments that I am a racist apologist because they only read the title and not the words.
But, if we are going to become more intelligent as a culture, it is important that we view things properly and without fear.
Meditation performed correctly can free us of our past conditioning. But still, as a society, we must recognise that racist conditioning begins at a very young age. Adults must become aware of their actions around children and realise that education is not necessarily formal— It is mostly done through observance.
In this article, I have admitted to being a conditioned racist in the past, I have admitted to still having subtle racist mental patterns.
But I have also offered a method — not only to become free from the mental disease of racism but free from conditioning of all types. It can be performed anywhere, at any time and requires neither a beard nor incense nor a deep voice to practice it.
Just watch your mind. All of the time. Just watch it. That’s all.
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