Title: Racial Healing Circles: Empathy and Liberal Education | Association of American Colleges & Universities
Headings: Racial Healing Circles: Empathy and Liberal Education
Racial Healing Circles: Empathy and Liberal Education
Racial Healing and Liberal Education
What Effective Racial Healing Circles Are and Are Not
Imagining Transformation
Looking Back, Moving Forward
References
Previous Issues

Content: Racial healing circles provide opportunities to engage with perceived others in ways that enable self-reflection and nonthreatening acknowledgment of one’s own previously unquestioned assumptions and biases. Faculty and student participants gain direct experience sharing authentic personal narratives among diverse peers, which enhances their perceptions of human interconnectedness while increasing their capacity for empathy and understanding. Participants become more willing to explore the historic and contemporary consequences of adhering to the fallacy of a racial hierarchy. Finally, participants gain a heightened sense of responsibility for taking actions to reduce needless human suffering and promote fairness and equity for the greater good. Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers
Austin Community College (TX)
Brown University (RI)
The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina (SC)
Duke University (NC)
Hamline University (MN)
Millsaps College (MS)
Rutgers University–Newark (NJ)
Spelman College (GA)
University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (HI)
University of Maryland Baltimore County (MD)
What Effective Racial Healing Circles Are and Are Not
While there are many approaches to the racial healing process, it is important to clarify what racial healing circles are not. They are not anti-racism trainings or workshops on dismantling structural racism. They also are not the old twentieth-century race relations work, designed to promote “tolerance” of the other. Perhaps most importantly, racial healing circles are not “conversations about race.” To say that the work is about race is to reinforce the belief system based on the false idea of multiple human races. Through racial healing circles, we intend to embrace the true reality of the human family, and the myth of racism is a barrier to that intention.