I’ll Take the Red Pill Please: Shattering the Illusion #threefifthsmagazine

This month, the Three-Fifths magazine’s founder, Kevin Robinson, shared lyrics from “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, a song by the late Gill-Scott Heron. After listening several times, I kept returning to the lyrics:

The first change takes place in your mind
You have to change your mind
before you change the way you live 

These words resonate deeply, as I have witnessed the power of a changed mind in both my own life as well as the lives of family, friends, and clients. I have also witnessed the heartache and dis-ease of closed and rigid minds.

Our minds are very powerful. Our thoughts can heal us and they can also make us sick. Our minds are the lens through which we see ourselves, others, and the world around us. In Dr. Kenneth V. Hardy’s Racial Trauma Course, he shared, “You can’t colonize the body without colonizing the mind.” If you can break the mind, you can break the body. On the other hand, if you can heal the mind, you can also heal the body. Imagine what we could do to change the world if we started with our minds! I believe we could heal the world.

I know I have written before about my experience taking the “Undoing Racism and Community Organizing Workshop” (URW) with The People’s Institute of Survival and Beyond (https://pisab.org/). This specific workshop changed the way I understand racism and my own racial identity. It has profoundly changed the way I see the world and the way I understand and treat others. The best way I can describe this change is by using an analogy from the Matrix movie. For those of you who haven’t seen the first Matrix movie, Neo, the lead character, was given a choice of taking a red pill, which would allow him to see and understand what was actually occurring outside the illusion created by the Matrix, or a blue pill, which would allow him to return to the illusion. After taking the URW, I chose to take the red pill. Once I realized the illusion I’d been living under, my world was rocked to the core. And I couldn’t go back! The way I see the world has never been the same, and I work very hard to not be lulled back into the illusion. A mentor of mine, Bonnie Cushing, uses the term “the white lullaby.” This concept describes how easy it can be for white people to get lulled back into a false sense of comfort. To get lulled back into the illusion.

If you are unfamiliar with the URW or PISAB, you may be wondering, “How can a  workshop have that much of an impact?”(https://pisab.org/undoing-racism-community-organizing-workshop/) It helped me see myself as a racialized person who has been socialized and conditioned to see white as normal. In other words, I’ve been conditioned to see that “the white way is the right way” and believe that I am superior to BIPOC. That lesson took a while to unpack as no one had ever explicitly told me this. I continue to learn this lesson as I take in all the unspoken messages I receive on a daily basis, from school to television to laws to social norms and more. I realized I had learned to dehumanize Black and Brown people and, in the process, had lost my own humanity. The workshop helped me understand my own connections to institutional racism and its impact on my life. I also know that undoing racism cannot function in a one-off workshop. I have taken the workshop several times since then and continue to organize it with PISAB.

I know that changing my mind is a lifelong process. I have a lifetime of white supremacy culture and internalized racial superiority to undo. Changing my mind means constantly paying attention to my thoughts, feelings, and actions. It requires commitment, intention, and will. By choosing to take the red pill, I have committed to a lifetime of  “undoing my internalized racial superiority and racial biases”. I have chosen to change the way I live. 

See you on the journey,

Robin

Tracey Rollins Spann, LMSW (left) and Robin Schlenger, LCSW (right) presented a 6-hour training at the 2024 International Interdisciplinary Conference on Clinical Supervision: Power, Privilege, Race, and Racism and Their Impact on the Supervisory Relationship

Chiku Malunga said, “when people come to work, they come with their full personhood”(2009). In this workshop participants will explore what constitutes one’s “full personhood”, and how systemic racism has created barriers that devalue and dismiss the strengths, skills, and experiences that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) folk possess and prevent them from fully utilizing their authentic selves in their work. Using Dr. Kenneth V. Hardy’s Privilege And Subjugated Task (PAST) Model, participants will examine specific actions that are critical to developing one’s ability to recognize, acknowledge, and discuss issues of race, privilege, and power as they relate to the supervisory relationship.

Robin Schlenger