Tru Leverette – författare

The Mindful Classroom: Constructive Conversations on Race, Identity, and Justice helps teachers and discussion facilitators practice and teach mindfulness and movement techniques that can deeply enhance conversations about race, identity, and social justice, furthering social justice efforts at their most basic stage—person to person—from the face-to-face or online classroom to the community at large. Mindfulness and movement practices can help us prepare for and engage in difficult conversations, and the more conscious we become of our emotional, mental, and physical landscape, the more we are able to engage proactively rather than reactively, consciously rather than automatically. We become able to act (or not act), rather than react in situations with others. The topics of race and social justice are timely, and they are triggers. Productive engagement with these topics demands we remain mindful of how we may be triggered and how we may be triggering others; it demands we pay attention to ourselves at a fundamental level, and it demands that we grant such attention to others.

The Mindful Classroom: Constructive Conversations on Race, Identity, and Justice helps teachers and discussion facilitators practice and teach mindfulness and movement techniques that can deeply enhance conversations about race, identity, and social justice, furthering social justice efforts at their most basic stage—person to person—from the face-to-face or online classroom to the community at large. Mindfulness and movement practices can help us prepare for and engage in difficult conversations, and the more conscious we become of our emotional, mental, and physical landscape, the more we are able to engage proactively rather than reactively, consciously rather than automatically. We become able to act (or not act), rather than react in situations with others. The topics of race and social justice are timely, and they are triggers. Productive engagement with these topics demands we remain mindful of how we may be triggered and how we may be triggering others; it demands we pay attention to ourselves at a fundamental level, and it demands that we grant such attention to others.

There are deep black nationalist roots for many of the images and ideologies of contemporary racial justice efforts. This collection reconsiders the Black Aesthetic and the revolutionary art of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), forging connections between the recent past and contemporary social justice activism. Focusing on black literary and visual art of the Black Arts Movement, this collection highlights artists whose work diverged from narrow definitions of the Black Aesthetic and black nationalism. Adding to the reanimation of discourses surrounding BAM, this collection comes at a time when today’s racial justice efforts are mining earlier eras for their iconography, ideology, and implementation. As numerous contemporary activists ground their work in the legacies of mid-twentieth century activism and adopt many of the grassroots techniques it fostered, this collection remembers and re-envisions the art that both supported and shaped that earlier era. It furthers contemporary conversations by exploring BAM’s implications for cultural and literary studies and its legacy for current social justice work and the multiple arts that support it.