Mindfulness for Black Community Leaders Engaged in Racial Justice Work: A Qualitative Examination of a Brief Community Group Intervention

Background

Our nation is experiencing broken trust and increasingly violent encounters between police officers and Black community members - the result of centuries of systemic racism and oppression of Black people. In response to these realities, we developed a 7-week mindfulness-based intervention for police and Black community leaders (BCLs) in Flint, Michigan, to examine whether mindfulness could help improve relations between these groups. For the first six weeks of the project, police and BCLs attended classes separate from each other and met for a day-long retreat in the seventh week for mindfulness practice and discussion. This study focuses on the BCLs engaged in this project and explores three questions. Q1. How do the instructors present what mindfulness has to offer to BCLs engaged in racial justice work? Q2. How do they culturally adapt and/or create a culturally-affirming and anti-oppressive space to promote engagement in mindfulness practice among BCLs? Q3. How do BCLs respond to the mindfulness practices and apply them to their lives?

Methods

Data consisted of videotaped recordings of five of six group sessions involving 12 BCLs. The lead instructor was a Black man, a qualified instructor of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), assisted by a Black woman trainee/BCL who also was in the first cohort of this program. Weekly sessions lasted 2 hours on average and were held over a six-week period in 2023. The curriculum integrated Black racial-cultural experiences into aspects of the MBSR curriculum. Session recordings were transcribed and transcripts were coded by a racially diverse three-person coding team using Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and organized using Dedoose software. Transcripts were coded individually and discussed as a group to iteratively develop the codebook, and to obtain consensus on the final themes. The project PI and the group’s lead instructor served as auditors and consultants to the coding team.

Results

Preliminary analyses revealed two overarching themes. First, instructors presented mindfulness as increasing inner capacity to deal with difficult experiences with less resistance in order to change it. Second, the instructors created an inclusive learning community that acknowledged the wholeness of the BCLs lived experiences, including sources of cultural meaning and strength (e.g., faith, family, meaningful work), as well as trauma, suffering, and injustice. Many of the cultural adaptations observed included explicit references and communication norms related to church and faith, and familial/communal roles within the Black community, acknowledgment of the race-based trauma held in Black bodies and the reality of anti-Black racism, use of trauma-informed pedagogy, and nuanced discussions about the role and impact of anger in Black lives. BCLs showed increasing levels of engagement over time, and described the effects of practice on affective experience (including heightened love and gratitude), insight/awareness (including deeper connections to self and spirit), and coping (including resilience, centering, and resistance).

Conclusion

This naturalistic investigation highlights ways that trainers adapted mindfulness practices to a Black community context to promote engagement and respond to participants’ lived experiences of structural violence and active efforts to promote healing and social change.