Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
This wonderfully insightful book challenges us to face our racial history with greater courage, compassion, and creativity.
Thomas Hubl, author and founder of Academy of Inner Science
Ruth King deepens our awareness - and courage - to face and ultimately heal the deep-seated wounds of racism - a disease of the heart that impacts us all. With clarity, wisdom, love and through the lens of scientific rigor, "Mindful of Race" is a must-read for advancing racial healing in our current world. Writing from profound depths of wisdom and relatedness, Ruth leads us into a new level of potentiality and wholeness, uncovering the often unconscious parts which fuel separation and division. For everyone who dares to look beyond the surface into the depth of their own hearts, this book is a sacred offering, a pathway to cure the disease of racism and polarization.
Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge
This powerful and penetrating book offers us healing medicine for the great suffering of racism. Ruth King, a deeply wise and caring mindfulness teacher and diversity consultant, not only helps us understand the complexity of our great racial divide, she offers a core of practices, reflections and actions that gives us hope for transformation. Our world needs this book. We need this book. Please read with a receptive heart, and share with all you know!
Patrisse Cullors, cofounder of Black Lives Matter, author of When They Call You a Terrorist
In Mindful of Race, King explores the impact of racial injustice on communities at the margins. She further illustrates practices Black people can embody to support our longevity and dignity. This book belongs in the hands of every activist, regardless of race! We need to develop a new language, a language that centers healing and restoration.
Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard to Talk to White People about Racism
Mindful of Race accomplishes a rare feat..[It is] a brilliant and unique addition to the struggle for racial justice. King has made engaging with this text a deeply affective as well as intellectual experience. She addresses the emotional and spiritual impacts of racism that are so rarely addressed in workshops and textbooks, but that are critical to our collective and personal healing.
Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart
Important medicine, wise, heartfelt, both demanding and comforting, with many tools for the real work of racism we need in these polarized times.
Ayo Pamela Yetunde, author of Objects Relations, Buddhism, and Relationality in Womanist Practical Theology
Mindful of Race will, at the very least, be a classic among contemporary Buddhist texts for decades to come. From what I know about you, the book is congruent with your spiritual and professional journeys over the decades and because you included your life's wisdom, the book is unique, powerful, and enduring. Thank you for the blood, sweat, and tears you poured into this work.
Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage and Taming the Ox
King's approach is revolutionary in the deepest sense because it addresses our racial problems at their root, which is consciousness, or the mind itself. Mindful of Race is rich in anecdotes and examples that will, I believe, cause a reader to smile and perhaps even say, “Thank you.” Mindful of Race is a trustworthy guide for claiming our birthright – happiness and freedom. Read Dr. Johnson's book review of Mindful of Race.
Sydney Reece, M.E.d., international educator and poet in social justice advocacy and mindfulness-based meditation teacher
This is the textbook of unlearning American racial history and its impact on our hearts and minds.
Larry Yang, author of Awakening Together
King brilliantly breaks down one of the most complex experiences of human suffering. She provides a laser focus in re-building our collective humanity using universal potentials of awareness and kindness in all of our hearts and minds. Ruth's book is a must-read, must-practice, must-live experience.
Barbara E. Riley, author of Are You Ready for Outrageous Success
In a clear, strong and brilliantly useful way, King reminds us of our gifts of heart, mind and spirit by introducing the practice and tools of mindfulness, while showing and teaching us how to put them in service to our shared humanity. I wholeheartedly recommend you take this journey alone and together with others who truly want racism to end in our lifetime.
Thanissara, author of Time to Stand Up
This masterful and courageous book is a gift offered from the searing depths of America's ancestral racist wound...both profoundly insightful and challenging... Ruth King’s authentic writing invites us to meet her with vulnerability and honesty while at the same time, inspiring us to faithfully engage the urgent task of accountability and racial healing. This is a book for everyone. Pick it up, read it, live with it, and share it on.
Zenju Earthlyn Manual, author of The Way of Tenderness
Mindful of Race presents a remedy to the pain that has cut across us as human beings and has left a seemingly indelible scar upon our hearts. King boldly states, this mark can be dissolved! With great care she carries us to the place in which we can rest and heal the racial divide.
Joseph Goldstein, author of Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening
Mindful of Race is a wonderfully pragmatic and inspiring guide on this journey of transformation. King explores the role of mindfulness in understanding the suffering of racism and the power of mindfulness for healing that corrosive conditioning. Highly recommended.
Sharon Salzberg, author of Lovingkindness and Real Love
Mindful of Race is a great contribution. King...show how mindfulness and empathy can help us understand the effects of racism and move toward its ending. A must read for everyone.
Jan Willis, author of Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist and Buddhist
In Mindful of Race, Ruth King boldly declares that “racism is a heart disease that’s curable.” She then proceeds to guide us on a three-part journey to healing. In doing so, King brings all of her compassionate insight, talent and grit to bear. This is a book for the ages, and it is exactly what the world needs now.
Gil Fronsdal, author of The Issue At Hand
Mindfulness of Race is a breath of fresh air by which everyone can find a way to contribute to healing racial pain and divisiveness. By applying mindfulness practice to address racism, Ruth King provides one of the most exciting, hopeful, and useful applications of mindfulness for our times. The book shows how each of us can look within so that contributing to overcome racism is not a burden, it is an expression of our compassion, wisdom, and mutual respect.
Noah Levine, author of The Heart of the Revolution
Ruth King’s work has had a positive impact on me personally and is highly influential in our community, Against The Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. As we all strive to end suffering and confusion, Mindful of Race is more than just a great book, it’s a map to freedom.
This is one of the best books on both mindfulness, and on racism, that I have read. It is tender, powerful, truthful, and useful, and calls on people to examine their inner selves without shame or retribution. This past summer I taught a doctoral level seminar on mindfulness, and Mindfulness of Race was a crucial text in my teaching. I can’t recommend it enough – so timely and needed.
I am a bookseller and wrote this to describe why I chose Mindful of Race to be featured on our Staff Picks shelf:
I’ve lived in a Brown body my whole life, and until recently, I reserved conversations about the experience of being Brown for specific and safe groups of people. In recent years, racial justice has become a more mainstream conversation and it’s been a struggle to have tough, awkward conversations with well-meaning White friends. This book is the antidote to that struggle for me personally, and a practical yet Universal aid to all humans about how to deal with this thing we’ve constructed to divide ourselves, called race. In Mindful of Race, King provides a concise history lesson on the roots of racism, with particular attention toward racism in America. She delves into the impact of historical racial trauma on individuals and societies and then traces an arc of transformation by offering mindfulness practices that can heal racism and its pain from the inside out. Perhaps the most impactful takeaway from my first read was this: “Racism is a Heart Disease, and it’s curable!”. In my humble opinion, this book is required reading for all humans, and knowing it exists gives me hope that a more kind, loving, and harmonious future is possible for us all.