Healing Racism Within: The Power of Gratitude

If gratitude can rewire the brain for happiness, then perhaps we can practice gratitude to rewire the brain against conditioned racial bias.

By Brett Bevell

Gratitude rewires the brain. Scientific studies show this. Happiness researchers know this. If gratitude can rewire the brain for personal happiness, then why not use it to change social programming and conditioning on race? It was when I was exposed to other cultures and began to appreciate them that my own negative racial biases began to change into gratitude and appreciation.

Expressing Multicultural Gratitude

Practice offering gratitude for individuals or cultural attributes beyond your own, even if it means starting small. Start with the phrase “I am grateful for ________,” and then fill in the blank. Make it a practice to say the things for which you’re grateful out loud, even if you can only speak in a semi-audible whisper. It might sound something like this:

I am grateful for the music of Richie Havens, especially his song “Freedom.”
I am grateful for the poetry of Aja Monet and the truth of her words.
I am grateful for the wonderful Zuni pottery I used to see in the windows of shops in New Mexico when I was a child.
I am grateful for Navajo fry bread, especially when it’s covered in honey.
I am grateful for the gift of African drumming, and the way it brings me into an alpha state of consciousness so easily.
I am grateful to the Ecuadorian shamans who did powerful healing work on me during a workshop in 2000 at Omega Institute.
I am grateful for the amazing Indian dhal dishes my wife cooks, based on her mother’s recipes.
I am grateful for the Hindu practice of Kirtan and singing Divine names.
I am grateful for the Thai Yoga I techniques I learned in Pai, Thailand, from a native teacher named Tiger back in 2002.
I am grateful for the amazing speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his commitment to justice for all people, especially the poor.

This simple exercise in cultural gratitude is like a muscle, and the more you use it, the more it will grow and widen the lens of your own perceptions of appreciation. The more you rewire your brain to appreciate and be grateful for other cultures and individuals from those cultures, the more you can contribute to bringing the world together.

Make it a daily practice to name at least 20 things for which you are grateful in celebration of individuals or cultural attributes not from your own race. It may seem very forced or even awkward at first, but the more you lean into it as a daily practice, the more you will genuinely grow your appreciation of the diverse world in which we live and simultaneously rewire any unconscious resistance you have to embracing the many gifts offered to the world by cultures and races other than your own.

Letters of Gratitude

You can also take this process even deeper by writing specific letters of gratitude to individuals, living or dead, expressing your gratitude. Again, the intent is for the letter to be to someone of another race, one that is typically marginalized or oppressed, to reverse the energetic flow from oppression to gratitude. Even if you feel you are not participating in that oppression or marginalization, do this practice anyway to help generate the energy of gratitude. That energy will be felt beyond you as an individual.

If your letter is to someone who is alive, I recommend mailing or emailing it to the recipient if possible. If the letter is to someone who is dead, then I recommend either keeping it in a place that feels sacred to you, like an altar, or burning the letter in a safe manner, intending that the flames are transporting your words to the recipient in the spirit realm.

Here is a letter I wrote to the spirit of Muhammed Ali, who was an amazing boxer, activist, and poet.

Dear Muhammed Ali,

I am grateful for the life you lived and how deeply it touched me as a child growing up. I loved the magic of your poems, the short rhymes about other boxers, and how you would “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” I am grateful for the brilliance of your mind, your wit, the courage you displayed standing up against the war in Vietnam as a conscientious objector to being drafted, even though it led to your being convicted of draft evasion by an all-white jury and losing your boxing title for several years.

You were an icon to me, someone who was amazingly talented in sports but who also stood for something. I remember listening on the radio in my mother’s car the night you knocked out George Foreman in “the Rumble in the Jungle,” as you called it, that boxing match in Zaire where you regained your world heavyweight crown. I remember the anger I could see in my grandfather’s eyes every time you were on television bantering with Howard Cosell, and how seeing my grandfather’s anger warned me about so many others I would encounter who were like him, pretending to be so liberal while harboring racial hatred inside.

You taught me so much, even though I never met you, never saw you other than on the television screen. I am grateful for the wisdom of your life path, your setting an example by following the courage of your beliefs, and how you inspired not only Black boys and girls to aspire to something greater, to be the greatest. Please know you also inspired me, a young white boy who saw your humanity, the gift of your spirit, which helped my own spirit push forward through challenges I didn’t know I would overcome, but did overcome, in many ways because of the light you showed me and millions of people all around the world.

I send this message through time and space to wherever your spirit is now, in the realm of angels, passing into a new life, or maybe existing on higher dimensions of reality that I cannot begin to imagine.

With reverence and gratitude,

Brett Bevell

The first few times I practiced these exercises of gratitude, focusing on appreciating attributes and individuals from races other than my own, I felt extremely tired afterward, as if there was some deep energetic resistance to me doing this practice. You may experience something similar, as the matrix of our collective social consciousness still erects barriers to this type of work. You must move beyond the psychic sludge to embrace this practice, but the rewards for doing so are immense and will make you aware of how deeply trapped in our own racial boxes many of us are—even those of us who consider ourselves very socially liberated and aware.

You may also feel this exercise is simply silly, or even stupid, which is simply another manifestation of that same resistance of which I speak. It will hurt no one to try this practice. Try either the 20 daily gratitude statements or writing a gratitude letter, focusing in either process on the gratitude you have for cultural attributes or individuals outside your own race, and extending that circle of gratitude outside the ethnocentric worldview.