Radical Honesty Anti-Racism Manifesto

“All of you is welcome here.” -Rumi

At Radical Honesty workshops, meetups or events, we offer a context in which all of you is welcome. That means the good, the bad and the ugly. All of your thoughts, judgements and opinions, all of your feelings and emotional reactions, big and small, we want them all.

We believe that healing, growth, and true connection come from honest, vulnerable sharing, not from pretending, avoiding, withholding, and being polite. What we’re after is becoming aware of our pretenses and our social games, our ways of looking good and playing nice, and revealing those things to each other, ongoingly.

From experience, we know that this leads to more connection, more groundedness, and more compassion towards ourselves and the people around us.

But here’s the catch: If all of YOU is welcome here, then all of EVERYONE ELSE is welcome here, too. This means that there must be a certain degree of willingness to sit with (and express) the discomfort that we feel when other people do and say things that we don’t like, or that hurt or trigger us.

Most people do not share our political and social views, our spirituality or religion, our values and morality, our judgements about what is right and wrong, or even our narrative about the way the world is.

How do we deal with bigotry in a Radical Honesty workshop?

The Radical Honesty Institute stands for inclusivity. We provide a context within which we are all welcome to share ourselves vulnerably, with the intention of getting over our hurt, shame, fear, anger, judgments, etc. and come into honest contact with one another.

Our aim is not to censor people or bigotted thoughts, or to remove people with differing ideas from our own from our workshops. Instead, our aim is to put our differences and our dirty laundry out on the table where it can be dealt with and gotten over, together.

Typically, people who want to do this work are looking for connection and liberation from the jail of the mind. We’ve found that over the years, the people that come to Radical Honesty workshops are looking to get over their anger, not to stew in it; to find the things that they have in common, rather than to dig their heels into their personal moral stance.

Safe Space vs. Brave Space

The term “safe space” typically refers to “a place intended to be free of bias, conflict, criticism, or potentially threatening actions, ideas, or conversations.”

A Radical Honesty workshop space is thus more akin to a “brave space,” where the intention is to come together, have hard, honest, and vulnerable conversations and feel our way through the discomfort together.

Together, we create a context in which we agree to acknowledge our biases, criticisms, judgments, and potentially threatening ideas, express them out loud, and sit with whatever experience comes up for us when we do so (for example: anger, shame, fear, sadness, grief, disgust, etc.).

Through this process, we learn to deal creatively with the conflict that arises in order to get over our attachment to our judgments, biases, criticisms and differences of opinion.

We believe, from thousands of hours of collective experience, that expressing our ideas and judgements - even when potentially harmful - and feeling our way through what comes up for everyone involved (in order to get over our attachments to our judgements and get to forgiveness on the other side) leads to the greatest possibility for healing and growth.

What can I expect at a Radical Honesty event?

If you choose to participate in Radical Honesty workshops, it’s very likely that you’ll witness people expressing anger, grief, and hurt, sometimes in a loud voice, or even yelling or screaming. It’s also possible that you’ll witness people expressing racist, sexist, ableist, sizeist, classist, bigoted thoughts.

A Radical Honesty Trainer’s job is to support everyone involved in staying grounded in our experience and expressing any anger, fear, disgust, grief, etc. that may come up in response to what has been said or done.

Radical Honesty is a method to support people through these experiences that can be scary and loud and outside of what some of us are used to. However, we will not allow dogpiling, harassment, a free-for-all of yelling put-downs, slurs, or the like. Our workshop leaders are trained to be with and guide people through highly challenging and typically uncomfortable interactions, and they’re also equipped to pause and redirect exchanges that are happening in ways that are outside of the Radical Honesty practice.

You can expect to feel out of your comfort zone at a Radical Honesty workshop, and we will stick with each other through the process.

Our commitment to ongoing education about race

We believe that effective group process work requires a certain level of awareness and training around issues of identity, power dynamics, and trauma. We are committed to continuing education about race for our Trainers, and we invite you to join us in our ongoing learning and conversation.

Watch a video from our list of Anti-Racism Educational Resources

Credits to Firdoz Gangat, former Radical Honesty Trainer Candidate, for the curation of this list and the facilitation of many Anti-Racism Monthly Community Calls. For more information and facilitation from Firdoz, contact him : firdoz@outlook.com