Racialized bodily grammar: A case study of white fragility in the embodied discourse of somatic practice

Abstract

Somatic practice gives agency back to the body, allowing it to reconfigure itself, thus integrating the mind into an empowered body. Yet, I question whether the reliance on individualism, humanism, scientific study, authentic movement, and liberatory processes reinforces and normalizes racially biased behaviours, attitudes and theorization. An autoethnography of sorts, this article puts in conversation my embodied and theoretical experiences with my own internalization of whiteness. Somatics, in essence, gives me the space to explore how I make sense of those feelings of discomfort and ease, uncertainty and confusion. Does my embodied experience somehow reflect my unconscious day-to-day enactments of white vulnerability? Do I expand into, seeking and sensing stability? Or rather, do I actively and unconsciously withdraw from discomfort? Do somatics reaffirm or dismantle my whiteness? I ask within the intrapersonal, immediate and ephemeral experience, is my white American fragility revealed through somatic practice?