Enacting Racial Healing: A Prospective Method and Model

Racism in clinical chaplaincy continues to degrade the quality of chaplains' spiritual care. Through a critical autoethnography of racism in clinical spiritual care, I examine racism in first-person narratives from the basis of mindfulness, self-acceptance, and self-reflexive critique. Through storytelling and critical self-reflexivity, I argue for the necessity of revealing how the White racial habitus enacts segregated White and Black clinical worlds. I reason that a theory of enactment integrated with mindfulness and an autoethnographic method positions White chaplains to repair this divide. The model of enacting racial healing the article proposes entails (1) exposing racism, (2) naming racist sociality, (3) accepting racist experiences as the ground to changing them, (4) caring with compassion for self and other, and (5) transforming experiences of racism that are both interior and exterior. The article concludes by inviting other chaplains to experiment with this model and enter into ethnographic dialogue by sharing their findings as a way to improve spiritual care.