The night of June 26, 2018, Layla Saad was unable to sleep. The previous year had been a taxing one for the writer, life and business coach, and spiritual advisor. The deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, had unsettled her deeply. It wasn’t just the hatred and the violence; it was also the reaction from the online coaching community she inhabits.
“People who are dominating this industry that I’m in are largely white women,” she explains. “And they’re never talking about this. They talk about, ‘We want to change the world,’ ‘We want to transform people’s lives,’ ‘We want freedom,’ ‘We want liberation.’ You’re using that language, but what that means is so limited to who it applies to.”
So, in August 2017, Saad posted an essay titled “I need to talk to spiritual white women about white supremacy,” encouraging the women in her field to look more deeply at how they benefit from—and even uphold—conscious and unconscious biases and institutional racism. Her post went viral, catapulting her into a spotlight that was often painful.
“I triggered a lot of people,” she says. “I was having my social media posts constantly censored and removed because people didn’t want to hear what I was talking about. I felt like I was fighting every day.”
It took almost a year of introspection, mentorship and self-care, but by the time that sleepless June 2018 night rolled around, Saad was ready to raise the issue of white supremacy again. She now felt stronger and more centered. She noticed her community gradually becoming less defensive. And, despite all the negativity, the viral post had expanded her online platform significantly.
So on June 26, Saad posted on Instagram, “White folks: Time for some radical truth-telling about you and your complicity in white supremacy. Not those white people ‘out there.’ Not white people as a collective. But you. Just you. We start tomorrow.”
And with that, the “Me and White Supremacy” challenge was born.
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