The Bami Soro Workbook
The Bami Soro Workbook’s most important value to those in the “helping professions” is that it provides a beginning for those professionals with little or no experience in communicating with Black Americans or people of color to develop their own comfortable, confident communication style with people from other ethnic and social backgrounds.
The first step in any effective therapy, counseling or teaching situation is to establish a relationship where honest, soulful communication takes place, creating mutual understanding and respect. If you are American, there is a better than even chance that you are White. That means your experiences with Black Americans don’t overlap. Black and White counselors, therapists and teachers will appreciate having a culturally directed tool to enhance their cross-cultural communications skills.
Bami Soro was developed as a “Culturally Directed Healing Program” for substance use, behavioral health and education professionals. The Bami Soro curriculum was designed to help bridge the communications gap by helping professionals translate their academic and practical experience into easy conversation with Black American patients and clients.
Excerpts from the Workbook
Suppose You Were a Slave
adapted from “American History”
Try this:
If you’re White, imagine living in a society where your pale skin brings both shame and a denial of privilege. Suppose there’s a word just for you: Whitey.” And imagine that this word carries with it all the meanings that “nigger” carries for a Black man in the real world. Would you still be comfortable in your own skin whenever someone called you whitey?”
Imagine waking up every morning wondering if every person with darker skin is thinking “whitey” every time you apple for—and are eventually denied—a job, a lease, or a bank loan.
Are We Creating a New Sub Class of Citizens?
excerpt from “The Business of Incarceration”
“This is the shadow-world of the second class or social outcast citizen. Add to this recipe for failure, economically inaccessible education and an unending supply of drugs and alcohol in low income neighborhoods, where there is virtually a liquor store on almost every corner, and a scarcity of economic opportunities, and it is easy to see how this status of social outcast citizen is created and maintained.
Society fuels its Business of Incarceration through recidivism. Recidivism as I see it, is the business of recycling people who have committed crimes and served their sentences, by releasing them to social conditions that makes it all but impossible for them to succeed.”
Spirituality in the Black Culture
excerpt from “Spirituality”
“Black Americans derive many of their religious traditions from regions of ancient Africa, such as Egypt, Punt, and Cush, where Black spirituality came into being. When slavery and colonialism introduced Christianity into the mix, Black slaves developed a hybrid form of Christianity that, over the centuries, took on its own character and style.
You certainly don’t have to be Christian to recover from substance use. You don’t even have to be religious. But I’ve seen again and again that true recovery can’t begin until addicts begin to repair or develop their spirituality. Long-term recovery can’t happen unless all three—mind, body, and spirit—get the care they need.”