Leading an Ending-White-Racism Workshop
I recently led an Ending-White-Racism Workshop for my Region. My goal was for white people to make connections with each other and have fun while creating the conditions to work on the brutality of racism.
The following are some of what I said:
- Our workshop is based on our understanding about human beings—that all people are good and that distresses can be discharged.
- “White” is a made-up [invented] idea based on racism. What we are is people of European heritage, and it is important to tell our European-heritage stories.
- We can contradict over-urgent patterns of “getting a lot done” and instead slow down and focus on connections and relationships.
- Our security is in relationships.
- We need to face the unbearable separation, discouragement, and defeat that got installed when we didn’t get to discharge as infants and young people.
- We can discharge about our relationships with Global Majority and Indigenous (GMI)* people and what it is like when our racism shows. [* The peoples of Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and those descended from them, and Indigenous people, are over eighty percent of the global population. These people also occupy most of the global land mass. Using the term “Global Majority and Indigenous (GMI)” for these people acknowledges their majority status in the world and interrupts how the dominant (U.S. and European) culture assigns them a minority status. Many Global Majority and Indigenous people living in dominant-culture countries have been assimilated into the dominant culture—by force, in order to survive, in seeking a better life for themselves and their families, or in pursuing the economic, political, or other inclusion of their communities. Calling these people “Global Majority and Indigenous” contradicts the assimilation.]
- We have been forced into “white” roles by advanced capitalism and class society.
- How can we become an organized, independent force of white people who like and enjoy each other and stick together as we challenge the system?
I also talked about how our chronic patterns can be experienced as racism. Someone said that when we call it racism, we feel like we are a bad person. But when we take the perspective that it is chronic distress experienced as racism, we understand how to work on it.
I made opportunities for people to hang out [spend relaxed, unstructured time]. We had a great dance party on Saturday night, with breakout rooms for people to hang out or have mini-sessions in.
Support groups were based on having a similar European heritage. (The young people and young adults could meet with whomever they chose.)
I mostly discharged on my European ancestors and the brutality they had experienced. I also discharged on noticing that I have people with me and what it would have been like to have had people stand up with me when I was targeted as a young person for being a mixed-heritage Jewish female.
During farewells many people said that they were taking away the idea of “connection before work.”
Since the workshop, people have e-mailed me describing what they have done differently since the workshop—for example, having kinder, more connected interactions with white people in settings in which racism is being addressed.
It is wonderful doing this work in partnership with all of you.
Phoenicia, New York, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for white allies ending racism
(Present Time 207, April 2022)