SEATTLE: City Holds Training Session For White Employees On, “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness”

Christopher F. Rufo
@realchrisrufo

The City of Seattle held a training session for white employees called “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.”

So I did a public records request to find out exactly what this means. Let’s go through it together in this thread.

First, diversity trainers informed white participants that “objectivity,” “individualism,” “intellectualization,” and “comfort” are all vestiges of internalized racial oppression.

Sometimes both sides of the coin are “oppression.”

Are white employees speaking too much? That’s probably the internalized racial superiority of “imposition” or “paternalism.”

Are white employees speaking too little? That’s oppression, too, because “silence” is “violence.”

What’s next?

The City of Seattle diversity trainers encourage white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism” and work on “undoing your own whiteness.”

What happens after the thought exercises? It’s time to DO THE WORK.

The trainers ask white employees to “let go” of “comfort,” “guaranteed physical safety,” “control over the land,” “social status,” and “relationships with some other white people.”

Then they go through a flow chart that outlines how white people “cause harm to POC,” “show up small and inauthentic,” and are unable to access their “humanity.”

In case some people are wondering if they’re “really white,” they pass out a datasheet called “Assimilation into Whiteness.”

Are you of Arab, get lost, Finnish, German, Italian, Armenian or Irish descent? You’re definitely white. No getting out of this.

As @DrKarlynB first reported, the invitation for this training was strictly segregated to “white City employees.”

The goal is to teach them how they have “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and must be held “accountable to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.”

How do you know when you’ve successfully “interrupted your whiteness“?

–When you “implicate yourself” in racism.
–When “other white people may be angry.”
–When you have stopped your “white normative behavior.”

 

 

h/t CrsCrpr