In January of 2020, I co-facilitated a two-day workshop on whiteness, race, and racism with a group of white high school students. I had designed the workshop with my collaborator, an English teacher who had long been a partner in discussing racism and our experience as white educators. We wrote that our intended audience was “white students who feel the need to explore their racial identity and become effective anti-racist allies to people of color.” We wanted to look at our experiences of being white, briefly survey the history of race, roleplay situations to practice calling in our white peers, and plan to turn our learning into action.
We had tried before to work with a group of white students, but it never got legs. This time, I felt a renewed urgency for that work.
The necessity of white antiracist spaces
Over the preceding two years, I had worked on a handful of faculty committees focused on racial identity and equity in our school. In that time, I came to see that the onus of talking about race and structural racism at our progressive, independent school fell almost exclusively to students of color.
Every year, the school set aside a day to program student-led discussions about racism and other systems of oppression as they manifest in our community. I was working on the faculty committee to organize it, and I quickly had to reckon with the fact that this day would be the first and only time white students would be gathered in an intentionally white space to talk about their experience of race. As I knew from being in those rooms in previous years, many would check out. Some would just not come to school for that day.
Students of color, on the other hand, would wonder what purpose this one day could serve for them, when they were constantly immersed in this exact conversation. Every other day of the year, in a variety of affinity groups, in their classes, and in weekly assemblies, they were tasked with exploring and expressing racism’s impact on their lives. If their white peers were present, they were responsible for communicating this experience in a way the white students found palatable. And they were doing this work while being subjected to frequent microaggressions, like those documented earlier this summer by the collection of “Black-at” Instagram accounts.
(To address the concerns of the students of color on the day of programming, the affinity spaces for people of color were devoted to “coalition building”, in which students across different racial and ethnic identities could have discussions together. The issue of white students joining this kind of conversation once a year remained.)
This changed my orientation when thinking about race at my school. I knew just enough to recognize the historical irony of people of color having to do all of the work, given that race was invention of white people intent on maintaining their power. This latest manifestation of that system is that race is a problem for people of color, so people of color have to do the work. But this has it backwards: white people are the source of race and racist ideas, and so it’s their work to undo it. To put it succinctly:
“I’m only black because you think you’re white.”
James Baldwin
Some white students, faculty, and administrators would have recognized the dynamic Baldwin names here, but the crux of it was lacking in the general white consciousness of the school community. There were frequent (if uneven) attempts to foreground matter of race and equity in our pedagogy, curriculum, and community practices — but there was no regular, faculty-mediated space for white students to talk about their whiteness, and to build skills to work against it.
It seemed necessary to develop white anti-racist student leaders, who would publicly do the work of calling in their fellow white students, while supporting and being accountable to their fellow students of color. The workshop seemed like a good start.
Our approach to the workshop
That month, I attended a one-day workshop led by the Center of Racial Justice in Education called “Talking about Race for Educators”, and I adapted the general structure and content of that workshop for a group of high school students. My collaborator and I brought in ideas from prior race-equity workshops at our school, practices in our classrooms, and other professional experiences to develop the program. I leaned on my experience as a chaplain resident in hospitals, my training in theology, and my Zen Buddhist practice as well. We prepared to open a space for white students to talk about their whiteness. We also anticipated, as facilitators, being vulnerable and sharing our own realizations about being white educators. We were thrilled when seven students signed up, just enough to justify the workshop. We were finally going to make this happen!
Our general structure was to first focus on our experience as white people: in the context of our families, of society, and in the school community. Then we zoomed out and talked about the historical roots of the idea of race in the modern West, and the different valences on which racism manifests now, from internalized to societal racism. With that set of ideas in mind, we read about microaggressions that students of color have reported in our school, and roleplayed talking to white peers about microaggressions they had committed. Finally, we laid plans for creating a regular organization of white students that would continue to focus on whiteness and racism in the school, hold itself accountable to students of color, and plan for antiracist action.
Theological tangent: The Fruits of Confronting Whiteness
This workshop was a powerful experience unlike any I’ve had in fourteen years working as an educator. I was moved by the students’ willingness to listen and to share. There were moments that were uncomfortable and challenging, and others that were energizing and, frankly, joyful.
There is some suspicion about a group of white people having a good time talking about race. This suspicion is justified! The way I’ve made sense of it is that it is a joyful thing to name the truth of your life, and that that joy has to be earned, by acknowledging the harm in which you’ve participated. That joy denotes an openness to what’s new, to a newly found ability to act. At best, what comes from confronting whiteness is an experience of liberation, by recognizing something that has restrained you.
What is restraining about whiteness? It’s obviosuly not conventional restraint: whiteness is something that gives white people power. But there is a cost to that power. There is a sense in which what you’ve gained, what you claim as yours fair and square, was won by brute force, violence, and cheating. That creates an underlying fear that keeps us in line and working for whiteness because it benefits us, and because we can’t fathom what will happen if we let go of it.
But if there’s a space where we can let go of it, if only for a moment, we get a glimpse of what it would be like to not rely on fear to live our lives.
In some ways, this is a kind of once-and-for-all experience: you can’t undo what you’ve come to know, it’s yours forever, and it suggests the potential for authentic connection within yourself and with others. In other ways, this experience requires maintenance, by constantly revisiting and reflecting on your experience of whiteness. Otherwise, the overwhelming flow of the material realities of our lives overcome what little progress we’ve made in seeing and knowing what’s true. Fear takes back the wheel that it’s held it for so long.
However, we can name the fear as a part of ourselves and move toward wholeness again — which is required, ultimately, for right relation with other white people and with people of color. Until we name the fear, the anger, the defensiveness, the dismissiveness, we can’t own it. When we name it, when we own it, then we can let it go and act against it.
The Best Laid Plans, 2020 Edition
At the end of the workshop, we discussed starting a white anti-racist student group to meet regularly. The students committed to having a discussion with one peer about being white at our school.
The next day I went to a NYSAIS meeting of white antiracist educators in New York independent schools (loosely organizing under the acronym, WARE), focused on structuring white anti-racist spaces. This built on what I had learned from the CRJE, and offered something of a model for regular meetings with white students committed to anti-racist action. Because we were in the middle of busy trimester already, my collaborator and I figured that, if we waited for the new trimester, it would allow us to open the group to the high school community. So we looked to the spring trimester to establish a regular group meeting.
The NYSAIS workshop was on February 1st, 2020, twelve days after the first diagnosis of infection from coronavirus was given in the United States.
Of course, as the winter trimester came to a close in mid-March, the arrival of coronavirus in New York City swiftly upended any normal expectation of what school would be in the spring. We returned from break in early April, and spent that month adjusting to a new online reality for school against the backdrop of dreadful news and the sounds of sirens out our windows.
By the end of April, the community had scrambled to some semblance of normalcy, or at least as much as a society-wide disruption would allow. We suspected that we would be online for the rest of the year. Grade policies for this trimester were established, as were class routines. This gave me space to think about the white antiracist group again. Despite the times, I didn’t want to lose the momentum that this group of young people had found, especially since it took so long to get off the ground.
I reached out to my collaborator to try and start the meetings, but she was now working from home while providing schooling and daycare to her two young children. So I reached out to the students, and in the first week of May we began regular meetings of what I was calling OWAL: Organizing White Antiracist Leaders. A small, regular group met weekly through the rest of the year. Since we were meeting outside of the regular school club structure (and because we were all spending hours on Zoom every day already), I limited the meetings to half an hour each. My intent was to keep the momentum going and prepare for a formal beginning in the fall.
In the meantime, I structured things to keep whiteness front and center in my students’ perspectives.
Structuring White Antiracist Meetings
I followed the guidance of peers doing this work in other schools and the professional trainers who work with the CRJE and WARE in structuring these weekly meetings. My priority was on our experience of whiteness, by which I mean we focused on personal narratives and feelings in situations where our whiteness seemed to matter.
This is powerful, simply because white people do not explicitly think of themselves as “white” — they think of themselves as “people”. “Race” is a phenomena assigned to others. Intellectually, we know we’re white, but the relevance is not immediately clear. Naming our whiteness as a relevant factor in our lives allows us to see that we have been treated differently than people of color, that we harbor racist assumptions, or that we have have hurt people of color in our lives despite our best intentions.
Because I was keeping the meetings brief, I imagined the whole meeting as a share, guided by one prompt: “What has your experience of whiteness been like recently?” Generally, I won’t define whiteness for them, but ask them to think about a time their whiteness seemed relevant. Despite our blinders on this matter, our whiteness is a fact of our existence, which means it’s something we can talk about as experiencing.
Three evasions to talking about whiteness…
This task is hard for the kind of white students I work with, and I think this applies to broader population of liberal white adults as well (including me). White students find ways around it, and so do white adults.
We are conditioned to not see race and not talk about it. Race is always something that happens to someone else. And for many of us, raised in good white liberal households and educated by good white liberal history teachers, we have a set of stories we tell ourselves about what race is and who perpetuates racism. These stories have titles like:
- “Racism is what Southern bigots and far-right Republicans do”
- “The Civil Rights movement peacefully and decisively defeated racism”
- “Racism can’t survive where white people are nice and well-meaning”
- “Race is a social construct and so it’s not real”
- “Everyone has to face adversity, but we all have to find a way to adjust”
- “Obviously racism is bad, but these protests/social media posts/assemblies/classes are not productive”
Although each one has a seed of truth, they are so taken out of context that their relevance is distorted. These are deployed in the same way some Christians will deploy verses or even single sentences in the Bible: as a bludgeon to end discussion. In both cases we can call this proof-texting. In the white liberal version of this, race and racism are ideas that fit into a tidy intellectual structure, one that conveniently places responsibility for racism elsewhere — on bigoted white people, or on people of color. And its cumulative effect is: even when race is the topic of discussion, we white people find ways to avoid a personal accounting of it.
If we can sidestep the temptation of proof-texting and talk about a personal experience where our whiteness is relevant, white students and adults will point out what other white people have done, and usually what they have done wrong. It’s an opportunity for judgment on others (and implicitly a claim of innocence for ourselves). Or, if we do talk about an experience we ourselves had, our account will be inseparable from our rationalization of our actions, without a chance to explore what actually happened. This is kind of the opposite of proof-texting: instead of too little context to sharpen our comment into a weapon, we give too much to use it as a shield.
I’m not asking them for an accounting of either right and wrong, or of what other people do, or of bromides gathered from the history books. I’m asking these students for their experience of whiteness. I’m asking them to swim against the stream of their conditioning, to unlearn a subconscious program that insists: do not talk about race, except along these safe parameters, and change the topic as quickly as possible. My role is to support them so they can break out of the routines of proof-texting, judgment, and rationalization.
So: how to do that? How to get them out of their heads?
…and one way to bypass evasions!
One way to short-circuit proof-texting, judgments, and rationalizations, and to keep the focus on one’s own experience, is to ground ourselves in our feelings, in our actual embodied life. So I insist that the students talk about how it feels to be white. Either I elaborate on the prompt to request this, or I ask follow-up questions about what it felt like to be in the situation described. The effect this has is moving past our ideas of things and get to our actual response to them.
Why? White feelings can often derail conversations about race, so why center them here? This is most painfully true in mixed-race spaces where even a comment about racism or a modest proposal to support students or teachers of color can lead to defensive responses from white people. In that case, white feelings are used as a tool to erase the needs of people of color to protect the comfort of white people.
What I’m talking about here is naming the feelings themselves, in a space of white people listening to and acknowledging those feelings as real. There is nothing right or wrong about a feeling. It just is what it is. A feeling can lead to actions that we can judge as good or bad, or as helpful or harmful depending on our goal. Some feelings should be cultivated for action, others should be restrained. But if we can’t even say “this thing made me feel this way,” we won’t be able to truly reckon with what happened or learn how to respond next time. We’ll fall back on proof-texts and rationalization again, instead of talking about what actually happened.
What is required, and what we’re looking to cultivate
Doing this requires vulnerability, trust, and humility — qualities that are rare in your average high school classroom, but essential to seeing this crucial aspect of our lives. The goal of the white antiracist space is to foster these qualities, so we can actually talk about our experience of whiteness, and then address the ways we perpetuate racism. Once we do that, it becomes more clear what action should follow, and when we hold ourselves accountable to our peers of color, we needn’t burden them with these unprocessed feelings.
So this is what we did each week over the course of May 2020. The meetings were modestly attended and felt good. We were treading water, making it through the hardest and strangest term of school anyone had ever seen. My only plan was to identify a handful of student leaders by June who would help facilitate these meetings in the coming school year. Then we could leave the spring behind, happily.
Nonstop 2020, and 2020 is Nothing New
I shouldn’t have been surprised by what happened next. That I was surprised makes it clear why I, personally, need white antiracist spaces. That feeling of surprise is something I could stand to reflect on.
Doubling down on a bit of white myopia, I thought it was going to be “Central Park Karen” who made the big splash the week after Memorial Day. I was so busy reading the news and Tweets about that encounter that the early reports of George Floyd’s death sailed right past me. When I met with the white students that week, one of them talked about George Floyd’s murder, and she was the first person I spoke with who used that word to describe what had happened (in case I suggested otherwise above, the kids who are actually doing the work are just as often out ahead of me). The next night, a police precinct in Minnesota was on fire. The night after that and for the weekend, it seemed like the whole country was.
“Now is the time to talk about what we are actually talking about,” was the headline of an article by Chimamanda Ngozi Aditchie after the 2016 election. The phrase occurred to me that week, the last week of school, because suddenly everything we had been discussing since January seemed plain and clear right in front of us: the blinding and binding effect of whiteness, the long, repetitive history of race, the many layers of racism in our contemporary life, and the need for action.
Our last white antiracist meeting of the year was well attended, and there were several other mediated spaces that the school organized for white students that were modeled somewhat on the work we had done in the winter and spring. I was grateful that I had pushed ahead with the work when I did in April — otherwise, we would have been left scrambling again.
But that’s the thing of it, isn’t it? There is nothing so predictable in our public life than racist violence, than racism’s persistent and consistent through-line in our national narrative. When this happens, when suddenly everyone is talking about race, we need to be preparing for the next time it happens. We have to be marching in formation already, not redeploying every time we’re surprised by the grimly predictable.
Staying Present in the Cycle of Beginning and Ending
So the question becomes: how can we be ready in the new school year?
I think the student work should continue in the same way: I’ll ask students to share their experience of whiteness. With more time in a meeting, we can transition to roleplaying situations to orient ourselves toward action, calling in our white peers, and being accountable to our peers of color.
Having the same structure to each meeting is important to me: as one white colleague put it, we are trying to make a routine of looking for and talking about our whiteness, of normalizing that reflection. We could have read all of the books on the anti-racist reading lists and we could have gone to all of the protests; we could have appropriately and authentically reflected on our complicity with white supremacy many times over. But as another white colleague of mine has said: everyday, when we wake up, we still have to recommit to the work. Everyday, we will still wake up white.
I’ve been meeting with different groups of white faculty and staff across my school this summer to support one another in the work, and their thoughts have helped flesh out what my collaborator and I had been pursuing in January. Another faculty member (another English teacher, they’re the best) joined me to facilitate the white antiracist student space near the end of the year. And two white students volunteered to facilitate the white antiracist students group in the fall, and we’ll have a regular meeting time.
Commitment is not the end. It’s the first step.
