Last Updated on July 13, 2020
The City of Seattle is hosting racially segregated training sessions for white employees only in order to challenge “Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness”, where diversity trainers urge them self-implicate themselves in racist incidents and abandon “intellectualization” and “individualism” in order to remove their own internalized racism.
The City Journal‘s Christopher Rufo reports that diversity trainers hired by the City of Seattle handed government employees a sheet claiming that “perfectionism”, “individualism”, “silence”, “intellectualization”, “comfort” and “objectivity” were symptoms of internalized racial superiority.
The diversity trainers then went on to urge the white city employees to “[practice] self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism” and work towards “undoing [their] own whiteness”.
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The public records Rufo uncovered also state that city employees should “be willing to be rejected by other white people” for their “racial justice” advocacy. Consequently, they would be expected to give up “relationships with some other white people”. In order to better serve the POCs, the white employees would also be expected to let go of any desire for “guaranteed physical safety”, “social status”, “expectations or presumptions of emotional safety”, “niceties from neighbors and colleagues”, “the certainty of [their] job”, and “white normative behaviors”.
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White people are then accused of helping “keep the system going” that oppresses POCs, by systemic co-option “through socialization”.
Furthermore, the definition of whiteness used is described as very broad, with Italian, Arab, Jewish and Armenian Americans all considered to have undergone “assimilation into whiteness”.
The diversity trainers then notified seminar attendees that they will have successfully “interrupted [their] whiteness” when they publicly “implicate” themselves in past racist incidents and anger other white people to the point the white “allies and accomplices” of POCs themselves become “targeted, marginalized, or experience retaliation”.
The Microsoft Teams training sessions organized by Seattle City government’s Office of Civil Rights were strictly racially segregated, with only white employees invited to attend due to their “complicity in the system of white supremacy”. Consequently, the white employees were expected to be held “accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color” for their sin of being born white.
