White Folks Workbook: Week 1
Start Where You Are
How do I know where to start?
Addressing systemic racism as a White person can be intimidating. However, when you learn anything, it is important to choose a logical and attainable starting place. If you're learning gymnastics, you don't start with a backflip off a balance beam. Some people might need to start with walking across a balance beam holding someone's hand, while others might be ready to try a cartwheel on the floor. Therefore, it is important to figure out your mental and emotional readiness for this work before you dive in headfirst to taking action.
The work of anti-racism for White folks takes a lot of honest self-reflection and humility. It requires you to abandon the need to be perfect, successful, important, and right. The first uncomfortable step is to take a hard look at your mindsets and actions to figure out where you're starting.
Reflecting on Your Starting Place
On this page, I will provide you with two frameworks for assessing your racial awareness and actions. You can start this work on your own through the activities below, but it helps to do this work alongside others.
The first framework asks you to examine the development of your racial identity as a White person in a White supremacist society. The second suggests you explore the level of impact of your anti-racist actions and accountability as a White person.
Derald Wing Sue's model below acknowledges that almost immediately in our socialization, White children integrate the idea that physical racial differences reflect other important differences. Therefore, our racial identity awareness is built by learning the mentality of White supremacy, then unlearning it, and finally relearning an anti-racist worldview. This model acknowledges many of the impediments White folks face in the course of reeducation.
Do the Work! Reflect on Your Phases of White Racial Identity
In a journal or in conversation with another White person doing this work, ask yourself:
What phase(s) am I currently experiencing in the development of my racial identity?
What phase was I in before the protests began this year? Have I made growth in that time?
When confronted with my own bias or mistakes, do I revert to an earlier phase?
How accurately am I assessing myself? Did I place myself where I am at my best or where I am most often? Are my pride, perfectionism, or need for validation preventing me from placing myself in the phase I am actually experiencing?
Britt Hawthorne's work (join her Patreon for more of the great work she's doing), which incorporates and expands on the work of many other scholars and activists including Dr. Bettina Love, demonstrates progressive stages of accountability. Many White folks start before this continuum begins, with performative allyship and other misguided attempts at allyship. Once White folks have truly committed to anti-racist work, they often begin as active allies. The work to become an accomplice or co-conspirator requires giving up time, energy, and power, while learning to leverage your privilege for others by taking big risks. Dr. Bettina Love covers the difference between being an ally and being a co-conspirator powerfully in this video. In order to be a co-conspirator, you must have built an anti-racist lifestyle plan that will sustain your work over time and in all venues of your life. For many White folks, the types of actions we take may vary on this spectrum from moment to moment and in different contexts.
Do the Work! Reflect on Your Stages of Accountability
In a journal or in conversation with another White person doing this work, ask yourself:
What stage do most of my day-to-day anti-racist actions embody?
Does the stage I'm in vary depending on where I am (work, school, with friends or family)?
If I view myself as a co-conspirator, what risks am I taking to leverage my privilege to impact systemic racism? If I'm struggling to think of risks I'm taking, is my self-identification correct?
How accurately am I assessing myself? Did I place myself where I am at my best or where I am most often? Are my pride, perfectionism, or need for validation preventing me from placing myself in the phase I am currently experiencing?
Using Your Reflection to Do the Work Where You Are
Because White supremacist culture is a culture of perfectionism, urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, fear of open conflict, paternalism, either/or thinking, and right to comfort (among others things, as named by Tema Okun in the must-read for White folks article "White Supremacy Culture"), the most vital first step is honest self-reflection. If you cannot truly identify where you are beginning, you will miss important parts of your own reeducation. Many White folks are in a rush to become anti-racist immediately so they aren't "part of the problem," but skimming past important parts of this development will result in unintended harm.
Do the Work! Take the First Steps to Figure Out Where to Start YOUR Work
After you have reflected on yourself using the above frameworks, take a week to study yourself honestly.
Keep an account of your actions and thinking this week.
What anti-racist actions did you take and where do they fall on the stages of accountability?
What are your thoughts and feelings this week and how do they reveal your phase in racial identity?
Get into some uncomfortable conversations or journaling prompts and see what underlying feelings, ideas, mindsets, and assumptions are revealed. Re-assess yourself using these two tools afterward and assess your own accuracy from before.
Additional Resources for the Week
The following are good supplements to the work you did above, if you are looking to dig deeper into this topic.
Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence by Derald Wing Sue
Britt Hawthorne's Patreon (lots of great information and workshops)
"What Can I Do to Be an Advocate for Real Justice?" from Passion and Power (Michelle Nicole)
Interested in Doing More of This Work?
The activities and materials on this page were created for the Anti-Racism Every Day White Allyship Discussion Group and were completed together in a virtual discussion. All are welcome to join us to continue this work and benefit from the power of collective reflection and discussion.