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We are a group of volunteers who want to help our families, schools, and communities become more aware and more resilient. We are teachers, writers, business people, and parents. We recognize that being white or passing as white comes with privileges of which we were mostly unaware before we started this project. We recognize that social injustice based on skin color harms all of us.

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Antiracism Actions

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Many people are asking themselves, “What antiracism actions can I take to help?” First, it’s important to realize that the U.S. social system is not broken. What we see in police killings of people of color reflects the expansive and intricate system of dehumanization that colonial-era settlers constructed to support white supremacy, dispossession of indigenous people, and slavery. Like every genocide in recorded history, racism started with dehumanization.

The system is more complex now and supported by policy. However, we, white folks, are the conduit for the system that was built to serve us. When we do nothing it surges through us. To end racism, we have to break the system. We have to see it and fight against it. We need to be anti-racist. There are many ways to break and rebuild.

The most important anti-racism work we can do is hear the teachings and follow people with the lived experience of racial oppression, not white people. This includes professors, writers, activists, bosses, and mentors. See, share, and honor the lived experiences of people of color whose realities are/were clearly different than white people.

Corinne Shatuck published in Medium a list of 75 actions white people can take now to improve racial justice for people of color. Here are the top 20 excerpted and adapted from Shatuck’s extensive article.

  1. Google whether your local police department currently outfits all on-duty police officers with a body-worn camera and requires that the body-worn camera be turned on immediately when officers respond to a police call. If they don’t, write to your city or town government representative and police chief to advocate for it. The racial make-up of your town doesn’t matter. This needs to be standard everywhere. Multiply your voice by soliciting others to advocate as well, writing on social media about it, writing op-eds, etc.
  2. Google whether your city or town currently employs evidence-based police de-escalation trainings. The racial make-up of your town doesn’t matter. This needs to be standard everywhere. Write to your city or town government representative and police chief and advocate for it. Multiply your voice by soliciting others to advocate as well, writing on social media about it, writing op-eds, etc.
  3. More and more stories of black folks encountering racism are being documented and shared through social media—whether it’s at a hotel, with the police, in a coffee shop, at a school, etc. When you see such a post, call the organization, company, or institution involved to tell them how upset you are. Then share the post along with the institution’s contact information, spreading the word about what happened and encouraging others to contact the institution as well. Whether the company initiated the event or failed to protect a POC during an onslaught by a third party, they need to hear from us.
  4. If you or a friend is an educator, buy said friend books that feature POC as protagonists and heroes, no matter the racial make-up of the class. A few good lists are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. And/or purchase educational toys that feature POC, such as finger puppets, Black History Flashcards, etc for their classroom. Use these items year-round, not just in February. The racial make-up of students doesn’t matter—kids of every race need to know American history and be exposed to people from different races, religions, and countries. If the friend is interested, buy them for your pal’s classroom. Don’t be shy to ask Facebook friends that you haven’t actually talked to in ten years.
  5. If you or a friend or family member is an educator, watch or share this video of Neil deGrasse Tyson speaking about his experience as a black student telling people he wanted to be a scientist and astrophysicist. Tyson’s experience reminds me of a black friend whose high school teachers tried to dissuade her from taking AP classes, because, with the best of intentions, they thought the AP classes would be “too much” for her. Be an educator who supports and encourages, not one who dissuades. Talk to educators you know about being educators who support and encourage, not educators who dissuade.
  6. Work on ensuring that black educators are hired where black children are being taught. If you want to know more about why and how this makes a difference for black children, check out this episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast. There are some really good nuggets in there about how schools can support the achievement of black students—from ensuring black students aren’t closed out of gifted programs by using test results instead of white teachers’ recommendations to the influence that having a black teacher has on a black student’s education to the importance to fostering a school ethos wherein black students think, “This school is here for me.”
  7. Many companies have recruiting channels that are predominantly white. Work with your HR department to recruit Americans who are descendants of enslaved Africans. Recruiting from HBCUs is a good start. Work to put descendants of enslaved Africans already hired under supportive managers.
  8. Donate to anti-white supremacy work such as your local Black Lives Matter Chapter, the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, the NAACP, Southern Poverty Law Center, United Negro College Fund, Black Youth Project 100, Color of Change, The Sentencing Project, Families against Mandatory Minimums, A New Way of Life, and Dream Defenders. Join some of these list-serves and take action as their emails dictate.
  9. Support black businesses. Find them on WeBuyBlack, The Black Wallet, and Official Black Wall Street.
  10. Bank black. It doesn’t have to be all of your checking or savings. Opening up an account with some money is better than no account at all. You can use the link from #9 (type “banking” in the Category field) or this site to find a bank. At the very least, move some or all of your checking, savings, mortgage, etc out of Wells Fargo as a part of the divestment movement to protect Standing Rock.
  11. Don’t buy from companies that use prison labor. Find a good list here.
  12. Read up about mandatory minimum sentences and watch videos about this on Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM’s) website. FAMM’s website includes work being done at the federal level and state level. Call or write to your state legislators and governor about reducing mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug crimes.
  13. To reduce mandatory minimum sentences on a federal level, call or write to your federal legislators in support of the bipartisan (sponsored by Sen Lee (R-UT)) Smarter Sentencing Act (S. 2850) which reduces the length of federal mandatory minimum drug sentences by half, makes the Fair Sentencing Act’s crack sentencing reforms retroactive, and expands the “safety valve” exception to mandatory drug sentences.
  14. To reduce mandatory minimum sentences on a federal level, call or write to your federal legislators in support of the bipartisan (sponsored by Sen Rand (R-KY)) Justice Safety Valve Act (S. 399, H.R. 1097), which would allow judges to give sentences other than the mandatory minimum sentence for any federal crime.
  15. To reduce mandatory minimum sentences on a federal level, call or write your federal legislators in support of another great criminal justice reform bill, the Second Look Act, which would make reduced sentences for crack convictions from the previously passed Fair Sentencing Act retroactive, reduce mandatory minimums for people convicted more than three times for drug crimes from life without parole after the third offense to 25 years, reduce mandatory sentences for drug crimes from 15 to 10 years, limit the use of solitary confinement on juvenile prisoners, etc.
  16. Call or write to your state legislators and governor to support state-wide criminal justice reform including reducing mandatory minimum sentences, reducing sentences for non-violent drug crimes, passing “safety valve” law to allow judges to depart below a mandatory minimum sentence under certain conditions, passing alternatives to incarceration, etc. Study after study shows that racism fuels racial disparities in imprisonment, and most of the US prison population are at the state and local level.
  17. Call or write to state legislators, federal legislators, and your governor to decriminalize weed. No, not because black folks use weed more frequently than white folks. Because black Americans are arrested for marijuana possession far more frequently than whites.
  18. Call or write to state legislators to require racial impact statements be required for all criminal justice bills. Most states already require fiscal and environmental impact statements for certain legislation. Racial impact statements evaluate if a bill may create or exacerbate racial disparities should the bill become law. Check out the status of your state’s legislation surrounding these statements here.
  19. Find and join a local “white space” to learn more about and talk out the conscious and unconscious biases us white folks have. If there’s not a group in your area, start one.
  20. Join or start a Daughters of Abraham book club in your Church, mosque, or synagogue.

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Antiracism on Social Media

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Balance your social media feeds by following organizations and individuals who practice and teach antiracism. Social media is a great way to connect, observe, and learn about white awareness. Below is a list of antiracism activists grounded in positive human rights.

Our job is to seek out the teaching, value it, submit to the pain of learning without asking our teachers to absolve us or add our emotions to their load, and know that being held accountable is hard and painful. And we have to act.

Brenee Brown, Facebook, May 31, 2020

A few basic ground rules help white people learning about white awareness. First, just listen to people of color and hear their experiences. Second, accept that your experiences as a white person are going to be very different. This is not about who’s version of reality is correct. It’s also not about persecution. So just watch, listen, and learn with an open heart.

Anti-racism work is not self-improvement work for white people. It doesn’t end when white people feel better. It ends when black people are liberated.

Lizzie Milanovich, Twitter, May 29, 2020

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Antiracism Films and Shows

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During lockdown, take a more passive approach to increasing white awareness by watching antiracism films and shows. There are many great teachers working to expand our understanding of history and racial justice. Here are a few to check out (alphabetical by title).

Films and Shows

  • 13th (Ava DuVernay) — Documentary film: “In this thought-provoking documentary, scholars, activists and politicians analyze the criminalization of African Americans and the U.S. prison boom.”
  • American Son (Kenny Leon) — Dramatic film: “Time passes and tension mounts in a Florida police station as an estranged interracial couple awaits news of their missing teenage son.”
  • Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 — Independent film: “For three decades, the film canisters sat undisturbed in a cellar beneath the Swedish National Broadcasting Company. Inside was roll after roll of startlingly fresh and candid 16mm footage shot in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, all of it focused on the anti-war and Black Power movements. When filmmaker Goran Hugo Olsson discovered the footage, he decided he had a responsibility to shepherd this glimpse of history into the world.”
  • Clemency (Chinonye Chukwu) — Dramatic film: “As she prepares to execute another inmate, Bernadine must confront the psychological and emotional demons her job creates, ultimately connecting her to the man she is sanctioned to kill.”
  • Dear White People (Justin Simien) — Series: “Students of color navigate the daily slights and slippery politics of life at an Ivy League college that’s not nearly as “post-racial” as it thinks.”
  • Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler) — Dramatic film: “The story of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old Bay Area resident, who crosses paths with friends, enemies, family, and strangers on the last day of 2008.”
  • I Am Not Your Negro (James Baldwin doc) — Documentary film: “Writer James Baldwin tells the story of race in modern America with his unfinished novel, Remember This House.”
  • If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins) — Dramatic film: “A young woman embraces her pregnancy while she and her family set out to prove her childhood friend and lover innocent of a crime he didn’t commit.”
  • Just Mercy (Destin Daniel Cretton) — Dramatic film: “World-renowned civil rights defense attorney Bryan Stevenson works to free a wrongly condemned death row prisoner.”
  • King In The Wilderness — HBO documentary film: “A look at the final years in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.”
  • See You Yesterday (Stefon Bristol) — Action film: “Two Brooklyn teenage prodigies, C.J. Walker and Sebastian Thomas, build makeshift time machines to save C.J.’s brother, Calvin, from being wrongfully killed by a police officer.”
  • Selma (Ava DuVernay) — Dramatic film: “A chronicle of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s campaign to secure equal voting rights via an epic march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965.”
  • The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution — Documentary film: “In the turbulent 1960s, change was coming to America and the fault lines could no longer be ignored — cities were burning, Vietnam was exploding, and disputes raged over equality and civil rights. A new revolutionary culture was emerging and it sought to drastically transform the system. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense would, for a short time, put itself at the vanguard of that change.  The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is the first feature-length documentary to explore the Black Panther Party, its significance to the broader American culture, its cultural and political awakening for black people, and the painful lessons wrought when a movement derails.”
  • The Next Question — Hosted by Austin Channing Brown “engages leading voices on critical topics of racial justice in America. Created by best-selling author Austin Channing Brown, Season 1 is now available featuring Nikole Hannah Jones, Andre Henry, Brené Brown, and more.”
  • The Hate U Give (George Tillman Jr.) — Dramatic film: “Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Now, facing pressure from all sides of the community, Starr must find her voice and stand up for what’s right.”
  • When They See Us (Ava DuVernay) — TV mini-series: “Five teens from Harlem become trapped in a nightmare when they’re falsely accused of a brutal attack in Central Park. Based on the true story.”

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White Awareness: Antiracism for Educators

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White awareness is an important topic for educators working in pluralistic societies, such as the U.S. and U.K., were most classrooms include diverse groups of learners. 

The field of culturally relevant teacher education argues that it is imperative that White teachers develop awareness, or critical consciousness, around issues of race, privilege, power, and oppression in order to be successful with students from diverse settings (Ayers et al. 1998; Cochran-Smith 2004; Jordan-Irvine 2003; Sleeter and McLaren 1995). Here are a few resources to get started:

Articles and Books

Websites

References

Ayers, W., J.A. Hunt, and T. Quinn. 1998. Teaching for social justice: A democracy and education reader. New York: W.W. Norton.

Cochran-Smith, M. 2004. Walking the road: Race, diversity, and social justice in teacher education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Jordan-Irvine, J.J. 2003. Educating teachers for diversity: Seeing with a cultural eye. New York: Teachers College Press.

Sleeter, C.E., and P. McLaren. 1995. Multicultural education, critical pedagogy, and the politics of difference. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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White Awareness: Antiracism Advanced Readings

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Learning about the history of racism in the Americas is not a personal attack on white people. No one is accusing anyone of owning a slave or trying to make anyone feel guilty. This set of suggested readings is for people who have done some beginning and intermediate-level awareness work.

These readings will you take your antiracism practice to an advanced level. However, these readings are for people who already recognize that U.S. and U.K. social systems are definitely not equal or equitable because racism is a structural, political, and an institutionalized practice that serves to maintain White supremacy.

Looking Deeply at Whiteness and Racism

Most white people are caught up in this mystified system, where Whiteness remains masked from everyday consciousness. The system allows white people to be blind, not only to their own privileges, but also to their group membership. From this blindness come phrases like, “I don’t see skin color,” or “I’m color blind.” At the individual level, these phrases serve to deflect and confuse the ways in which whites benefit from a variety of institutional and social arrangements that often appear to Whites as having nothing to do with race, such as mortgage lending and school choice. 

What we learned in school about American history is just one point of view, and specifically, it’s the point of view of the white male Christian victor. This list helps to expand and complicate American history since the 1500’s into a better rendering of the messy fullness. Warning, these are not light readings, but they are deeply informative and possibly transformative.

  • 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann (2006). Mann uses science, archaeology, and history to deeply inform our understanding of the Americas before Columbus.
  • 1493: Uncovering the New World Created by Columbus by Charles C. Mann (2012) shows how post-Columbian European settlements in the Americas altered the world and ushered in the modern era of globalization.
  • Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), who is a botanist and citizen of the Potawatomi Nation. She shows how other living beings―asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass―offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten, or never learned, how to hear their voices.
  • Stamped from the Beginning: The History of Racist Ideas on America by Ibram X. Kendi (2016). “Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America – more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.
    In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history.”
  • Stolen Continents: Five Hundred Years of Conquest and Resistance in the Americas by Ronald White (2005). A history of how aboriginal people in the Americas discovered Europeans. White’s meticulous work focuses on the voices, primary texts, and original records of the five nations of first people: the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, Cherokee, and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois to the French). White traces the experiences and perspectives of these five groups from pre-contact to modern time. The history calls into serious question the U.S. and Canadian national founding myths and helps us reconsider these myths through the lens of European “settler republics,” which enacted policies of lying, cheating, stealing, reversing treaties, and murdering to grab more Indian land.
  • White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo and Michael Eric Dyson (2018). The authors address how the emotions of anger, fear, and guilt lead to argumentation and silence, which maintain racial inequality. This is vital reading for anyone who wants to understand how racism perpetuates, despite good people and good intentions.
  • White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg (2017). Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. She exposes how Reconstruction pitted poor whites against newly freed slaves, and how we continue to live with this legacy today.
  • Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt (2020) takes an unflinching look at the history of white encroachment and eventual taking of Creek and Cherokee land during the early 1800s. Saunt follows the money and shows how the forces of capitalism enrich southern planters and northern bankers, alike, and overcame the moral outrage of the time.
  • Unworthy Republic Review: The People Who Profited Off the Trail of Tears by Caitlin Fitz (2020) published in the Atlantic. Fitz summarizes and critiques Saunt’s carefully researched history. An excerpt summarizes the book’s arc , “He (Saunto) follows the money, exhaustively researching company correspondence and government records to show how bankers in Boston and London financed the dirty work of dispossession in collaboration with southern speculators. The result is a haunting story of racialized cruelty and greed, which came to define a pivotal period in U.S. and indigenous history alike.”

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White Awareness: Antiracism Courses

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Take a deeper dive into white awareness through anti-racism courses. This list of suggestions range in level from beginner to advanced. The first two courses are good places for beginners and intermediates.

  • An article introducing the Healing White Toxicity online course.
  • Roots Deeper Than Whiteness is on online course purposed to increase emotional resilience and socio-political clarity. Teachers, Eleanor Hancock, and David Dean designed the course for people seeking self-awareness at a beginning to intermediate level.
  • Undoing Whiteness is a Seattle-based course aimed at helping white people understand the ways that white privilege can be harmful to body, spirit, and mind.
  • Waking Up to Whiteness: Dharma and Racism Study Curriculum. Course materials for collective self-study coming from a non-denominational Buddhist perspective. (Shortlink at: http://bit.ly/29WiTSx ).
  • Witnessing Whiteness by Shelly Tochluk is an 11-part workshop that pairs with a book and blog.
  • WhiteAwake.org is an online platform and network of trainers focused on educating people socialized as “white”. They offer workshops, consultations, and resources for self-study.
  • White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-racism Training by Judy H. Katz. The books presents a group training program, where white people work together in a nonthreatening environment to alter deeply ingrained, often unconscious racist attitudes and then embark on a program of behavioral change. “The six group experiences, called stages, center on the following themes: racism, definitions and inconsistencies; confronting the reality of racism; dealing with feelings; cultural differences; exploring cultural racism, the meaning of whiteness; individual racism; and developing action strategies. Instructions and suggestions for conducting each session are provided, along with recommended readings, lists of materials required, and sources of materials.”

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White Awareness: Antiracism for Intermediates

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How can you become a voice for social justice for all people?

If you have a basic understanding of white awareness and want to inform yourself further, consider exploring the intermediate-level resources below. Remember, developing white awareness and practicing anti-racism is a process, not an event. It’s okay to take a break when you need it and come back when you’re ready.

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White Awareness: Antiracism for Beginners

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What it your role in creating an equitable, diverse, and inclusive work environment?

Recent instances of police brutality against people of color in the U.S. make it harder than ever to ignore systemic racism at work. If you want to know what you can do to help, this website is an invitation to gently wake up to what it means to be white.

Want to know if you are racist? Take the quiz.

This work is not about blame or guilt. It’s about coming to understand that we live in a social system rooted in white supremacy, and white people benefit from that system at other people’s expense. Each of us can take actions to make good on the promise of “liberty and justice for all” offered in the U.S. pledge of allegiance.

  • 15-minute introductory video of Camara Jones’ TED talk on race and racism.
  • Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy Macintosh is an introductory checklist to raise awareness for beginners
  • White Awake by pastor Daniel Hill (2017). He gently helps white people realize they have a culture and what it means. He comes from a Christian point of view. He also explains his approach in a series of short videos.
  • Seeing White podcast produced and hosted by John Biewen goes deep into questions about what it means to be white in America.
  • Race: The Power of an Illusion (2018) is a 3-part film produced by the California Newsreel that focuses on the notion of why race was not a biologically meaningful concept until the founding of the U.S.

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What Does It Mean to be White?

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What privilege does not mean that your life hasn’t been hard. It means that your skin tone is not one of the things making [your life] harder.

— Surinder Karu @SKGEducator, Twitter, May 12, 2020

White awareness means understanding the unearned privileges (White privilege) that come from being white in countries like the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, where whites are the historically dominant group. If you are a well-meaning white person wondering what you can do to help your society become more just for people of color, you are in the right place.

Want to know if you are racist? Take the quiz.

We recognize that there are plenty of conditions that create suffering. These include socio-economic injustice, class systems, environmental injustice, and religious injustice. We recognize the universal nature of suffering. We also recognize that people of color suffer because of their skin tone.

“Video evidence of unjustified shootings of black people is so jarring in part because it exposes the terms of the [unequal] racial contract so vividly.”

Adam Serwer, The Atlantic, May 8, 2020

We are here because of racial injustice. This is not self-improvement for White people that end when we feel better, but an effort to extend equitable liberty and freedom to all people of color. White awareness is an important conversation to have with everyone you care about.

Please use the resources here to inform yourself and compassionately speak with others. More people are becoming aware of historical injustices and the value of equity, diversity, and inclusion in large, pluralistic societies. To be clear, we are not promoting white supremacy.

Antiracism

This website shares many resources to help well-meaning white people discover and learn about anti-racism to dismantle systems of white supremacy, including police brutality, mortgage discrimination and red-lining neighborhoods, and mass incarceration of people of color.

[By] ‘White supremacy’ we do not allude only to the self-conscious [private] racism of white supremacist hate groups. Instead, we refer to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings. (Ansley 1997: 592)

Our Mission

The topics of White Awareness and White Privilege require skillfulness to raise because it is easy to tap feelings of defensiveness, guilt, fear, confusion, or anger. Moreover, the topics take on extra emotional charge in workplaces, schools, and other organizations. As teachers, authors, and leaders in our communities, we are committed to social justice. Our mission is to offer a curated list of resources to help facilitators working in this area to raise and extend awareness of white privilege in ways that are compassionate and ethical. Therefore, feel free to share, cite, and use these resources.

Citation

Volunteers for Social Justice. (2020, May 1). White Awareness. Retrieved from https://www.whiteawareness.com/

Reference

Ansley, F.L. (1997) White supremacy (and what we should do about it), in R. Delgado & J. Stefancic, J. (eds)(1997) Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 592-595.

Notice something missing?

Notice that something is missing? If you have a resource or topic to suggest, please contact us.

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