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No, but we can help you work toward becoming an anti-racist organization so that your future recruitment efforts will be more successful.

We follow the perspective that white-led organizations fail to recruit BIPOC members because of the failure to address racism.   This process is necessary because white-led organizations are latently (or overtly) hostile to people of color (and often many other groups) while being usually entirely unaware. This is unlikely to be addressed without anti-racist organizational change.

If your organization is interested in addressing the root cause of the problem and working toward transforming your organization to become an anti-racist organization, we would love to help you.

Great question! You’re right, language is a vital tool for social change. And yes, the ultimate goal is for the false categories of white and Black, Asian, etc., to no longer exist and for us all to be one human family someday.

However, that will be the final stage when we successfully dismantle systemic racism. This will be when these manufactured categories do not unfairly determine our access to health, income, education, safety, and so many other parts of our lives.

Discussing and bringing awareness to how race is a manufactured system but a social reality is really important to end systemic racism. This is because to fix problems, we need to be able to accurately identify their causes to create solutions that will be effective. Successful change also requires collective participation. Bringing these discussions of how systemic racism manifests within all of us, our organizations, and institutions is an essential strategy because it is the process we use to bring others into the work.

An example would be if we wanted to stop paying taxes, simply refusing to call ourselves taxpayers would not stop the IRS from taxing us. If we want to stop paying taxes, we would have to organize to build power to change the tax code policies to enact that change first. That process would involve lots of talking about ourselves as taxpayers in our communities to bring attention to our cause, educate others, and get them involved.

This is a very common question; thank you for asking. The answer is maybe. We can and will help you answer questions. Still, our approach is to empower you with the resources and framework to answer your questions for the long term, rather than providing you with ‘answers.’ So sometimes, we can and will answer your questions directly or provide you with reasonably specific direction. Still, our ultimate objective is to empower your learning to be able to answer your own questions in alignment with effective, accountable anti-racism so that you can share this work forward with your community.

We would note that in many instances, we don’t have the answers because there are simply no easy answers to these questions. We will always work to provide you with helpful information, but in many cases, our response will be, “We don’t know”. We offer our experience in supporting your process, but we do not have, nor will we ever claim to have ,‘all the answers.

This can be frustrating for many accustomed to definitive and immediate results along a defined path. But a lot of this work is unchartered territory. What is  required is to roll up our sleeves and say, “Okay, how do we do this?” Healing racism is a collective work in process; to engage in the process of inquiry and problem solving of profoundly complex and nuanced issues is the work.

A final note is that ‘I understand systemic racism’ is one of the very sneaky and sophisticated ways white supremacy maintains itself in white people’s collective and individual consciousness.

We would caution that when we think we know something, we actually shut down the very process required to become effective. The process of continual learning is vital. “I already get this” is a red flag, and one that all white people in anti-racist work perpetually have to grapple with.

Thank you for this great and important question! A vital part of the work is grappling with apparent and true contradictions. And is an excellent example of the deep questions that arise, and as you perfectly stated, must be navigated with nuance and care.

Our perspective is that we should vigorously oppose and organize against the Proud Boys and other white supremacists and right-wing nationalists on a political level. However, on a spiritual level, we can also hold their inherent value and humanity as human beings and have compassion for the deep pain and suffering that enable violent hatred as a lifestyle.

In terms of analysis and enhancing our understanding of white supremacy, we can see the deep historical roots of violent white hate groups in the US as an inherent outcome of the creation of race and whiteness. In a certain way, Proud Boy and other white hate groups are tragic victims of systemic racism, as they represent the most deeply dehumanized products of racial hierarchy. Most European ancestors were economically coerced into the dehumanization of whiteness by the poverty of being immigrants. These ancestors (including many of our own) faced the dehumanization of giving up our ancestral cultures and becoming the violent enforcers of an economic system that largely did not benefit them. Several hundred years later, vigilante hate communities represent the pinnacle of maladjusted response to the historical pain and alienation of whiteness and the continuation of the enforcement role on behalf of the wealthy interest that most benefit from systemic racism. In other words, they’re still being played.

However, it is also important to note that white people of all political backgrounds, including liberals and progressives, are also socialized and dehumanized by the same system of white supremacy. Until we are actively anti-racist, we are all still being played to behave against our own economic and spiritual interests.

Yes, while Healing White People is focused on white people helping white people on racism, we work with a network of anti-racist consultants and trainers. For multi-racial teams and organizations, our coaching and consulting teams will be mulit-racial, ideally to be representative of your organziation.

This is a great question, and it involves a lot. First of all, without specific examples of what you are referring to, it is hard to give you a specific answer.

A lot of what is referred to as cancel culture is the necessary act of interrupting and holding people accountable for creating harm, which is an essential part of anti-racism and social justice. In those instances, opposition to ‘cancel culture’ is resistance to healing, as it is an act of defending the harmful status quo of racism. It is necessary to interrupt and cancel racist behaviors, practices, and norms that create harm, but it is rarely appropriate to cancel people.

And, cancel culture is also a big problem. It is a symptom of the dehumanization of racism because it treats fellow human beings as disposable when we should be working with them to understand and change their actions. Cancel culture also assumes people are either good or bad and unchangeable, all of which are wrong and harmful to the effort to dismantle racism. All white people can both perpetuate systemic racism and create harm, and we can all work to dismantle racism and contribute to healing; we can all be wrong, and we can all do good through our actions. The work of anti-racism is to help us all understand that a flawed system has conditioned us to create and sustain harm and that with work, we can all transform our conditioning and do good by working toward healing.

When anti-racist white people engage cancel culture by treating people like they are disposable, it is a performative and lazy attempt to shortcut the deep and long-term work anti-racist healing requires. It is also evidence of an immature state of anti-racist development that assumes that the cancelers have achieved the destination of ‘good’ white people and have no further learning to do when the truth is those that they cancel are where they were at some point. Both the cancelers and those canceled have a lot of work to do. Being an effective anti-racist means we need to bring as many white people into this work as possible, and disposing of people does the opposite. So it is essential that we are fierce with the critique of harmful systems and behaviors, but we do that while treating our fellow white people with dignity and compassion because we are all products of a harmful system, and all white people need healing from racism.

As for white people running around canceling things that people of color don’t have a problem with, there are certainly many instances where well-intended anti-racist white people make mistakes in a lot of ways- by speaking for or behaving as paternalistic saviors to people of color, by being overzealous and attempting to shortcut the deep change required by going too hard on things that don’t matter, and many other ways. Those things happen because they are part of unlearning a deeply embedded system within us all, and they are going to happen because healing and change work is messy.

However, one of the primary roles we play as anti-racist white people is to interrupt racism in our communities so that people of color have one less burden of racism. So white people interrupting racism on our own is an anti-racist strategy that we are asked to engage in by, and on behalf of, people of color. So, while it is hard to say without knowing the specifics of various situations, it is assumed that some of what you are referring to is a deliberate strategy. The next time you encounter this, our suggestion would be to engage with those folks with inquiries.

Thank you for this critical question.

This is one of the most frequently asked questions, and it is a great question, thank you. Yes, it does seem weird and counterintuitive for white people to be talking about racism, but this is an intentional anti-racist strategy.

And yes, we should always be following the leadership of BIPOC-led social justice organizations regarding racial justice. What the leadership of our local BIPOC organizers has asked of white people is for us to educate and organize other white people about racism and for anti-racist social justice so that people of color have one less burden of racism. For many reasons, the depth and nuances of which will be discussed further in other formats.

Healing White People exists to fulfill this request toward sharing the anti-racist education we have learned from our BIPOC leaders so that you can share it with your community, and it can be continued to be passed on this way, all to create more and more anti-racist white activists and organizers.

This is an important question because one of the sophisticated ways our white unconscious programming undermines anti-racist work is that, in our early stages of anti-racist development, we resist working with other white people around racism. While on the surface, this is a logical approach, once we go a little further, we see that this is a manifestation of our conditioning as white people in which we expect people of color to do the labor for us. We confuse transactional proximity to individual people of color with systemic anti-racist change at this stage, and it can be a form of objectification.

What is essential to understand is that this is a nearly universal stage in anti-racist white development because racism operates systemically. Hence, we all have or will encounter this stage in our journey.  Our task is to maintain our engagement to become comfortable learning from and working with other white people around racism.

Thank you for this critical question and the opportunity to address this sentiment.