About Us

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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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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