by Barbara Beckwith

Article appearing on Cambridge Center For Adult Educations’ blog

I stand up straighter because of a CCAE body workshop, converse in French with the help of CCAE conversation classes, and am a well-published writer in part because of the encouragement of CCAE teachers like Mopsy Strange Kennedy.

That’s why, when I got active in National Writers Union’s diversity committee as a white ally, I signed up for the Center’s “White People Challenging Racism: Moving From Talk to Action” (WPCR) course. I was attracted by the title’s focus on action and saw the course as an opportunity to work through various negative media stereotypes rolling around in my brain.

I worried a bit that such a course would be all about blame and shame, but it was not. Instead, it made clear that white people benefit from racial inequities that persisted long after the end of slavery and Jim Crow. World War II internment camps that forced Japanese Americans to sell their homes for a pittance; boarding schools, and allotment policies that broke up Native families and communities, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the “guest worker” program that exploited and then expelled Mexican agricultural workers, and a post- World War II G.I. bill that created all-white suburbs, cutting people of color out of home equity, access to college education, and job protections. Today, unequal systems persist via racial profiling, school re-segregation, mass incarceration, restrictions on immigrants and refugees, and voter suppression.

Since I didn’t ask for my white skin privileges, I don’t feel guilty, but I do feel responsible to do something about inequities and about the constant slights that people of color still face from the unconscious bias of people like me: like papercuts, they look slight, but sting like crazy.

I was impressed that the Center’s program coordinator, Tracy Gibbs, had been the impetus for the class back in 1999. She asked Jennifer Yanco to create such a class and CCAE director Jim Smith felt strongly that it was both needed and should be affordable. So the Center has always offered it at a significantly reduced rate. It’s now held four times a year, led by rotating co-facilitators, each of whom first took and now co-lead it.

I was so energized the first time I took White People Challenging Racism that I took it a second time, and then was asked to co-facilitate. The facilitator group was all white until 2012, when participants of color have joined the steadily expanding group.

We developed a 10-hour course that combined reflection, practice, and commitment to action. In all five sessions, we reflect on our “implicit biases” and how to undo them. We acknowledge how racism affects us. We read short articles, view videos, share everyday situations and practice what to say when we hear offensive remarks by a friend, boss, stranger, or family member. We “call in” instead of “calling out.”

Our evolving group of facilitators helps the course itself evolve. Early classes found inspiration in Peggy McIntosh’s “Unpacking the White Privilege Knapsack” (1988 essay), and Lee Mun Wah’s “The Color of Fear” (1994 documentary), while current classes are inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” (The Atlantic, 2016), former WPCR facilitator Debby Irving’s memoir Waking Up White (2014), and Norma Johnson’s “A Poem for My White Friends — I Didn’t Tell You” (YouTube).

People of all ages take WPCR. The younger participants are surprised by those who are older, and visa-versa, since each had assumed that the other generation was indifferent. Motivations range from personal (a relationship with a person of color) to professional (job environments; teacher/student relationships) to social (finding community with other racial justice activists). Participants of color have included diversity consultants, a college student bothered that she was avoiding her white roommate, and a Columbian American wanting to share the racism he experienced as an immigrant but who also recognized his own prejudice against indigenous people in his country of origin.

By the end of the five 2-hour sessions, each person makes a plan to take some kind of racial justice action in their work places, organizations, neighborhoods and faith communities, as well as in their personal relationships. I found myself pressing my local newspaper to report racial incidents without bias, talking openly about my white skin advantage, and pondering  those images that had rolled through my head via personal essays (What Was I Thinking? www.cddbooks.com), and contributing to theUnderstanding and Dismantling Privilege Journal (www.wpcjournal.com) and the 2016 anthology, What Does It Mean to Be White? (www.2leafpress.com). Other facilitators also turned their perspectives into books: Jennifer Yanco (Misremembering Dr. King), Susan Naimark (The Education of a White Parent), Michelle Chalmers (The Skin on My Chin and The Story of METCO), and Debby Irving (Waking Up White).

After the class, WPCR participants are able to stay connected to the larger racial justice community via Boston-based Community Change Inc. (www.communitychangeinc.org), which hosts White People Challenging Racism (www.wpcr-boston.org), the multi-racial Boston Knapsack Anti-Racism Group (www.meetup.com/Antiracists) and Showing Up for Racial Justice (www.surjboston.org), the Boston chapter of the nationwide white allies group.

The Cambridge Center’s willingness to deal with our group’s revolving facilitators is gratifying, as well as its responsiveness to our suggestions re: staffing diversity and website enhancements (www.ccae.org/about) so that immigrant and Black historical aspects of its buildings are featured.

As teacher and WPCR participant Lavette Coney writes: when she’s asked “Why does everything have to be about race?” she responds: “Because it is.  Race is a social construct that affects everyone and everything we do. Racism continues to be the biggest unresolved issue in our society.”