White People Challenging Racism
MOVING FROM TALK TO ACTION
About Us
White People Challenging Racism: Moving from Talk to Action is an antiracism workshop focusing on the role of White people in challenging and dismantling racism.
The workshop, created in Cambridge, MA, in 1999, operates on the premise that anti-racism work is the obligation of all White people. It is designed and facilitated by a diverse group of everyday people committed to support others who want to take action to dismantle racism. Membership in the group changes as new people come in and others step back to take on new challenges.
WPCR has not incorporated as a non-profit, preferring to retain its grassroots identity and avoid the administrative and financial obligations of the non-profit world. Our fiscal sponsor is Build Up, Inc. (BUI), a capacity building firm founded by a woman of color that specializes in "brave projects and concepts."
Why White People Challenging Racism?
In the United States today, structural racism pervades all our major institutions, and power continues to be concentrated among White people. This reality betrays our nation’s founding principle of liberty and justice for all. While White people today did not have a hand in creating or institutionalizing racism, all of White society benefits from and is complicit in the continuation of such institutions.
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We believe that all people who value social justice must work to dismantle these systems if equal opportunity is to prevail. We take our cue from Malcolm X’s famous words of advice that white people need to fight racism in their own communities. WPCR was founded to provide people with tools and resources to challenge and change attitudes, policies, and practices that perpetuate racism.
“What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, White institutions maintain it, and White society condones it.”