and mental health counselor working in private practice ok very good very good so you can do some hopefully some surgical work on this breaking white silence and hope fifteen hold difficult conversations dash ways ok and out of that sesame kaplan who's the director of the senior center at the piano and karen schneider who's a longtime community activist decided to organize a group around dealing with racism and especially people with more progressive values so she invited me and so in some ways it's the whole group is just it's a small affinity group that's the organizing but the whole process is called of sort of one of invitation ok i wanted to say a couple things ally but the best thing you can do is go back to your community and talk to white people and change their hearts and minds ok so karen really took this as a as a call  and so right from the beginning that's been our purpose and the name comes we chose her name and our very first organizing meeting which was in november of tw synagogues to study a book by anti racist educator robert d'angelo ok and the book is called what does it mean to be white and it's a it's a  was a facilitator at the beginning of one of these study groups so that's how that's kind of the former using a broker paul would like to add to the oh yeah you know it's a it's a pretty involved book and it's it's it needs to be involved because i think because the level of understanding i mean this notion of developing white racial literacy is such was such a high need that meaning there is just so little understanding of racial dynamics among white people so they just have to be like there's a lot we have to get and so it's kind of a textbook almost and so we decided to take it really seriously and and so we these groups are you know usually between five and seven different meeting periods for almost two hours or so and then there's you know quite a bit of reading in the middle and so that we try to really stay pretty close and pretty disciplined about the learning process partly because the one of the things we're trying to break is the attitude that white people know very much about  race and so we're trying to actually get a much more open attitude about what what we know and what we especially don't know and so a lot of it is just looking and it sort of white defensiveness and sort of the those races we're looking at the way we've been saturated and white supremacy whole right and how unconscious and insidious it is inside of us of making the unconscious conscious and and and then taking action to actually break white silence in situations where it's a good thing to do  disappeared races and would trundle along pretty much deterred it would just go on so that we're real what really dealing with is we don't we're not really addressing it's one of the obvious points if so those are easy points to make about people who are valid races but what happens a lot of times with white people is they think that what that's where the problem lies and so this is why it's so important to address the way that white supremacy  a kind of white progressive culture and less we can begin to understand what it is to be a white person and what this notion of being white is almost as as a property and the idea that white people hide behind the quote neutrality of whiteness as if that's the world that's such an incredibly powerful way to dominate other people is not to identify your own position because you know we know that seattle is considered a progressive right right city right but i know several you know people of color feel well it's progressive for the caucasian right and not necessary might see a few people of color but you don't you don't see anywhere and i don't think their voices are being heard in the technology you know they're trying to do more still in programs in seattle area but there is such a  you look at it and it's just like well all these people have these good jobs but i don't see people of color having that so they're progressing but maybe not you know other hoax right  about developing white racial literacy which basically means white people understanding the structural nature of racism and recognizing  that it's our problem but part when i think that that challenging thing is it's moving really from being a literate to being fluent which means being able to talk about it and that's the breaking white sounds part like you talk about in situations where there's some kind of racism being perpetuated are unconscious bias more like you were saying at the hiring situation room or in our neighborhood it happened phinney ridge which is a predominantly white neighborhood and that people are prone to saying think it's too bad we live in a segregated more segregated city as if as if white people just it just project oh well it's funny the first thing comes to my mind with a question is what folks are not  and and what concerns me and us is that there are so few cents it's a project where white people are trying to educate among white people so that partly so that black people and have to have that responsibility and also have so they don't have to make themselves vulnerable and they shouldn't have to but so so now white people are trying to do this among ourselves  the the low participation of men is really in evidence then so we are realizing as we learn and as we go figure this out that we have to do more explicit outreach to men and i just filled another group that i'm going to be co leading starting in january with a with a mail facilit partly trying to just show that men are partly doing this but also we realize we had to make much more explicit invitations in our written material but also i remember saying to somebody would you pass this on to your i mean i i know that that seems to core correspond pretty well to you know attitudes you know racial attitudes and it seems like some of the more problematic things that happen or among white men particularly so i'm not exactly surprised but it's really noticeable  to well i would just want to say how we promote the group that we do is we have the private groups people who invite their friends and their communities but the public group gets advertised through the finny neighborhood association news letter and so it's they're as likely to be sitting and reading through the course leaves and going through and they have the most to lose when it comes to white supremacy you know to through there's like i think the most resistance and just some extent what robin d'angelo calls the most white fragility which is kind of a very very basically a very defensive reaction that serves to perpetuate racist and right and what does that actually s good there's something about what happens when white people suddenly become the center of attention in their quote a problem in their hopelessness in their in their  s you know oh my god i didn't realize i didn't mean to hurt you there's something about this kind of gigantic response that suddenly causes people of color to feel suddenly now they're sideline again and there's there's something that also says it sort of claims the victim position which you see i see doing i think happens a lot in bowling situations actually it's a real interesting  sort of says i'm the one who's being armed here and and that actually really is harmful and i think it's really harmful when people who have waited for centuries to be seen and then they start to speak up and then the people who have been doing the dominating start to make themselves the center of attention and get all kind of they get they get brittle and they get defensive and then they can start to attack or they can search you know do this wavering stuff it feels like that can actually the effect is that it harms people and i guess what i'm calling that's why i'm calling a bowling you know just to add to that too it's that i think there's some different differences in how men and women express their fragility i think men are more likely to be argumentative and defensive in that particular kind of way but women are often just i feel so guilty i feel so bad and not there's a chapter in robin's more recent book white for jodi that's called white women's tears just sort of falling apart and basic we being unable to withstand the discomfort so one of the things that is a purpose of our project is to help people just develop more resilience and more capacity to tolerate discomfort in talking about like you know saying i don't feel safe you don't feel comfortable you know get used to it you lack people have been feeling comfortable for a long time when they're more nor ties and shoved off to the side and not listened to so the idea that i don't feel comfortable is not the same as i'm not safe and then white people often make the claim i'm not safe and i don't like this comes you know we can see this a lot when it comes with people of color especially african american and dealing with our in our groups instead of calling what we're doing creating safe space we talk about it is creating brave space so that we working to create people's courage and capacity to t ake risks with the understanding they're safe there and they're there white people generally in this culture are safe yes and that the  that save space idea comes out of dealing with people who have truck trauma and this even if it with women who may have had trauma in their own histories our purpose is to focus on the part of their experience that isn't the trauma part it's where especially with women have to move from identifying with the victim to looking at ways they perpetuate racism and that's a that's a challenging thing because one of one of her points is robin d'angelo points is that all of us have had situations where we've been in power we've been powerless or we've been humiliated or we have not had advantages and so it's important for why people don't understand that even though i have been traumatized or even though i've been you know the victim of sexism or classism or something like that i haven't also had to deal with race i have not had that and so trying to learn how to step aside and just say ok in this area i've had all this privilege right all these advantages that i didn't i mean you know that you know the joke about being born on second base and thinking you had a double and that's important to get  i think you just answered well you know i actually have very mixed feelings about it because on the one hand it's definitely on the one hand on the other hand you know on the one hand there is a  a recognition of systemic racism that i think is people are beginning to get in that culture and that's very good and important and  and i do think there's something about everyone all everyone who has thought of racism is being out there looking at themselves it is starting to happen am among pinprick progressive communities and i think that's a good thing but then there's this increase in hate crimes in and vitriolic expressions of racism or that is terrifying and  so i think of it as like kind of a major turning point and we hope that all the people who are doing good work toward it going in the direction that's day is true and in a way you just mentioned something about feeling hopeful i feel like hope is sort of a discipline that it's important to feel hopeful that hopelessness is another way that white people let them off themselves off the because because it's my duty and in a way it's like it's just an important thing to maintain that position but i want to just also talk about that that this period we're right where we have this hopeful side and then of i take a little bit of a hopeful attitude towards that because what's always been under the surface is just now becoming more obvious more patently obvious obviously these things have been going on forever is now the you know really that is that how that window so so that's good but it also i think what's scary is that it can also get white progressives doing this thing where they say see we're not doing that we didn't do that they're not are the bad you know that sort of sense that they're not any part of it and that's where i want to maintain that's why we're doing this group as a no no you are a part of it and it's not a personal thing it's not a personal badness because that's a critical point that robin angela makes which is one of the logics that keeps racism alive among white people is they say a racist must be a bad person and sense i'm not a bad person i race yeah and therefore i'm not i cannot be perpetuating this thing that harms black people or people of color so that dynamic you have to get out of that dynamic you have to say you're you're a white person and it's not your personal failure it's that you're part of a system and the system has been set up to create value essentially to create property and  advantage for white people and it's been going on for centuries and you're part of it we all have to we all have to be part of that and look at that and we all have to use our privilege very good use our privilege and we've got about maybe a minute minute or so when to use it and how to use it i think that's that's the best point is to put ourselves out to to understand that we have to make good use of the this position by challenging racism from as a white person especially directly addressing it towards other white people because it normally just see the negative in society and we don't see people who are trying to make a difference and i yeah i must you know i commend you all because that's a tough responsibility you know to try to get people to understand and listen and kind of you know thinking and and then it will be kind of different thing only thing i would add would be you know just like when young people say well you know i want to be an activist want to get involved again the topic was breaking wide science and it's something that is not discussed you know that often but we're grown glad to see that you know you're involved in a group that is doing that and just keep up the work there and if there's any