"The City of Seattle held a racially segregated employee training session aimed at White staffers and instructing them on 'undoing your own whiteness'..."

"... in order to be held accountable by people of color, according to documents obtained by a public records request... According to the documents, the Office of Civil Rights hosted a two-and-a-half-hour 'Training on Internalized Racial Superiority for White People.' In the email invitation to the event, the office asked 'city employees who identify as white to join this training to learn, reflect, challenge ourselves, and build skills and relationships that help us show up more fully as allies and accomplices for racial justice.'... Diversity trainers instructed White employees in 'practicing self-talk that affirms our complicity in racism.'... In order to be considered 'accomplices,' White employees must give up 'comfort,' 'guaranteed physical safety,' 'expectations or presumptions of emotional safety,' 'control over other people and over the land,' and 'relationships with some other white people.' White employees were also urged to give up 'niceties from neighbors and colleagues,' 'the certainty of your job,' and 'accepting jobs and promotions when we are not qualified, including racial equity jobs.'... Employees were taught how to 'interrupt' their whiteness by being 'honest and implicate yourself either in the moment or in past experiences in which you acted or thought similarly.' 'Don’t blame others. Don’t distance. Don’t make yourself seem "better." None of us is,' a handout said. 'You are also white and what someone else did today you may do tomorrow.'... 'Internalized Racial Superiority,' was defined by perfectionism, individualism, imposition, arrogance, paternalism, silence, intellectualization, control, violence, comfort, appropriation, cognitive dissonance, objectivity and 'anti-blackness.'"

Fox News reports. It's not clear from the article, but I think these sessions were voluntary. If they were required, it looks as though they were only for people who "identify as white." A possible loophole. Is it like gender, where you can apply your own standards and go by how you feel and not be stamped permanently by what you were assigned at birth? Probably not! I'm just guessing I could be cancelled just for asking that question.

Anyway, isn't it awful to think that you could be accused of white supremacy if you're into individualism and objectivity?! You're going to get leaned on now for silence and for wanting comfort. And God forbid you should buy into "intellectualization," but hey, wait a minute, isn't this whole presentation of "whiteness" and "internalized superiority" an intellectualization? I know, just asking the question, has me putting myself above that which I'm calling intellectualization — that is, I'm intellectualizing on the intellectualizers. And I'm being arrogant — and arrogance is on the list of attributes of "Internalized Racial Superiority." I'm in big trouble!

I'd like to know who accepted the invitation to go to these sessions (assuming they are voluntary). Specifically, I'd like to know the gender balance of these meetings. If they were, as I am guessing, overwhelmingly female, then I'd like to see some intellectual analysis of whether this training is a mechanism of the subordination of women. And, by the way, I already suspect that it is a device of white supremacy. Why wouldn't it be if white supremacy is systemic?

ADDED: I didn't want to copy too much of the text, but I realized I stopped where I did because I was offended by what came next, the city's idea of "Internalized Racial Inferiority." I can't tell from the article what was said about these attributes, so I hate even to show you the list: "colorism, isolation, protectionism, addiction, self-doubt, self-hate, rage, shame, denial, assimilation, ethnocentrisms, distancing, exaggerated visibility, hopelessness, apathy, erasure, invisibility, 'anti-blackness.'" Is that supposed to be how black people feel or think or what white people think black people feel or think? I don't know what was taught in these sessions, but the list, laid out like that, is very offensive, and I'm not seeing how these concepts can be used in a teaching session that is not instantiating the very system of white supremacy it purports to dismantle.