Charting the Uncharted Path

What happened when a group of white educators met weekly during a pandemic year to talk about whiteness

A Quick Review: Why We Need White Antiracist Learning Spaces

White antiracist learning spaces can be, as my 12-year-old might say, triggering and cringey. For many white people, the process can feel like going backward. People often protest, “But we’ve worked so hard to create inclusive communities, to get away from segregation!” Others ask, “Doesn’t putting white people together like this signal some kind of white power message? Shouldn’t we be talking with people of color?” These reactions are visceral. And I get it. We want to believe that we live in a world that’s inclusive and equal. Many of us were taught that talking about race only divides us further. We were taught that talking about race is, well, racist.  

Not only do white people need to engage in conversations about race, but we also need some of this antiracist work to happen without people of color. When it comes to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice work, white people have leaned too heavily on people of color. Not only have we routinely asked people of color to be our guides and teachers, but we’ve also harmed them through our own process of learning. For white folks, increasing our racial awareness is a bumpy and often clumsy process. As we learn how whiteness works, we often have aha moments that come out in all kinds of messy ways. And when people of color are asked to bear witness to these moments, it can amount to a kind of piling on for them. Living in a racialized world and working in schools built on the foundations of white supremacy is already a tremendous burden for our colleagues of color. Taking time to build our racial literacy in white antiracist learning groups is one way we can lessen the burden our colleagues are so often asked to carry. 

Certainly, we need to do our own racial identity work so that we can be better colleagues, but perhaps most importantly, we must do it for our students. As white educators, our lack of racial fluency has a powerful, albeit often silent, impact on the children we teach. Through regular modeling, we teach our students that it is not okay to talk about race and that they should, in fact, run from any such conversation. While most students of color, out of a necessity, have conversations about race at home to learn about the world they live in, white parents rarely talk to their children about race. As a sixth-grade teacher, I often heard white students denounce peers as racist for something as insignificant as asking for the black marker. They’d already learned that the best defense is a good offense, that deflecting any real dialogue about race is the only option. Before I did my own racial identity work, not only did I let students get away with these kinds of comments, I also didn’t have the confidence or skills to care for my students of color who were being asked to navigate a school steeped in white culture and norms. It was only after I became comfortable talking about race myself, primarily through my participation in antiracist learning spaces for white educators, that I had the fortitude and skills I needed to disrupt racialized moments in my classroom. It was only after I’d begun to see how talking about my own whiteness was in fact a positive experience that I was able to engage my students in productive and healthy conversations about race. 

Finally, antiracist learning spaces are helpful because white folks are usually more willing to talk honestly about race with fellow whites. Not only do these groups protect people of color from our clumsy process, but they also allow us to be authentic about what we’re coming to understand. Robin DiAngelo dedicates an entire chapter in her book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, to the concept of the good/bad binary. This is the idea that white people, in conversations about race, are often out to prove that we’re on the right side of justice. We really want people, especially people of color, to know that we’re not racist. But when we spend our energy defending our character, we are not doing the work of antiracism. Furthermore, it shouldn’t be upon people of color to call us on our performative behaviors. 

Essentially, the majority of white folks today need to get together to unlearn whiteness in ways that don’t harm people of color and that don’t allow us to stand to the side pretending we’ve got it all figured out. 

Traveling an Uncharted Path: What Happened in Those Weekly Meetings 

For years, I’ve led and participated in groups for white people in pursuit of antiracist work. While these groups have been engaging and certainly worthwhile, they’ve mostly been one-offs or infrequent. I was curious about what would happen when white people met regularly over time to talk about whiteness and antiracism. As we know, 2020 was a year like no other. Just before the nation came to a grinding halt, I had begun coaching a young, white woman who had joined our school to teach kindergarten. Immediately, we’d connected over our shared desire to focus on the impact of whiteness in our school. I’d been wanting to re-engage a group for white educators that had met years before and she was just the right person to partner with me. But just as we were ready to launch, COVID was upon us and the school closed its doors. Despite the unknowns, we decided to press on. We’d shift our meetings to Zoom and see who showed up. 

At the first few meetings, attendance hovered around ten people. We used Anneliese Singh’s book, The Racial Healing Handbook, as a guide and began doing the work of unpacking our whiteness step by step. And then, on May 25th, George Floyd was murdered. At the next meeting, a week after Mr. Floyd’s killing, 35 people showed up, almost the entire white faculty and staff at our school. As it turned out, attendance at that meeting mirrored what was happening across the country. White people wanted to talk about racism. There was an urgency, an energy that propelled a lot of white folks to engage in conversations they’d previously put off or avoided altogether. But then the school year ended. 

In September, we were back to averaging around ten people. It was discouraging to see the drop-off in participants. But we pressed on, committed to those who continued to show up. Each week, a variation of a core group of people popped into our Zoom screens. There were the regulars. There were some who came half the time. Occasionally a person would show who we hadn’t seen in months. Yet there was enough consistency that we began to feel a camaraderie, a shared purpose. The more people talked, the more open people became. My co-facilitator and I did our best to model vulnerability with our own whiteness. We did our best to bring in voices, topics, theories, and questions we thought would advance our conversations. Sometimes things fell flat. Sometimes we rambled. Sometimes people cried. Sometimes it just felt awkward. But people kept coming and that was invigorating in a way I hadn’t expected.

The week after the Capitol riots, we began the meeting with an open check-in, and it became clear to me that our exploration of whiteness was making us consider things in new ways. The questions were deeper: What did it mean that the people who stormed the Capitol were predominantly white? Was it okay for us to distance ourselves from them completely? Could we just write them off as extremists who had nothing to do with us? A few months earlier, I believe many of us would have said we had nothing in common with the rioters. We would have othered these people with ease and enacted some version of the good/bad binary. But now, instead, we sought to understand how we connected to this story. We wondered how to think about our own whiteness in relation to those we saw inside the Capitol carrying Confederate flags and wearing Camp Auschwitz T-shirts. We weren’t them, but we were white and, thus, a part of a racist history and system that had made thousands of people act out in such heinous ways. It felt complicated to wrestle with these new kinds of questions, but mostly in a way that felt like progress for our group.

In February, a music teacher who came regularly burst out in the middle of a conversation about Black History Month and the many pitfalls of teaching students of color in mostly white classrooms, “How can I ever be a good person and also be white?” She threw her hands up in frustration. None of us stepped in to reassure her. Instead, her words washed over us, and I believe we all felt them in our bodies. She was naming a shared feeling. At that moment, with that one sentence, we realized that this journey was, if anything, getting harder. And although I’d been learning about my racial identity for some time, I shared the group’s feeling of heaviness because I know that once we shrug off the defensive tactics, the braced body, the performative actions, we’re forced to really sit with how whiteness operates. But I also know that this is when the real work begins. A major component of white identity is denial of one’s impact, one’s complicity in a system of oppression. It’s only once we decide to reject this complicity, that we can begin to disrupt the system. 

After each meeting, my co-facilitator and I would debrief and talk about where to go next. We tried to balance the personal with the systemic, the somatic with the intellectual. There was a circular aspect to our conversations, but perhaps this was inevitable. After all, we’d spent most of our lives becoming racialized as white. A direct path to undoing this seemed far-fetched. Yet for the most part, people remained engaged. We noticed, with pride, how they became increasingly comfortable talking about their feelings, their biases, their whiteness, no longer distancing themselves from the topics as many had done in the first meetings. 

Then, in mid-April, just about a year after our inaugural meeting, a restlessness arrived. It came on the heels of the increased comfortability. It wasn’t everyone and it wasn’t even an obvious shift. But I felt it. At the end of a meeting, a regular attendee noted with dismay that she wasn’t uncomfortable coming to meetings anymore. Wasn’t this group supposed to bring her discomfort each week? Another regular commented that she felt she’d reached a plateau. I listened, but I was churning inside. I felt a defensiveness creep into my chest. It wasn’t my job to make participants uncomfortable, was it? What were they doing on the other six days of the week to challenge themselves? 

In the remaining sessions, my co-facilitator and I addressed the restlessness head-on. We asked for even more feedback. We asked the group to think about what an expectation of discomfort from the meetings meant in the context of whiteness. Was it achievement-oriented? Individualistic? Were people relying on the group to check a to-do box? “Look at us, we go to an antiracist group for white people and get vulnerable for an hour a week!” Afterall, the good/bad binary is a powerful pitfall. As facilitators, we asked these questions with genuine curiosity because we too were in uncharted territory. We had to check our own egos. We reminded ourselves, and the group, that whiteness wasn’t something to conquer or to accomplish. We weren’t the captains of a ship we could bring to port at the end of a long journey. That urgency for this group to reach a destination was whiteness itself making noise. For me, the ongoing nature of this group only solidified my belief that antiracist work with white folks must be messy. There is no end. There is no resolution. There is no port. In some ways, that’s the hardest part. 

Summer Reflections and Why I’ll Keep Going

At times during the year, it was hard to tell what was shifting. As a facilitator, my inner critic often drowned out the moments of growth. But now, with the slower days of summer and time to read participant feedback and reflect on this fifteen-month journey, I’m able to see the positive impacts more clearly. 

Teachers who participated in the group began to interrupt moments when students made jokes about race or racism. They questioned curriculum and resources they’d taught, sometimes for years, without any previous concern. A development staff participant began thinking deeply about hiring practices, asking what ways whiteness is embedded in the school’s process. After all, we know that there’s a long history of implicit bias in hiring practices in all sectors. Why would schools be any different? A senior administrator told an audience of white parents that while their children might feel uncomfortable learning about race, the answer isn’t to stop teaching about race. Rather, the answer is to facilitate them thoughtfully through the learning. The music teacher talked openly with her fifth-grade students about what happened when her teenage son found a gun in the woods and called the police for help. She told her students about the conversation she’d had with her son about how his whiteness had allowed him to feel safe seeking help from the police without a second thought, and then she made space for the class to share reactions and questions. These are the pathways that an antiracist, white learning space can open.

This coming academic year, new people will join the group and they will each be at their own place in their racial identity development. I’ll also have a new co-facilitator as the kindergarten teacher has moved away. I know that the conversations will be different, but also the same. I know we’ll have moments that feel performative. Sometimes I’ll ramble and sometimes plans will fall flat. But I also know that I’ll show up every week ready to try again. I’ll do this because, ultimately, I find it hopeful — because in the messiness, there is growth. In the messiness, we make changes. When we choose to gather in these spaces, to explore how whiteness functions, we work against white supremacy culture; we reject the complicity it asks of us. As with so many aspects of whiteness, it’s a choice to confront our racial identity. But when we do, if we stick with it, we begin to see that dismantling the impacts of whiteness is a surprisingly hopeful and invigorating endeavor.

Liza Gleason is an instructional coach for teachers focused on equity literacy and a graduate student at Mills College. 

Author’s Note: For further reading on white, antiracist learning spaces, Ali Michael and Mary Conger offer an excellent synopsis as well as helpful tips for running a white, antiracist group.