Seattle Hosts Segregated Class To Teach 'Undoing Whiteness'
Seattle has gone from a summer of love to a season of shame.
It was bad enough the city has been a national disgrace for the better of a month, ever since Black Lives Matter protests turned a six-square-block downtown area into their own squalid, anarchic territory.
The Capitol Hill Occupied Protest wasn’t over until July 1, when the city finally took action in force, but not before two young men had been shot to death — a 19-year-old and a 16-year-old.
Both of them were black — an ugly irony in a “Black Lives Matter” event.
It was a far cry from what Mayor Jenny Durkan had once optimistically predicted could be a “summer of love.”
But that was only Seattle’s better-known humiliation. It turns out, the Emerald City has also been forcing white employees to attend an instructional class officially aimed at “undoing your own whiteness” — which sounds a lot like inculcating self-loathing solely on the basis of skin color.
As Fox News reported, Christopher Rufo, a contributing editor for the conservative, New York-based City Journal, has documented a training session Seattle held for white city employees on June 12 that would probably outrage a city that still had some sense of decency.
In a Twitter thread, Rufo wrote that he had done a public-records request for the session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.”
The City of Seattle held a training session for white employees called “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.”
So I did a public records request to find out exactly what this means. Let’s go through it together in this thread. ?
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 6, 2020
First, there was an outline of what constituted “internalized racial oppression.” For white people, apparently, that included traits like perfectionism, arrogance and objectivity.
First, diversity trainers informed white participants that “objectivity,” “individualism,” “intellectualization,” and “comfort” are all vestiges of internalized racial oppression. pic.twitter.com/qrZwHZgx1H
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 6, 2020
The clearly subjective nature of the material brought logical problems, Rufo noted.
Sometimes both sides of the coin are “oppression.”
Are white employees speaking too much? That’s probably the internalized racial superiority of “imposition” or “paternalism.”
Are white employees speaking too little? That’s oppression, too, because “silence” is “violence.”
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 6, 2020
That was probably dealt with by the employees then engaging in some self-indoctrination, Rufo wrote.
What’s next?
The City of Seattle diversity trainers encourage white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism” and work on “undoing your own whiteness.” pic.twitter.com/CJxNEcIeh2
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 6, 2020
Then came the point where the rubber of self-degradation hit the road of utter abasement — and employees were instructed to “let go” of apparently white expectations, including “guaranteed physical safety” and “social niceties.” (Most people would probably think of those things as being part of “civilization,” but most people don’t live in Seattle.)
What happens after the thought exercises? It’s time to DO THE WORK.
The trainers ask white employees to “let go” of “comfort,” “guaranteed physical safety,” “control over the land,” “social status,” and “relationships with some other white people.” pic.twitter.com/sRZf8gA6Go
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 6, 2020
Here’s how Seattle pitched this Stockholm Syndrome workshop to its white employees:
As @DrKarlynB first reported, the invitation for this training was strictly segregated to “white City employees.”
The goal is to teach them how they have “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and must be held “accountable to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.” pic.twitter.com/kPbppFYDtM
— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 6, 2020
And how would employees know that it worked?
How do you know when you’ve successfully “interrupted your whiteness”?
–When you “implicate yourself” in racism.
–When “other white people may be angry.”
–When you have stopped your “white normative behavior.” pic.twitter.com/7Pv5FvRxm1— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) July 6, 2020
When “white normative behavior” is out. (That presumably includes “perfectionism” and “objectivity,” so Seattle residents better hope the tax collector’s office wasn’t part of this. Or the engineering department. In fact, it’s hard to think where striving for accuracy and objectivity wouldn’t come in handy in city government, but maybe Seattle knows better.)
When “other white people may be angry.” (This seems like a moving target. As the session organizers should guess by now, white people can get angry at any number of things that have nothing to do with racism. Other white people not using their turn signals, for instance. Or black people, or Asian people not using their turn signals.)
If all of this sounds more than a little Maoist, if it seems more than a little alarming to think an American city is engaging in openly racist practices like this, it should and it is.
And a city that has already made a disgraceful name for itself on the national stage just lowered itself a step further.
A rainy climate might have given Seattle the nickname Emerald City, but its politics should be making it red with embarrassment.
The Western Journal reached out to the Seattle mayor’s office for comment Wednesday but did not hear back by publication.
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