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Seattle Hosts Segregated Class To Teach 'Undoing Whiteness'

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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.”

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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.”

First, there was an outline of what constituted “internalized racial oppression.” For white people, apparently, that included traits like perfectionism, arrogance and objectivity.

The clearly subjective nature of the material brought logical problems, Rufo noted.

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That was probably dealt with by the employees then engaging in some self-indoctrination, Rufo wrote.

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.)

Here’s how Seattle pitched this Stockholm Syndrome workshop to its white employees:

And how would employees know that it worked?

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.)

Do you think sessions like this do anything to ease racial tensions?

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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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
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