Resources to acommpany the book,

Tools for Becoming a White Antiracist Educator

by Jack C. Straton (email Jack)

<https://white-antiracist-tools.jackstraton.com/public_html/tools.html>

Chapter 1: A Group-work Survival Guide

Link to the Process Guidelines for Group Meetings, Roles for Supporting a Group, Roles for Sabotaging a Group

Chapter 2: Moving Beyond Guilt to Action

Dear Readers, Please see the note at the start of Chaper 10, below.

Link to the Racial Intervention Story Exchange

You are invited to read these stories and pass them on to students, workshop participants,and colleagues, and all are warmly invited to contribute their own stories.

Chapter 3: If You Can Only Spare 75 minutes (Confronting 21st Century Racism)

Link to Kiri Davis' documentary showing that Black children as young as 5-7 have internalized a preference for White dolls over Black dolls “A Girl Like Me.”

Link to a video clip showing White bias in White children from four schools in the greater New York area and four in Georgia, shown in May 2010 on CNN’s Anderson Cooper

Link to the Monday, May 17, 2010 full initial broadcast segment on CNN and the correxponding full transcript and second half

Parents respond on the Tuesday, May 18 show, with transcript as do professionals on the Wednesday, May 19 show, with transcript

Link to Jack Straton talking about internalizing messages of White superiority on RACE TALKS - Uniting to Break the Chains of Racism, March 2012 - White Allies at 12-37-2015

Link to the clip, Because most lethal toxic deadly racism comes from moral fair-minded people 29_34_09 1_18

Link to George W. Bush's 205 commentary on the FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina, “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job” and a 2015 CNN news piece on Michael Brown

You are invited to read these stories and pass them on to students, workshop participants,and colleagues, and all are warmly invited to contribute their own stories.

Link to delaneyDent to HS deint +15% The Delaney Sisters_ First 100 Years - actors - 53_32 7_32e

Link to Bessie Delaney near-lynching interview with The Delaney Sisters - aged 102 and 104 in 1995 20_36 2_22

Link to The Way Home - Date only Ashkenazi women 1_17_46 55

Link to Tracy Chapman’s song Material World

Link to cwest pdna - think crit in mrket.mpg = let freedom ring bling bling

You should be able to stream Chick Webb's “The Music Battle of the Century” versus Benny Goodman’s from Ken Burns Jazz: Episode 5: "Swing: Pure Pleasure" at 1:15:22 -1:21:26 via your university or county library’s streaming service. Just replacing my Multnomah County Library designation “multcolib “ in the link <https://www.kanopy.com/en/multcolib/video/4934610> with your library’s designation should get you there. I’ve not used it but the equivalent hoopla link is <https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/10085838?utm_source=MARC>.

Link to 1 all american girl - kkkday

Link to 3 lose wt2play yourself

Link to decussed 1 all american girl - kkkday

Link to decussed 3 lose wt2play yourself

Link to What the Bleep - Fat 1_13_12 10_49

Link to an easy, free video editing software for Macintosh & Windows called MPEG Streamclip

Chapter 9: White Bashing: Utilizing the Gender Parallel to Bypass Resistivity

Click here to download the Questions to Provoke Thought

Chapter 10: The Overprivileged Experience

Dear Readers,

As is too often the case, I suppose, two months after publishing this book I came across two articles that made me rethink the language of “privilege” I was using in Chapters 2 and 10. While there may not be anything “wrong” in continuing to use the term in the particular contexts I have in the book, the Zen folks declare a preference for “Skillful means” that one can apply to any teaching situation.

The first article, “A Call to Critically Reconsider Popular Antiracist Activities,” by Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides and Arianna Banack (English Journal 110(4),18–20 (2021)) provides a good summary of why I never use the Privilege Walk: it uses the involuntary discomfort of People of Color to educate White people. I had a wake-up call on this when I was co-facilitating a workshop in 2010. My training partner, a Woman of Color, decided that we should have participants do a Privilege Walk, and at the end one Black Woman participant said “I hate this workshop every time I have to do it.”

But this article made me re-examine whether the Interlocking Oppressions workshop of Chapter 10 likewise uses the involuntary discomfort of people targeted by various isms to educate those who are not so targeted. I believe that it does not and instead is a celebration of the richness of who we all are. And at each step workshop participants choose for themselves whether to declare a targeted identity or to celebrate others who choose to do so.

I would suggest making the celebratory elements somewhat more explicit in the teaching script that you will revise from Chapter 10: “Today we are going to celebrate the richness of who we all are. We all carry multiple identities within us, your sister’s brother or your mother’s daughter among many other such relations. Some of our identities have societal meaning for others, and some of our identities are not obvious to others. This class is about community building and we wish to create a community that nurtures the richness of who we actually are. With that as the goal, we will give you the option of letting others know a number of your identities.”

And a bit later, “If you identify with a category, and wish to do so, you will step into the center and meet the eyes of any others who join you. After a pause, you will turn outward and be out and proud to the full circle. This attitude is the first key point of this workshop. The second key point of this workshop is for all of us to start actively celebrating the varied authentic expressions of humanity we encounter. So as the inner group is out and proud to us, we in the outer group will shower them with the gestural appreciation that deaf folks use: also sometimes called Jazz hands. You can add a grin or a bow or however you are moved to celebrate your fellow students in their authentic expressions.
Then you will rejoin the circle. Silence throughout, please.”

The second article, “A Divergence of Interests: Critical Race Theory and White Privilege Pedagogy [WPP],” by Rayn M. Crowley and William L. Smith (Teachers College Record Volume 122, 010303, January 2020), was an excellent challenge to my thinking on the utility of the idea of “privilege.” As a theorist, I am always conscious of the need to not take my theories as reality without some sort of test, and lacking experimental data, at least comparing it with other theoretical papers.

Among many fascinating points, they say that at times, “the ability to acknowledge and discuss White privilege becomes the action rather than a framework for taking action.” (p15.pgh1.s2) Since I utilize the term “privilege” in Chapter 10, reading this caused me to re-evaluate what the was action for this workshop. What I realized is that almost nothing within the workshop was about “privilege” apart from its one actionable element, that one may use one’s belonging in the majority group to speak to those in power on behalf of the oppressed group and be listened to.

So I went through and stripped out all of the language having to do with privilege and found that nothing was missing. Skillful means would dictate that one not use an unnecessary term in educating others, particularly when that word may evoke emotional responses.

I have long bean uneasy with the word “privilege” because, as I say in it Chapter 10 “[n]ot very many of us actually feel privileged in our lives, so this word is not a very good word to describe what its users intend to convey. It is perhaps best understood by its lack rather than its presence, and it is almost always best understood as relative privilege. That is, if you have worked your butt off to make ends meet, you might get your back up if someone tells you that you are privileged because you are White. But you can ask yourself whether the personal connections that got you your job would have played out the same way if you were a Native American, or transgender, or were a Latina in a wheel chair. Perhaps yes, for you as an individual this one time, but given probabilities for an entire class of people, likely not.”

So I have produced a new set of assignments for you that better reflect what they are actually about and do not include the trip hazard word “privilege.”

I renamed them the “Learning Before Acting” assignments. A significant part of not being in a particular oppressed group is not really knowing much about it (and not needing to know about it), so for Fall term I tell students that “moving to a new level of critical thought requires that over the year you will be researching that group's predicament. . . . I want you to learn about societal power and not focus on interpersonal prejudice.”

In my new set of assignments for you, I inserted some phrasing that has been in my teaching script into the assignment of the Winter term research paper: ‘This is the point at which you begin moving from Learning to Acting, to use the respect you are automatically accorded by those in power to highlight, and acknowledge, the cogent arguments made by advocates and scholars in an oppressed group who have trouble gaining traction in the halls of power. This is also, in part, because members of that oppressed group are deemed to have “a vested interest” in the issue, whereas you have no obvious interest in the outcome. That someone might experience the benefit of gaining more of one’s own humanity through the process of speaking up for justice is seldom on the minds of those who deal in power. [This is very different from the expressions of White interests stemming from WPP that Crowley and Smith critique on p. 14.]
This legal brief provides you with some practice at how to do this before you ever have to advocate for others in real life. As you do move into a real-life situation, bear in mind that neither one research paper, nor 40-hours of diversity training, makes any of us experts on oppression if we are not its direct targets. Thus, we need to continue to learn year by year by reading books and articles by those who are targeted, and in conversations with any targeted people who are willing to help us learn.’

Crowley and Smith also say that ‘WPP asks White students to set aside all other salient aspects of their identity (class background, gender expression, sexual orientation, ability status, religious belief, regional background, immigrant status, etc.) and engage only with the benefits of their racial identity. . . [while] Gillborn (2015) writes that “intersectionality has a core activist component, in that an intersectional approach aims to generate coalitions between different groups with the aim of resisting and changing the status quo” (p. 279).’ (17.2.3) This is precisely why I have always prefaced my (newly renamed) Learning Before Acting assignments with Dr. Muhanji’s Interlocking Oppressions workshop. This assignment gives Black men, for instance, a chance to learn about (and eventually practice in advocating for) women or other groups to which they don’t belong, which will ultimately strengthen their ability to advocate for Black men, too.

Finally, I want to touch on the paper’s assessment that “White guilt and White shame—two common (and generally acceptable) affective responses to WPP—help to punctuate how class divisions mediate the emotional stakes at play in WPP. . . [since they are] more readily available to middle and upper-class White students.” (19.2.1)

Since I have shifted from a mode where I would do workshops in which I would train my students on diversity to instead teaching my students how to do workshops on diversity, I always assign my students to read the material in Chapter 2. Although it contains a section on White privilege, this is included to make the point that since “European Americans often have the privilege of having their viewpoints on race really heard as opposed to dismissed as oversensitivity, it is our responsibility to use that voice for change.” Given that the first section asks students to replace guilt with action, and third section provides explicit examples of actions, I suspect that Chapter 2 could continue to be used precisely as written without falling prey to the concerns Crowley and Smith express. But this Fall I am going to ask students to read a version with the section on White privilege stripped out just to see if it is unnecessary.

Skillful means would indicate dropping it if the middle section makes it emotionally more difficult for White students to connecting the first section -- in which Lauren Nile and I show how “guilt is an emotional trap that keeps many European Americans stuck in a lack of both understanding of and compassion for People of Color [and give them] a list of things to do that, if adhered to, will provide a way out of this trap” -- to the final section on intervention strategies for when we witness oppression, prejudice, or bigotry unfolding.

Best wishes, Jack (March 8, 2024)

Click here to download the updated Learning Before Acting assignments

Click here to download an example of what a legal brief looks like

(Click here to download the original Overprivilege research paper assignments)