Christopher F. Rufo July 8, 2020
Reprinted with permission from the City Journal I recommend subscribing to their e-mail alerts.
Last month, the City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting “white City employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” a program designed to help white workers examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.” Hoping to learn more, I submitted a public records request for all documentation related to the training. The results are disturbing.
At the
beginning of the session, the trainers explain that white people have
internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to
access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to people of color. The
trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,”
and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and
must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles. In conceptual terms,
the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are
reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are
reducible to the essential quality of “whiteness”—that is, the new metaphysics
of good and evil.
Once the
diversity trainers have established this basic conceptual framework, they
encourage white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms [their]
complicity in racism” and work on “undoing [their] own whiteness.” As part of
this process, white employees must abandon their “white normative behavior” and
learn to let go of their “comfort,” “physical safety,” “social status,” and
“relationships with some other white people.” As writer James Lindsay has
pointed out, this is not the language of human resources; it is the language
of cult programming—persuading
members they are defective in some predefined manner, exploiting their
emotional vulnerabilities, and isolating them from previous relationships.
It’s important
to point out that this “interrupting whiteness” training is not an anomaly. In
recent years, nearly every department of Seattle city government has been
recruited into the ideological fight against “white supremacy.” As I have documented, the
city’s homelessness agency hosted a conference on how to “decolonize [their]
collective work”; the school system released a curriculum explaining that “math
is a tool for oppression”; and the city-owned power company hired a team of
bureaucrats to fight “structural racism” within their organization. Dozens of
private companies now offer diversity training to public agencies. The idea
that all whites have unconscious, “implicit bias” that they must
vigilantly program themselves
to overcome has become an article of faith across corporate boardrooms,
academia, and law-enforcement agencies, even though the premise is unscientific and
impossible to verify.
The endgame is
to make Seattle’s municipal government the arbiter of the new orthodoxy, and
then work outward. At the end of the session on “internalized racial
superiority,” the diversity trainers outline strategies for converting
outsiders and recommend specific “practices for interrupting others’
whiteness.” In effect, the activists have organized an ideological pyramid
scheme—using public dollars to establish their authority within the government,
then using that authority to recruit others into the program. As Lindsay
writes, “the goal is no longer to indoctrinate on what is ‘rightthink’ and
‘wrongthink.’ It is to make the [subject’s] thinking be completely in line with
the view of the world described by the cult doctrine.”
How far can
this racial-justice shakedown extend itself? The new racial orthodoxy has seen
exponential growth in the past few years and has proved extremely difficult for
local governments and elite institutions to resist. The movement’s key
rhetorical premise is designed as a trap: if you are not an “antiracist,” then
you are a “racist”—and must be held to account. Skeptics might dismiss
Seattle’s “interrupting whiteness” training as a West Coast oddity, but it is
part of a nationwide movement to make this kind of identity politics the
foundation of our public discourse. It may be coming soon to a city or town
near you.
Christopher F. Rufo is
a contributing editor of City
Journal and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth
& Poverty. He’s directed four documentaries for PBS, including his new
film, America Lost, which tells the story of
three “forgotten American cities.” Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
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