The City of Seattle held a racially segregated employee training session aimed at White staffers and instructing them on “undoing your own whiteness” in order to be held accountable by people of color, according to documents obtained by a public records request.
The session took place on June 12, as protesters took part in the so-called “Capitol Hill Organized Protest” in the Capitol Hill district.
One handout distributed in the session reportedly declared how “racism is not our fault but we are responsible.” Another said White staffers must give up “the land” and their “guaranteed physical safety” in order to be an “accomplice” for racial justice.
Christopher F. Rufo, an editor for City Journal and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth and Poverty, said he filed a public records request regarding the training session. On Monday, he published copies of the materials distributed to employees in the session on his Twitter account.
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
According to his screenshots, the Office of Civil Rights hosted a two-and-a-half-hour “Training on Internalized Racial Superiority for White People.”
In the email invitation to the event, the office asked “city employees who identify as white to join this training to learn, reflect, challenge ourselves, and build skills and relationships that help us show up more fully as allies and accomplices for racial justice.”
“We’ll examine our complicity in the system of white supremacy – how we internalize and reinforce it – and begin to cultivate practices that enable us to interrupt racism in ways to be accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) folks within our community,” the email invitation said.
The name of the initial sender was redacted. Rufo claimed, “the City of Seattle has refused to provide the names of the diversity trainers, the budget for the program, or the video of the session.”
“I’m going to keep pushing—because this is exactly the kind of thought-policing they want to implement everywhere,” Rufo tweeted. “The new cultural revolution is being fought via corporate HR, city diversity training, and public school curriculums. When you find something like this in your community, expose it, criticize it, mock it, and reject it.”
