Seattle City Wire

When CityJournal contributing editor Christopher F. Rufo learned of the city of Seattle’s training session for white employees, called “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” he submitted a public records request and broke it down in a twitter thread composed of 11 individual tweets.

Diversity trainers first explained to participants what the concepts of “individualism, intellectualization and comfort are vestiges of internalized racial oppression.”

The diversity trainers encouraged white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms complicity in racism and to work on undoing your own whiteness,” Rufo wrote in the series of tweets. He also included screenshots of practices that “white accomplices” should complete to “interrupt IRS and whiteness.” Some of those include being clear about who “we are in the world, our unique contributions and our purpose as racial justice advocates and organizers.”

The trainers, who the city declined to identify in the information request, further told attendees to do their own healing work, and to hit “the pause button to slow ourselves down so we don’t react and can recognize when we’ve had our trauma responses activated. This will help us get to know our own patterns, our own triggers, and see them not as WHO we are, but as behaviors we can work to replace with ones that are liberating for all.”

Trainers provided a flowsheet on how white people keep the system going, and even passed out a data sheet titled “Assimilation into Whiteness.”

Rufo was not alone in sounding alarms about this training. Canada's Post Millennial and the Daily Mail have reported on Seattle’s “bizarre diversity training sessions” where they teach white employees to undo their whiteness, as The Post Millennial headlined their piece.

The employees who attended these sessions were given a step-by-step guide to be good “white accomplices” as well. City employees of other races were not required to attend this training, Rufo notes.