Engaging Your White Family About Intersectional Racism

Curious about addressing whiteness and intersectional racism in your family? Don’t know where to start? Feel like you’ve tried, failed, and are looking for support?

This six-week workshop will be led by Amanda Gross, an anti-racist organizer and a weaver of people, ideas, and threads. You can learn more about Amanda HERE.

We will use self-reflection, trauma healing tools, arts and movement, and small and large group work to support you to disrupt racism within family patterns and nurture family cultures of liberation.

Based on ongoing work in my immediate and extended family, I will share tools, strategies, and frameworks that have supported me in engaging with white family members around intersectional racism and whiteness, along with stories of how I have grown through making mistakes and deepening my own self-reflection. As a group, we will develop shared language and analysis for better understanding intersectional racism, have opportunities to reflect on how these patterns show up on the embodied, personal, relational, familial, and cultural levels, and begin to work towards healing, shifting, and ultimately transforming them.

As an introductory workshop series, these sessions are intended to lay the groundwork for ongoing and future further engagement in anti-racism and decolonization. Interested participants will be eligible to participate in a longer format Anti-Racist Family History Project. As an affinity-based workshop*, this space is designed for people who have been racialized as white and who are committed to disrupting racism and other forms of oppression in their families, communities, and within themselves. Participants are expected to attend all six sessions.

*What is a white affinity space?

Affinity spaces (sometimes called "caucusing") are commonly used in anti-racist organizing. For those unfamiliar with race-based affinity work, the idea of racially segregating on purpose can come as a surprise. Affinity spaces help facilitate more honest conversation than often happens in multiracial spaces. For people racialized as white who have rarely had to think about their own racial identity, the white affinity group creates a space for introductory conversations about race and racism without re-traumatizing Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color in the process. White affinity spaces also transfer the emotional labor and responsibility of race-related conversations onto white people as a space to practice these conversations with other white people