Last week, the city of Minneapolis took an unfortunate and harmful misstep by cancelling a series of “Sacred Conversations” that would have given an opportunity for city staff to learn and reflect about the United States 400 year history of white supremacy.

According to the city, they were cancelled because of white pushback to the Division of Race Equity’s decision to offer separate workshops for white-bodied and Black-bodied staff.

Jeff Kolb, a former Crystal City councilmember, was among those who expressed outrage on social media.

Minneapolis is having a series of “Sacred Conversations” that are segregating employees by the colors of their bodies. pic.twitter.com/CV5Ho613Rr — Jeff Kolb (@jpkolb) May 31, 2019

Local media followed suit, with both the Star Tribune and City Pages harmfully and erroneously using the term “segregation” to describe the programming.

This inappropriate and ignorant language reinforces a dangerous falsehood: that efforts to confront white supremacy and systemic racism are divisive, not racism itself.

Segregation has been a key feature of the structural racism that defines our American story: from the legal construction of “separate but equal” to the schools, neighborhoods and services more covertly racist policies have kept segregated—and unequal—today. The Sacred Conversations the city has put off were meant to confront the violence and trauma of that history, using separate spaces for white-bodied and Black-bodied people as a vital tool in that process.

In other words, calling for separate spaces is not the same as segregation has been and is being used in the US; it is respecting the wishes of Black-bodied people in constructing how the sacred spaces will work for them.

Writer and embodiment facilitator Kelsey Blackwell, a bi-racial woman, makes the issue plain: “These spaces aren’t acts of oppression, but rather responses to it. They are our opportunity to be with each other away from the abuses of racism and patterns of white dominance.”

European colonizers built the United States on an economy of slavery and a fabricated racial hierarchy, and white-bodied people’s investment in maintaining the illusion of our whiteness (read: superiority and entitlement to wealth, access and space) is what powers it forward.

In this moment, in Minneapolis and elsewhere, white people are spending that power to obstruct opportunities for folks of color to come together and heal without us.

It’s understandable for white-bodied folks to feel uncomfortable being asked to convene with one another to address racism. We might feel like engaging in anti-racism entitles us to build relationships across race—relationships many white-bodied people lack. The idea could trigger our discomfort with whiteness itself—a category created as a tool of oppression. Too, we are often led to believe that the solution to racism lies in diversity and inclusion—and therefore find it incongruous to create racially separate spaces.

None of us who have been conditioned into what sociologist Joe Feagin calls “the white racial frame,” and certainly none of us raised in white bodies, can know the formula for dismantling white supremacy.

But we can know that the work must involve two things: being uncomfortable, and listening to folks of color.

The call from folks of color for BIPOC-only and Black-only processing spaces is clear.

White-bodied people should consider that caucus spaces for us, too, can be a helpful tool to unlearn our racist conditioning: it’s important for white-bodied people to come together to reflect on our role in white supremacy as one step (not the only step) in healing our society.

If that idea creates discomfort, then we should practice stepping into it. Doing so is an essential part of our work.

Signed,

Mike Alberti

Zoe Bird

Heather Bouwman

Patricia Cumbie

Clair Dunlap

Amy Fladeboe

Molly Beth Griffi

Geoff Herbach

Jennifer Bowen Hicks

Deborah Keenan

Julie Landsman

Kate Lucas

Tasslyn Magnusson

Chris Martin

Jen Manthey

Rachel Moritz

Nora Murphy

Timothy Otte

Carrie Pomeroy

Leykn Schmatz

Mary Austin Speaker

Elizabeth Tannen

Emma Torsz

Benjamin Voigt

Carolyn Williams-Noren

Claire Wahmanholm

The writers are members of EAR: Equity, Accountability, Reparations: MN Writers for Racial Justice.