Grab your favorite beverage and a journal designated for this experience and please complete the below steps.

1. Complete this survey to help us learn more about you and do what we can to customize the experience to the group's needs.  

2. Read our Resource Guide, which includes our:

   • Our Community Agreements

   • Facilitative Guidance

   • Definitions

3. Reflect on these Journal Prompts:

   • Resource Guide

     • What resonated with you in the Resource Guide?

     • What created tension for you in the Resource Guide and why?

     • What are you curious about in the Resource Guide?

     • What Community Agreements are most important to you?

     • What Community Agreements are missing for you?

   • Your Practices

     • What practices/ways do you use to keep yourself centered and grounded?

     • What do you need to do for yourself when you become destabilized/wobbly?

As preparation for Session 2, please listen to the following:

• Seeing White Episode 1 - Turning the Lens (Listen - 16 min)

• Seeing White Episode 2 - How Race Was Made (Listen - 28 min)

• The Myth of Race (Watch - 3 min)

• The Danger of a Single Story, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Watch - 18 min)

Total prep time needed - 1 hour, 15 minutes of learning plus journal time

We invite you to journal prior to each of our sessions to help prepare you for some of the prompts in our sessions and also to build a practice of reflection.

Journaling Reflections

• What were the main messages I heard?

• What am I curious about?

• How did I feel while/after listening?

• How am I experiencing this feeling in my body?

• How does this learning impact me as a White woman?

• What is this calling me to be and do?

Suggested Resources

What We Mean When We Say 'Race Is a Social Construct", T. Coates (Read - 10 min)

"Race and Racial Identity Are Social Constructs", A. Onwuachi-Willig (Read - 5 min)

Stamped From the Beginning, I. Kendi (Book)

Stamped from the Beginning | Official Trailer | Netflix (Watch - 90 min)

As preparation for Session 3, dive into Episodes 3, 4, and 5 of Seeing White.

• Episode 3: Made in America: Chattel slavery in the United States, with its distinctive – and strikingly cruel – laws and structures, took shape over many decades in colonial America. The innovations that built American slavery are inseparable from the construction of Whiteness as we know it today.  (33 min)

• Episode 4: On Crazy We Built a Nation: “All men are created equal.” Those words, from the Declaration of Independence, are central to the story that Americans tell about ourselves and our history. But what did those words mean to the man who actually wrote them? (36 min)

• Episode 5: Little War on the Prairie: Growing up in Mankato, Minnesota, John Biewen heard next to nothing about the town’s most important historical event. In 1862, Mankato was the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history – the hanging of 38 Dakota warriors – following one of the major wars between Plains Indians and settlers. In this documentary, originally produced for This American Life, John goes back to Minnesota to explore what happened, and why Minnesotans didn’t talk about it afterwards. (1:03)

Also, check out the below in preparation for our discussion:

• The truth behind 'We the People' (Watch - 18 min)

Total prep time needed - 2 hours, 30 minutes of learning plus journal time. Particularly with this content, we do not suggest trying to tackle all the learning in one block of time. If you can do it in a few segments to digest, absorb and journal in between that’s ideal.

We invite you to journal prior to each of our sessions to help prepare you for some of the prompts in our sessions and also to build a practice of reflection.

Journaling Reflections

• What were the main messages I heard?

• What am I curious about?

• How did I feel while/after listening?

• How am I experiencing this feeling in my body?

  • The idea is to also process somatically because white supremacy lives in both the mind and the body. Consider some descriptions of impacts on the body - tightness, dryness, constriction, tingling, rolling, bouncy, heavy, thick, numb, frozen, panic, pain, pulsing, etc. In the neck, stomach, feet, face, back, throat, mouth (anywhere!)

• How does this learning impact me as a White woman?

• What is this calling me to be and do?

Suggested Resources

• To end white supremacy, attack racist policy, not people - Berkeley News (Read - 10 min)

• How white supremacy became part of nation's fabric — Harvard Gazette (Read - 20 min)

As preparation for Session 4, please listen to the following:

• MEN Episode 5 - Feminism in Black and White (Listen - 47 min)

• An Intro to White Feminism (Watch - 5 min) 

• The Urgency of Intersectionality - Kimberle Crenshaw (Watch - 18 min)

• White Feminism Explained (Read - 15 min)  

For this session, we will start in pairs to share more personal stories or reflections. Given this, we are offering a streamlined set of our regular prompts and a few new questions to spark reflection for our story telling time.

Journaling Reflections

• What were the main messages I heard?

• What am I curious about?

• How did I feel while/after listening?

And for our paired conversations…

• Where do you see yourself in this content?

• What do you notice coming up for you (e.g. defensiveness, sadness, confusion, shame, affirmation, guilt, release, etc)? When, where, why, how did those noticings come up for you?

• Can you think of a story from your own life that connects to the ideas and themes that emerged from the pre-read/listens?

Suggested Resources

• MEN Episode 1 - Dick Move (Listen - 38 min)

• What is White Feminism (Watch - 4 min) 

• Why We Need to Talk About White Feminism (Watch - 2 min)

• White Women, We have a very, very serious problem (Read - 7 min)

• Intersectional Feminism - What it means and why it matters (Read - 10 min)

• Scholars thought White women were passive enslavers. They were wrong (Read - 10 min)

As preparation for Session 5, please listen to/read: 

• Seeing White Episode 11 - Danger (listen 46 min)

• What’s in a Karen? (read 15 min or listen 22 min) 

• Watch Deconstructing Karen (1 hr 13 min - this is $4 rental on Vimeo)

We invite you to journal prior to each of our sessions to help prepare you for some of the prompts in our sessions and also to build a practice of reflection.

Journaling Reflections

• What were the main messages I heard?

• What am I curious about?

• How did I feel while/after listening?

• How am I experiencing this feeling in my body?

• How does this learning impact me as a White woman?

• What is this calling me to be and do?

Suggested Resources

Karen is You (Read - 10 min)

Dear White Women, Are you abusing your racial privilege? (Read - 10 min) 

The Trouble with White Women (Listen - 5 min, audio excerpt from the book)

Glennon Doyle Real Talk to White Women (Watch - 13 min) 

Dear White Women, it’s not you it’s me, I’m breaking up with you (Read - 10 min) 

A grand jury declined to indict a woman whose accusations set off Emmett Till killing (Read - 10 min)

Till (Movie, 2 hour, 10 min)

As preparation for Session 6, please listen to/read:

• White Supremacy: America’s Roots (Watch - 9 min) 

• White Supremacy Culture Explained (Read - 20 min) 

• White Supremacy Culture Characteristics (Read - 30 min) 

• 10 ways white supremacy wounds white people: A tale of mutuality (Read - 15 min) 

We invite you to journal prior to each of our sessions to help prepare you for some of the prompts in our sessions and also to build a practice of reflection.

Journaling Reflections

• What were the main messages I heard?

• What am I curious about?

• How did I feel while/after listening?

• How am I experiencing this feeling in my body?

• How does this learning impact me as a White woman?

• What is this calling me to be and do?

Suggested Resources

• To end white supremacy, attack racist policy, not people - Berkeley News (Read - 10 min)

• How white supremacy became part of nation's fabric — Harvard Gazette (Read - 20 min)

As preparation for Session 8, check out the below in preparation for our discussion:

• Seeing White Episode 9 - A Racial Cleansing in America (Listen -29 min)

• Seeing White Episode 13 - White Affirmative Action (Listen - 48 min)

• How Can We Win, Kimberly Jones (Watch - 7 min) 

• The 2024 Equality Index  (Read - selections)

Total prep time needed - 2 hours of learning plus journal time.

We invite you to journal prior to each of our sessions to help prepare you for some of the prompts in our sessions and also to build a practice of reflection.

Journaling Reflections

• What were the main messages I heard?

• What am I curious about?

• How did I feel while/after listening?

• How am I experiencing this feeling in my body?

• How does this learning impact me as a White woman?

• What is this calling me to be and do?

For this session, our Equity Advisors will be joining our community in what we call a “Fireside Chat”. There are no pre-reads or listens for this coming week. We encourage you to use this space to catch up on anything you haven’t been able to do from previous sessions or prepare the pre-work for Session 9.

As preparation for Session 9, please listen to Episodes 12 of Seeing White.

• Seeing White - Episode 12 - My White Friends (Listen - 40 min)

After listening to "My White Friends," find a photo of yourself that illustrates how whiteness shows up in your life and add it, along with a descriptive caption to this deck (examples included)

In addition, listen to: On Being - Robin Diangelo and Resmaa Menakem - Towards a Framework for Repair (Listen - 51 min)

We invite you to journal prior to each of our sessions to help prepare you for some of the prompts in our sessions and also to build a practice of reflection.

Journaling Reflections

• What were the main messages I heard?

• What am I curious about?

• How did I feel while/after listening?

• How am I experiencing this feeling in my body?

• How does this learning impact me as a White woman?

• What is this calling me to be and do?