Hi. I’m Rachel. My friend, Julia, and I run Cultural Coherence, the organization I started in 2019 to create antiracist resources for white people.
People often ask how we got into this work. As you might expect, Julia and I were raised in politically progressive families of northern European ancestry who went to church on Sundays.
Our elders passed down many beliefs and values around social justice, including that racism is wrong and racial equity is worth fighting for.
And yet, while our families, communities, and educational opportunities were mostly filled with love and care, we lacked clear guidance on how not to cause racist harm, and what it means to be part of our own antiracist cultural community.
What do I mean when I say we cause harm to people of color? Here’s an example.
In 2017, I attended a three-day advanced workshop for clinicians on promoting racial sensitivity with Kenneth Hardy. On day one, a Black clinician pointed out that educational institutions don’t provide the accurate and complete history of race needed for white people to address racism effectively, and that when confronted with the everyday realities of racism, we inevitably become overwhelmed and immobilized by our guilt.
I felt energy rising in my body and raised my hand. I responded by pointing out the differences between guilt (I did something bad) and shame (I am bad) based on definitions I’d learned in graduate school, and stressed without looking at or even acknowledging the Black clinician who had just spoken, or anyone really, that white people can and should hold ourselves accountable for correcting the gaps in our education and learn to address racism more effectively. I felt confident that what I shared made clear I was committed to the cause of the workshop: promoting racial sensitivity.
The next morning, Dr. Hardy started the workshop by asking, “Who went home with you last night? Whose voice was with you when you put your head down on your pillow?” Oblivious to the harm I had caused the day before, I was shocked when the same Black clinician spoke up and said, “Rachel.” She looked at me and said, “Last night you took what I said and resaid it in a way that sounded super white and all up in your head. White people do that to me all the time, and I hate it.” She then asked, “Can you feel me? Because I need you to feel me.”
She was right. I hadn’t felt her and had responded in a way that distanced myself from her and my emotional discomfort about what she said by making abstract, intellectual points. For the first time in my life, rather than attempt to defend my good intentions, I said the only thing I could think of that I hoped wouldn’t cause more harm: “I’m sorry. I will work to do better.” But then I collapsed into a puddle of guilt (and shame!), as she had said white people ill-equipped to address race do.
The next and last day of the workshop I decided only to engage in ways that brought me into relationships with fellow white people to prevent, disrupt or repair harm we caused during the workshop, rather than try to prove myself as a racially sensitive white person. That approach was better received by my fellow workshop participants, and what I learned that day continues to serve as the foundation for the antiracist framework I teach and practice today.
I needed to shift my focus from reassuring myself and others that I am one of the white people who already knows racism is bad to reversing the ongoing patterns of racist harm that my people and I continue to inflict on people of color, especially in the name of being “helpful.”
Over time, the anxiety and avoidance of our racial identity we inherited from our elders grew and we compensated, as they had, by identifying strongly with various political and social identities – liberal, educated, feminists – that helped us feel better about, if not culturally and ancestrally rooted in, who we are.
As Julia and I went off to college and started getting jobs motivated by our family’s strongly held but vaguely defined values for racial equality and public service, we found ourselves in one frustrating situation after another.
Time and again, we’d throw ourselves into work at social service agencies, many of whose missions are to serve people of color, and quickly find ourselves disillusioned by the ways we and fellow white people continue to cause harm to people of color… in our very efforts to be “helpful.”
We needed help.
We lacked clear guidance on how not to cause racist harm, and what it means to be part of our own antiracist cultural community.
Fortunately, we found teachers and mentors to show a path forward. After a period of intensive meditation practice, I decided to return to graduate school to pursue a degree in marriage and family therapy. There I met my mentor, Terri Karis, who encouraged me to explore the intersections of race, culture, and healing and introduced me to Kente Circle therapy clinic and Kente Circle Training Institute (KCTI), where I did my practicum under the mentorship of Larry Tucker. Through KCTI, I met and became deeply influenced by Kenneth Hardy and his work on the different roles white people and people of color have in cross-racial interactions about race and racist harm. A few years later, I met racial trauma therapist, author, and facilitator, Resmaa Menakem, and began to be mentored by him. He encouraged me to focus my work specifically on growing antiracist culture among my people, which I did alongside him in two long term projects within the Division of Race and Equity at the City of Minneapolis.
Out of one of the projects – an antiracist community of practice for white people – Cultural Coherence was born: an organization dedicated to growing a culture I want to belong to by creating antiracist resources for my people.
Many of the teachings and practices of Cultural Coherence emerged alongside years of collaboration with Resmaa Menakem, including our work at the city of Minneapolis from 2017-2020.
After attending the Cultural Coherence community of practice a few times in 2019, Julia Sisson approached me to see if she could help out. She had recently left a job where she too felt disillusioned by the ways her efforts to be “helpful” in the nonprofit world were falling short of her expectations. She was especially eager to learn to move out of feeling frozen then angry and cut off when fellow white people say and do things that perpetuate racist harm, which she now realizes she at times does, too.
Julia has brought with her a stunning bouquet of skills; bookkeeping, tax preparation, graphic design, video editing, web design, as well as a creative genius and wide open heart that make our antiracist resources vastly more engaging and accessible than in our early days.
Cultural Coherence now creates online resources to support, not replace, antiracist communities of practice for white people. Our long term goal is to create a facilitator training program to support communities of practice wherever white people are committed to growing antiracist culture.
We honor the generosity of elders, mentors, teachers, friends, visionaries, and community members. Their wisdom and love has fertilized the soil in which our Cultural Coherence model for growing antiracist culture among white people has sprouted. This includes people we’ve been in close relationship with over the years, as well as people whose written and online teachings we’ve benefitted from.
Terri Karis, Larry Tucker, Ken Hardy, Resmaa Menakem, Elder Semerit, Pat Ogden, Kekuni Minton, Dan Seigel, Janina Fisher, Peggy McIntosh, Robin DiAngelo, Jacqueline Battalora, adrienne maree brown, Autumn Brown, prentice hemphill, Sonya Renee Taylor, Steven Porges, Joy DeGruy, Peter Levine, and so many more.
We look forward to continuing to learn from wise and wonderful people like you.
Please join us as we grow and pass down the antiracist cultural practices we needed but didn’t learn growing up.