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The Washington Post is being blasted for “promulgating ignorant neoracist nonsense” for posting a podcast video in which experts encouraged white people to create “accountability groups” — in order to go through a “period of deep shame.”
The paper released the video on Friday as part of its “The New Normal” series in a segment titled “What is White Racial Identity and Why Is It Important?”
In the episode, several mental health experts and scholars discussed “understanding your whiteness and the ways that white supremacy benefits you,” Fox News reported.
One of the ways they suggested to “understand whiteness” included joining or creating “white accountability groups,” according to the news outlet.
Resmaa Menakem, an author and trauma specialist, said: “[A]n antiracist culture does not exist among white people. White people need to start getting together specifically around race.”
He added that such groups could have to meet over several years to end up with a community “aligned with each other.”
Rebecca Toporek, a professor in the Department of Counseling at San Francisco State University, said accountability groups “are really helpful in terms of having a place to process, having a group of people whose responsibility it is to call me on things, or to challenge me.”
Texas-based trauma counselor Ilyse Kennedy added that whites needed a “period of deep shame for being white and for acknowledging the harm that our ancestors have caused,” Fox News reported.
The podcast also insisted that no matter how much effort is put into being “anti-racist,” there is no end to white accountability — and an Oklahoma woman featured in the video said: “No matter how much you work on that, there’s still almost even more work to be done.”
“The New Normal” host Nicole Ellis, who introduced the video by saying it is about “white racial identity,” said George Floyd’s death marked the “first time that white people were becoming aware of their whiteness — and the systemic ways that white supremacy affects all of us,” the Post Millennial reported.
Menakem said: “Racism, racialism, white body supremacy is not episodic, it is structural.”
The psychotherapist — who wrote “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies” — added: “Remember that there were thousands of George Floyds before the one that you say. Your bodily response to this horror, right, is not the same thing as you dealing with the structural aspects of this.”
Toporek said that “white people in particular get aroused, get upset, say ‘This is unjust, this isn’t right, this shouldn’t happen.’ There’s like an awakening that happens. And so part of their racial identity development is seeing that awakening. What they do with it is really the next piece of it.”
She explained that “exploring white racial identity” is in fact “a life-long process.”
“Part of the structure of racism … is to keep us from recognizing that racism is part of our daily lives,” Toporek said, the Post Millennial reported.
“So it’s a longer term process of looking at your understanding of yourself in the world, both historically but also contextually. Also the family you live in, the community you live in, and what role whiteness plays in that,” she said.
The video was lambasted in social media, where users assailed its blatant attack on white people – with many mentioning that the content resembled a kind of “religion.”
“Washington Post urges white people to feel ‘shame,’ to self-segregate into ‘white accountability groups,’” right wing Malaysian commentator Ian Miles Chong said in a tweet.
Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative think-tank the Manhattan Institute, wrote: “It all makes sense now: the Washington Post published a 3,000-word fake hitpiece against me because they really want to defend race essentialism and ‘White racial identity.’
He added: “I’m fighting against race supremacy; the Washington Post wants to install it everywhere.”
In a separate tweet, he wrote: “The game is that they want to create an essentialized racial category (‘whiteness’), load it with negative connotations, then impose it on individuals through guilt, shame, and school indoctrination. This approach is reductive, manipulative, and malicious. Don’t fall for it.”
Rufo urged people to not “let institutions like the Washington Post manufacture racism, divide us from one another, and tear this country apart. The elites want to move us into racial retrograde. It’s up to us to fight back, build a shared culture, and unite around a common purpose.”
Brooklyn-based journalist Jesse Singal called it a “very strange pseudoreligious movement that is likely to do more harm than good.”
He said in a tweet that “one of the WaPo sources is Resmaa Menakem, a proponent of Somatic Abolitionism, which holds that ‘Nearly all our bodies — bodies of all colors — are infected by the virus of white-body supremacy.’
“Luckily, his trainings ($350+/day for ‘white bodies’) offer hope for treatment,” Singal added.
Twitter user @AGHamilton29 said the video was “propagating ignorant neoracist nonsense. It’s really astonishing the extent to which this stuff is becoming mainstream and normalized, especially by the press.”
He wrote: “These views are legitimately harmful and backwards. They shouldn’t be normalized and they certainly should not be forced on young kids via public education that is funded by taxpayers. Parents have every right to be concerned and want to step in.”
The user added: “Defenders keep playing this game of saying ‘well that’s not really critical race theory’ (despite some proponents identifying it as CRT) and ignoring the evidence that it is being injected into education without actually engaging the real substance of the concerns.”
And user @tmazz929 said “it’s like a bizarre new religion.”
“They have their own language, their idea of original sins (whiteness), and seeking redemption through ‘doing the work’ to understand race issues. It’s a disconnect from the reality 99% of Americans live in,” he wrote.
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