In an effort to “deconstruct and decentralize whiteness,” the University of Minnesota’s Center for Practice Transformation and School of Social Work recently presented a “12-step program” to make white students aware of their innate “white supremacy.” This allegedly “anti-racist” course is the ultimate apotheosis of racism, telling whites that as a sole result of their skin color they endorse and promote racist beliefs and policies.
The course is presented in the form of an online “webinar” titled “Recovery from White Conditioning.” The official program description explains that “The Model of Recovery from White Conditioning, a derivative work based on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, is rooted in love and accountability. It involves white people, working in our community to transform violent legacies of whiteness into healthier, white, anti-racist community…” The AA community has notably rejected this usurpation of their 12-step format for an “anti-racist” crusade.
The webinar is led by therapist and clinical supervisor Cristina Combs, a white woman who states that the program “is designed for white people to challenge and support each other to accept our responsibility for dismantling white supremacy, as it lives in us and around us.”
This is the very definition of racism—telling a group of white people that solely because of the color of their skin, white supremacy “lives in us.”
According to Combs, all white people are on a “spectrum of recovery” from white supremacy. She includes herself in that figure, even displaying a slide featuring a picture of herself with the words “The face of White Supremacy” beneath it. She tells her pupils that it is important to have conversations about how “good people” can be “complicit in perpetuating systemic racism and white supremacy” and that to do so we need to assert “that all of us as White folks are implicated, we are complicit, we all have work to do.”
Combs then delves into “The 12 Steps of Recovery from White Conditioning” which include: “We admitted that we had been socially conditioned by the ideology of white supremacy—that our minds were subject to racial biases, often unconsciously so;” “We came to believe that we could embrace our ignorance as an invitation to learn;” “We journeyed boldly inward, exploring and acknowledging ways in which white supremacist teachings have been integrated into our minds and spirits,” and “We confessed our mistakes and failing to ourselves and others.”
For presenting the racist ideology that whiteness is equivalent to the belief in and promotion of white supremacy, the University of Minnesota deserves a place on the most racist list.