A webinar series for social workers titled “Recovery from White Conditioning” was held by the University of Minnesota and the Center for Practice Transformation.
The series focused on how participants could become allies and purge themselves of internalized white supremacy.
The description explained that the “Model of Recovery from White Conditioning” is “a derivative work based on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.” It also says that the session intends to “call forward white people to recover and reclaim our full humanity.”
The session, which occurred in 2020, is intended for social workers, who can receive 1.5 continuing education credits. Continuing education credits allow workers to maintain their licenses.
The associated powerpoint presentation articulated the aim of the session. It stated that the goal is to “decenter whiteness.” It continued to say that “in this model, we center it… differently, to expose and transform it.”
Early in the session, presenter Cristina Combs discussed “the face of white supremacy.” She showed images of a KKK member, marchers in Charlottesville, and the movie “American History X.” Her next slide, however, which was still titled “the face of white supremacy,” showed a picture of herself.
Combs went on to explain that she, as a white person, has white privilege and benefits from white supremacy. “All of us as white folks are implicated, we are complicit … no one is exempt,” she alleged.
The presentation argues that white supremacy is “ever present in our institutional and cultural assumptions.” It also claims, as critical race theorist Bell Hooks has espoused, that we live in a “imperalist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”
The session even strives to reconstruct “a more inclusive sense of reality,” condemning our current understanding in its entirety as a product of white supremacist social conditioning.
The first step of the 12-step process is to admit that “we had been socially conditioned by the ideology of white supremacy.”
It continues to say that the course “involves white people, working in our community to transform violent legacies of whiteness into healthier, white, anti-racist community.”
In step 5, participants are called to offer a confession. The slide reads, “We confessed our mistakes and failing to ourselves and others.”
In step 8, participants were tasked with auditing their minds for remnants of white supremacy, engaging in an “ongoing study of our racial biases, conscious or unconscious, and our maladaptive patterns of white supremacist thinking.”
In the very last step, the participants are asked to share the messages of the session with other white people in order to assist others as they “seek help in recovering from white conditioning.” It went on to explain that one way to achieve this was to work with “future recover-from-white-conditioning groups.”
Spencer Lindquist is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach out at slindquist@breitbart.com.
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