Enhancing Personal, Relational, Professional, and Community Change for Socially Conscious Humans

Allyship Trainings for White Helping Professionals

Allyship Trainings for White Helping Professionals

Because of our profession, we European-American helping professionals often deem ourselves to be socially aware. We may call ourselves “liberal” and, therefore, believe we are not racist.

The truth is, there is no way we cannot be racist. As children, we are inter-generationally force-fed the kool-aid of White supremacy. Whether we see it or not, race and racism are present in everything we were taught, every advantage we have, and every system with which we relate, i.e., medical, banking, military and police, social service, mental health, education, religious, health care, etc. We may not “see it” because we live in a country that was built by “whitewashing” everything.

Additionally, because we do work that is, in theory, designed to “help people,” we may be surprised when we realize that our professions, by design, only serve White Supremacy. The education, training, testing, evaluation, and practices of the helping professions were created by and for White people.

The helping professions are grounded in racism, White Supremacist patriarchy, capitalism, anti-Blackness, assimilation, and colonialism. The reality is unless we actively interrupt it, we non-BIPOC mental health and social work professionals participate in, benefit from, and perpetuate systemic and personal racism.

These White allyship trainings for helping professionals move beyond basic diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) trainings. These deep-dive trainings are unique because participants are asked to go beyond their intellectual understanding of anti-racist concepts. Participants are asked to examine their Whiteness more personally and transparently and commit to making specific changes.

These “active-allyship, Whiteness, and anti-racism” trainings and groups are three-pronged:

(1) participants will learn and share information that infuses fresh insights

(2) participants will interact and build on the discussion by dissecting concrete co-worker situations, workplace dynamics, and client situations

(3) participants will create realistic take-away action plans for meaningful change

In these trainings, participants will learn and share information about the topics, each other, and themselves. These Whiteness trainings incorporate lectures, readings, videos, storytelling, large and small group discussions, reflection time, role-playing, somatic body check-ins, homework, personal sharing, and racial bias assessments. Participants will leave with meaningful, practical strategies and concrete action steps to incorporate their learning into their daily personal and professional lives.

Ally is a verb, not a noun.

The White allyship trainings I offer go beyond learning anti-racist concepts or basic DEIJ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice) trainings. In these deep-dive trainings, we will identify and challenge our White complacency and entitlement, privileged safety, and White comfort. We will pay attention to our mind, body, and heart as we discuss the damage that our White dissociation perpetuates. We will practice having hard conversations about race and racism with family, friends, and co-workers. We will commit to doing our part to make meaningful long-term changes.

(The outcomes and topics are tailored to the group’s specific needs.)

Training takeaways

Participants will:

  • Examine White supremacist culture, structural and systemic racism
  • Explore how White supremacy benefits us personally and professionally, even when we think of ourselves as “liberal White people who get it.”
  • Supportively identify and challenge the insidious nature of our White complacency, judgment, entitlement, privileged safety, and White (dis)comfort.
  • Identify concrete examples of how we (un)intentionally cause racist-based harm to our co-workers and the people we serve and learn how we can do better.
  • Practice having “hard and brave conversations” about racism with each other and our non-BIPOC family, friends, and co-workers.
  • Commit to specific, meaningful short and long-term changes.

Available training topics 

  • Increase our racial literacy through the lens of White supremacy culture
  • Examine ways to decolonize social work and mental health practices and workplace dynamics
  • Identify concrete workplace examples of what “an anti-racist, trauma-informed, anti-oppressive, client-centered approach” means in your organization
  • Understand the complexities of our unconscious biases and micro-aggressions
  • Stretch our personal and professional White comfort edges
  • Strive for congruence with our professional ethics and personal values, and develop an understanding of the ways humility interfaces with our anti-racism work
  • Identify common racist-based habits and attitudes that White people display in the workplace and elsewhere
  • Identify and shift our feelings of guilt, anger, grief, defensiveness, dissociation, and shame
  • Identify our inevitable White savior, martyr, and performative motivations
  • Examine how our fear of “making a mistake” (i.e., saying or doing the wrong thing) protects our Whiteness, keeps us safe, perpetuates racism, and causes harm
  • Understand the tenants of impact over intention
  • Address our conflict-avoidant “White niceness” and “White is right” defensiveness and fragility
  • Discuss the inter-generational moral injury our White dissociation and inaction perpetuate in us
  • Identify concrete workplace scenarios where racism comes into play, and discuss, roleplay, and learn anti-racist practices
  • Develop meaningful and realistic plans for personal and professional anti-racist actions and accountability

We will use Tema Okun’s Characteristics of White Supremacy (1999) to understand our race-based views and habits. We will also get out of our heads and connect with our embodied experience of racism using some exercises from Resmaa Menakem‘s My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017). We will apply the healing work of Myisha T Hill’s book Heal Your Way Forward: The Co-conspirator’s Guide to an Antiracist Future (2022).

When White people “do our work” with other White people

When we White people do our anti-racist work in White affinity spaces, we are often more honest and vulnerable in unpacking and facing our conscious and unconscious internalization of White supremacy.

In White affinity spaces, White people are more open to examining our racial stereotypes and assumptions. We can more directly face our performative desires to be “the best White person” and “the most anti-racist ally.”

We can address our common racist reactions of over-apologizing, over-explaining, White tears, and our feelings of guilt, shame, anger, blame, and denial. In White affinity spaces, we can more effectively process and challenge our inevitable micro-aggressions and racial biases, our White perfectionism, White entitlement, fear of making mistakes, conflict, and discomfort. We can dissect, roleplay, and debrief examples of situations where we have or could cause racist-based harm.

Doing our privilege work as a White affinity group can help reduce at least some of the harm, pain, and disrespect our unexplored Whiteness and “White mistakes” may cause for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color if they were present. We will not be able to look to BIPOC for permission, forgiveness, education, responsibility, validation, or comfort.

A White affinity space for non-BIPOC people allows us to muck around in our messiness, fear, and upset. We have space to heal our inter-generational moral injury and loss and address the White-supremacist-based dissociation that keeps us separate from our values and bodies. We can learn the roots of our White identity development and increase appreciation for our own ethnic backgrounds. Together we can claim the growth and liberation that come with accepting our anti-racist responsibility, holding each other accountable, and being agitators for racial justice.

Whiteness Anti-racism Trainings & Coaching – Description 2023 Greene (PDF)

Why I, as a White Person, Offer White Affinity Trainings – Irene Greene 2019 ©

We all start our anti-racist journey somewhere.

The point, though, is to start.

 

The insidious systemic nature of White Supremacy permeates our lives systemically, culturally, and personally. We, White people, have a choice as to whether we will be active supporters of racism or active agitators against it. European Americans are not “responsible” for slavery or the genocide of the Indigenous people of this land we refer to as the United States. However, the fact is we are either colluding in the continuation of racism or we are actively dismantling it. If we are not actively anti-racist, we are perpetuating racism. 

We need to understand our Whiteness to better make changes in our lifelong anti-racist work.

Recent titles: Unlearning Anti-Racism and Understanding Whiteness Trainings and White Affinity Groups Offered by Irene Greene 2017 – 2022

  • Workplace Moral Injury Through a Racial Equity Lens for the Undoing Racism® Executive Collective Meeting (Monthly Speaker, New York City, NY, Virtual Workshop, June 2022)
  • White Helping Professionals: What It Means to Be an Active Racial Ally | European-American Helping Professionals: What It Means to Be an Active Racial Ally: Facing Our White Liberalism, White-Body Privilege & Savior Complex (Seventeen 4.5-hour trainings: throughout 2017, 2018, 2019)
  • Anti-racism and Whiteness Training for White LGBTQ Helping Professionals (Two 4.5-hour trainings: March 2021 and April 2021)
  • Helping Professionals: Facing Our Whiteness, Unlearning Racism, and Decolonizing Mental Health (Four 20-hour trainings: October 2020, November 2020, December 2020, January 2021, March 2021)
  • Deeper Than Skin Deep: For LGBTQPAI+ White Helping Professionals: Facing Our Whiteness, Unlearning Racism, and Decolonizing Mental Health (A 38-hour training and group series. This weekend training is followed by twelve 1.5-hour Action, Ally, and Accountability Groups. October 2020 – February 2021.)

    Anti-Racism Whiteness Allyship Trainings

    Irene’s training and coaching services are cited and endorsed by Mary Pender Greene, LCSW-R, CGP, MPG Consulting, New York, in the book: The Enduring, Invisible, and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness Edited by Kenneth V. Hardy (2022): Section VI. Anti-racism and On Becoming White Antiracists, Chapter 20: Becoming an Anti-racist Leader: From the View of a Back Female Clinician and Consultant, by Mary Pender Greene, pages 371 – 404: page 400.

Detailed example of anti-racism training. (The trainings can be tweaked to fit an organization’s particular needs.)

Deeper Than Skin Deep: Helping Professionals: Facing Our Whiteness, Unlearning Racism, and Decolonizing Mental Health – by Irene Greene © 2020

Deeper Than Skin Deep is an anti-racism intensive virtual live training for White socially conscious mental health and social service workers. The training is grounded in the premise that all white people are racist and benefit from our whiteness. Although it is a life-long process, we can work to unlearn our White entitlement and learn what it means to be anti-racist. We can learn what it means to be an active anti-racist ally. We can choose to work for liberation, safety, and equity for all people. 

Deeper Than Skin Deep is a training opportunity for white helping professionals who want to commit dedicated time and effort to their anti-racism journey. Through the 20-hour weekend training and the twelve group meetings, the participants will invest together in a 38-hour (over four months) deep dive into unlearning racism, increasing racial literacy, decolonizing our mental health and social services, and developing our anti-racist perspectives into personal and professional practices.

This training goes beyond learning the concepts. We will learn, challenge, and connect with our embodied experience of racism. 

  • Stretch your personal and professional comfort edges with each other
  • Accept your relationship with racism
  • Identify and shift your feelings of guilt, anger, grief, dissociation, and shame
  • Examine how completely white supremacist culture influences and benefits us personally and professionally
  • Increase your racial literacy
  • Examine the colonization of the mental health and social work fields
  • Strive for congruence with your professional ethics and personal values
  • Bring a willingness to be open to your and others’ mistakes, healing, risks, change, and growth
  • Address your conflict-avoidant “white niceness” and “white is right” defensiveness and fragility
  • Connect to your body. Challenge your dissociation from racism 
  • Identify realistic concrete changes that you will commit to within yourself and with your clients and patients
  • Do a written assessment of racial equity and systematic racism issues in your workplace and practice
  • Commit to conversations and changes you will make to help your workplace operate as more of an active anti-racist space
  • Develop meaningful and realistic plans for anti-racist actions and accountability

Meeting Schedule:

  • Phase I: 20-hour anti-racism training (Cohort: maximum of 15 people)
  • Phase II: Twelve 1.5-hour follow-up Action, Ally, and Accountability Groups

“White helping professionals” include anyone in the helping and wellness professions: therapists, nonprofit mental health workers, social workers, psychologists, mental health counselors, marriage and family therapists, wellness coaches, school and career counselors, community health workers, interns, students, etc.

All profits are donated to MN Indian Women’s Resource Center, 2300 15th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55404

Designed and facilitated by: Irene Greene MSED

More examples of White allyship trainings:

LGBTQPIA+ white helping professionals often believe we automatically understand our white privilege because we have experienced queer oppression, discrimination, and hate crimes. However, we white LGBTQPIA+ people have a cultural and social history of centering whiteness and overtly and covertly excluding, exploiting, denying, dismissing, appropriating, harming, eroticizing, and micro-aggressing the Black, Indigenous, Two-Spirit, and People of Color members of our LGBTQP2SIA+ communities.

Credit for the photo above: A Small Matter of Engineering, Part II by Kara Springer https://link.medium.com/06iKCF4Qiqb

*Definitions: *LGBTQPIA+: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Pansexual, Intersex, Asexual / LGBTQPI2SA+: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Pansexual, Intersex, Two-Spirit, Asexual

**QBIPOC: Queer Black Indigenous and People of Color

Overview of training topics, terms, and concepts:

Decolonizing mental health and social work | white savior complex| The Pathology of Whiteness | Healing Ethno-Central Trauma (HEART), Healing-Centered Engagement | Moving Beyond Trauma-Informed Care | Healing justice, racial justice, reparations | Intersectional feminism| Professional ethics and personal values | The intersections of environmental justice, queer justice, disability rights, women’s rights, gender justice, health justice, religions freedom, and economic justice | Land acknowledgment | personal, cultural and systematic racism | Collective liberalism and liberatory consciousness: Awareness, Analysis, Action, Accountable Ally-ship | Complacency is Complicity| White racial identity development | Decentering whiteness, “calling in” and “calling out” | Multi-culturalism, white humility, cultural humility| Inter-generational white moral injury | Racial equity, racial equality, racial justice | Racist, non-racist, and anti-racist | Impact over intention | Dismantling the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal systems of oppression| Defunding the police, abolition, transformative justice, state violence, and the prison pipeline | Colonization, imperialism, fascism, white nationalism | White Liberalism, “white lady” liberalism, white woman violence, white feminism , “white women’s tears,” Karenism | Cultural appropriation, appreciation, and assimilation | Whiteness, white-body privilege, white violence, white gaze, white defensiveness, complacency and complacency, white fragility, white entitlement | Being the “good white person,” performative allyship, earning allyship | White fear, trauma, and our psycho-biology and brain science: flight, fight, freeze, fawn and face| Systematic racism and COVID-19| Anti-Blackness, transmisogyny, and the killing of trans women of color | Racial bias and microaggression | Racial trauma, racial exhaustion, Black rage, and post-traumatic slave syndrome | Why ally is a verb; not a noun.

Training Resources and References used in the trainings (QBIPOC, BIPOC, and non-BIPOC)

Kay Cheng Thom, Jennifer Mulan, Resmaa Menakem, Ijeoma Oluo, bell hooks, Rachel Cargle, Janet Helms, Tema Okun, Kenneth Jones, Angela Davis, Cara Page, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Pema Chodron, Mary Pender Greene, Paul Levine, Judy Ryde, Staci K. Haines, Megan R. Gerber, Tyler McKinnish, Claire Burgess, Colleen Sloan, Joy DeGruy, Tiffany Jana, Renee Linklater, Jordan Flaherty, Ibram Kendi, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Daina Ramey Berry, Kali Nicole Grow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Lama Rod Owens, Robin DiAngelo, Jennifer C. Nash, Layla F. Saad, Zeshan Mustafa, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Barbara J. Love, Paul Kivel, Ali Michael, Mary C. Cooper, Adam Getachew, Babe Kawaii-Bogue, Akala, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Asha Bandela, Susan Raffo, Kenneth Hardy, Atum Azzahir, Manijeh Daneshpour, Jose G. Luiggi-Hernandez, R. Brockman, Paul Gorski, Noura Erakat, Catrice M. Jackson, Elisa Lacerda-Vandenborn, Mimi Khuc, Lambers Fisher, Patrick Grzanka, Keri Frantell, Ruth Fassinger, Vikram Kolmannskog, Ruth King, Brene Brown, Sonya Renee Taylor, Tarana Burke, Bree Newsome Bass, and more.

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For more information about Irene Greene’s education, experience, training, and work experience. 

To learn about the individual and relationship, group, and training services offered by Irene, schedule your complimentary 30-minute consultation.