White People in Interracial Relationships
Coaching for white people who are in interracial relationships.
Do you think you aren’t racist? Do you think you are less racist because you are in a relationship with a Black, Indigenous, or Person of the Global Majority (BIPGM)?
Do you want to be more supportive of your BIPGM partner when they share their needs, fears, experiences of racial exhaustion, micro-aggression, and discrimination?
Has your partner asked you to change how you respond to their race-based needs and concerns?
Do you take it personally if your partner talks about their experiences of white people, oppression, and systemic racism?
Do you become defensive, quiet, dismissive, ashamed, angry, protective, or hurt if your partner points out racist words or actions done by you, your white family, or friends? Do you cry or shut down or go numb?
When your partner shares racist experiences or you witness them, do you become overly outraged and want to “fix it,” even if that is not what your partner wants from you?
Do you want to increase your knowledge about racism, your white privilege, and what it means for you to be anti-racist?
In what ways are you actively working against systemic racism? If you aren’t, why not?
What do you know about your ancestor’s culture, language, food, and customs? Do you value your ethnic origin?
Decenter Your Whiteness | Assess Your White Savior Complex | Understand How Your White Entitlement Shows Up | Increase Your Racial Literacy | Discern Your Performative Allyship from Humble Anti-racist Work
Common Goals & Issues:
-
- Learn how to really listen to your partner’s race-based experiences and needs.
- Understand what blocks you from being more supportive of your partner.
- Support your BIPGM partner without getting defensive, numbing out, avoiding, overly protective, shocked, minimizing, or patronizing.
- Face your White privilege, rage, and fragility.
- Address your White guilt, White shame, White denial, White perfectionism, White exhaustion, White violence, and White entitlement.
- Increase your racial literacy.
- Get clearer about how your white privilege shows itself within your relationship dynamics.
- Learn how to de-center yourself and your Whiteness in conversations and actions.
- Learn how to really listen to your partner’s needs, experiences, and concerns about how they are treated by your white family, friends, work colleagues, neighbors, etc., and what they would like from you.
- Learn concrete ways to address racism, anti-Blackness, Whiteness, White privilege, and White supremacy in your family of origin.
-
- Identify how different types of power and privilege operate in your relationship. Explore how they intersect with intergenerational wealth, class, education, sex, gender identity, sexual identity, family of origin dynamics, job, education, religion, mental health, physical health and ability, immigration status, first language, etc.
- Be open to understanding and building a relationship and family that fosters and celebrates multiculturalism, justice, and liberation.
Explore how the insidious nature of race and power-based dynamics play out within yourself, your relationship, your friends, family circles, and systemically in your work, school, etc. Review The Characteristics of White Supremacy by Tema Okun
‘Below is a list of the characteristics of white supremacy culture that show up in our organizations [and in our relationships, families, and in ourselves]. The characteristics listed below…are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking. They are damaging to both people of color and white people.’ – From Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, ChangeWork, 2001 |
- Perfectionism
- Sense of Urgency
- Defensiveness
- Quantity Over Quality
- Worship of the Written Word
- Only One Right Way
- Paternalism
- Either/Or Thinking
- Power Hoarding
- Fear of Open Conflict
- Individualism
- Progress is Bigger, More
- Objectivity
- Right to Comfort
Irene’s experience and training regarding anti-racism issues
To learn more about Irene’s own training and education regarding race, whiteness, and racial justice issues, SEE
Trainings offered by Irene: Learn about some of the anti-racism trainings from 2017 – 2021 that Irene has offered to white people regarding race, privilege, and whiteness. Examples:
- What It Means to Be an Active Racial Ally | 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)
- Antiracism 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’s training was followed by twelve 1.5-hour Action, Ally, and Accountability Groups. October 2020 – February 2021.)
To schedule a free 30-minute Zoom consultation, contact Irene.
