Cult Programming in Seattle
By: Christopher F. Rufo (City Journal)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Last month, the City of Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights sent an email inviting “white City employees” to attend a training session on “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness,” a program designed to help white workers examine their “complicity in the system of white supremacy” and “interrupt racism in ways that are accountable to Black, Indigenous and People of Color.” Hoping to learn more, I submitted a public records request for all documentation related to the training. The results are disturbing.
At the beginning of the session, the trainers explain that white people have internalized a sense of racial superiority, which has made them unable to access their “humanity” and caused “harm and violence” to people of color. The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles. In conceptual terms, the city frames the discussion around the idea that black Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “blackness” and white Americans are reducible to the essential quality of “whiteness”—that is, the new metaphysics of good and evil.
Once the diversity trainers have established this basic conceptual framework, they encourage white employees to “practice self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism” and work on “undoing [their] own whiteness.” As part of this process, white employees must abandon their “white normative behavior” and learn to let go of their “comfort,” “physical safety,” “social status,” and “relationships with some other white people.” As writer James Lindsay has pointed out, this is not the language of human resources; it is the language of cult programming—persuading members they are defective in some predefined manner, exploiting their emotional vulnerabilities, and isolating them from previous relationships.
It’s important to point out that this “interrupting whiteness” training is not an anomaly. In recent years, nearly every department of Seattle city government has been recruited into the ideological fight against “white supremacy.” As I have documented , the city’s homelessness agency hosted a conference on how to “decolonize [their] collective work”; the school system released a curriculum explaining that “math is a tool for oppression”; and the city-owned power company hired a team of bureaucrats to fight “structural racism” within their organization. Dozens of private companies now offer diversity training to public agencies. The idea that all whites have unconscious, “implicit bias” that they must vigilantly program themselves to overcome has become an article of faith across corporate boardrooms, academia, and law-enforcement agencies, even though the premise is unscientific and impossible to verify .
The endgame is to make Seattle’s municipal government the arbiter of the new orthodoxy, and then work outward. At the end of the session on “internalized racial superiority,” the diversity trainers outline strategies for converting outsiders and recommend specific “practices for interrupting others’ whiteness.” In effect, the activists have organized an ideological pyramid scheme—using public dollars to establish their authority within the government, then using that authority to recruit others into the program. As Lindsay writes, “the goal is no longer to indoctrinate on what is ‘rightthink’ and ‘wrongthink.’ It is to make the [subject’s] thinking be completely in line with the view of the world described by the cult doctrine.”
How far can this racial-justice shakedown extend itself? The new racial orthodoxy has seen exponential growth in the past few years and has proved extremely difficult for local governments and elite institutions to resist. The movement’s key rhetorical premise is designed as a trap: if you are not an “antiracist,” then you are a “racist”—and must be held to account. Skeptics might dismiss Seattle’s “interrupting whiteness” training as a West Coast oddity, but it is part of a nationwide movement to make this kind of identity politics the foundation of our public discourse. It may be coming soon to a city or town near you.
Christopher F. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. He’s directed four documentaries for PBS, including his new film, America Lost , which tells the story of three “forgotten American cities.”
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This is really going on in the City of Seattle. Most of us might never have known had it not been for the story itself by Chris Rufo or the coverage it got last night by Tucker Carlson.
Orwellian mind control?
Trump & his supporters are off topic
One of the stupidist and most inane ideas I've ever heard a city administration come up with. And I bet the the ones that refuse to participate stand the chance of being singled out by the city and would be in jeopardy of losing their jobs. Just more lunacy people have come to expect of the leftist liberal bastion of that the city of Seattle has become.
I would call it a form of anti-white racism. It is something I would expect to see these days on an American campus. It will ultimately lead to more division & more violence.
The beauty of NT is how much we can learn!
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"
If you don't know, neither do I.
Seems like people are sleepless there.
The movie pun, not withstanding, Hillary Clinton got about 80% of the vote there in 2016. You can't find a much more progressive region.
"Liberalism is a disease that only gets worse over time. Thus the term "progressive""
The name they chose to define themselves. How did they say it on that day in 2008 - "We are the ones we've been waiting for!"
They do think highly of themselves!
It's like a cancer that needs excised.
Meanwhile in NYC:
The radicals in BLM can kiss my lily white ass.
I want someone to name me any other country where the wants and concerns of the minority are the dominant concern of the majority, as it is in the United States of America?
This keeps going the way it is ..... it might become a self fulfilling prophecy.
You mean the regression of the white majority rather than the advancement of the black minority? That seems to be what they really want in Seattle.
Not exactly what I had in mind but for the purposes of NT? Okay ....
😉
You do see where that crusade has gone? And yes, it is about getting it to our readers.
Yep and no more comment. 😉
Spoken like one who wore the Eagle, Globe & Anchor.
Well done, sir!
Oorah!
I would hope everyone felt that way.
that is if we can collectively come to a point where we can have a debate
A full debate, which includes two items - discrimination (where it exists) and Black American's living standards (Why haven't they advanced over the last 60 years?)
a government that can address the concerns of all.
Which would serve as the nemesis identity politics
Sadly, it will not occur in this environment.
No way!
You can go back as far as you want. However, I noticed you seem to think that discussion is strictly about assuring equal opportunity. That is only part of it.
I would question why, despite all that has been done to advance the living conditions of Black Americans, we still have so many lagging behind. That question is for the black community. That must be answered! Why specifically have other groups (like ethnic groups) managed to advance with little or no help, yet Black Americans have not?
Well we could start with Biden.....
Should we start with LBJ's war on poverty? That was a benevolent gesture. It established the EOC and 40 programs designed to help low income areas. Most notable was welfare.
Not long after came the famous Moynihan Report which details what happened to the black family.
Fifty years later House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan released his damning "The War on Poverty 50 years later" report
Please tell me what effect you think welfare had upon the black family?
No problem...I have another one for you...
Be good - talk later
You mean like your dRump is a turd comments....
Seems that is using tax money for a political purpose and should be illegal and investigated
It more than seems so. It is everything that George Orwell warned about!
It is a cult. It’s a warping of the religious impulse from traditional religion. It’s starts with the original sin of racism that can only be cleansed Through puritanical spectacles of public shaming, where blasphemy is punished.
the whole movement, particularly its attraction to unhappy white people, becomes much more understandable when understood as a proxy religion.
Useful idiots on parade in Seattle.
Serenity now!
Well this is beyond creepy.
Interesting thought - "death camps". Maybe that's part of the future plan
Why?
When you have people denouncing themselves because of their skin color, can genocide be far off?
Don't tell me you didn't read the article? Chris Rufo went to great pains to inform the public.
South Park seems to ...... see things .
Seattle is making it so, right now.
"The trainers claim that “individualism,” “perfectionism,” “intellectualization,” and “objectivity” are all vestiges of this internalized racial oppression and must be abandoned in favor of social-justice principles."
"The endgame is to make Seattle’s municipal government the arbiter of the new orthodoxy, and then work outward. At the end of the session on “internalized racial superiority,” the diversity trainers outline strategies for converting outsiders and recommend specific “practices for interrupting others’ whiteness.”
I believe my ancestors worked too! Odd that you or I or any other living American should be tried for enslaving people centuries ago!
I've seen this before. Faux feel good sensitivity training so that administration can check a box and perhaps put something on a resume.
Wild guess - but from experience - most of the problems are coming from a very small portion of the body being addressed. ( Pareto Principle) Administration does not want to deal with the bad press and lawsuits that would come from actually identifying the small percentage and firing their asses so they do global "sensitivity training". Sometimes they appoint someone to be the figure head of the new initiative.
That's my experience - your experience may be different.
I have done the whole sensitivity training BS several times, at several different companies.
Never once have they asked anything like this.
Let go of some "relationships with some other white people"? Who the fuck are they to tell anyone who they can, or can not have, a relationship with? This is not normal sensitivity training, this is forced reprogramming.
As for the rest of the BS
I would teach them a valuable real world lesson. I would drop the instructors and employers asses, wouldn't matter what color their asses were, at some prime real estate I know in Detroit and Chicago. We will see what their "privilege" earns them; as they will definitely lose their “comfort,” “physical safety,” “social status,”. Maybe even permanently.
I used to fly out of Detroit Metro quite a bit with my family (I live about an an hour and half away) and one time just my daughters and I where flying out to Arizona to visit my parents. I let my daughter drive us down there and somehow she missed the turn off and we went down to a different one to get back on the freeway. After making several attempts to get back on track we where very lost.
She stopped at a gas station to get some directions (before GPS) and when they both came out laughing I asked them what was up and they said the attendant told them to never ever leave their mother alone in a car in this area again...lol.
"A Fond du Lac man intentionally crashed into and killed a motorcyclist last week because he believed the motorcyclist was white, Fond du Lac County Sheriff Ryan Waldschmidt said."
Not really surprising given the attitudes on the left..