Looking inside themselves

Bill Gardiner hands a five-page printout to Angela Giudice, Marian "Meck" Groot, and Patricia Maher that describes the reasons white people resist discussing race. The four, meeting in Maher's Codman Square home, are part of a group of 10 whites who have gathered monthly since 2004 to discuss issues of racial justice and white privilege.

As the women listen, Gardiner explains what prevents such conversations from occurring among whites, including the lack of knowledge whites have about the history of race in this country, a desire to not deal with the emotional consequences of racism, and the effect of living isolated lives among whites, which makes thinking about race unnecessary.

Gardiner, a 65-year-old antiracist consultant for the Unitarian Universalist Association, uses his own upbringing as an example. He grew up in Framingham when it was a predominantly white community. "One of the things about being white," he says, "is you don't have to think about it. If we don't have to think about it, we don't have to talk about it with other white people."

However, this group, which has no official name, regularly talks about what it means to be white. The members examine the privileges they receive because of their skin color and how it effects their interactions with people of color. The information helps them combat racism at a time when some use Senator Barack Obama's ability to garner multicultural support for his presidential campaign as proof that we live in a colorblind society where racism no longer exists.

"The new form of racism teaches people that they're not supposed to notice color or race," says Becky Thompson, a Simmons College sociology professor whose book "A Promise and a Way of Life" explores white antiracist activism. "We're not supposed to notice each other's differences. It's impolite to acknowledge that we have different races and different histories."

Yet a multitude of stories about the presidential campaign show how racial misunderstandings persist. The Rev. Michael Pfleger generated controversy recently as a guest preacher at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago when he called Senator Hillary Clinton a white elitist who felt she deserved the presidential nomination. Former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro has repeatedly courted controversy when speaking about race and Obama, most recently by writing in the Globe, "If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist."

The antiracist work done by whites requires constant self-reflection about what to say, where to live, and how to act. Hilary Allen, a 28-year-old group member who, along with Seth Kirshenbaum and Chris Messinger, represents the group's younger side, works as a community engagement manager at the Boston Center for Community & Justice. She also runs the website HollaBackBoston (hollabackboston.blogspot.com), which encourages women to write about the harassment they've encountered on city streets. Allen's partner in the Internet endeavor, Brittany Shoot, is also a white woman.

Allen tries to remain cognizant of her and Shoot's whiteness and the consequences it may have on their work, particularly when engaging women of color. "Everything I do," says Allen, "needs to have that sort of analysis: What does it mean for me as a white person to be doing this? How can I be engaging more organizations of people of color? How might I be doing this work based on a position of privilege?"

A local course such as the Cambridge Center for Adult Education's White People Challenging Racism, which begins a new session June 18, can serve as an entryway to explore such issues. The downtown organization Community Change Inc., whose director, Paul Marcus, is also a member of the monthly white antiracist group, was founded in 1968 to achieve racial justice with a focus on whites working in this area. Nationally, the Facing Race Anti-Racism Initiative in St. Paul, the Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere in Los Angeles, and the University of Colorado at Colorado Spring's 9th annual White Privilege Conference, which occurred in April in Springfield, Mass., introduce whites to the subject.

These opportunities can have limited appeal, though, particularly for those beyond the introductory stage. "The conferences, they're still a little bit impersonal," says Giudice, 54, a former senior associate at Visions Inc., a Roxbury diversity training organization who now works as a multicultural consultant. "They aren't ongoing. It's hit or miss about whether you get anything out of it."

It started in New Orleans

The monthly white antiracist group began as a response to a meeting convened by a national group of white antiracists in New Orleans in 2002. The event drew local activists such as Marcus; Maher, who at the time was the director of the Jamaica Plain social justice foundation Haymarket People's Fund; and Groot, codirector of the Women's Theological Center until last year; as well as national luminaries such as Tim Wise, who wrote the influential book "White Like Me." The goal was to encourage whites to organize white antiracist groups in their areas. The first attempt to do that in Boston occurred at Simmons College in 2003. There were subsequent public meetings in Chinatown and Cambridge before the group became a smaller one focused on discussing its purpose and developing trust so the members could tackle sensitive topics.

Last fall the group began having one member organize three sessions around a particular topic. Gardiner, who was manning his first session at Maher's home, will continue to use his time to discuss why whites resist discussing racism and how to reduce that resistance. In April, Giudice finished putting the group through a training exercise from Visions that examines how whites subconsciously perpetuate racial oppression.

There's a long history of mixed-race groups meeting to tackle the subject. The AWARE-LA website (awaresatdialogue.blogspot.com) explains the importance of whites meeting to discuss these issues. White antiracism activists say the painful and perhaps embarrassing work of discovering how one manifests white privilege is best done in the company of other whites. The community also says people of color shouldn't bear the burden of educating whites about racism.

"For whites to have an understanding that it's not just a people-of-color problem is essential," says Karla Nicholson, an associate director at Haymarket, which around 2002 brought in the New Orleans-based antiracist training organization The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond to facilitate Haymarket's process of placing people of color into leadership positions. Nicholson and Tommie Hollis Younger, Haymarket's current director - both of whom are black - watched as Maher came to grips with sharing codirector duties with Hollis Younger in 2005. Hollis Younger credits what she calls the "white allies" group with helping Maher adjust.

During the antiracist meeting at Codman Square, Maher talked about being cut off from her feelings at Haymarket as she tried to navigate shifting from director to codirector.

"It lead me to make bad decisions," says Maher, who left the organization last year. "It made me make blunders because . . . especially in the beginning of the antiracism process, I was so afraid of the emotional content of what racism automatically involved."