Healing from Toxic Whiteness: The woman behind a course helping white people tackling internalised racism

When the President of the United States is tweeting his internal monologue, decades-old political unions are coming apart at the seams, and no one can quite predict what norm is going to be flung out the window next - trying to make a positive change can feel as useful as moving deck chairs on the Titanic.

But Sandra Kim, the US-based founder of the Everyday Feminism website, thinks she has the answer (sort of) with her course Healing from Toxic Whiteness. And in these tumultuous times, she suggests the course is more vital than ever.

Kim launched the course in October 2016 with help from Dara Silverman, who campaigns against racial justice. That was a month before Donald Trump was voted the 45th President of the US. Since then, almost 2,000 people have signed up to the ten week course which costs $97 (£77) and involves presentations, worksheets and access to a Facebook group where students discuss how their are practising tackling their racist attitudes.

The course aims to break down everything we think we know about race. Kim acknowledges that the term “toxic whiteness” will be seen as offensive to a lot of people. She has been accused of racism towards white people and being a “hardline feminist”.

But that’s because white people don’t understand that they’re not actually “white” at all, argues Kim, but rather that is a concept that society conditions them to believe.

Here, racism not only means the extremities of actively hating people of colour and signing up to the KKK, but also not recognising that as white men hold most of the world’s power and money it is skewed in favour of those of European descent. White supremacy, then, is not just used to describe far-right groups, but the structures of society that built by people originally from Europe.

“White folks are not inherently 'white', they are people of they are people of European descent. Whiteness is a social construct created to keep poor people down in the US and colonial America to make it easier to exploit them," argues Kim.

“We can see in US politics how racism is scape-goating people of colour for economic issues that are the fault of the ruling economic class, and the government is in cahoots with them. And now Trump’s appointees are very fragrantly doing it," she says, pointing towards the giants of capitalism who are in the President's cabinet.

A racist society, therefore, not only harms people of colour but white people, too, she says. The “healing” in the title of the course, then, is very real. This is an idea that Kim calls compassionate activism.

“The course is looking at how that systemic oppression is harmful both to people who are marginalised and those who are privileged,” explains Kim.

“Compassionate activism is looking at how to heal from systemic oppression so we can respond to everyday injust with love. First we need to heal ourselves and the way that we are harmed both as marginalised and well as privileged people. Then when we are in a place of emotional wholeness and taking care of the pain caused to us by systemic oppression we can tackle racism."

When people are fearing the outbreak of World War Three, this might sound a little fluffy. Kim uses the example of stepping on someone by mistake to explain the idea of toxic whiteness.

“If you walk by someone and you're in a hurry and step on their foot the appropriate response is to say ‘sorry, do you need anything, is your foot OK?’ But when it comes to racism, sexism, transphobia and any other form of systemic oppression, it gets very emotionally charged.

“People want to deny the harm has happened. That's why people keep saying the US isn't racist and Trumps' policies aren't racist despite the fact of who is being targeted disproportionately by his policies and belief systems.”

“The course is really about helping people of European descent heal from whiteness imposed on them without their consent and so to free themselves from it, so they don't have to be a white person in a racist society but a human being who cares about systemic violence happening in their name.”

It’s not unusual for the course to make people cry, according to Kim.

The majority of people who have signed up are involved in activism, but Kim says the age of participants is quite varied and after some interest from a sorority she hopes to expand the program into university campuses. While people enter the course hoping to learn skills to help persuade other white people that immigration isn’t inherently harmful and that multiculturalism can work, they are surprised by the outcome.

“They realise that they're here to heal themselves and they're here to realise how much white supremacy they've internalised," she says. Without tackling this, people become fearful of offending others and give up fighting for equality.

She adds: “It's really important that the model of compassion activism suggests that nothing is right or wrong, it's just that things have an impact. And if what you're doing is having the wrong impact then you correct it.

"It's important white folks have skin in the game as well," she concludes. "When our water goes their water goes. We are in this together, but white folks have been told they have nothing to lose but everything to lose if people of colour are acknowledge in this country. But they're getting screwed over too." .