“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to re-educate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of American believe they have so little to learn.”  Rev Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Breaking White Silence Northwest Leadership Team serves to organize the Breaking White Silence Northwest project. This group is currently made up of five Seattle-based community member volunteers who work to educate themselves and participate in interrupting racism through Breaking White Silence groups and other anti-racist activism in the community.

The project grew out of a Phinney Neighborhood Association-sponsored free series in 2015, discussing the social construction of race. One of the speakers was Dr. DiAngelo, a race and social justice educator whose  New York Times’ bestselling book White Fragility (2018) has become an important part of the national discussion about race. Moved by the challenging but relatable way she communicates her powerful message, volunteers formed an affinity/planning group in November 2016 to launch this study group project, taking DiAngelo’s book on white racial literacy as the central text for discussion. Breaking White Silence was a project of the Phinney Neighborhood Association (PNA) until October 2020, when we transitioned to an independent community project. We were inspired by a comment that Reverend Harriet Walden, co-founder of Mothers for Police Accountability, made to one of our affinity group members, Karen Schneider, at a Black Lives Matter rally in 2014 that was organized in response to the killing of Michael Brown (an 18-year-old unarmed black man from Ferguson, Missouri) by a white police officer: “I appreciate your being an ally, but the best way you can help my people is to go back into your community, talk to white people and change their hearts and minds about racism.” It is in this spirit and with this sense of accountability that we pursue our project of Breaking White Silence.  Our name comes from the words of Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter: “We need you defecting from white supremacy and changing the narrative of white supremacy by breaking white silence.”   

We held our first meeting for volunteer study group facilitators at the Greenwood Senior Center in January 2017, sharing a suggested group framework and discussion guide to support facilitators in forming their groups.  Breaking White Silence study groups began to meet in homes, churches, synagogues, and Greenwood/Phinney community spaces to raise consciousness about racial inequity, white racial identity, and the ramifications of white people’s silence in the face of injustice. About two-thirds of the groups have been formed through private invitations made by the facilitator, while about one-third have been groups open to the public (advertised through PNA’s Review).  We held a second meeting for facilitators in September 2017, which led to the formation of another ten groups (four of which were open to the public). Since then, we have held Facilitator Orientation sessions once or twice each year and community groups and public groups have continued to be created.  Approximately 400 people have participated in our study groups (sponsored by us or initiated by a community member for their own community) in the past four years, with an age range from 20s to 80s. Many groups have continued to meet informally after the official end of their study of DiAngelo’s book, as people have felt connected and inspired to further their learning and their support for each other in taking action toward racial justice.