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In print | Published March 27, 2008

To the Editor:

We are a group of students who identify as white women who have been meeting since September 2007, to talk about white privilege and racism. Our goals have been to develop our understanding of racism and our role in it as white women, to talk about the ways we have internalized racism growing up white and to support anti-racist action on Swarthmore’s campus and beyond. We started meeting because we believe we have crucial personal work to do as white people around racism and white identity.

We find that white students at Swat often co-opt multiracial discussions about racism and make them about our needs alone, narrowing the conversation to white guilt and white students’ experiences and identities. White students do need to be doing this work, but in ways that are not at the expense of students of color. This group comes out of the conviction that we as white people need to take the responsibility onto ourselves to educate and challenge each other around racism, in ways that are accountable to and in relationship with people of color.

We believe that confronting racism honestly and usefully requires both reflection and action, so we have structured the group around both of these aims. We plan to have:

- Bi-weekly organizing meetings open to all students to discuss and plan for events, etc. that the group is working on around campus, and

- Weekly discussion meetings open to students who identify as white women to challenge each other to deepen our understandings of racism and to process the racism we have internalized.

- We want this group to be as transparent as possible. To that end, we are committed to posting the topic of our weekly discussion meeting in the Campus Calendar and to publishing minutes from our bi-weekly organizing meetings on an open SCCS website. In addition, group members will be available for questions and welcome suggestions for how to improve the transparency of the group.

We invite those interested to join us for our next discussion meeting on Wednesday, March 26th, at 9pm in Kohlberg 328, and our next planning meeting on Sunday, April 6th, at 9pm in the IC big room.

Please feel free to contact any of the following group members with questions, suggestions or concerns:

Lisa Schumacher ’10
Sarah Apt ’10
Erika Slaymaker ’11
Susannah Gund ’08

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