White People Work

In this episode, in addition to starting out with my own confession of the realities of being on this journey of taking responsibility for my own character formation as a white man, I interview the insightful Brandi Miller. Brandi has an incredibly popular podcast of her own--Reclaiming My Theology--and she and I have been friends for the past 10 years or so. Brandi shares about her experience of getting out from underneath whiteness as a queer Black woman raised in central Oregon, and about her insights after spending much of her life navigating white institutions as a woman of color and directly seeking to unlearn the toxicity of whiteness. Listen in to be inspired by Brandi's character and challenged by her perspective.

This week I interview my friend, Larissa Marks. Born and raised in rural Maui and now living on Oahu, Larissa is a realtor and a spiritual director. Larissa is a fifth generation Chinese American woman who has done a lot of deep work to come to a powerful sense of her own personal and ethnic identity. You can also learn more about her land-rights-advocacy work for indigenous Hawaiian folks at www.greenlinehawaii.com.

Join me for the first published interview of my friend, Eddy Ekmekji. Eddy is an Armenian American immigrant, grew up in Lebanon and immigrated to the US at age 10. He's a thoughtful soul who knows how to navigate in and out of the white world in the US, and as a result has deep perspectives that we can learn from.

This is the first episode in the second season of White People Work! I've spent the last couple months in a new season of learning, teaching a class, and interviewing a number of friends of color about their perspectives on whiteness, white people, and their experience of life in the US as folks of color.

In this final episode of the first season, Scott shares about what it looks and feels like to have whiteness come close to home. As he processes the death of his father, Scott looks at the ways that the culture of whiteness shaped his family of origin and contributed to both his parents' declines, and then broadens out the danger of the "pioneering spirit" that's such a core part of whiteness.

Also, if you want to become a part of supporting White People Work continuing and expanding, you can join the WPW Patreon at:

patreon.com/WhitePeopleWork

In this episode, Scott illuminates the most common problems with white progressives, even while identifying himself as one. This episode is targeted at folks who tend to identify as white progressives and is designed to hold a mirror up to their most common blind spots toward the end of being consistent between values and actions.

In this episode, Scott does a deep dive on the issue of intent versus impact. This is a very common complaint of folks of color about white folks. Often white folks want to be assessed on the intent of their words, actions, or choices, yet in contrast, folks of color are often more focused on the impact of those words, actions, and choices.

In contrast to the last two episodes, which featured common practices that injure folks of color and common pitfalls white folks fall into, this episode is a proactive expression of cross-cultural practices that are healthy for white people.

In this sixith episode, Scott goes into some of the pitfalls white folks can fall into as they grow in racial awareness, and how to avoid them.

In this fifth episode, Scott lays out the eight common practices of white folks that injure and alienate folks of color. Additionally, he lays out why it's so important that this isn't a list of do's and don'ts for white folks--and what's wrong with that--but that it comes from a place of deeper engagement with wanting to discover our part to play in opposing racist systems.