This course is a reckoning and not an academic critique, but a lived one. It’s for those whose presence has been made “other,” diluted, exoticised, tolerated, or co-opted within white-majority spaces: education, psychotherapy, churches, NGOs, progressive enclaves, or institutions that pride themselves on inclusion while maintaining hierarchy. It’s a space to unmask these dynamics and reclaim the right to take up space without apology, over-explaining, or strategic self-trimming.
We begin with the spaces we’ve entered whether educational, religious or therapeutic and what it took to be there. Who were we allowed to be? What parts were left at the door? What does it mean to be “welcomed” into whiteness?
We turn toward the cumulative toll of microaggressions, code-switching, dislocation, and erasure. We explore internalised compliance and the rage or exhaustion it masks. Our concept of ethical trauma comes into focus here.
We experiment with re-storying and who we are outside the gaze. Drawing from intersectional and decolonial thought, we look at creative refusal, dignified boundaries, and unapologetic self-insistence. We affirm voice without performance.
We explore what it means to move forward differently: in our work, our relationships, our institutions. We close with practices of re-alignment, where solidarity is not tokenistic but co-struggled, and agency is not conditional on assimilation.
Even within supposedly “woke” spaces, whiteness remains the unspoken norm… polite, evasive, and unconsciously central. For those of us living in diaspora, racialised bodies, or hybrid identities, the violence is often subtle but cumulative. This course is a call toward personal and collective integrity. It is not a call to assimilate better, but to rupture, re-story, and re-align. We name the cost of fitting in. We explore what it means to stay in our dignity.
This four-week course brings critical race theory into embodied practice. Using dialogical methods, narrative reflection, and group witnessing, we move between structural critique and personal reclaiming. Readings may include Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, and our own work on transraciality, hybridity, and epistemic misrecognition.
Each session includes:
