Yes, It’s Called ‘White People School.’ Here’s What It Teaches

The name is supposed to get your attention: White People School.

Tamara Johnson-Shealey, the Black woman behind the provocative new initiative from the nonprofit organization Reparations Sunday, believes that dealing with the name of the project itself is a big lesson for the intended students.

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“First, you have to get beyond the shock of the name, right?” Johnson-Shealey said. “That’s been the big kicker. Like, they’re like, ‘What? What is this?’ And I think once they get past that part of it, that’s when they’re open to wanting to know more.”

Johnson-Shealey, a mediator and organizer of Reparations Sunday, is facilitating Acknowledge the Divide/White People School. It’s an initiative specifically designed for white people who want to examine what they understand — and may misunderstand — about Black Americans, racism and reparations.

“This White People School is an opportunity for white people who have a willingness — and I think that’s the bigger word — the willingness to learn,” she said. “And unlearn what they think they know … about the Black community.”

‘We Can Do This’

The program grew out of Johnson-Shealey’s years of conversations about race and reparations. 

Around 2017 and 2018, she and a white friend, David Slavin, conducted Facebook broadcasts discussing racism and Black-white solidarity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she joined streaming conversations on the Clubhouse app, including discussions with white women about reparations.

“We just wanted people to see that Black and white people, like, ‘We can do this,’” she said. “But we have to have very honest conversations in order to do it.”

Now she is taking that work into a more structured setting.

White People School is built around a five-part virtual lecture series and 20 hours of online instruction. Ten hours of material are available through the Reparations Sunday website, while another 10 hours involve direct engagement with Johnson-Shealey.

Her inaugural group is small — two students — and Johnson-Shealey considers it an opportunity to test and refine the program. A new session is scheduled to begin in September.

Safe Spaces, Historic Places

The conversations can be difficult.

During a recent class, Johnson-Shealey said participants discussed the distinction between prejudice and racism, including the role of systemic power and control.

Sometimes, she said, the learning is uncomfortable for teacher and student alike.

“I’ve been triggered thus far,” Johnson-Shealey says. “It hurts me to hear some of this. But I know that I have to hear this with my heart too, and allow them to be open and honest and feel safe.”

That willingness to remain in the conversation is central to her approach.

“The information is out there,” she said. “But unless you digest this information and walk through it, it’s just information.”

White People School does not stay in a classroom.

The program also includes a field experience in Savannah, Georgia. The goal is to connect participants to the history behind Special Field Orders No. 15, the Civil War-era Union Army order commonly associated with the promise of “40 acres and a mule.”

Participants visit Ebenezer Creek, where hundreds of newly freed Black people who were following Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s forces were left behind during a Confederate attack in December 1864. Many drowned trying to cross the swollen creek.

Johnson-Shealey also takes participants to Savannah’s Green-Meldrim House, which served as Sherman’s headquarters and is connected to the January 1865 meetings with Black ministers that preceded Special Field Orders No. 15.

“It’s an experience where you’re up close and personal with this history,” Johnson-Shealey said.

The on-site lessons help participants connect historical decisions to present-day economic conditions in Black communities.

“They can see and hear that this is real,” she said. “This was a broken promise, and why our communities look the way they look today based on the history.”

‘It’s a Debt’

That history, Johnson-Healy says, leads directly to reparations. She argues that the discussion must specifically address descendants of people subjected to chattel slavery in the United States and the accumulated effects of slavery and subsequent government policies.

“Our history is our history, and our experience is our experience in America,” she said. “And white people don’t get to dictate what that is.”

She points to slavery, Jim Crow, convict leasing, discriminatory housing policies, the war on drugs and mass incarceration as parts of a continuum rather than disconnected chapters of American history.

“It’s been systemic injustice after systemic injustice,” she said. “We can’t catch a break. Every generation is underwater, and we just keep drowning.”

Reparations, she insists, cannot be reduced to a symbolic apology. She supports cash payments as part of comprehensive repair and rejects the idea that reparations would constitute a gift.

“It’s a debt,” Johnson-Shealey said. “You’re not giving us anything.. It’s a debt.”

Nevertheless, the The challenge for White People School is convincing studentspeople to enter an uncomfortable but necessary conversation whose very name may initially offend them.

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Johnson-Shealey has already heard from at least one person who considered the title divisive but she rejects that assessment. She disagrees.

The school, she says, is intended to create the opposite — relationships built on truth rather than superficial racial harmony.

And perhaps that explains why she has no intention of softening the name.

Before America can repair its racial divide, Johnson-Shealey believes Americans must first be willing to acknowledge that the divide exists, understand how it was created and confront what remains unfinished.

“Take the right steps in the right direction,” she said. “Take the steps.”

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