On December 13th, an internal, Red Hat Powerpoint presentation was leaked to The Lunduke Journal by a confidential source.  That presentation, entitled "Allyship Kick-Off", contained some extremely racist (and extremely concerning) content -- as originally reported by The Lunduke Journal.  (If you are looking for some of the key points, read that original article.)

The fact that Red Hat (a subsidiary of IBM and the largest Linux company in the world) would produce and support the kind of statements found within this presentation was troubling, to say the least.

A few days later, on December 15th, some details of that presentation were also covered by James O'Keefe (and OMG) -- helping to continue bringing some much needed attention to this critical topic.

In the interest of full transparency -- and because the contents of this Red Hat presentation are so outlandish, racist, and cult-like -- The Lunduke Journal is publishing the entire contents below.  Quite frankly, it must be seen to be believed.

Every slide is presented without any edits or watermarks of any kind.  Beneath each slide we are including the full, completely unedited text of the Speaker Notes included within the Powerpoint presentation.  Exactly as originally leaked to The Lunduke Journal.

CLARENCE: Welcome message to everyone + disclaimer (this is completely voluntary, no judgement if you choose not to participate, this journey is unique to everyone and we welcome you to B.U.I.L.D. regardless)

ANNE:
Good afternoon everyone! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Anne Moorer, and I’ve been at Red Hat for 5 years now currently working in the IT org. I appreciate the opportunity to come and share this presentation with you today and I thank the leadership team for their support, faith, and trust in this role. Without further ado, here’s the agenda we’ll cover in this kickoff and what to expect. While you’re reading through it on your own, I want to reiterate that our time together will really focus on laying a foundation for what allyship is and looks like, and not so much the definite ways in which we will execute on it. In order to for us to draft a clear plan, we need to know how many people are truly committed to this work. I don’t know most of you and vice versa, so I have no way of knowing today where each of you are on your own journey in this, so for the purposes of this presentation, we’re going to start with the basics first. It if aligns to what you are willing to do, great, and we’ll proceed from there. 

A note on scope. We need to make it clear that we are only a small part of BUILD and that we serve BUILD, in everything we do. We support, we are not separate. 

Words are important, especially in this context, so we first want to ground ourselves in the chosen definition of what allyship is and what it is not. This is a critical part of this presentation because we all have to commit to how allyship is defined before we even think about how we develop a plan around what it looks like for participants at Red Hat. A special thanks to Boo Boo Howse for sourcing and sharing this formal definition with us, taken directly from the Anti-Oppression Network’s website. (Read Definition). In closing, we must acknowledge that allyship is a journey and it is unique to everyone who embarks on it. But, that said, there is no arrival date and time for becoming an ally. It is truly a lifelong endeavor and a lifestyle choice, both at work and at home once you truly commit.

Our goals for allyship at Red Hat are listed here. (Read List). Again, these are goals we drafted with the lens of allyship as a program of work, so to speak. But on the next slide, we’ll address goals of allyship at a more personal level.

At the individual level, your allyship should (read list). This work is deeply personal by nature, so it’s important to think about your individual strengths, talents, and gifts that you can bring to the table. This way, you more readily ensure that your commitment stays true and that you continue to have good energy that can be sustained behind this work. Find a lane, or a few of them, and stay in it for the long haul.

One of the reasons why I love working at Red Hat is due to its people. I think we hire and retain some of the brightest most intelligent folks I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. That said, it’s always been fulfilling to be around so many people who share the same commitment to excellence as I do, and sometimes that means that we aim for 100% on whatever “test” is ahead of us. But that kind of mentality will only lead to trouble here in this journey. Allyship is inherently messy and mistakes will be made if you are living into it correctly. So, it’s best to truly surrender your ego and any perfectionistic tendencies you bring to your everyday work life, because as Brene Brown so eloquently said, “I’m not here to be right, I’m here to get it right”. I strongly advise that you adopt that perspective before chosing to participate. 

If there’s one thing to take away from this introduction to allyship, it is the power of listening first. White people have had a long indoctrination in their history that has led them to believe that they are the ones to accurately analyze, problem solve, and articulate solutions over any other group. But, in allyship, this role is reversed. This work is about listening first, second, and third, before ever speaking. It is about observing and reflecting, unto yourself. It is about granting free and safe spaces to those we are fiighting for and in service to. We must recognize when we are in a black space, and treat that space as we would if we were a guest in someone’s home. White people most certainly do not have the answers in allyship. We are participating in this work to learn from the stories and experiences of our Black and Brown friends and colleagues so that we can take the actions for change that THEY tells us to do.  This work will never be about YOU. 

A special note on what allyship is NOT. We have to make it crystal clear that allyship is not the area in which the “Woke Olympics” are played out. This truly where this work fails before it even begins. Too many white people learn about allyship as a checklist of things to DO as opposed to an internal process that requires personal reflection and vigilance. This is not about competing with each other for who’s doing the right work the best way, or who’s doing the most work, or whatever other measuring stick you want to use to compare yourself to others. The only metric of success is our collective impact on levers of systemic racism, however those changes come about. 

That said, here’s how allyship can show up in all the wrong ways if we are not careful in our approach and understanding.  

Sources: 
https://guidetoallyship.com/
https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/10/counterproductive-allyship/

BEFORE YOU SIGN UP, CONSIDER THIS YOUR CHECKLIST CRITERIA.

1. We won’t debate this.
2. Google racial gaslighting. We’ll be spending a lot of time here. It happens everywhere, everyday, and it’s digging a deeper and deeper trench out of which Black people have to fight to get out of in their mental health. Just because you have not experienced a particular type of trauma in your life, does not mean that it does not exist or that its impact must be proven to you.
3. Race is the greatest lie that was ever told, period. It is a myth. It was created by humans to oppress other humans. ALL sides of politics have played into this idea. We will not entertain a fight over which party did Black people worse, but will examine law and policy as it relates to how systemic racism is perpetuated today.
4. We started it. We have to end it.
5. Again, reverse racism does not exist and we have all the power.
6. Just because you show up as an ally does not mean that you get a pass when you make a mistake. Any Black person, at any time, can hold you accountable however they see fit in that moment and you understand that their grace is out of your control. Do not expect ANYTHING for showing up. Again, this is our problem, and our only obligation is to learn and get back up again, not appeal for absolution.
7. This can take many forms and depends on too many factors to name, but the key word here is MISTAKES. If you are truly leaning into this work, you will learn the hard way most of the time. But never lose sight of the fact that a race conversation that goes horribly wrong will ALWAYS be safer and less consequential for YOU as a white person than it will EVER be for the Black person holding you accountable, so keep your tears and hurt feelings to yourself in that moment and find another white person to help you through it.
8. Let’s spend some time on this one. This is another term that you need to Google ASAP before deciding to opt in. White saviorism holds the idea that first and foremost, Black people are victims in need of white people to come to their aid and help them. LIES. Black people have been victimized, but they are not infantile as a result. Remember that Black people are PEOPLE rightfully demanding the delivery of the very same fundamental inalienable rights and you and I prosper from as white people. They are, as a population, INHERENTLY equal by virtue of their very humanity alone. Allyship seeks to dismantle the white systems that pull racist levers against Black people so that they can be honored fully as human beings, as they are. Don’t get it twisted.
9. Here’s where this work gets tricky. We run the risk of coming into this work wanting the rule book for how to be the best support possible for this cause, and that simply doesn’t exist. We’re talking about addressing and solving for the most complex topic in the history of the world because it is a HUMAN one. Even among Black anti-racist educators and D+I experts, there are differing opinions and perspectives. Our job is not to seek the RIGHT one, but to learn all we can and proceed day by day with whatever we’re presented with in this work and do our level best with what we have and where we are. Please remember that a Black group of individuals is NO different than a white group of individuals in their humanity and range. HONOR THAT and don’t seek a manual that isn’t there. It’s like parenting - it doesn’t come with instructions. There are plenty of resources but NO instructions. Know the difference?
10. I cannot stress this point enough and will continue to say it. Think about how icky is sounds to be a part of the race that started and continues to uphold systems of violence, destruction, and murder, AND ask for a reward each and every time you do ANYTHING to help. This is not about YOU. This work is about Black liberation. Do not measure your own actions in quantity or quantity. The measuring stick we should ALL be focusing on is the collective impact made upon the systems of oppression. PERIOD. 

This is the time in my presentation where I want to pause for a second and set the tone for the next few slides. We’ve learned about what allyship is and how it’s defined, as well as its core behaviors. But in truth, allyship and its success is predicated on real work. And it’s critical to understand the foundation of what this work is really about. Allyship is based on internal work, first and foremost. External actions come second. It doesn’t mean that you can’t take action when called to do so - in fact, please do, whenever possible. But, the point is that without first understanding where YOU are coming from, and assessing what you currently understand about how systemic racism came to be and how it operates, we end up spinning our wheels and progress is slow to achieve. So these next slides are critical to jump starting your education and understanding the mindshift required for how to take part in allyship appropriately from the beginning. Ok? 

We’re going to spend a lot of time here on WHITENESS. Far too often in this conversation, we talk about the Black experience and focus on Black people first. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, of course. BUT, in order to truly affect change, we have to first come to grips with OUR whiteness, as members of the white race, and the weight of what that carries within us. I want you to think about whiteness as a sociological construct, because systemic racism was birthed directly from it and is fed by it, all day, every day. Now, at this point, I want to make something very clear. This slide represents quite a wide range of resources that I have been consuming across multiple platforms from multiple authors and for the purposes of this presentation today, I wanted to try and distill key themes into a very simplistic, hyper-reduced model for you all on purpose. There is so much to talk about here, and innumerable nuances to go into, so this does not represent and end-all be all depiction. I will absolutely be sharing my citation list of sources with you all, I just couldn’t put them here all on one slide and still get the intended message across. But please know that none of this comes from my own head. There experts in this space who have been talking about whiteness for decades, so we know it’s a credible concept. Ok? So, that said, let’s dig into the first part of how whiteness operates: POWER.

Power: it’s our thing. We are the oppressors because we feed and thrive on power at the expense of other races. In fact, if power doesn’t come to us through the inherent domination of other races, it’s not real power. 
Kimberly Latrice Jones - monopoly

And because we made the rules based on how we hoard power, we have divided people by race through privileges for white people, and violence and oppression for everyone else. The thing to realize here is that because white is the default, it never has to be named. We hear about Black churches, associations for Black members, right? But try naming a white space the same way. You really don’t even think to do it because it’s off the table. Why would you bother? How and why would that ever be relevant? And this is a key origin of the violence inherent in whiteness. Because when it creates the privilege of being unnamed, all other spaces divided by race are automatically “othered”. And these spaces, in turn, only talk to themselves for the most part, because with white othering comes white violence to keep those other races “in line” and unthreatening to the power of whiteness. Stereotypes are created and marketed so that white people feel safe in our judgements and the violent actions we take against these groups. So white people become accustomed to seeing other races through a white gaze and white lens, evaluating them based on white cultural norms and measuring them in proximity to whiteness. In other words, the other races are dehumanized at worst, and pre-judged at best. So, the divide by race occurs and these groups focus inward because in this context, safe integration simply isn’t possible. We are very segregated by race and that is on purpose, no matter what you were taught about Brown V Board of Education.  Check your social. Data shows white listens to white, black listens to black. Now that’s not to say that these groups don’t mix at all, right? I mean, here we are right now - we work together and many of us do have Black friends or family, right? But, whiteness prevents white people from seeing and understanding and CARING about the fact that when there is a Black or a Brown person that enters our sphere, we rarely think about how that person may be twisting themselves into knots around us in conversations because they have been forced to NAVIGATE whiteness with extreme penalty for getting lost, or mistepping. And that is the foundation of the next phase, which is blindness.

If we are only talking to each other, and remain segregated, white people get the privilege of blindness. We don’t have to navigate what was built for us, and we don’t have to think about the fact that the game is rigged, because this is our status quo. And because whiteness doesn’t let on to us that we have a choice about staying in this white bubble, we don’t know what we don’t know, and we don’t question anything about our world view or experiences as they relate to race. White is right, again by default. You’ve heard that racism and hate is taught, and this is absolutely correct, but how? It’s taught through outright lies passed down through white generations, certainly, but the omissions of the truth are just as powerful. It’s what we leave out of our textbooks in school. It’s what we don’t read or see reflected in the news. So we don’t know that we are consuming our own white story, over and over again, and being put into spaces and context where it’s constantly reinforced without question. And because of this indoctrination and blindness, and the IGNORANCE we internalize because of it, we go right along perpetuating this system of power and oppression because that is what we’ve always done and no one that whiteness deems worthy of our attention is compelling us to stop. WE HAVE TO STOP IT. White people created race to breed racism and we are responsible for dismantling it by first owning our own ignorance and surrendering our baseless supremacy.

Sources for slides 17-21: 
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_bias_of_professionalism_standards#
https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culturally-speaking/202006/what-is-whiteness
https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/summer-2016/why-talk-about-whiteness
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a25747603/silencing-black-voices/
http://www.mpassociates.us/uploads/3/7/1/0/37103967/sec_4_ch_11.pdf
https://nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack
https://othersociologist.com/sociology-of-race/#whiteness
https://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/power_privilege.pdf
https://www.cwu.edu/diversity/sites/cts.cwu.edu.diversity/files/documents/constructingwhiteness.pdf
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3577&context=penn_law_review
https://medium.com/@amcarter/a-brief-history-of-whiteness-8d12e2ae0b25
http://fourteeneastmag.com/index.php/2020/02/21/11505/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/31/black-writers-courageously-staring-down-the-white-gaze-this-is-why-we-all-must-read-them
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/toni-morrison-free-white-gaze/595675/
https://blogs.umass.edu/afroam391g-shabazz/files/2010/01/George-Yancy-on-Whiteness-as-Ambush.pdf
https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1266&context=mjrl
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/black-to-the-future-part-ii/unchained--but-unchanged--in-need-of-a-revolution/
https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1770&context=etd

Additional content extracted from the following social media accounts and their posts:
@accordingtoweeze
@sincerely.lettie
@ckyourprivilege
@privtoprog
@blavity
@context.project
@thezinnproject
@chnge
@impact
@everydayracism
@sharethemicnow
@blackculturenews_
@blacksuccesstoday
@blackdollarnetwork
@soyouwanttotalkabout
@whydontwediscuss
@blacktwttr
@rolandsmartin
@theblkdaily
@voltedvoice
@thejournalista
@proudnastywomen
@keishadelvacreative
@rachel.cargle
@austinchanning

Let’s take this a step further. I love this analogy that I heard from an IG live session I attended by Privilege to Progress, which I strongly encourage you to follow. They presented this idea of a microscope to help visualize the ways white people have been taught to view the world. Whiteness knows that if it puts every single aspect of another race “under the microscope”, and constantly focuses white attention on what’s WRONG with that race, without ever naming whiteness as the measuring stick, it will keep itself fed. So, what’s been under the microscope historically? Well, we’ve successfully created numerous stereotypes out of “Black behaviors”, right? We start with the premise that Black people are more dangerous and violent than any other group, and we make sure that campaign sticks enough so that when they start protesting racism in the streets or even just becoming angry at you in a conversation, we can say, “Well, there’s the proof! It must be true!”.  We distort Black culture and its representations to ensure that we believe it to be uncivilized, unsophisticated, barbaric even. White people cherry pick the parts of Black history that are agreeable to THEM and ALLOW those facts to be taught in schools, but only during February, please. Black oppression focuses on victim blaming - how do they deserve to be where they are or have been. We reframe Black celebrity to congratulate ourselves anytime the reality our own racism gets a little too close for comfort, like Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who “Broke the Color Barrier”. This is a classic white supremacist headline because he didn’t break through anything, white people in power decided he could play that day so that they could show “progress” in a way that still kept them large and in charge. The game is rigged, remember? The list goes on for each of these things and there are too many examples to cite for each, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list. BUT, we can’t linger here. Because they real work of allyship is to address the real problem that is whiteness and how it has successfully convinced us that it’s everyone else who’s coming up short, and therefore this struggle of racism is theirs to solve, not ours. So this list is the real problem allyship seeks to address first. How do we name and claim whiteness in all its forms aligned to how we’ve been told to think about Black people. We have to be honest that our microscope lens is WHITE and opaque. We’re not seeing truth. We’re seeing what serves us. We’re seeing what keeps us in power and keeps us free from accountability in the violence we execute through this lens. 

A note about what gets missed on purpose when we examine things through a white lens AND continue to segregate ourselves. I have challenge for you all here today, and I can tell you firsthand that it has made a profound impact on my life as a white person looking to do better in this work. 8 weeks ago, I was scrolling through Instagram. This was after I had started following many Black and Brown anti-racist educators in my feed. I came across a post that was very simple and it gave me a lot to consider in a single moment. It said: White people. Check your list of people and accounts that you follow on Instagram. Go through it and remove anything that doesn’t give you true joy or provide education. Now, check to see how many of those people and accounts are WHITE. If your instagram feed isn’t 50% Black, you’re doing it wrong. Take the challenge.

I took the challenge. And I started researching the Black people and accounts I could follow based on my interests, hobbies, industry, you name it. And within the span of a day, my feed was 50% Black. And it still is today. And it will likely continue to be so, because through this change I have been nothing short of amazed at the extent of white erasure. White erasure directly supports our white blindness. It keeps us ignorant of what whiteness doesn’t want us to see. Whiteness loses power when we humanize those we oppress. Heaven forbid we should recognize anything that’s going WELL in the Black population. And even when whiteness chooses to do so (like Jackie Robinson’s example, because that never really went away) you would think that this was the FIRST time a Black person ever really achieved anything at all. You think that Black person must be a unicorn. But the reality is that Black Excellence has been the true foundation of our human history (as this graphic speaks to, clearly). Black Excellence has been normalized as a rarity and not the norm itself. So, throughout time, whiteness has systematically erased or kept hidden from view, the list on the left, so that it can ensure we are shocked and surprised when a Black person receives an accolade, let alone “speaks well”.

Fun fact #2: Beethoven was Black.Fun fact #3: The SAT was created by a eugenicist named Carl Brigham, who firmly believed that such a test would reveal the natural intellectual ability of white people. These are the things allyship requires us to learn about and understand, and then see their impacts as violent and trauma-inducing. And we have to look inside ourselves to see where our learned biases and racist ideas have prevented us from asking the right questions or self educating to know the real truth about our world. 

So, what SHOULD be under the microscope? Whiteness. All day, every day, until we can truly name and claim its every impact and appearance within the context of systemic racism. And the reason we have to do this first, is because of these numbers. White creates the game, then rigs it. Because it can. Because it dominates and oppresses. And we have to be hyper aware of the ways whiteness will protect itself and those that believe in its power, at every turn. Because if you are doing allyship correctly, whiteness should start to turn on YOU. You should expect to feel it stab you eventually. Maybe you lose friends. Maybe you miss out on a promotion because you did the right thing. Allyship takes true risk and sacrifice to do, and it requires your vigilance regardless of these consequences. After all, our Black friends and colleagues have navigated whiteness long enough to tell you that its brutality never stops as long as it reigns. But whiteness’s greatest lie is in telling you, a white person, that this is journey is too hard. It’s actively banking on your fragility to force you into giving up and coming back over to the other side again. It will scream at you to be terrified of living into the work of allyship but it will give you a false reason why. It will convince you to be afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing in front of a Black person because of the consequences you will suffer. It will convince you that the real fear lies there, in the anger and trauma of a Black person. When really, NO race conversation that you will ever have as a white person will carry nearly the risk and extreme consequences for you as it does a Black person. They are the ones that suffer in a race conversation gone wrong, not you. Whiteness will misplace your fear. Your real fear should be how whiteness will turn on YOU when you choose the side of the oppressed over your white race. And that is what we have to prepare for and support each other for in allyship. 

So in summary, the path is to address what’s on the inside first. Understand our whiteness and how it operates, and see where we have been complicit or complacent within it. Address the biases we’ve internalized through our own indoctrination, and reframe our perspective. Acknowledge that we never got the whole or true story. And then, and only then, can we start to trade out the white lens we’ve been using in our microscope for a clear one, one that doesn’t distort the things we’ve been taught to believe or think about Black people, and internalize what’s true for once, learning from THEM directly, we can force their humanization with other white people. We can arm ourselves with the facts and knowledge to champion what whiteness erased in its anti-Black agenda, and change the narrative around us. All while tackling the systems in place that uphold the status quo.

ALLYSHIP PITFALL
Successful allyship requires a thoughtful understanding of key psychological consequences of engaging in this work. This is directly related to the fact that allies are (usually) in the white majority. 

White people who are committed to allyship will inevitably undergo a process known as Racial Identity Development. The more they learn, act, and engage in the work, the further they progress along a continuum of emotions and growth. 

Allyship is EMOTIONAL and PSYCHOLOGICAL.

Each stage, especially in the beginning, can lead the aspiring ally to potentially cause harm and discomfort to the very people they intend to serve. 

We will educate the B.U.I.L.D. community (both Black and ally members) about this process and its continuum, focusing on the behaviors that may appear and how best to address them in advance.

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