“I’m Mary Ruth, and I’m a racist.”
So begins a Racists Anonymous meeting at the Congregational Church in Sunnyvale, California. Ron Buford, the pastor of the church, started the program with a simple idea: What if we started treating racism like a disease that everyone suffers from?
“Once you accept the fact that we’re all racists, it’s just varying degrees,” Reverend Ron Buford, founder of Racists Anonymous, told Mother Jones. “In our culture, it’s impossible not to be a racist to some degree.”
Founded in 2016, the program works like Alcoholics Anonymous: Its members attend voluntarily, usually in churches, and there are 12 steps. The first step is to admit that you have a problem, with the statement: “I have come to admit that I am powerless over my addiction to racism in ways I am unable to recognize fully, let alone manage.”
Similar to how AA doctrine claims that an alcoholic will forever be an alcoholic, Buford thinks that racism is something we can’t totally outgrow.
“I don’t think we realized it was really as bad as it was,” Buford said. “We’re going to have to talk about it.”
Talking about racism might be the solution, but could something like Racists Anonymous ever go mainstream?
At least 90 congregations in four different countries have adopted the program, and Buford hopes it can one day become ubiquitous across the country. Still, it seems unlikely that many people would be willing to go to a church, sit next to people of all races, and say “Hi, I’m a Racist. ” But that doesn’t mean Americans have shown little interest in ridding themselves of prejudices. A viral video from 2016 encapsulates this hard-to-quantify desire. In the video, a white man from North Carolina calls into a C-SPAN show to ask guest Heather McGhee, president of Demos Action…
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