 Our fifth presenter is Will Penman, his title, rhetorical structures for building interdependence, whiteness, affect, and an aspirational rhetoric of anti-racism. To a lot of people, racism is something that happens between two people, where one person says or does something maliciously based on the other person's race. But the Black Lives Matter movement has reminded us that racism also operates on a structural level, independent of anyone's intentions. The criminal justice system, public education, and home buying, for instance, are systems that all slyly constrict people of color. Many white people who learn about these unjust systems feel committed to changing them. But changing and learning to take into account the systemic impact of your actions as a white person can be confusing and can lead people to feel uncertain and stuck. Maybe you can relate to some of these situations that people in my dissertation project have faced. Taking a leadership position in an organization as a white person. On one hand, you're just contributing your skills to that organization, but at a structural level, maybe you're perpetuating white control, buying a house. In a gentrifying neighborhood, you're pushing poor people out, but in a mostly white area, you're segregating yourself from people who are different. Even initiating a community project can feel fraught and problematic. One existing approach has been to build people into better activists who go to marches and so on. This does work at the structural level, but at the expense of day-to-day interactions. If we don't scaffold people into confident interpersonal interactions that also take into account this structural piece, then the 20 or so white people participating in my project who feel committed to supporting people of color will end up avoiding it out of uncertainty of doing the wrong thing. Together we hypothesized that if people had a space where they could talk through delicate questions about race, it would lead them to feel more confident and be better allies. So we designed a unique communication structure. It's a monthly group of white people where the voices of people of color from through the month are the focus. Each person in the group took on some new relational activity with people of color according to their context, like hiring black workers or volunteering at their son's mostly black elementary school. Then at the monthly meetings, we would debrief those encounters. What was confusing or uncertain or conflicting? The key move here was to use the group to push people a little past where they were so that over time, they would be able to do and handle more. We've met that way for nine months and just finished. So far, I can say that as a result or in combination with encouraging people in this group to push through these difficult situations, that participants began to welcome more encounters with people of color. I expect that this study will be a resource for other white people who want to join people of color in bringing racial justice and equality to America.