This document traces the working processes and learnings of the whiteness group, as well as the individual and collective journeys of its members as part of the RTM cohort. It focuses on our particular perspective as white museum leaders (executive directors) and the journeys we each follow in contending with our individual and cohort accountabilities. Advocating for institutional and system-wide accountabilities is a methodology applicable to all arts workers. We want to note here that while the white members of the group took this deep dive to write, share and process; this work was finessed, edited and worked over many times by the entire RTM cohort. There are no singular stars in the group and this is designed as a recommendation to museum leaders, artists and arts workers within the sector. Collective work and collective processes as evidenced here are paramount to moving forward.

Museums readying themselves must form a facilitated sub-group to address the culture of whiteness and do the work of analyzing how power, wealth and normative privileges of white supremacy orient the museum. This is imperative! Through a process of making acknowledgement and offering, white-identifying members of the cohort can relieve Black, Indigenous, Brown and other members of color from this burdensome reckoning, and with diligence, vulnerability, and compassion, model trust and understanding for the whole cohort and the museum’s ecology.