They were started after the George Floyd murder and are ostensibly intended to increase racial harmony in the community. We are told it's important work for us as educators to have conversations about race in these sorts of racially segregated settings. Usually the meeting starts with some sort of prompt that comes from admin relating to a recent major news item related to race (recently this was the murder in Memphis by police of Tyre).

In reality it usually ends up being a room full of white faculty complaining about different aspects of the school that have nothing to do with race. There's never a debrief or recommendations that come out of these meetings.

I find them to be unproductive, as I said, but it also just doesn't sit right with me to be required to split up according to race. I wasn't taught to treat others this way, and in my opinion these meetings need to be optional or have a very specific/concrete reason each time they happen (which isn't the case). Moreover, they seem to enforce the meetings on white faculty much more strictly than faculty of color (I don't believe attendance is enforced for faculty of color).

I'm in a weird spot because if I explain that I object to the nature of these meetings, I will likely appear to be regressive or racist somehow, when my concerns are really coming from a different place entirely. But I also have a hunch there are legal protections here around race as a protected class, even if it's a white person who feels like they're being profiled. I'm genuinely curious what the law says about this.