---
id: "virtual-communities:case/white-people-doing-something"
type: "GovLab case study"
title: "White People. DOING Something."
url: "https://virtual-communities.thegovlab.org/case/white-people-doing-something"
date: "2021-02-23"
summary: "Building a racial justice community around compassion and empathy"
source: "The GovLab (virtual-communities.thegovlab.org)"
licence: "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)"
---

# White People. DOING Something.

**Building a racial justice community around compassion and empathy**

- Founding year: 2020
- Group size: 36,647 members of the public group
- Location: United States
- Part of: [The Power of Virtual Communities](https://virtual-communities.thegovlab.org/)

## Introduction

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the eruption of protests in every city in America and around the world, racial justice and systemic discriminaton came to the fore of public discourse. A new awakening about racial injustice coincided with stay-at-home orders induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. With households forced to spend more time with one another, important conversations about racism and discrimination began to surface.

“People had to have conversations they didn’t have to have before,” explains 40-year old Molly Ola Pinney, co-founder of the White People. DOING Something Facebook group. For many, Pinney's Facebook Group has become a place where people gather to have difficult conversations about race empathetically and constructively. Many of the group’s members report that these difficult conversations about racial issues, ranging from the Black Lives Matter movement, to American football player Colin Kaepernick’s take-a-knee protests against police brutality, to multicultural characters in children’s books, have helped people to become more open-minded.

## How it All Started

In response to the police killing of George Floyd on May 27, 2020, many turned to social media to share information, organize, and express their thoughts about racial injustice in the United States and beyond. Pinney decided to create a Facebook Group to share information and organize members so they would be ready when a call to action happened. As Pinney says, the group started as “a place where maybe we'd get a thousand people or so together so that when there was an action to take we could just put it there and people would jump on it.” Inspired by the artwork below that expressed a similar idea, she called the group “White People. DOING Something.”

More than a thousand people [joined on the first day](https://transitionofstyle.podbean.com/e/tos-check-in-episode-9-check-in-with-molly-and-aja/) and the group grew to 23,000 in the first few days. Now, five months later, over 35,000 have joined.[1] The group says it is building a new space for inclusive, empathy-driven discussions around racial justice. “The mission now has shifted from a group of people signing petitions, and taking those sorts of actions, to a group of people transforming the possibilities within race relations through conversations,” Pinney says.

## Leadership

The group was founded and is managed by married couple Molly Ola Pinney and Aja Davis. Pinney, who is white, and Davis, who is a woman of color, also run the Global Autism Project, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit which provides education and other services to support children with autism. Cassie Harden Scott, the group’s third ‘admin’ (administrator), also works for the Global Autism Project.[2]

![Wpds Davis Pinney Headshot](https://thegovlab-files.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/thegovlab-directus9/uploads/7b2e8f2c-54e4-4757-aaec-dce0d99a78d2.png)

*Figure 1: Molly Ola Pinney (left) and Aja Davis (right) founded and manage the White People. DOING Something Facebook group. Photo courtesy of Aja Davis and Molly Ola Pinney.*

Pinney and Davis devote about two hours of work to the group each day, while most day-to-day operations are handled by a 15-person volunteer moderation team. The group’s moderators were chosen through an application process. Davis and Pinney say that leadership traits needed to run the group are the same skills they had developed through decades of entrepreneurial and nonprofit work, notably the ability to treat people with differing viewpoints with empathy and compassion.

Likewise, the group’s rules aim to steer comments and posts towards more constructive conversations. Opinions about party politics are not allowed, nor are posts that could take the conversation off-topic. In this vein, Group Rule #2 states: “Before commenting or submitting a post, ask yourself - Are you making this person, thing, action wrong?” As an example of these rules in action, when someone posts that “All Lives Matter,” a phrase that is generally taken as a rejection of the proposition that Black Lives Matter, rather than rejecting the post, or telling the person they are wrong for posting it, the moderators allow the post but ask why the person posted this, so they can have a constructive discussion about why the post is hurtful. This common occurrence indicates that there is a diversity of viewpoints within the group. The group actively welcomes members who are not fully committed to, or ignorant about, the racial justice movement so long as they are willing to learn more.

Pinney and Davis also created [two learning modules](https://www.facebook.com/groups/whitepeopledoingsomething/learning_content/) that new members are asked to complete before participating in the group. The first module, which is required, is a series of videos in which Pinney and Davis explain the Group’s purpose. The second module, which is optional but strongly recommended, is a series of conversations with community organizers, former civil rights leaders and other people who do work related to racial justice.

## Participation

Davis attributes the group’s rapid growth to a combination of the renewed attention to racial issues and people spending more time online because of the pandemic: “The medium of social media, combined with the context of COVID and George Floyd just set it on fire,” she told us. The group has not run any ads and grew organically as members promoted it on blogging sites and within their networks. Many early adopters were people in the autism community and the online entrepreneur community. Both of these are communities where Pinney and Davis have professional ties.

The group aims to be a place where people can ask questions and discuss race in a way they may not feel comfortable doing in everyday life. “We opened up the conversation about race to a group of people on the Internet who were previously on the sidelines,” Pinney says. Many of these are people who are realizing for the first time that racism is a problem that needs to be taken seriously.

## Action

Each day, White People. DOING Something holds a live stream in which Davis and Pinney host lectures, lessons, and interviews. Each live stream includes a “daily action.” For instance, the September 3rd action was about [microaggressions](https://www.vox.com/2015/2/16/8031073/what-are-microaggressions), which they describe as everyday slights or insults made against members of marginalized groups. Members of the group were asked to watch a series of videos about the topic, then reflect on a time they had used a microaggression and the impact it had on another person. They were also encouraged to contact the person with their reflections.

Some days have a running theme. On “Listening Tuesday,” people of color who belong to the group are invited to share their stories without judgment. “It can be anything,” Davis says. “It can be about an incident of racism, or it can be about what they ate for breakfast.” Other members of the community are asked to comment only with the “heart” emoji to show that they are listening. This is one of the traditions, rules and customs the group has developed.

## Outcome and Impact

Pinney and Davis say the group’s greatest impact has been to build a community whose members feel safe sharing intimate and difficult stories about their experiences with race. Davis told us. “We've gotten so much feedback that \[Listening Tuesday\] is the best day because it's healing for them to be able to share their story without having to deal with somebody's backlash or judgment.”

At the time of writing, Davis and Pinney have gone live with daily actions for nearly 100 consecutive days. Some actions have helped to raise money and awareness for racial justice causes. For instance, in an August [livestream](https://www.facebook.com/aja.davis26/videos/10103366273852025/), the group told the story of Brittany Crishawn Williams, a Black woman from Jacksonville, Florida who was reportedly [assaulted by a police officer](https://amp.jacksonville.com/amp/41750393?fbclid=IwAR1wsC7w9qTcXE7gik65QjnqqmuSEXM-YmoEKZvADmOgunhv8phghpPWZms) after reporting another officer trespassing outside her home. The group helped to raise more than $9,000 to help cover Williams’s medical bills and attorney fees.

## Challenges

As this group is configured to require moderators to approve all posts, White People. DOING Something has largely avoided problems with spam and flame wars. While people occasionally come into the group to post incendiary comments, the members tend to meet them with compassion rather than outrage, which causes trolls to quickly leave. “Because of how we interact with the group, it’s not fun for trolls,” Pinney told us.

Rather, Pinney says that the greatest challenges have come from hardline antiracists who are not willing to reach across the aisle. These group members would get into conflicts over minor issues (for instance, whether the word “Black” should be capitalized) rather than finding commonalities and solidarity with other members.

When asked about hosting such sensitive, personal conversations on a private platform, Davis raised mixed concerns. “Everybody who is in the group is on Facebook willingly,” Davis said. “They have some knowledge that whatever they post, Facebook knows about. That \[surveillance is\] good in a way, but also terrifying.” To be sure, Davis says the group has a positive relationship with Facebook and has not experienced any problems over enforcement of the platform’s rules. Davis and Pinney have taken some steps, such as compiling a member mailing list, to help keep the group together if it ever had to leave Facebook.

## Future Prospects

Idiosyncratically, the group’s ultimate goal is to no longer need to exist. When asked about her idea of success, Davis says she hopes that “the ideas that we are bringing forth become so part of the zeitgeist of our collective humanity that the impetus for this group is no longer necessary.” She also hopes that the model of action and solidarity that the group has piloted will become more widespread on the Internet and in real life. Davis sees Facebook as ground zero for that change, due to its large number of users. “It’s totally possible if Facebook doesn’t get greedy - If they don’t start to be like ‘How can I make it about Facebook itself, and its shareholders?’ as opposed to making it about users on the platform,” she says.

## Lessons learned

- **“Get on the court and play”** \- Pinney and Davis saw that the existing ways of organizing for racial justice online were flawed. Past groups have tended to be unwelcoming of differing viewpoints and dismissive of those who are ignorant of racial issues. This made it difficult for those new to the racial justice movement to feel welcome. But rather than just criticize others from the sidelines, Pinney and Davis decided to start their own community. They did not advertise the group, but members found them, indicating that the group fills a real need. Rather than meticulously designing the perfect movement from the top down, they started with imperfect action and learned along the way. In Pinney’s words, they decided to just “get on the court and play.”
- **Lead with empathy** - A major success of the group’s work has been figuring out ways to incentivize people to interact online in ways that recognize the feelings and humanity of one another. The moderation team came up with the idea to interact with all members as if each was a loved one, a strategy that Pinney says has set the tone for how members interact as well. By improving the quality of communication within the group, Pinney hopes that the same kinds of conversation will continue in members’ lives offline, particularly with people who oppose antiracist causes. “Please continue the conversation. Please continue to ask them questions. Don’t walk away from or give up on racists,” Pinney says, “because one less racist in your life as a white person is not one less racist in the world.”

## End notes

1. As of September 3, 2020
2. For more information about the role admins and moderators play on the Facebook Groups platform, see [https://www.facebook.com/community/building-a-team/](https://www.facebook.com/community/building-a-team/)