The university's School of Social Work hosted the virtual lecture to teach White people about their relationship with White supremacy. The lecture suggests this relationship can be countered by using a 12-step program.

The two-hour lecture is hosted by the school's Center for Practice Transformation and featured "therapist" Cristina Combs, the author of the 12-step program.

Combs, a University of Minnesota alumnus, created the 12-step recovery from Whiteness program, "after years of struggling to navigate the role and presence of whiteness in her personal, academic, and professional journeys."

"I also want to hold that alongside the tension that, in this model, we are, in fact, centering Whiteness, but we are centering it differently: to expose it, study its patterns, and to transform its violent legacy," she says in the lecture.

Setting up the meat of her lecture, Combs prefaced it by quoting feminist author Bell Hooks, saying "'imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy' [is] the power structure underlying the social order" [but] "it is sometimes necessary to focus singularly on race."