WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
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DENIAL & DEFENSIVENESS

This page explores our cultural ​dis-ease with truth telling, particularly when we are speaking truth to power. White supremacy culture encourages a habit of denying and defending any speaking to or about it. White supremacy culture encourages a habit of silence about things that matter and, as the collective of artists fighting the AIDS epidemic so wisely and succinctly said, silence = death.

The invitation on this and every page is to investigate how these characteristics and qualities lead to disconnection (from each other, ourselves, and all living things) and how the antidotes can support us to reconnect. If you read these characteristics and qualities as blaming or shaming, perhaps they are particularly alive for you. If you find yourself becoming defensive as you read them, lean into the gift of defensiveness and ask yourself what you are defending. These pages and these characteristics are meant to help us see our culture so that we can transgress and transform and build culture that truly supports us individually and collectively. Breathe into that intention if you can.


​defensiveness

Defensiveness shows up as:
  • The organizational structure is set up and much energy spent trying to prevent abuse and protect power rather than to facilitate the capacities of each person or to clarify who has power and how they are expected to use it.
  • Because of either/or and binary thinking, those in power view and/or experience criticism as threatening and inappropriate (or rude).
  • People respond to new or challenging ideas with objections or criticism, making it very difficult to raise these ideas.
  • People in the organization, particularly those with power, spend a lot of energy trying to make sure that their feelings aren’t getting hurt, forcing others to work around their defensiveness rather than addressing them head-on. At its worst, they have convinced others to do this work for them.
  • White people spend energy defending against charges of racism instead of examining how racism might actually be happening.
  • White people claim that participation in anti-racist activity means they cannot be racist or be engaged in racism; closely linked to individualism.
  • White people targeted by other oppressions express resentment because they experience the naming of racism as erasing their experience; closely linked to either/or/binary thinking.
  • An oppressive culture where people are afraid to speak their truth.​



antidotes


​​Antidotes or suggestions for how to show up in more connecting and healing ways include:
  • Understand that structure cannot in and of itself facilitate or prevent abuse
  • Understand the link between defensiveness and fear (of losing power, losing face, losing comfort, losing privilege)
  • Work on your own defensiveness; ask yourself what you are defending against and why
  • Develop a culture of naming defensiveness as a problem when it is one
  • Set up brainstorming and other sessions designed to consider ideas ahead of time by naming defensiveness as a behavior or attitude the group wants to name and avoid
  • Give people credit for being able to handle more than you think; in other words, avoid deciding what someone can or cannot hear, particularly if you don't have evidence 
  • When someone responds defensively, ask them to talk through what they are defending (or defending against); you might find some rich information that way
  • Discuss the ways in which defensiveness or resistance to new ideas gets in the way of the mission. Use your own experience with your own defensiveness and resistance as an example. Brainstorm options for what the group can and will do when defensiveness and resistance show up.
  • Consider the power differences at play; when someone with a lot of power is defensive and resistant, the options are very different than when someone with less or little power is defensive and resistant. Be clear about the power dynamics in the situation and respond thoughtfully. The person with power has greater responsibility to name and move through their own defensiveness and resistance, although the collective is best served when everyone has those skills.
  • Know that resentment is a form of defensiveness and signals that the person feeling the resentment feels unseen and unheard. Or afraid of losing power. See the bullet point above.





​a story

"That happens to me too."
“That happens to me too,” she protests, her voice plaintive and accusing. The tone underneath her words puts me on notice that she is unwilling to seriously consider what I am telling her.
     The words come from a white woman, in her 50s or 60s, a do-good school teacher or social worker, hard-working, long suffering, underappreciated. Or at least that is what I am telling myself as my eyes land on her. I don’t actually know anything about her except her race and my guess at an age; the rest is my prejudice painted onto a pinched face framed by shoulder length grey hair atop a slight body leaning against the back of a metal folding chair, legs crossed at the ankles in a pantomime of indifference. Her chair is one of 25 placed in a loose circle, each chair holding another white body, faces all looking my way, curious, a few agitated, and hers, lips set firmly after the explosion of her five words into the middle of the room.
     I’m standing, breaking the rhythm of seated bodies in this gathering of white people, part of a larger group of community members and activists spending two days attending a racial equity training that I am facilitating with a colleague. The BIPOC people are also meeting in their own circle in a neighboring room.
     I’m doing what I have done so many times before in so many rooms just like this one. We are gathered in these seats after a morning spent looking closely at the deviousness of white supremacy and racism. We are meeting in separate racial groups to dig deeper, with the hope that these affinity groups will support our ability to speak and share more honestly.
     This woman is only saying what others are thinking. I know this, even though my body is weary with the truth of it. Racism is so clever and its ability to exclude and exploit and violate Black and Brown bodies eventually finds its way to white bodies too. The tone of her complaint lets me know that she isn’t feeling solidarity, she is feeling unseen. That is, after all, how white supremacy’s zero sum ideology works. Underneath her protest is the conditioned resentment that acknowledging the damage racism does to People and Communities of Color would somehow leave her erased.
     As her “that happens to me too” gives way to tense silence, I experience what feels like a visitation from god, an electric explosion of cosmic truth in the synapses of my brain. I hear myself say, “yes, and that’s how white supremacy works. Because instead of saying, ‘oh, that happens to me too’ in an opening of mutual recognition, we say ‘but that happens to me too” from a place of resentful defense, rejecting what is essentially an admission of shared experience.”
     I’m not sure I can do this story justice in writing, because this is a lesson that requires an ability to hear the difference between a “that happens to me too” said with angered defensiveness and the same phrase uttered with weary recognition of shared experience. That difference is evidence of how devious white supremacy is. We’re so desperate to be validated, especially those of us who are brought up to believe that being seen is our birthright, that we fail to notice how the poison of racism inevitably seeps into our lived experience, into our psyches, into our cells. And we find ourselves desperate to claim our own oppression, as if there isn’t enough to go around. And in this way white supremacy claims another victory as it successfully disconnects us from each other across lines of race and from others within our own group too.


​denial

Denial shows up as:
  • Just what it sounds like – denying what another person is saying about the ways in which white supremacy and/or racism are showing up in an interaction or space.
  • A pattern that often has a white person with different levels of power denying what a Black, Indigenous or Person of Color or a whole community is saying about their experience of racism.
  • Claiming the right to define what is and what is not racism.
  • Insisting that white supremacy and racism require intent. Attempting to separate intent from impact in order to claim that if racism is not intended, then it is not happening.
  • Refusing to consider or acknowledge the historical legacy of white supremacy and racism and the structural nature of racial disparities. Rewriting, reframing, or omitting histories to erase or downplay racism.
  • The refusal or inability to feel the emotional cost of racism. At worst suggesting that acts of violence and rage targeting BIPOC communities and people are deserved and/or necessary and at best ignoring or downplaying acts of violence and rage directed at BIPOC.
  • Insisting that individually or collectively, a person or group is free from racialized conditioning, leading to statements like “I don’t see color,” and “we’re all the same.”
  • Refusing to acknowledge the benefits of belonging to the white group while generalizing about BIPOC people and communities. Connected to individualism.
  • Seeing and/or understanding the actions of white people as individual while generalizing to whole BIPOC groups. Refusing, for example, to acknowledge the accelerating pattern of white boys and men committing acts of gun violence while attributing “danger” to whole Communities of Color to excuse police or other violence directed at Black and Brown people.
  • Erasing intersectionality - generalizing about a whole group without recognizing the ways in which class, gender, sexuality, religion, age, dis/ability, and other identities inform our individual and collective experiences.


​

​antidotes


​Antidotes include:
  • Assume that any naming of racism is on target. Instead of asking is it or isn’t it racism, ask: how is it racism?
  • Understand deep in our bones that naming racism is the first step toward repair. Learn to acknowledge any fear that naming brings up – the feeling is not wrong or right – so that you can move through the feeling and address what has been raised.
  • For white people: Avoid taking accusations of racism or collusion in racism personally. Avoid defending yourself. Learn to say "tell me more." Understand your racism (or your collusion in racism) as conditioning, not as who you essentially are. Understand that awareness of your conditioning is necessary if you are going to change and grow.
  • Call yourself and others in, not out. We will not grow the movement through shame and blame, even though shame and blame are necessary elements of our own individual and personal development. We will grow the movement by holding each other accountable from a position of care, kindness, and love. Sometimes we will have to employ tough love and always the goal is to avoid throwing ourselves or anyone else away. (Thanks to our beloved Cynthia Brown for this instruction.)
  • Know our history. Learn our history. Understand how racist patterns repeat over and over again. Take the time to learn where you live and work and love and the Indigenous history of the peoples who lived and worked and loved there before you (or live there now). Take the time to learn your own indigeneity (thank you Justin Robinson and Vivette Jeffries-Logan). Take the time to know both the history of white supremacy patterns and the stories of resistance and resilience. Plant yourself in the river of resistance and resilience.
  • Learn about the history of the recurring structural power, privilege, and benefits bestowed on the white group at the expense of BIPOC people and communities. Understand the price paid.
  • Learn to admit when you are wrong. Understand that vulnerability can be a strength, particularly if you are sitting in a position of power and privilege. Understand that not everyone can afford to be vulnerable in the same way.
  • Develop self-awareness and emotional intelligence so you can take responsibility for yourself and your emotions in collective and collaborative work. This is an essential part of self-care and the link between taking care of ourselves and our ability to show up in community with integrity.
  • Take the time to understand yourself as both an individual and part of a racialized group. Take the time to understand that you are deeply informed by your racial group (or groups if you are mixed roots). Understand that you are not defined by your racial group(s). Learn to discern and respect the difference for yourself and for others.
  • Acknowledge the power of intersectionality. Being a white cisgender owning class male is a different experience than being a white gender-non-conforming working class person. While the construct of whiteness and racial grouping means that we are being invited into the same construct, the invitation looks different and will be a different lived experience. Acknowledge and respect the overlaps and the differences.
​I sat cross-legged on the floor, my back against the seat of the couch, trying to stay anchored as I felt my desire to fight or flee rise from my pelvis into my chest. My breath became shallow and my mind was racing.
     The roiling of my insides belied the fairly calm conversation taking place around me. I was at a meeting of our training collaborative. Five of us were seated in a circle – two on the couch, one on a chair, another on the floor next to me; we had gathered as we regularly did to plan. I was the eldest in age and one of two who had founded this team over 10 years ago after Kenneth Jones' untimely and sudden death. Those seated in the circle had joined the group at different points in the last decade; two had joined within the last couple of years. They were raising questions about some of our decision-making processes and suggesting changes to better meet their needs and the needs of the group.
     And with each suggestion, I felt myself becoming more and more defensive. I had apparently forgotten that one of the characteristics of white supremacy culture in the article I had written decades earlier is this one: leaders perceive calls for change as personal attacks. And this: their defensiveness creates an oppressive culture where people feel they cannot make suggestions or when they do, their suggestions are ignored.
     The good news is that I had enough sense by this time to just keep breathing. I reminded myself that nobody was actually naming me as the problem although at the same time this was encouragement to consider whether I might be. I noted the speed with which my defensiveness arose, simply because of how threatened my ego felt in the face of a call for change. This was another one of those “ah ha” moments, delivering a level of understanding, and even empathy, for other leaders who might move so quickly to defensiveness without realizing why.
     I’ve witnessed this behavior play out in one form or another repeatedly, where those feeling accused point their fingers at the accuser who is bravely naming what we are too afraid to know, much less admit. When a Black or Indigenous person claims racism, we blame them for “rocking the boat,” for making us uncomfortable. Or we accuse them of being too sensitive, or not understanding the situation clearly, or anything else that gets us off the hook of actually having to listen to what is being said.
     So many of us lead or work in organizations devoting too much energy trying to protect existing power structures, because too often, like me, leaders perceive calls for change or the naming of dysfunction as personal attacks. We have internalized that if we are doing it “right,” then no one would have to suggest changes. We have internalized that if we are “good,” then there is no dysfunction. We fail to grasp that our intention often has little to do with our impact. The result, too often, is that much organizational energy is spent trying to make sure that the leaders’ feelings aren’t getting hurt or working around a leader’s defensiveness. That defensiveness creates a culture where people feel they cannot offer ideas because if they do, they risk being ignored, or even worse, punished or isolated. And so it goes.
     So what can we do about our defensiveness? One thing we can do is create a culture of appreciation, both in how we talk to ourselves and then in our relationships with each other. We can extend this compassion and gratitude to our colleagues, our comrades, our friends and family, particularly when we are in disagreement with each other. In organizational settings, we can recognize that the different roles we play bring different challenges – leading an organization and having to be concerned about the whole is very different than leading a program area or working in the community. So often our conflicts with each other come because we have such different lenses through which we understand the work we are being called to do. Developing the skill to see through the lens of our colleagues and comrades can be extremely helpful in addressing conflict.
     We can learn to name our power when we have it, and bring transparency about our accountability – including who we are accountable to and how, including who we should be accountable to and how. The dilemma here is how often those of us in social justice organizations are more accountable to funders than to the communities we are organizing and serving, which just replicates problematic dynamics that encourage dependency rather than authentic and mutually reciprocal relationships.
     We can learn to recognize our own defensiveness when it arises. Defensiveness is well named; it arises because we feel we have to defend ourselves in some way. Defensiveness is a response to fear – fear of losing face, losing power, losing control, losing privilege. Fear of being a mistake (so much worse than making a mistake). So the best defense against defensiveness is learning to name it when it happens. Once recognized, we can then dive in and name what it is we are defending and why.
     We can look for the cues that let us know we are entering defensiveness. I have come to know that when my breathing gets short and shallow, then I need to pay attention. As soon as I catch that I’ve started to breathe differently, I can usually slow myself down enough to take a pause before I react.
     Once I realized how defensive I was becoming about the suggested changes to our decision-making processes in the meeting with my colleagues, I was able to remind myself to breathe, relax a little, and listen with a more open mind and heart. I would like to say that my defensiveness melted away; the truth is that I am learning to live with my defensiveness, to notice its presence while trying to show up without acting out of it. Some defenses are easier to let go than others.
     One of the ways I have learned to let go of defensiveness is to realize that I don’t need to take everything so personally. When I do take things personally, I realize that I’m feeling vulnerable, either about the topic at hand or in my life at the moment. I find it very difficult to stay open-hearted when I am feeling hurt or vulnerable, and so, in those states, I tend to think and feel narrowly and I am more likely to shape feedback as a personal attack. In reality, whatever feedback people offer is information – often extremely valuable information – about who they are and what they feel capable of in that moment, about what they want and need from me.
     One of many ways to respond when we are challenged is to ask, when we are ready, "tell me more." There is great wisdom in the instruction to "seek to understand" before demanding that we be understood. Another way to respond is to realize that any challenge is really a gift - we are getting information about ourselves, about those we are in relationship with, and about what is really needed. If we can keep our heads and hearts, we can delve deeper and find out what is, in fact, needed, and then we can start to address that. So often we just give up on each other; how much better to be thought enough of to deserve a challenge. 
     And if you're thinking "but what about those times when they are wrong?" or "what about those times when it is a pattern of accusations?" or any of the other "but what about..." queries, this is the complexity of being in relationship with each other. Sometimes we are working out our shit on each other and we tend to work out our shit on the people we're closest to, because that's who is available. I don't have any easy answers; we are continually learning to be with and for each other. I simply think it helps to remember that everything we do and everything the other person is doing has a "good" reason ... even if it doesn't make sense to us in the moment. Acknowledging the good reason can be very helpful in moving through sticky situations, even when there are power imbalances. Just saying.



a story

We can learn to recognize our own defensiveness when it arises.
Picture
Artwork and poem by Tema Okun     

reluctant surrender
​

​I am willing to concede
turmoil; then it
bolts me down.
 
I am willing to concede
any single story
provides (too) many plots.
 
Did I mention
I am exhausted?
 
I want to concede,
give in, give up,
wave a flag bleached white,
 
drape it over my body,
collapsed, a silken silhouette
from head to toes,
tucked in neatly.
 
My bones cut the earth
carve it just deep enough-
a dirt bowl ready to acquire
my blood my sweat my tears.
 
Am I dead yet, I wonder,
even though I can still hear
my own breathing?

 

antidote

RACIAL EQUITY PRINCIPLE​


know yourself
​

Picture
Taking action for racial justice requires a level of self-awareness that allows us to be clear about what we are called to do, what we know how to do, and where we need to develop. Another way of thinking about this is that we have a responsibility to know our strengths, our weaknesses, our opportunities for growth, and our challenges. Knowing ourselves means that we can show up more appropriately and effectively to the work, avoid taking on tasks we are not equipped to do well, ask for help when needed, and admit when we don’t know what we’re doing or claim our skills gracefully when we do.
     White supremacy and racism affects all of us; we internalize cultural messages about our worth or lack of worth and often act on those without realizing it. We also tend to reproduce dominant culture habits of leadership and power hoarding that encourage defensiveness and denial, individualism, and either/or thinking. We may be dealing with severe trauma related to oppression. We may be addicted to a culture of critique, where all we know to do is point out what is not working or how others need to change.
     Doing our personal work so that we can show up for racial justice is, ironically, a collective practice. We need to support each other as we work to build on our amazing strengths – our power, our commitment, our kindness, our empathy, our ​bravery, our keen intelligence, our sense of humor, our ability to connect the dots, our creativity, our critical thinking, our ability to take risks and make mistakes. We also need to support each other as we work to address the effects of trauma and the dis-ease associated with white supremacy and racism. We do this by calling each other in rather than out. We do this by holding a number of contradictions, including that we are both very different as a result of our life experience and we are also interdependent as a growing community seeking and working for justice. We do this by taking responsibility for ourselves and how we show up to facilitate movement building. 

White Supremacy Culture | Offered by Tema Okun
first published 2021 | last update 2/2025
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