ONE RIGHT WAY |
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Perfectionism shows up as:
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one right way
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One right way shows up as:
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paternalism |
Paternalism shows up as:
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There is no relationship between perfectionism and excellence. Perfectionism is the belief that we can be perfect or perform perfectly. The question has to be asked: according to who? Who decides what perfect is? Perfectionism is the conditioned belief and attitude that we can be perfect based on a standard or set of rules that we did not create and that we are led to believe will prove our value. Perfectionism is the conditioned belief and attitude that we can determine whether others are showing up as perfect and demand or expect that they do so. White supremacy culture uses perfectionism to preserve power and the status quo. As long as we are striving to be perfect according to someone else's rules, we have less energy and attention to question those rules and to remember what is truly important. We can be perfectionist in our social justice circles when we assume or believe there is a perfect way to do something and we know what it is. When we look more closely at our own perfectionism, we see that the perfectionist tendency is always in service of our own power or the current power structure. We might be fighting power out in the world but when we are perfectionist about how we do that, we preserve a toxic power structure internally. Excellence has more potential to be defined by and for us. We can talk about what we think excellence is and hold ourselves and each other accountable to a shared and collectively defined standard of excellence. We can rock the boat with excellence. We can care for each other with excellence. We can write and lead and work and teach and cook with excellence. We can forgive with excellence. Excellence requires making and learning from mistakes. And even as I distinguish perfection from excellence, I also want to add that we don't have to strive for excellence either. Sometimes we just want to have fun, try something out (thank you Bevelyn Ukah). Sometimes, often times, we arrive at a new way of thinking or doing that comes from playfulness and/or a lack of striving towards any particular standard. And even excellence is in the eye of the beholder. And here's the main point; we are already perfect. We are made perfect. We do not have to prove our perfection to anyone, even to ourselves (no matter what our inner voices may be telling us). We may have lost touch with how perfect we are and when we do, our perfectionism becomes a way to try and prove to ourselves and others that we are worthy. But we are already worthy. We are already invaluable. No proof necessary. |
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Objectivity shows up as:
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A call for subjectivity: Another antidote to objectivity is to claim our subjectivity, share our specific experience, as well as what we know and don't know. Be clear about our biases and our limits. Avoid generalizing from our experience and open ourselves to the gifts of getting specific and particular about our subjectivity (thank you Bevelyn Ukah). |
Antidotes to one right way, perfectionism, and paternalism include:
Antidotes to objectivity include:
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As I listen and watch, I feel my body become ever more tense, ever more anxious. A familiar sense of urgency begins to build in my chest. After several minutes, my agitation peaks and I push myself away from the wall. I walk quickly and deliberately to the front of the room. I step up to Kamau and, putting my white palm flat against his solid Black arm, I push him gently but firmly aside. I take his place and begin to talk.
I was (and still am) a college educated upper class white woman full of idealism and fervor for racial justice. At the time of this story, I was very young, quite naïve, and fairly inexperienced in terms of living into this commitment. Just minutes before I pushed Kamau aside, I was standing at the back of the room, leaning against the wall, relaxed yet alert, arms crossed, watching and listening. The room was both large and packed, people seated in tight rows of brown metal folding chairs, knees brushing the backs of chairs of the row just in front. Sun struggled in from windows punched into one side of the makeshift meeting hall. The people gathered here lived within a few miles of this hall, built on the land of what is now known as the Arkansas Delta. This land was, centuries ago, home to the Quapaw people. Then French and Spanish settlers arrived, paving the way for takeover by a young nation hungry for land and resources. Plantations pushed out the Indigenous peoples, substituting the forced labor of enslavement in service to cotton. As the Civil War rumbled, much of the Delta was home to Black and enslaved peoples whose blood, sweat, and labor was continuing to build the wealth of the white elite. By the end of that war, white landowners wielded their power to transform slavery into sharecropping and debilitating segregation. The Great Flood of 1927 rendered many Black and poor families homeless. This, with the rise of industrialized farming, slowly but surely pushed Black families off their land as the Quapaw had been forced decades earlier. The people in this meeting hall were the descendants of the men and women and families who stayed. Perhaps they stayed in a desire to claim the resistance of a people who brought the world ragtime, hokum, Delta blues, gospel, the boogie-woogie, and the rootedness of juke joints and dance halls producing cultural genius. Perhaps they stayed for love of the land and regard for their ancestors. Perhaps they stayed because they understood the power of staying in the face of continued disregard. I can’t really tell you because I never asked. My job that day was to lean against the wall and listen and learn. I was with my colleague, Kamau Marcharia. Kamau, with his dark black skin and solid frame, stood dignified and relaxed in front of the room in his regulation outfit of jeans, sloganed t-shirt, and kufi hat covering a close shaven head. Kamau was a deeply experienced community organizer, 10 years my senior. He grew up in the equivalent of the Delta several states over in South Carolina. His life experience was (and is) diametrically opposed to mine. Black, male, born into geographical and racialized poverty, denied a strong education by systemic racism, which could not diminish his deep brilliance ... Kamau has navigated it all, including an unjust imprisonment during which he became a social justice warrior. Kamau’s job that day was to share his expertise about the promise of organizing as one way to take on the kinds of historical and present day disregard that this community was facing. His goal was to move this gathering of people to identify what they wanted and how they could work together to get it. He was standing in front of the room, sharing a history of what organizing can do. As he talked, every fiber of my being vibrated with an embodied certainty that he wasn’t doing it right. So I left my perch at the back of the room and walked up to Kamau, pushed him aside, and took over. The roomful of people listened to whatever I said with studied politeness. Kamau listened with studied politeness. No one met my level of rudeness with their own. Perhaps they were used to this behavior. The Delta was, after all, the object of much well-meaning “help” by and from people who didn’t live there and never had, from people who didn’t know them and never would. Perhaps they didn’t want to put Kamau at risk, not knowing what might happen to him if they objected to my white arrogance. I cannot know because I did not ask. It did not occur to me to ask. I was too busy living into my entitled confidence that I knew the right way, the best way. My perfectionist belief in my own abilities was absolutely absurd. I had no experience working in the Delta or communities like it. I was not a community organizer. I was wet behind both ears in every possible way. I should also add that Kamau never said a word about what I had done at the time. We worked side by side as colleagues for several years before I had grown enough awareness to realize my folly and ask him about it. “I thought with time you would figure it out,” he replied, and with that simple response offered me grace that my white conceit did not deserve. I can tell you too many stories like this one, where my well-programmed body becomes anxious and agitated when other people aren’t doing it right, when I feel compelled to fix or save or advise out of some internal sense that I am qualified to do so. I guarantee that almost every white person reading this this story has their own to tell, stories of our cultural conditioning into the belief that we know best in spite of massive evidence that we often know little or nothing at all. I guarantee that every Black, Brown, or Indigenous people in our lives could tell us such a story if we invited them to do so. For that matter, our white friends could too, for that's how racism works, inhabiting our bodies and spreading out on everybody, even those it wasn't intended for. Whenever we claim to know what’s best in ways that squash another’s knowing, whether lived or intuitive, whenever we argue with urgency about needing to land on the right way to do something in disregard of another’s suggestion that in its unfamiliarity makes us uncomfortable or afraid, whenever we insist that the way we think about something or talk about something or do something is the best way, we shut ourselves off from the possibility of relationship – to a new way of doing, to a new way of knowing, to a new way of being with an idea, a plan, a person. Because whiteness does not know itself, it cannot truly know others. If we are to transform white supremacy, we need to know ourselves, to understand where these beliefs - that we are qualified, particularly when we are not, or that we know the one right way, particularly when we do not - come from. This unspoken assumption that white is both the norm (normal) and better (better than all those painted as “other”) is the toxic air we breathe, and like most breaths we take, too often we fail to notice how the pollution of this particular air is killing not just our neighbors, it is killing us. We must learn to breathe a different air fully and with intention. As I pushed away from that wall in that meeting hall in the Arkansas Delta, what openings might have been possible had I simply taken a moment to notice my rising anxiety and paused a moment to breathe. Perhaps I could have relaxed back into the wall and allowed myself to really listen. Perhaps I could have appreciated Kamau’s ability to communicate with this community so similar to his own. Perhaps I could have learned new ways to be in community with both Kamau and the people in that room. Perhaps I could have opened an invitation to myself to participate in creating one of those sacred spaces where we are really able to be with each other, see each other, hear each other, in all our beloved complexities. |
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These four principles will support us to move through our internalizations of one right way, perfectionism, paternalism, objectivity, and qualified. Simply acknowledging that mistakes are inevitable and the only real mistake is failure to learn from them is a big step towards thwarting these characteristics. Being transparent with ourselves and others about our expectations helps us think and act collectively to define what we think excellence looks like. Defining excellence in ways that take into account both the people affected and our grounding principles helps us to let go of our conditioning into the idea there is one way, or a perfect way, helps us let go of our belief that we are qualified to define reality for ourselves and others. It can be such a relief to name both what we know and what we don't know without having to pretend that we can or should be in control ... of people or circumstances or resources. We can still plan, we can brainstorm intended and unintended consequences, we can prepare based on what we think we know at any given moment. The skill is in claiming what we know, admitting the limits of what we claim to know, being clear about what we don't know, while learning from our experience and each other.
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White Supremacy Culture | Offered by Tema Okun
first published 2021 | last update 8.2023 |