This page explores our cultural belief that there is one right way to do things and once people are introduced to the right way, they will see the light and adopt it (deriving from and linked closely to Christian hegemony - see the What Is It? page). This belief is connected to the belief that the right way is the "perfect" way and therefore perfection is both attainable and desirable.
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.
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.
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Perfectionism shows up as:
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One right way shows up as:
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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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INTERSECTIONALITY ALERT
All of these tendencies, like many of the characteristics of white supremacy culture, are deeply class and gender based. This is one of the ways that intersectionality works. The belief in one right way is used to establish perfectionist standards based on upper middle-class paternalistic values that claim an objectivity while rationalizing (in order to hide) racist, classist, and gender conforming hierarchies of power. Those in the white group who live and identify as poor or working class are under constant pressure to figure out, adapt to, assimilate into, and support the perfectionist thinking and standards that they have little to no say in defining. For example, poor and working class white people almost always have to adopt upper middle-class ways of talking and writing if the desire is to move up the hierarchies of power economically and socially.
Objectivity is another characteristic that reflects the ways in which white supremacy culture is also a manifestation of gender and class. Women of all races and classes are often targeted for being "too" emotional within the white supremacy cultural expectation that emotions need to be controlled, "mastered," and/or absent. Poor and working class people are similarly targeted, with the intersecting belief that expressing emotions indicates lack of intellectual rigor, intelligence, and/or control.
White supremacy culture requires that we cut ourselves off from our emotions in order to participate, so emotional intelligence is anathema to white supremacy culture. For more, you will want to read journalist Lewis Wallace's article Objectivity is Dead and I'm OK With It.
All of these tendencies, like many of the characteristics of white supremacy culture, are deeply class and gender based. This is one of the ways that intersectionality works. The belief in one right way is used to establish perfectionist standards based on upper middle-class paternalistic values that claim an objectivity while rationalizing (in order to hide) racist, classist, and gender conforming hierarchies of power. Those in the white group who live and identify as poor or working class are under constant pressure to figure out, adapt to, assimilate into, and support the perfectionist thinking and standards that they have little to no say in defining. For example, poor and working class white people almost always have to adopt upper middle-class ways of talking and writing if the desire is to move up the hierarchies of power economically and socially.
Objectivity is another characteristic that reflects the ways in which white supremacy culture is also a manifestation of gender and class. Women of all races and classes are often targeted for being "too" emotional within the white supremacy cultural expectation that emotions need to be controlled, "mastered," and/or absent. Poor and working class people are similarly targeted, with the intersecting belief that expressing emotions indicates lack of intellectual rigor, intelligence, and/or control.
White supremacy culture requires that we cut ourselves off from our emotions in order to participate, so emotional intelligence is anathema to white supremacy culture. For more, you will want to read journalist Lewis Wallace's article Objectivity is Dead and I'm OK With It.
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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Graphic artist Ellen O'Grady offers a perspective on navigating perfectionism and letting it go. |
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paul kivel
Living in the Shadow of the Cross
pp. 53-55
Similar to many of the other characteristics, we see the influence of western Christian hegemonic thinking in shaping one right way, perfectionism, paternalism, and objectivity.
Paul Kivel writes: Another fundamental Christian concept is there is only one truth in the world and that truth is contained in Christianity. ... If a person believes they have The Truth and all others are misled, this can lead to arrogance and disrespect for others' beliefs and cultures. Dominant Christianity has relentlessly searched out and tried to destroy the belief systems of other cultures and even of dissident groups within it, partly because of its claim to hold the truth. ... The belief in one universal truth can lead to the claim that dominant Western beliefs are universal truths. ... The claim to universal truth becomes a justification for appropriation of anything that exists in the world. ... Dominant Christianity has always accepted universal statements about the Other. But when Christians are the subject of generalizations, they suddenly become very discerning about the limits of generalizations ... and almost never accept that observations made by those in subordinate groups are valid.
We can easily substitute the term "white supremacy" for "western Christianity" in these sentences. The characteristics of one right way, perfectionism, paternalism, and objectivity are also reflected in the fairly general insistence by those in the white group that they be seen and experienced and treated as unique individuals uninformed or untouched or not privileged by membership in the white group, reflected in the claim "I did this on my own," while at the same time easily engaging in generalizations about other communities and groups of people. The deviousness of whiteness is in how it insists on individualism while also claiming to represent the universal norm, default, and desired state.
Paul Kivel writes: Another fundamental Christian concept is there is only one truth in the world and that truth is contained in Christianity. ... If a person believes they have The Truth and all others are misled, this can lead to arrogance and disrespect for others' beliefs and cultures. Dominant Christianity has relentlessly searched out and tried to destroy the belief systems of other cultures and even of dissident groups within it, partly because of its claim to hold the truth. ... The belief in one universal truth can lead to the claim that dominant Western beliefs are universal truths. ... The claim to universal truth becomes a justification for appropriation of anything that exists in the world. ... Dominant Christianity has always accepted universal statements about the Other. But when Christians are the subject of generalizations, they suddenly become very discerning about the limits of generalizations ... and almost never accept that observations made by those in subordinate groups are valid.
We can easily substitute the term "white supremacy" for "western Christianity" in these sentences. The characteristics of one right way, perfectionism, paternalism, and objectivity are also reflected in the fairly general insistence by those in the white group that they be seen and experienced and treated as unique individuals uninformed or untouched or not privileged by membership in the white group, reflected in the claim "I did this on my own," while at the same time easily engaging in generalizations about other communities and groups of people. The deviousness of whiteness is in how it insists on individualism while also claiming to represent the universal norm, default, and desired state.
qualified
I have added qualified to the list of characteristics of white supremacy culture. This particular characteristic is internalized primarily by middle and owning class white people, formally educated, who are taught by the culture that they (in this case referring to people like me who live in these identities; see my story below) are qualified and even duty bound to fix, save, and set straight the world (thank you Parker Palmer). Closely aligned with dominant mainstream Christian ideology that teaches a Christian duty to convert the "heathen," the "savage," the "impure," this characteristic is particularly violent both psychically and physically in its determination to ignore and/or erase the culture, wisdom, genius, joy of people and communities being "saved" while seizing their land, labor, architecture, music, food, and other material goods to commodify for profit.
I want to stress that while the intention to fix, save, and set straight is often overt, the deviousness of this characteristic is how strongly white middle and owning class educated people can internalize and assume their own inherent qualifications to "improve" whatever is in front of them that is "broken" without acknowledging or seeing their role in breaking it. This internalized assumption becomes an unnamed way of being, a conditioned impulse to "help" others out of a what feels like a benign sense that they know the right way, the best way with little or no understanding of how limited they really are.
Examples of this characteristic are all around us. Academia defines "the classics" as all things Roman and Greek and male, while the word "classic" means that which is judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding. And so with the simple use of a word to describe a body of work, a whole category of knowledge assigns superiority to a very limited body of knowing and being, consigning other ways of knowing and being as "less than" while rarely recognizing other cultural and community-based ways of knowing at all. Examples include how so many white people lead, make decisions, and define reality for BIPOC and poor communities, from Congress and its policymaking to funders and their assessment of who and what is deserving to whole fields that overtly or subtly assume they can and should make decisions that impact people and communities with whom they have no real relationship.
In my classrooms, I hear BIPOC faculty and students tell stories over and over again about how their white colleagues continually question their very presence, how these colleagues equate their race with "not qualified," and assume their inclusion is a "watering down" of standards. BIPOC faculty and students have to navigate overt and subtle accusations of being admitted simply to satisfy an affirmative action requirement. They have to navigate overt and subtle accusations of playing the race card or making everything about race if they decide to speak out. At the same time, white faculty and students can and do assume their qualifications, often giving the benefit of the doubt to others who are white, even and especially if they have little or no commitment to or experience living into a racial equity practice. We assume, those of us who are white and middle and upper class and educated, that we are "race neutral" when our very ignorance means that we are daily reproducing racism.
The Alice in Wonder upside down nature of this assumption that white people as a group are "qualified" while BIPOC people as a group are "unqualified affirmative action hire" is given lie to with one phrase: the Trump Administration and Congress. If we want to point to an entire group of mostly white people who are obviously and deeply unqualified for their positions, that's all we need to say. Their internalization of their entitlement and ability to govern is at complete odds with their very apparent inability to think, feel, and act responsibly and humanely.
The antidotes to this characteristic include, first and foremost, knowing ourselves so that we become skilled at catching our internalized assumptions about our own qualified-ness. We must learn to question and get comfortable with the limits of our knowing. We must learn to prioritize relationships over being right (thank you Rev. Tami Forte Logan). We must learn to lean into the racial equity principles of collective action and accountability. We must learn to let go of the need to fix, save, and set straight in the acknowledgement that we are at our best when we are "with" others (and ourselves).
I use the word "must" with great deliberation here. The internalized assumption that I know best is, in my experience, one of the most harmful internalizations that I carry. The assumption that I know best leads me to become defensive when my "knowing" is challenged, fills my body with anxiety and dread at having to know what's best even as underneath the anxiety and dread I am aware that I don't and can't really know. The assumption that I know best brings a sense of despair when I am confronted with my own not knowing. The assumption I know best disconnects me from everyone, for no one wants to be in the company of a know it all, particularly when it is so clear to others what I don't know at all.
I remember how several years ago a friend told me that I wasn't a very good teacher. She shared this with me, I think, in an effort to "help" me (in her own assumptions about being qualified to make this judgment about my teaching). I am not sure if she knew (or even if I knew) how attached I was to my identity as more than just a good teacher but one of the very best teachers. By whose standards, I cannot say. I do know that when she told me, very matter-of-factly, that I wasn't doing a good job in a class that she was attending, I was devastated. I obsessed about her accusation for days and weeks after, thinking of all the ways she was definitely and absolutely wrong and fuming that she could be so heartless and rude. I kept thinking about it and thinking about it, my mind racing like a hamster on a wheel trying to get away from this idea that I was a bad teacher. Finally, in an attempt to alleviate my anxiety, I took a long walk. I was visiting friends in Brooklyn at the time and I walked block after city block, my mind full of defensive thoughts and denials. Finally, stopping at a red light and waiting to cross, I decided to consider what might happen if I allowed myself to believe that what she said was true. And so I did. I decided to admit to myself I was a bad teacher. Once I allowed that thought, I took it further - I wasn't just a bad teacher, I was a terrible teacher, one of the worst precisely because I had been so convinced that I was one of the best. As I kept allowing the possibility of my own inadequacy, I started to notice that underneath the story of my own badness, deep in my gut, I could feel a tiny sense of relief. I brought my attention to the feeling because it was such a surprise. As I focused on it, the relief grew. As it expanded, I noticed, with a start, the relief was about no longer having to hold onto this idea that I was one of the best. I could finally let go of this story. I could just admit that sometimes I was a very good teacher and sometimes I wasn't and mostly I was just human, glory and warts and genius and faults and all. The sense of relief flooded my body and I felt free - free from the need to be the best, free from the need to be the worst. I became a teacher like any other teacher. And I can tell you that I became, as a result of that letting go, a much better teacher after that. I still prefer to do well rather than falter and that's ok too.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t claim our wisdom. I also have the experience of giving away my “knowing” too easily, particularly when challenged by people who are skilled at insisting their way of knowing and their content knowledge is superior to mine. I want us to claim what we know and how we know, particularly if and when we are standing up for wisdom mined from the ways in which life offers learning from our lived experience in relationship with others, from our suffering, from our efforts to know ourselves as the racialized beings we are.
I am talking here about the ways those of us who are white internalize the sense that we know when we actually don’t. This internalization that we are qualified, that we know best, that we can fix and save and set straight, is actually deeply harmful to those of us who hold it. We can never live up to knowing what is best all the time or even most of the time. Even when we think we know what's best, if we are honest, we will find ourselves surprised by the unintended consequences and unanticipated twists of this life. We know deep inside where authentic knowing resides that our own insistence about how right we are makes our bodies tense as we hide our fear of finding out we might not be, which makes us insist even more that we know what we couldn't possibly and on it goes.
Just saying.
I want to stress that while the intention to fix, save, and set straight is often overt, the deviousness of this characteristic is how strongly white middle and owning class educated people can internalize and assume their own inherent qualifications to "improve" whatever is in front of them that is "broken" without acknowledging or seeing their role in breaking it. This internalized assumption becomes an unnamed way of being, a conditioned impulse to "help" others out of a what feels like a benign sense that they know the right way, the best way with little or no understanding of how limited they really are.
Examples of this characteristic are all around us. Academia defines "the classics" as all things Roman and Greek and male, while the word "classic" means that which is judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding. And so with the simple use of a word to describe a body of work, a whole category of knowledge assigns superiority to a very limited body of knowing and being, consigning other ways of knowing and being as "less than" while rarely recognizing other cultural and community-based ways of knowing at all. Examples include how so many white people lead, make decisions, and define reality for BIPOC and poor communities, from Congress and its policymaking to funders and their assessment of who and what is deserving to whole fields that overtly or subtly assume they can and should make decisions that impact people and communities with whom they have no real relationship.
In my classrooms, I hear BIPOC faculty and students tell stories over and over again about how their white colleagues continually question their very presence, how these colleagues equate their race with "not qualified," and assume their inclusion is a "watering down" of standards. BIPOC faculty and students have to navigate overt and subtle accusations of being admitted simply to satisfy an affirmative action requirement. They have to navigate overt and subtle accusations of playing the race card or making everything about race if they decide to speak out. At the same time, white faculty and students can and do assume their qualifications, often giving the benefit of the doubt to others who are white, even and especially if they have little or no commitment to or experience living into a racial equity practice. We assume, those of us who are white and middle and upper class and educated, that we are "race neutral" when our very ignorance means that we are daily reproducing racism.
The Alice in Wonder upside down nature of this assumption that white people as a group are "qualified" while BIPOC people as a group are "unqualified affirmative action hire" is given lie to with one phrase: the Trump Administration and Congress. If we want to point to an entire group of mostly white people who are obviously and deeply unqualified for their positions, that's all we need to say. Their internalization of their entitlement and ability to govern is at complete odds with their very apparent inability to think, feel, and act responsibly and humanely.
The antidotes to this characteristic include, first and foremost, knowing ourselves so that we become skilled at catching our internalized assumptions about our own qualified-ness. We must learn to question and get comfortable with the limits of our knowing. We must learn to prioritize relationships over being right (thank you Rev. Tami Forte Logan). We must learn to lean into the racial equity principles of collective action and accountability. We must learn to let go of the need to fix, save, and set straight in the acknowledgement that we are at our best when we are "with" others (and ourselves).
I use the word "must" with great deliberation here. The internalized assumption that I know best is, in my experience, one of the most harmful internalizations that I carry. The assumption that I know best leads me to become defensive when my "knowing" is challenged, fills my body with anxiety and dread at having to know what's best even as underneath the anxiety and dread I am aware that I don't and can't really know. The assumption that I know best brings a sense of despair when I am confronted with my own not knowing. The assumption I know best disconnects me from everyone, for no one wants to be in the company of a know it all, particularly when it is so clear to others what I don't know at all.
I remember how several years ago a friend told me that I wasn't a very good teacher. She shared this with me, I think, in an effort to "help" me (in her own assumptions about being qualified to make this judgment about my teaching). I am not sure if she knew (or even if I knew) how attached I was to my identity as more than just a good teacher but one of the very best teachers. By whose standards, I cannot say. I do know that when she told me, very matter-of-factly, that I wasn't doing a good job in a class that she was attending, I was devastated. I obsessed about her accusation for days and weeks after, thinking of all the ways she was definitely and absolutely wrong and fuming that she could be so heartless and rude. I kept thinking about it and thinking about it, my mind racing like a hamster on a wheel trying to get away from this idea that I was a bad teacher. Finally, in an attempt to alleviate my anxiety, I took a long walk. I was visiting friends in Brooklyn at the time and I walked block after city block, my mind full of defensive thoughts and denials. Finally, stopping at a red light and waiting to cross, I decided to consider what might happen if I allowed myself to believe that what she said was true. And so I did. I decided to admit to myself I was a bad teacher. Once I allowed that thought, I took it further - I wasn't just a bad teacher, I was a terrible teacher, one of the worst precisely because I had been so convinced that I was one of the best. As I kept allowing the possibility of my own inadequacy, I started to notice that underneath the story of my own badness, deep in my gut, I could feel a tiny sense of relief. I brought my attention to the feeling because it was such a surprise. As I focused on it, the relief grew. As it expanded, I noticed, with a start, the relief was about no longer having to hold onto this idea that I was one of the best. I could finally let go of this story. I could just admit that sometimes I was a very good teacher and sometimes I wasn't and mostly I was just human, glory and warts and genius and faults and all. The sense of relief flooded my body and I felt free - free from the need to be the best, free from the need to be the worst. I became a teacher like any other teacher. And I can tell you that I became, as a result of that letting go, a much better teacher after that. I still prefer to do well rather than falter and that's ok too.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t claim our wisdom. I also have the experience of giving away my “knowing” too easily, particularly when challenged by people who are skilled at insisting their way of knowing and their content knowledge is superior to mine. I want us to claim what we know and how we know, particularly if and when we are standing up for wisdom mined from the ways in which life offers learning from our lived experience in relationship with others, from our suffering, from our efforts to know ourselves as the racialized beings we are.
I am talking here about the ways those of us who are white internalize the sense that we know when we actually don’t. This internalization that we are qualified, that we know best, that we can fix and save and set straight, is actually deeply harmful to those of us who hold it. We can never live up to knowing what is best all the time or even most of the time. Even when we think we know what's best, if we are honest, we will find ourselves surprised by the unintended consequences and unanticipated twists of this life. We know deep inside where authentic knowing resides that our own insistence about how right we are makes our bodies tense as we hide our fear of finding out we might not be, which makes us insist even more that we know what we couldn't possibly and on it goes.
Just saying.
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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. It 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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