![]() I do not mean or intend any of these, although as we all know, my intention has little to do with my impact. They think I am saying that worship of the written word is the same as the ability to write well, and therefore I am implying that those who are BIPOC cannot achieve a high standard of written expression (whatever standard of "high" might be in the reader's mind). Some readers equate perfectionism with excellence and think I am saying that BIPOC people and communities cannot demonstrate excellence. Sometimes readers are angry because they believe I am suggesting that BIPOC people and communities cannot achieve or accomplish at the same level or standard as white people. Sometimes people are angry about being connected to any of the characteristics, feeling that to admit we have perfectionist tendencies or a belief that our way is the right way makes us bad. ![]() I have come to understand that some people, when introduced to the White Supremacy Culture article and its list of characteristics, respond with anger, thinking that my goal in listing the characteristics is to shame or blame. I hope you find some support for navigating your lived experience here. I do understand the limits in being able to communicate the impact of white supremacy culture on you, the current reader of this website. The miracle is that we have survived as well as we have, the miracle is our ancestors who have fought to remember who we really are, the miracle is the earth and wind and water that restores itself in soft and fierce determination to keep us all whole.Īnd we are all impacted. This brew is a cancer, a dis-ease, an addiction, an infliction and it infects everything with and without our awareness. White supremacy culture is inextricably linked to all the other oppressions - capitalism, sexism, class and gender oppression, ableism, ageism, Christian hegemony - these and more are all interconnected and intersected and stirred together in a toxic brew that is reflected in our devastation of the air and water and land and living beings we have and are destroying and disregarding in the name of profit and power. all the ways that the ruling class power elite use identity to define who is human and who is not, as well as all the ways in which oppressions intersect. Our experience of white supremacy culture and our navigation of white supremacy culture is very different based on who we are and our lived experience, our race, our class, our gender, our sexuality, our religion. White supremacy targets and violates BIPOC people and communities with the intent to destroy them directly white supremacy targets and violates white people with a persistent invitation to collude that will inevitably destroy their humanity. While white supremacy culture affects us all, harms us all, and is toxic to us all, it does not affect, harm, and violate us in the same way. You will also find a downloadable print version of the characteristics below the buttons. You can use the buttons at the very bottom of the page to explore each of the different pages about the characteristics. I've grouped some characteristics together, although they all intersect. And that’s exactly the point – our institutions not only value these characteristics, they to some extent require them and constantly reproduce them in order to benefit from them (thank you for this clarity Alexis Pauline-Gumbs), which is why they are so prevalent in our culture and institutions.Īs I say elsewhere on this site, I have revised, updated, added to the original article and the result is this website. Asked to report, one young student spoke for her group, sharing that the list represents all the characteristics taught by law schools as essential to success in the profession. We asked participants to work in small groups, looking for ways in which these characteristics show up in their personal and organizational lives. The tragic relevance of the list was reinforced a few years later when I was co-facilitating a workshop at a national conference of progressive attorneys and law students. The paper I wrote in such a frenzy on that afternoon so many years ago lists 15 behaviors, all of them interconnected and mutually reinforcing – perfectionism, a sense of urgency, defensiveness and/or denial, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, the belief in one “right” way, paternalism, either/or binary thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, progress defined as more, the right to profit, objectivity, and the right to comfort. In a flurry of exasperation, I sat down at my computer and typed, the words flowing of their own accord into a quick and dirty listing of some of the characteristics of white supremacy culture that show up in our organizations and communities and homes. Sometime in the late 1990s, I arrived home after a particularly frustrating consultation with an organization I was working with at the time.
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