This post in the second of a series on Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline and Diversity and Inclusion.
The Discipline of Personal Mastery is highly appropriate to the practice of creating equity in organizations. Personal Mastery is an approach to individual learning that encompasses the entire person. It includes questioning our assumptions about the world we live in and finding ways of making meaning that embrace broader and broader experiences. It means taking a creative approach to work and life in general. Personal Mastery is grounded in competence and skill, but goes far beyond them. It is the kind of learning many of us Whites need to experience if we are going to be able to create true equity in the workplace.
Personal Mastery entails the kind of learning in which we don’t “see what we believe” but rather take in external data and form hypotheses based on it. It includes an orientation towards learning that is continual, always striving and never arriving.
For many of us Whites who are socialized in a system that not only teaches us that the system treats all races and ethnicities fairly (while the data shows otherwise), but also teaches us to keep Whiteness invisible, this kind of learning will help us to meaningfully integrate others’ experiences of the system that contradict our own beliefs. Personal Mastery can be a way we approach our explorations of the nature of Whiteness, not only its dominance, but also its content: its symbols, preferences, and ways of understanding the world.
My own research is driven in part by the lack of any place or technique that I could find to help guide me through my own racial awareness development process. I have found some workshops, and plenty of writing about what racial awareness development looks like, but there are few resources available to actually help White people develop racial awareness. We often have to do this on our own. We often look to People of Color for help with this, and we can sometimes act as if they are responsible for our development. We sometimes form groups of like-minded Whites, but the racial development journey is so intense and fraught with guilt and shame for so many Whites that the dynamic of these groups can overpower their raison d’être. We Whites often have such deep needs to be seen as non-racist that we unwittingly start to police each other for racist thought, words, and deeds. We want to distance ourselves from anyone in the group who may be expressing what we deem as inappropriate behavior while all the while ignoring some of the realities of our own development as well as some of the ugly realities of what the learning process can look like: the fits and starts of it, the profound difficulty there is in trying to change deep-seated and unconsciously held beliefs, how we can trick ourselves into thinking we’ve grown when what we’ve actually done is gotten more sophisticated at rationalization and denial. Senge’s notion of Personal Mastery attends to the way that developing awareness must impact the non-conscious parts of lives.
In this discussion I think it’s also important to acknowledge that there are some resources for us Whites. One powerful tool that I’ve encountered is the various models of racial awareness development that do exist, models that, while they may not offer a “how-to” method of development, can offer an overview of what development can look like so that we can have some sense of direction or something for which to strive in our journey.
Milton Bennett’s Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (MIS) is one of a number of cultural awareness models that is available to diversity practitioners who want to help their White clients build awareness of themselves as racial/cultural beings. In the model, identity awareness development is manifested as movement from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism. There is also a secondary (though slightly less explicitly described by Bennett) movement which will be described here as movement from commitment (to a set of ethnocentric values), through stages of relinquishment of commitment (in the service of ethnorelativism), to a new commitment (to values that serve the integration of the self with an ethnorelative world and worldview).
The MIS is the product of Bennett’s extensive work with people who have had or are having encounters with other cultures. Its main focus is on the intercultural sojourner. Though not exclusively designed to describe the experience of Whites in a White dominated culture, it addresses the notions of dominance, ethnocentrism, and development. There is also a survey instrument, the Intercultural Development Inventory, that is based on this model and available to practitioners.
The MIS describes two main stages, ethnocentric and ethnorelative. Within each of these stages are three stances. They are described in brief here:
The Ethnocentric Stages:
Denial of Difference: The person does not or is not able to see difference. The person either experiences Isolation from members or experiences of other cultures or, more likely in a heterogeneous society, lives in Separation from them.
Defense Against Difference: The person is able to see difference and negatively evaluates that difference on some level. One can Denigrate other cultures or profess a belief in the Superiority of one’s one culture. This is similar the White identity models that show a sort of active racism/ethnocentrism in earlier stages. The MIS also has the stance of Reversal in this stage, where a person takes up a new culture and begins to Denigrate his or her culture of origin or claim the Superiority of the new culture.
Minimization of Difference: This stage is dominated by the belief that all human beings are essentially the same and that differences between them are superficial. This “sameness” tends to be seen in ethnocentric terms, so that the person in this stage sees universalism as all people sharing her or his values. Physical Universalism is an emphasis on the physiological commonness of all humanity. Transcendent Universalism is an emphasis on the belief that all human beings exist in context or relation to some universal experience such as one God, human nature, or supernatural law. This phenomenon can be likened to colorblind racism.
The Ethnorelative Stages:
Acceptance of Difference: In this stage a person begins to see as valid other ways of acting and believing. The context of human activity becomes central to its interpretation. Behavioral Relativism is understanding that all behavior happens in a cultural context. Value Relativism, which Bennett sees as a bit more difficult to accomplish and engage in than Behavioral Relativism, is the understanding that beliefs and values are held in cultural context. People in this stage can suffer from a lack of the ability to commit or take action.
Adaptation to Difference: In this stage the developing person begins to acquire intercultural communication skills. These include the effective use of empathy and taking multiple cultural perspectives. Empathy is the ability to alter cultural perspectives to act in a way that is culturally appropriate in context. Pluralism is the developing of the ability to shift between cultural perspectives without much thought or effort.
Integration of Difference: The person in this stage actually holds more than one cultural perspective. Contextual Evaluation is the ability to use multiple frames of reference to evaluate human activity. Constructive Marginality is a stance in which the person sees her or himself as a cultural being in context and in process. The person begins to identify more as a cultural sojourner than with any one culture.
Using a model like the MIS, we can begin to reflect on our behavior and attitudes and to compare them with the different stances of the model. We can also use the survey that is based on the MIS to measure ourselves on the scale and get better understanding of where we may be developmentally. People who have read other posts of this blog are aware of my support for the notion of private, individual coaching as a means of racial awareness development. If you can find someone willing (and skilled enough) to deliver this kind of coaching, that can be a starting point for this conversation.
