My Own Private Birmingham

I have been to the supermarket, and I've seen the other isle.

     With the 28^th Martin Luther King Jr. day upon us I’m going to take a moment to point out exactly what I mean by my assertions in this blog that, “Racial Identity is a White Issue,” and, “We’ve Come Far but Not Become Fair.”

     I’m not going to make a complex argument about whose responsibility it is to end racism. Those arguments are out there if you seek them.  I’m simply going to say that racism is a problem in the racist just like theft is a problem in the thief. If the thief doesn’t steal there is no theft.  If the racist stops his racism there is no racism.

     I’m not going to quote statistics about racial inequity, though if you go seek them you will see that Whites in the US hold power and wealth disproportionately compared to People of Color. 

     If you believe that all races are equal in natural ability then systematic, often-unconscious White oppression is the logical explanation for the racial disparities in the US.  After all, 99 years after slavery was made illegal in the US we needed to pass the Civil Rights Act to enforce equality among the races, and 49 years after that there are still disparities among the races in achievement, power, and legitimacy in our culture.

     And of course, if you believe that racial disparities stem from one race being superior to other races then you are, by definition, racist.

     But this is already more than I wanted to say today. Here’s what I really want to say: Last year on MLK day I went to the supermarket and there I saw the color line starkly. On this national holiday celebrating this Black man who was a civil rights leader, every single person buying food was White and every single person working behind checkout was a Person of Color.  MLK day seemed to be a great opportunity for us White folks to catch up on our shopping while for People of Color, at least in my little corner of the world, it wasn’t a day off.  Yes, they may have been getting holiday pay, yes they may have been glad to make some extra money, but no White folks seemed to be in the same boat. For us it was a day off. 

     At the time I wanted to say something to the person who checked me out, to at least acknowledge that I saw it, but what could I say that wouldn’t be some attempt to be viewed as a “good” White person instead of one of those other, bad, unaware White people? “Boy, that racism sure is persistent! Oh, I brought my own bag…” 

     All this happened, mind you, while the first Person of Color to be President of the United States is in office, a thing that until it happened many people thought was unimaginable, even in 2008. 

     And so my little experience reflects the philosophy of this blog. With Obama in the White house we have “come far” in terms of what race means in the US.  With such disparities among the races still in place, we’ve “not become fair.”  It is my responsibility to continue to do what I can about it because it’s doubly unfair to ask the targets of inequity to take the responsibility for eradicating it: “racial inequity is a White issue.”     

Race Abating

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” ― C.G. Jung

Racial microaggressions are an important part of modern racism. Racial microaggressions are the small insults and inequities that are often directed at People of Color by Whites.  They can build up in one’s experience and become a destructive force in the person’s life.  The fact that microaggressions are subtler than overt racism contributes to the difficulty in dealing with them.  People who are the targets of them aren’t always sure they actually have happened or often have a difficult time eliciting support form others because of the lack of clarity involved.

As few as the resources are for People of Color to deal with microaggressions, there are even fewer resources available for Whites who want to deal with their own microaggressions.  Many of us are simply not conscious of our biases and we often have intense emotional and psychological pressures to keep our biases out of our awareness, to keep them unconscious. It makes sense. The unconscious is the place to which we banish thoughts, feelings, and impulses that we cannot consciously bear. And in our society, one of the worst things a person can be is bigoted. In our society, being a racist is so bad that even committed White supremacists deny being racist.  They will say that they are defending their race against threats by other races, but they will often refuse to be considered racist themselves.  How much more difficult, then, can it be for one of us White liberals or those of us Whites who consider ourselves part of the antiracist movement to admit to unconscious bias? Whites who are able and willing to see their own unconscious bias are few and far between. And those of us who know in principle that we have them have a difficult time seeing them in action when we do act out on them.  Just as People of Color can be heard to say, “Did he really just say what I think he said?” a White person in pursuit of his own racial awareness development may ask himself, “Am I being racist?”  And if we believe we are, what then?  Where do we go with this knowledge? How do we build skill to overcome it?

Many people have experienced the psychotherapeutic model as a tool of oppression. I agree that it has been used that way.  It is a Eurocentric technique.  It has been used in an overall context of White privilege to further the goals of the oppressor. It has often been used by people who do not examine its assumptions critically. It has often been used by the privileged to dictate what is “normal,” and that “normal” almost always has a Eurocentric set of values.

I take a multicultural perspective. One of the values of multiculturalism is striving to respect all people and their cultural identities to the furthest extent that we are able.  This perspective includes respecting White culture, and as a White person it is important to me to create a cultural identity that nurtures my well-being. Just as it is sometimes the task of members of non-dominant groups to learn to love and respect their own cultures after having had them denigrated by White society, it is my task as a White person to learn what is lovable and respectable in my own culture once I have come to see Whiteness’s role in racial genocide.

It is in this spirit that I advocate for a psychotherapeutic approach to dealing with unconscious racial bias in Whites as a culturally appropriate approach.  None of us was born with our biases.  We were socialized to them.  They are not our fault but they are our responsibility. A White person could work with a coach-like person acting in the role of non-judgmental listener.  And this coach should also be a White person who is well trained and supervised at least in part by People of Color.  The hurdle of speaking openly about one’s racial biases to a Person of Color is too great for most people.  Admitting to bias is hard enough without worrying about attacking the racial identity of the listener. Just as talk therapy can help a person become aware of her or his unconscious motivations in life, this kind of “race therapy” can allow White people to become aware of their biases, make them conscious, and begin to learn to manage or even relinquish them.  Holding impulses in the unconscious takes up a great deal of our emotional energy and tearing down the dam that holds them back can release that energy and allow it to be used constructively. It will allow us to confront our biases when we act on them, and hopefully eventually, before we do.

In an ironic way, the psychotherapeutic model also addresses one of the critiques of White culture. White culture is highly individualistic and often nurtures no sense of personal history for its members.  Many other cultures have a good deal of focus on the past and one’s ancestors.  With its focus on the childhood, the psychotherapeutic model is a way that Whites can focus on their ancestors in a way that makes their impact on the present explicit. It is our version of evoking our ancestors.  Why would we want to deny us Whites that tool?

Pre-racial

How can we be "post-racial" if we've never seen ourselves as racial beings?

I began this post wanting to write about the term Post-racial. It’s bandied about in the media and I’ve never been comfortable with it. But that’s no surprise: I’m usually uncomfortable with just about anything I see-read-or-hear in commercial media when it comes to race. So much of the US hasn’t ever taken a focused look at what race IS let alone the impact of race on daily life in the US. Most of us White folks don’t even realize that WE are racial beings (in as much as anyone is a racial being – race being a social construct- or as I like to call it, the most meaningful and important nonexistent thing in the US). When we Whites talk about race, we almost without fail talk about other people and not ourselves. With so little thought given to ourselves as racial beings, it’s no wonder we’re a bit simple in our outlook on race.

A web search of the term post-racial brought varied responses. Much of them had to do with Obama’s election and the notion that he transcends race as a politician (we White folks never seem to have to transcend race). Some talked about how his election ushered in a new post-racial era in which race is no longer (or at least less) relevant in the US. One self identified traditionally valued conservative web site near the top of the response list talked about the fallacy of post racialism and how Whites will continue to be blamed for Black peoples’ failings (such as the achievement gap) in the Obama era. I think that anyone who has read any of this blog will know what deluded, barely concealed bigotry against Black folks I consider that to be.

The fact is that I still find it easy to get fired up in exactly the way that the US commercial media wants me to get fired up when it uses such terms that lack any nuance. It’s easy for me to confuse the revenue-driven chatter of the airwaves (which the US government gave away for free a generation before I was born) with actual interaction and discussion on the matter, including the questions of how race is lived in the US today.

So this post is in a way a refutation of the term Post-racial. But is also hopefully a refutation of the process by which I collude with commercial media to short-circuit the important discussions of our day. That doesn’t mean that I will ignore the notion of post-raciallity. What happens in the media affects us all in different ways and post-raciallity is an idea that millions have taken into their consciousnesses. But I will acknowledge that without some kind of mutual interpersonal interaction with others, and without action on my part, my blogging is only one tiny photon bouncing between two vast mirrors: the commercial media and the US people.

When I think about race in the US, I don’t think immediately about People of Color. I think about White people. I do this because that’s where my experience has led me. As a White man, when I first began the process of my own awakening to multicultural values I started by focusing on everyone but myself. I wanted to reach out and help people of other races, ethnicities, genders, disparate abilities, etc… to be more successful, to have a better chance at their share of the American Dream.

As time passed I began to see and believe that much of the struggle of race in the US is one that must take place in the hearts and minds of White people. It is we who don’t see ourselves as racial beings. It is we who don’t understand the impact of race in the US. It is we who live in a system that reflects the values that we are socialized to have and in its complex way grants us greater access to resources because of our physical phenotype and so much of the identity that comes with it. And so few of us Whites spend much if any time thinking about Whiteness. I’ve found only two general groups that do, luckily only one with which I’ve come into actual contact.

The first group is White Supremacists. This is the group with which I haven’t had real contact. From what I’ve seen and read, they have created various mythologies of Whiteness designed to highlight their belief in the superiority of the White race as they understand it, mythology that underpins their assertion that White people should possess the power in society. They hold European, especially northern European, forms to somehow be the optimal forms of humanity, but from what I’ve seen, they take the forms they like and leave the rest. They often will say that they are under siege and only fighting for the existence of their race, but those arguments seem to me to be arguments for racial dominance, not racial survival they never question the meaning of the word race or its vagueness as a construct. They never discuss the fact that what they call the superiority of the White race is nothing more than their own preference for the things that are familiar to them. They never question their own authority to deem one thing inherently superior to another. They want to continue the dominance of White people and any threat to that dominance feels like a threat to survival. This is not my notion but comes straight from Paulo Friere and The Pedagogy of the Oppressed – the oppressor feels oppressed when he loses his ability to oppress others. I won’t spend any more time talking about this brand of White Supremacy because the majority of Whites in the US are repulsed by its blatant racism and violence. The fact that most people equate the word racism with this kind of behavior is the reason why I don’t use the word racism even to describe what many would call modern, aversive, or unconscious racism. This is a notion that was made very clear to me by a Black woman who works in, among other areas, the field of diversity. The term racism shuts too much of the conversation down. These days I lean towards the term racial partiality.

The other group of Whites who are doing a lot of thinking about Whiteness is the White antiracist movement (WAM), folks with whom I’ve spent a good deal of time. As a group they have done a great deal of powerful thinking about Whiteness as a system of oppression in the United States. I’ve learned a lot from my time spent in Undoing Racism workshops with The Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond and reading various White antiracist authors. But the thinking about Whiteness I’ve found in the movement stops short of thinking through the cultural realities of Whiteness. They define Whiteness only in terms of the role it plays in oppression. Whiteness has no actual cultural content in this viewpoint.

This is an ironic continuation of the classic notion in the White US that “we don’t have a culture, we’re just White.” In discussions with people in the WAM, when I talk about my cultural identity, I’m often told that I need to seek out my Italian heritage and reclaim it because it was taken away from me in the bleaching process that turned my grandparents White in the early 20^th century. To them, the fact that Italian identity was never something that was truly available to me and as such was never taken from me is only proof of my denial of who I am: The fact that I feel no desire to find a deeper affinity with that heritage is proof that I’m still a prisoner of Whiteness. What is lost on them is that I’m actually defending my identity as a culturally White person. They don’t see any irony in the fact that they are responding to the history of Whiteness’s obliterating others’ identities by attempting to obliterate White identity. Some will simply defend the obliteration of Whiteness as the only way to end racism and see me as clinging to my White identity in an attempt to avoid my own development and perpetuate racism. I return to Friere here and his notion that the oppressed can perpetuate the oppressor mind when they strive to become oppressors themselves. Turning Whiteness on its head and making it, instead of the be all and end all, an empty structure that does only ill, is trading White Supremacy for White Abasement. Not only is that a tough sell to a lot of White folks, but it perpetuates the cycle of oppression.

Without a frank look at the lived experience of Whiteness we Whites will remain Pre-racial: we will be people who have not yet begun to experience and express ourselves as racial beings and to understand the lived experience of others.

Stay tuned to M2F for some thoughts on the middle way to a White identity that respects the White cultural experience and relinquishes racial dominance.

My Maine Man?

A recent New York Times article began:

Gov. Paul LePage of Maine directed a graphic insult at the state’s N.A.A.C.P. leaders on Friday after they questioned his decision to pass on attending Martin Luther King Birthday events in Bangor and Portland.

The article is very brief and worth skimming before you read on here (by clicking the hyperlink above).

I won’t dwell on the fact that the NAACP only said that it seemed that the Governor wasn’t concerned with their interests. It’s not a huge leap in logic for LePage to infer some kind of racial meaning to this statement since the NAACP exists to advocate for People of Color. But, from what I am given to understand in the article, it is, ironically, the Governor who “plays the race card” by bringing his Black son into the argument.

We can infer from the fact that the Governor has taken a Person of Color into his home and heart that he knows that racial differences are superficial, that the color of one’s skin is no indication whatsoever of the potential that a person has at birth. But is also seems clear, from the Governor’s response to the NAACP, that his understanding of the lived experience of race in the United States is superficial.

Governor Mr. LePage is doing what a lot of White people do. He is living in the belief that because he loves one Black person, or a small number of Black people, that his understanding of what it means to be Black in the United States is complete. Let me say this unequivocally: having a close relationship with a Black person, or a few Black people, does not mean you have rid yourself of your responsibility to work for racial equity as a White person. It certainly doesn’t mean that you do not continue to benefit from the system of inequity that favors White people. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t have any unconscious prejudices towards Black people in general (though in this instance, I will not explore another person’s unconscious after reading one brief article about him in the newspaper). Think about the number of incredibly sexist men who have wives and daughters, wives and daughters, I’ll add, whom they love and who love them. These relationships do not stop these men from pursuing sexist goals at work and leisure. We White men often have people who are members of other identity groups in our lives for whom we genuinely care, who genuinely care for us, but who constantly have to make allowances for our ignorance and insecurity, even though it is they who pay the very price for our shortcomings. The generosity of some of the people in our lives is truly staggering if we think about it.

The concerns of Black people and other People of Color in the United States have to do with the many inequities to which they are subjected. Maine’s NAACP and Black community are actually losing out because the Governor has a Black son. Because he loves his son he seems to feel that he can ignore the concerns of the Black community. He seems to think that not only has his own personal racial awareness development progressed enough, but that is own development is sufficient: that if he can somehow prove that he is not motivated by basic bigotry then he can be excused from taking direct action to address racial inequity in Maine in his role as its Governor. The fact that he may have inherited a state that perpetuates institutional inequity doesn’t seem to concern him and that leads me to fear that his understanding of the impact of race in how life is lived in the US is limited. And since the Governor has brought his son onto the fray, I’ll ask: “What can you do, as Governor of Maine right now, that can make the system more fair for your son and his own children in the future?”

One last non-racial point that just sticks in my craw: the spokesman for the Governor made a statement along the lines of “the Governor has always been combative and his response in this situation is what people have come to expect.” To me, this sounds a lot like, “The Governor has always been a jerk so it’s ok for him to be a jerk now.” Wrong answer.

Update 1.17.10: LePage ultimately changed his mind and the tenor of his speech and did attend an MLK Day event. Keep up the self-reflection, Gov, and listen, listen, listen to your constituents of color!

Mutually Inclusive

This post is the fourth and final in a series on Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline and organizational equity.

Shared Vision and Team Learning are the final two of the five disciplines that Peter Senge espouses to be the facilitators of The Learning Organization.

Shared Vision is logical to follow the previous discipline of Shared Mental Models since the both disciplines involve shared meaning making. Shared Vision is, in a way, a Shared Mental Model of what we are trying to create. Our vision will flow from our mental models. Yet, as with any attempt to move a group of people from one way of doing things to another, it is key that the group has an explicit goal or destination in mind. Senge states that people who share a vision are “bound together by an aspiration.”

To quote Senge further: “At its simplest level, a shared vision is the answer to the question, ‘What do we want to create?’” An explicit Shared Vision is essential when we gather together to create racial equity. People have such disparate ideas about what race really is, how it impacts our lives, and what should be done about it that without a Shared Vision, we could spend a lot of time and energy working at cross purposes. We could also have members of our group who have visions for our future that are based in assumptions that do not include the perspectives of non-dominant groups and unwittingly perpetuate the dominant discourse. It’s very important that we Whites internalize other groups’ perspectives to avoid this, and work in active and honest communication with them to be sure we’re inclusive. (I guess what I’m saying here is that to be inclusive we had better be inclusive. An inclusive future starts with an inclusive present!) In fact, it is often advisable to have non-Whites leading the drive to create more equity in organizations, but we must be sure to guard against two habits that White led organizations often have: 1) to “outsource” diversity to members of non-dominant groups in such way that Whites are not responsible or accountable for building equity, and 2) having members of non-dominant groups lead in the diversity drives but nowhere else in the organization.

The final of the five disciplines is Team Learning. Team Learning is a way of creating alignment among members of a team so that their individual visions become extensions of the team’s Shared Vision. Team Learning calls for all members of the team to be skilled in dialogue and discussion. These two words have very specific and different meanings in this context. In dialogue, the goal is to build understanding. People in dialogue suspend their own opinions or beliefs while they deeply listen to others’. By practicing this, people are able to internalize others’ perspectives and build communication within the team. In discussion, different views are presented, defended, and the preferred view is chosen. These two types of communication practices can be highly complimentary. They allow the best ideas to surface and synthesis to occur in a way that a final decision is truly made by the team rather than some subset of people who may have the most power, or who may be the most verbally dominant. In groups where racial equity is the subject of their focus, Whites often have a hard time stepping back and allowing Non-Whites to express their experiences , views, and aspirations. Practice in dialogue as it is defined here could help minimize this dynamic in groups. On the other end of the spectrum, discussing race can be such a heated and frightening experience for some Whites that a team with good discussion skills might be a place where they can express their views and get the kinds of developmental feedback or support that can facilitate their own racial awareness development.

When people come together to make meaning, there are often members of the group who have unconscious needs that they seek to gratify. We Whites who do racial work can be so ambivalent about what we’re doing. We are raised in a society that teaches us to act according to the dominant discourse and these habits of mind are often slow to leave us despite our best efforts and intentions. We can be so determined to avoid our own racism that we become the “racism police,” projecting our own unconscious racism onto others, seeing them as the bearers of racist thinking that, if we were to be completely honest, we still harbor in a dark corner of our own minds. We can create a sort of “hegemony of the oppressed” by rejecting all things White as bad. Seeking to share a vision can become cover for squashing dissent and disallowing a certain kind of open diversity. Dialogue and Discussion can act to keep the group form doing this as well.

One of the reasons I chose to use The Fifth Discipline as a framework for creating racial and ethnic equity in organizations is because of its pragmatic transcendence of the usual individualistic approach of US organizations. In our attempts to be objective in how we approach organizational life, the emotional, intuitive, and interconnected quality of human performance is often ignored or deemed too personal to discuss at work. Senge’s work makes room for the emotional and intuitive in the organizational setting. How often do we try to acknowledge and address our lived experiences of work? Some people don’t want to be bothered, thinking it’s all a waste of time. Some don’t trust their organizations to respect their more personal experiences, often with very good reason, having suffered in one way or another for any kind of personal disclosure. Add working on racial equity to the mix and the emotional stakes get even higher. Most people believe that their own approach to racial issues is the best way to create fairness for everyone. When one of my fellow White males says that the best way to deal with racial differences is to pretend those differences don’t exist, he truly believes, at least in his conscious mind, that he is advocating for equality for all. How can one intervene to move another person from a belief which is destructive to others but that he believes is truly generous and liberating? Is it even possible? Can we afford to believe that is isn’t?

Modeling Equity

This post is the third in a series on Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline and organizational equity.

Mental Models are our understandings of how things work. They are the shorthand we use to make sense of the world. They can be simple generalizations or complex and specific. They shape how we act.

I made coffee for myself this morning. That’s what I did. But it’s not really what I did. What really happened was: I walked into the kitchen, found my cup, found, my conical plastic filter-holder, found the paper filter that fit into it, etc… But that’s not what I really did. Here’s what really happened: taking advantage of a subtle and tacit kinesthetic knowledge I have of my own body, I used my legs to convey my body into a specific area of my home. Turning my head in the direction that experience tells me that I am likely to find the ceramic object that I prefer to hold the coffee, etc… But that’s not what really happened. I won’t go into detail, but the process started with electrical impulses traveling within my brain and between my brain and certain impulse receptors in various parts of my body…

And thus we see the power of the Mental Model. If I didn’t have a Mental Model for “Making Coffee,” I would never actually be able to make it. I would be too busy trying to describe it to myself to actually do it.

Our mental models determine not only how we make sense of the world, but also how we take action. For example, I don’t make coffee with a coffee maker, but I’d be willing to wager that those readers that do envisioned a coffee maker as part of the process when I first mentioned making coffee. If you were at my house and I was a poor enough host that you were forced to make your own coffee, it may take you a moment to get on board with the no-coffee-maker method. That is because our Mental Models of how to make coffee would be different in that situation. To make life easier for you (without becoming a better host myself) I would have to give you some information about making coffee in my house. We would then have a Shared Mental Model of how to make coffee and the process would be more efficient.

How much more important and intricate are the Mental Models we have about how human beings and society work? Senge’s work on Mental Models addresses things like the way we work, what the culture of an organization can look like, and how we define success.

Senge also points out that Mental Models that do not effectively address the environment become liabilities because they hinder us from taking effective action:

“New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting.” (P174)

Mental Models are often tacit or implicit instead of intentional and explicit. People work within systems and their shared understanding of how things are supposed to happen is learned and communicated unconsciously through the actions of others, what is rewarded, what is punished, what is ignored, etc… within those systems.

In the realm of racial equity, tacit assumptions about people of different racial and ethnic groups as well as our assumptions about the source of inequity shape the discourse and our actions. If those assumptions remain unchallenged we Whites are likely to play roles that perpetuate inequity. Challenging our assumptions and building new skill and understanding about the reasons for inequity can lead us into new, equity-building roles.

Here are some examples of relatively common mental models about race and how they can impact our decisions and behavior.

If we believe that racial inequity is the product of some kind of cultural deficiency in Non-Whites then the means of creating equity would be to teach Non-Whites how to act more like Whites.

But:

If we believe that racial inequity is the product of a historic and present-day system to which we are all socialized without or knowledge, then a great deal of very important learning needs to occur in the minds of Whites.

If we believe the system reflects “the way things are supposed to be” or “the best way to do things,” then we assume that conformity to the norms that are in place would be the goal, regardless of what our race is.

But:

If we believe that the system reflects specific White ways of doing things, then to create systems that are inclusive to all may mean that we assume that Non-Whites are already making personal and cultural accommodations within their organizations and that White people can learn to do things a bit differently, making some accommodation to others.

If we believe that talking about race just perpetuates our differences when what we really need to do is highlighting the ways in which we’re the same, then the reality of the lived experiences of other racial groups are actually shut out. As Whites, we can take this seemingly friendly and supportive view of race and minimize the realities of members of other groups. In so doing, we think we take ourselves out of he racial equation but we’re actually actively (if unconsciously) continuing the status quo.

But:

If we believe that there are important cultural differences (the Human Genome Project has already proven that physical differences based on race are superficial and impossible to define clearly) and that we can speak in overarching themes about different cultures, then we can begin to have frank discussions about race that can lead to new understandings and connections for all.

If we Whites are to be truly effective partners in creating equity then we have to seriously examine the systems that we help to create simply by going in the same direction as we always have and using the notions of race that we’ve always had. Not taking action is a decision. You can tread water in a river but that doesn’t mean you’ll stay in one place.

Mastering Equity

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.