It is Time for White Accountability
Are you ready to join a white accountability group?
I have just signed up to co-lead a “white accountability group” in my workplace, which happens to be a private school.
What even is a white accountability group? When the planning group met recently, we did not know what to call ourselves. We looked at other schools’ anti-racism information and we saw the word “accountability.” It rang true. It is a word that challenges us in a way that “ally” could never challenge us.
We haven’t met yet, but the news of the group is getting out. So what are we going to do? Read on, and then talk to me in the comments.
Today I spent some time with an essay by Laura M. Quainoo:
Her essay led me to another essay by 'bumpyjonas…
Both essays inspired my thinking about white accountability.
In the 'bumpyjonas… essay, the author invites us to look at whiteness like smoking. In the 70s people could smoke anywhere. Then we decided that it was harmful, so we limited which public spaces people could smoke in. Smoking didn’t go away. We just decided that we would limit the harm it caused by smoking by deciding where we would allow it. We can do this with whiteness.
In order to eliminate harm from whiteness in our public spaces, we have to be able to see it. Currently, we, as a society, have big blind spots here. It is like the smoke is invisible and we can’t see the source easily either. It is like radon in that case. We need detectors for radon/whiteness because it can be invisible. Then we need to pinpoint the sources and block them.
How can we see whiteness in my school?
A note about vocabulary re: “white”, “whiteness”, and “white supremacy”: The persistence of race in America is due to the persistence of differing outcomes based on race. When we talk about a “white” accountability group, we are talking about a “white supremacy” accountability group, except that term is triggering for too many people and could stifle the opportunity for change and self-reflection. So, while the term “white” accountability group is somewhat misleading, we are stuck with it as a means to limit the harm of white supremacy in our school. We are not being accountable for the color of our skin. There is nothing wrong with having white (pink) skin. It is all the baggage that goes along with white skin that we are accountable for — the white supremacy bits. Ideally, we can separate white people from our “whiteness” in this process.
So when I ask how can we see whiteness in our school, I am really asking, are there places in our environments or curriculum where whiteness operates in harmful ways? And what are we going to do about it?
'bumpyjonas… cited the following quote in his essay, and I pulled it for here because it is a key to understanding how whiteness works in institutions, and how white accountability might function in a school like mine.
Decentering whiteness is not decentering white people. Whiteness is not emblematic of a race of people; it is the pervasive dominant culture in the United States. This culture erases any validity of other cultures or ways of being. It is the normed reference for what is often “proper,” “appropriate,” “successful,” and “worthy.” American school systems are set up, implemented and measured by whiteness standards.” (Kelly Niccolls, Rebecca Midles, Susan Enfield)
For the foreseeable future, white people will be in the majority at my school. We are not saying we should de-center white people. We need to look at “whiteness” as a culture, apart from the people. From the perspective of white people, it probably doesn’t look like “white” culture, it just looks like “school culture.” But to the extent that school culture looks like the “dominant culture” of the USA, it is actually “white culture.”
This is how we see “whiteness”: we look for instances where the “dominant culture” of the USA is the dominant culture of the school. And then we need to look at the way the dominant culture manifests in our school and then de-center it.
We also need to specifically look at the ways that the dominant culture is actually harmful to people, and then dis-allow those actions.
It is like smoking, to come back to our author’s analogy. We can’t stop you from smoking, but we don’t want you smoking in our school.
At one time, smokers were the dominant culture in the USA. Then we deliberately de-centered the act of smoking in our public spaces. We made “smoking sections.” And when we discovered that secondhand smoke is equally harmful, we eliminated smoking entirely from many spaces, like schools.
Whiteness/dominant culture manifests in many ways. Some of the ways dominant culture manifests are not harmful, except that they are dominant. Those ways can be de-centered without being eliminated. For example, teaching about white people who existed in history is not inherently harmful, except when they are the only people we talk about. We don’t need to teach a revisionist history where white people did not exist, we just need to teach the whole history (which can sometimes be hard to find — given the dominant culture’s bias towards whiteness).
Other times, we need to see where “whiteness” or the “dominant culture” is harmful to children and families. We need to eliminate the harmful ways that whiteness shows up — we can’t just de-center them.
We know that the dominant culture in the USA is not just white. Dominant culture also lifts up people who are: neuro-typical, cis-gendered, heterosexual, male, college-educated, wealthy, physically attractive, able-bodied, and native English speakers, among other categories. We also need to de-center each of these dominant identities and disallow harm that comes from centering those identities. But our group is about “white” accountability, so we will need to focus on accountability for the “white” part of the dominant culture.
Of course, everything is connected. So if we can make our school more accountable for the harmful aspects of the dominant culture vis-a-vis “whiteness,” then we will likely have an impact on other ways that the dominant culture is harmful.
In fact, the multi-faceted nature of identity can be an “in” for any of us wanting to challenge whiteness — because each of us has some parts of our identity that experience harm at the hands of the dominant culture. And when white people challenge/de-center/eliminate harm from the dominant culture, we create a more inclusive space for ourselves too. Challenging “whiteness” is liberation work for white people, too.
As a part of being accountable, we will need to do a “whiteness”/dominant culture audit in our school. We need to see where whiteness is centered but not otherwise harmful, and where whiteness is centered and harmful.
Then we need to make recommendations for accountability. Those recommendations might be de-centering, or elimination.
Some ideas for a whiteness/dominant culture audit:
Do we teach about the history and culture of European-heritage people more than the history and cultures of peoples from other places?
Do we center white people and whiteness? Do we teach from a European heritage perspective? Do we say “we” and mean white people?
Do we treat our hiring process as a “meritocracy”? There is no such thing as a meritocracy. Meritocracy is a thing that “colorblind” people say they do.
What about grading, assessment, and behavior intervention? If the “dominant culture” is also “white culture,” then when we hold children to a standard, then are we holding them to a “white” standard?
Our dominant culture audit will need to extend to the hiring processes, the recruitment and admissions processes, representation in visual spaces, and every outward-facing part of the school.
As an example: let’s look at assessment.
Before we do our whiteness audit for our school vis-a-vis assessment, we would need to educate ourselves about what is the dominant culture towards assessment.
Some basics are obvious to me: the dominant culture has the teacher assess the student. The teacher has a rubric of assignments or metrics during the assessment period. The teacher assigns a weight to each metric or assignment and then gives a number or letter assessment to each student which is then averaged out over the rubric and an overall assessment is reached. Then there are comments or conferences to explain the assessment to the child and parents. The numbers to judge the student in the traditional dominant culture’s way of assessing are based on outcomes for the other people in the class. If a young person exceeds the average scores, then they are judged highly, and if a young person misses the average, then they are judged harshly.
The dominant culture of assessment in the USA is not necessarily harmful. But because it only represents one way of assessing learning and that way of learning is also associated with “whiteness,” it stands to reason that de-centering the dominant culture’s norms for assessment would be a good first step towards white accountability. That would mean offering alternative forms of assessment that could function alongside the dominant/traditional ones. It would be like the smoking section in the 1980s airplane.
The logical second step would be to see if the dominant culture’s version of assessment is harmful in any way and then eliminate those ways entirely from our school. We could do research into outcomes and best practices for assessment (although we would have to look at the inherent bias in the studies), and then make recommendations to the administration. This would be like banning smoking from airplanes entirely.
If we were to do an audit of assessment practices at my school today, we would likely see significant differences compared to traditional schools. We are already going against the dominant culture in many ways. That might make our job as auditors even more difficult. We would need to audit how the dominant culture (whiteness) manifests itself in assessment spaces where we are deliberately attempting to do things differently. This might be unconscious bias, or unintended outcomes of well-intentioned practices, or even “second-hand smoke” effects of assessing other children using the dominant culture’s norms.
So we would want to (1) audit our assessment policies vis-a-vis conformation to the dominant culture, (2) de-center dominant culture assessment modes, and (3) remove and replace any modes that are objectively harmful.
Some people will say “But, But. But…”
The essence of the counterargument is that the dominant culture is dominant for a reason, because it works. It just happens to be mostly run by white people. That is cause for inclusion (see below for my thoughts on inclusion), not dismantling. We can fix any problem by inviting more people into the dominant culture.
The counterargument says that “wokeness” wants to eliminate whiteness altogether. “Woke” people want us to get rid of Thomas Jefferson and replace him with Sally Hemmings. “Woke” people want to deny that Abraham Lincoln was a great president and focus on his failings. “Woke” people want to get white people to be ashamed to be white and to feel bad about themselves.
The counterargument says that people who feel “oppressed” by the dominant culture are just simply weak. They are not able to cut it. The dominant culture feels like a meritocracy (to them), and so it is people’s own fault if they can’t meet the standards.
For example, we have standards of “professional” dress in many workplaces. The dominant culture (white/male/straight) defines these standards and they seem fair to them. When people do not meet the standard for any reason, the enforcers do not see a problem with the standards, they see a problem with the employee.
Critics of “wokeness” claim that disgruntled “woke” people criticize the standard because they are simply not able to cut it, not because the standards are harmful or unfair.
I think that this critique of anti-racism is coming from a false dichotomy. It says that either we have a single standard that is dictated by the dominant culture or we have no standards at all and we allow anarchy to reign supreme. That is outdated binary thinking that has no place in our institutions.
The end result of dominant culture people having to defend binary thinking is that those people feel like they are facing an existential threat if any piece of their identity is criticized at all. This is the classic male/white/straight fragility. It leads to hyper-defensiveness and big blind spots.
As an example, let’s look at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home and his personal forced-labor camp (AKA plantation).
At my school, we visit Monticello every three years, as part of our bus trip that we use to start the school year as a community. I don’t go on the trip every year, but I did go this year, and I went fifteen years ago. So I have two snapshots of Monticello.
My previous visit to Monticello gave me the sense that the keepers of the space were upholding the dominant culture. They did not mention Sally Hemmings, and the visit was a series of moments glorifying Mr. Jefferson. We got to see his gardens and how interested he was in botany. We saw the house itself and learned that he studied architecture and designed it himself. We marveled at his collection of books and Native American artifacts and we saw his specially designed writing desk that allowed him to make two copies of a letter at the same time. He was a great man and look at his greatness! This is meant to inspire us as Americans, because here was the birthplace of Liberty! Rah, Rah, Rah!
This visit was very different. We saw all of the same stuff, but we also had a guide who told us the stories and names of people enslaved by the president. We learned of Mr. Jefferson’s debts and how he bought and sold people in order to sustain a certain lifestyle. We saw Sally Hemming’s room and also saw rooms for the cooks and other people enslaved at Monticello. In one room we saw posters of the hundreds of descendants of people enslaved at Monticello who have been sought out and invited to be part of the continuing story of the place.
We also had a second tour of “Mulberry Row” where a guide held my students’ rapt attention for almost an hour with information and stories of the African heritage people enslaved at Monticello. Our guide used real names and documents to bring the people alive. He also gave us stories of resistance and escape.
On this trip, we saw what happens when an institution does work to de-center the dominant culture and the dominant storyline. Thomas Jefferson and his descendants did not disappear from Monticello. The place is big enough to hold multiple stories and center different stories in different places throughout the space and tour.
Admitting that Thomas Jefferson owned people and raped a child who was enslaved by him undermines the binary thinking that says that the founding fathers were infallible. It opens up me and my students to the idea that people in authority could be wrong, or that they could be right about some things and wrong about others. It opens up the possibility that the students themselves could be complicated, sometimes fallible, humans, and still be good.
I much prefer the “woke” version of Monticello. It seems like an institutional version of evolving white accountability. Oddly enough, on our way out of the site, we walked past the cemetery where T.J. is buried, along with many of his acknowledged descendants. That cemetery is not managed by the people who manage the rest of the site and our guide told us that the people in charge of the cemetery have strenuously resisted any and all attempts by the descendants of Sally Hemmings to be buried there. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, folks.
These are just a few thoughts as I embark on the process. I am sure my co-leaders and the members of the group will have a lot to say and do. Part of being accountable for questioning the dominant culture is to listen and be flexible. I hope to provide you all more updates as our white accountability group makes progress. It can’t come soon enough.
A note about “Inclusiveness”: We have a movement in the USA for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. That is essentially a reform movement. The idea is to make the dominant culture more inclusive. This leaves the dominant culture intact. It even lifts up the dominant culture. This is Bill Cosby’s show. It says: “you can join whiteness if you assimilate.” We don’t want the “Mean Girls” to be racially inclusive. We want the Mean Girls to be de-centered and not harmful. We don’t want to reform the dominant culture. We want a revolution where the dominant culture does not dominate.
A note about “allyship”: While I would like to be viewed as an “ally” to Indigenous folks and People of the Global Majority in my orbit, I think that designation is counterproductive to the task of white accountability. The tendency of white people to self-identify as ”allies” allows us to think of ourselves as “helpers” for people of the global majority who are doing the work. That removes us from a position of agency. It also misses the situation. If we are attempting to de-center the dominant culture, then those of us within the dominant culture have more of the power to make change. Allyship allows the dominant culture to continue without an internal challenge.
A note about my use of quotation marks around “whiteness” and a bunch of other words: I think there is a difference between whiteness and “whiteness.” Without quotation marks, it is skin tone only. With quotation marks, it is another word for the dominant culture in the USA. I would like to reduce “whiteness” to whiteness. Otherwise, throughout the piece, I tried to use quotation marks to designate a use of a word or phrase that I wanted to specifically define. Usually, I did this only the first time such a word was used, but this topic caused me to want to be as precise as possible with word use and I may have over-used the marks. “Sue me.”
A note about Montessori/Progressive/Waldorf : In many ways, these types of education are counter to the dominant culture of traditional education. These include children’s choice of activity, child-centered versus teacher-centered, etc. However, the dominant culture is so pervasive in the USA that it can easily manifest, even in counter-culture spaces. This can be a problem because it can be invisible because the space appears to be liberatory. It is possible to de-center whiteness in such a school. But we have to acknowledge that it is not enough to just be classically counterculture.
