33 Ways (and counting) that ‘Whiteness’ Works

I started in anti racism when some of my favourite musicians starting playing gigs in the late 70s for the Anti Nazi League and Rock against Racism and I was ‘just seventeen’, if you know what I mean. It was not long after Bowie had declared that ‘Britain is ready for a Fascist leader’.

In the 80s I trained as a Teacher when the impacts of race, class and gender on educational attainment and child development were taught rather than the mechanics of the national curriculum. It was the time of the miners’ strike and the North/South divide in the UK was wide.

In the 90s I worked in black, village schools in rural West Africa in an old British colony before coming back to Leeds to raise a family and build a career. I had some theory as well as a little practice and experience under my belt.

But no-one had re-framed the challenges of anti-racist practice with the study of ‘whiteness’ and how it operates until Tracie Jolliff introduced it to me at the NHS Leadership Academy perhaps 5 years ago. It has shaped my practice and my observations and reflections ever since.

Now I will ask leadership teams and boards to have a good look at how ‘whiteness’ operates in their culture. Because until we can start to see ‘whiteness’ as an ‘operating system’ and start to re-write some of its code, it will keep being extractive. It will keep producing inequities.

More recently working with Pauline Mayers on ‘Lessons From Henrietta Lacks’ has helped me to see a bit more of how my own whiteness operates as part of the wider system. Heather Nelson at the Black Health Initiative in Leeds too has helped me to look in the mirror. And Whiteness has also had me in its sights. “If you are going to do ant-racist work you will have your baptism of fire”. You will have many baptisms…

By ‘whiteness’ I don’t mean all white people. As Professor Kehinde Andrews has said ‘whiteness is not just for whites’. I mean a system of cultural and historical assumptions about hierarchy, power, objectivity, logical positivism, duality (whiteness is happier with black and white rules not shades of grey, nuance, wisdom and judgement) and patriarchy that are so deeply enmeshed in many ‘white’ cultures that they pass invisibly as ‘how things are’.

I have started to look for clues about how whiteness works. Signs of whiteness at work. In myself. In the organisations I work with, and for. In the communities and societies that I am a part of. That are a part of me. They are clues, not laws, or rules or truths.

1. Whiteness looks for and at what is wrong with colour
2. Whiteness commissions or supports people of colour to sort out ‘what is wrong’ (provide special course for people of colour, set up networks, write reports)
3. When Whiteness experiences dissent or challenge it frames it as a threat and defaults to power and hierarchy over compassion and listening
4. Whiteness likes to be taught by colour (What should we do?)
5. Whiteness finds reflecting on itself difficult – it often triggers guilt and shame rather than hope and opportunities to change
6. Whiteness often blames victims (if we feed the children they will become dependent)
7. Whiteness polices tone – ‘calm down…’
8. Whiteness when it feels threatened punishes
9. Whiteness invites people to learn and when the learning becomes powerful, painful and the Zone of Uncomfortable Debate is entered with accompanying emotion, they close it down or punish the ones expressing their pain
10. Whiteness values compliance over dissent
11. Whiteness ‘does to’ rather than stands alongside
12. Whiteness rarely looks hard at itself
13. Whiteness learns slowly because it already knows how to look after itself
14. Whiteness values self development over self sacrifice
15. Whiteness exercises ‘power over’ in preference to ‘power with’ or ‘power to’
16. Whiteness holds on to its power
17. Whiteness sees itself apart from the system rather than as a part of the system
18. Whiteness prefers domination to collaboration; competition to cooperation
19. Whiteness is used to ‘winning’; getting its way
20. Whiteness is trapped in its own miserable, extractive, consumerist nightmare of progress
21. Whiteness finds it hard to see its paradigm of privilege
22. Whiteness manipulates through psychological safety and self supporting cliques
23. Whiteness recognises as intelligence/wisdom the products of white normative educational and developmental processes. It tends not to recognise the product of other non-white developmental norms.
24. Whiteness claims inclusion and compassion – while presiding over enormous inequalities and violence
25. Whiteness shies away from complexity and nuance in favour of evidence
26. Whiteness tends to divide the mind from the body
27. Whiteness encourages us to privilege certain world views and to dismiss others as unscientific, or not evidenced
28. whiteness upon learning of the pain/trauma of others will become the emotional ‘victim’ needing comfort thus derailing the conversation and focus back to themselves
29. Whiteness upon learning of the pain/trauma it causes others will become the emotional ‘victim’ needing comfort and thus derailing the conversation and putting the focus back to themselves
30. Whiteness starts with white as the default. It then uses categorisation and tick boxes to fragment people, shift them away from default and identify them in more and more ways as Not Normal. To hide intersectionality by counting variables that it can then treat as ‘independent’.
31. Whiteness prizes ‘knowledge’, but is very clear about the forms that it finds acceptable – fetishising a narrow field of science and turning away from epistemological positions that doesn’t privilege it.
32. Whiteness sees ‘BAME’ as a ‘background’. In the foreground it sees opportunity.
33. Whiteness prefers to see racism as an individual, personal act, an event that can be condemned – rather than as a structure of its making for its own convenience and power.

What have I missed?