White Dominant Culture
More than any other country, America defines itself by a collective dream: the dream of economic opportunity and upward mobility. Its proudest boast is that it offers a chance of the good life to everybody who is willing to work hard and play by the rules.
How to Show Up
- Interrogate the system. Has ALL of your leadership developed a critical analysis on race, class, power, and privilege?
- Find the right white people. Identify white leadership that will call other white leaders on their white privilege, in real time, to interrupt oppression when it happens.
- Look in the mirror, not out the window. Does your organization center leadership and policies around the status quo (ie the individual) or on the collective?
Getting Started
There’s a lot to learn! Here are 4 resources you can use to start your journey. Browse even more resources below.
- Read: White Dominant Culture & Something Different
- From the reading, identify where white dominant culture shows up in your organization.
- For Directors: Ensure your leadership and board fully understand white fragility.
- For Direct Service: Highlight practices that leverage a collective culture vs a white dominant culture.
More Resources
How White Supremacy Manifests in Organizations (Adaway Group, 2018) A one-hour recording of a presentation on the topic from the Adaway Group, “a black woman-owned consulting firm that brings together multi-racial teams to work on projects related to equity, inclusion and social justice.”
Interrupting White Dominance to Make Good on the Promise of Equity (Promise54, 2018) “One of the things holding us back is our unwillingness to interrogate the ways in which our systems, structures, and behaviors serve to maintain inequity, specifically white dominant culture, in our society and in our organizations.”
Why White People Downplay Their Individual Racial Privileges (Insights by Stanford Business, 2015) “…Stanford researchers, L. Taylor Phillips and Brian Lowery found that on an individual level, whites do not think that the privileges extend to them.”
White Supremacy Culture (ChangeWork, 2001) This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations. Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify.
Robin DiAngelo on White People’s Fragility (NPR, 2018) NPR’s Jennifer Ludden talks to author Robin DiAngelo about her latest book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism.
White People Assume Niceness is the Answer to Racial Inequality. It’s Not. (Robin DiAngelo, 2018) “An inability to grapple with racial dynamics with any nuance or complexity is ubiquitous in younger white people who have been raised according to an ideology of colorblindness.”
Watch: DeRay McKesson on Whiteness, White Supremacy, and Privilege
Watch: Deconstructing White Privilege
Download White Dominant Culture Glossary
