Re: Re group commitment Diversity, Inclusion, Bias
From: Kathleen Lowry (kathleenlowrylpcclmftgmail.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2023 13:11:21 -0800 (PST)
Hello again. I am taking a facilitation course, and would very much
appreciate 3 people willing to participate in a 20 minute zoom
conversation, this week on Thursday evening, if possible, or any Thursday
in the next 8 weeks. Friday mornings, 9 am Central time, are also an
option, including this week.

Please let me know if you would like to join and timeframes that work for
you.

This week I am presenting for the discussion, a short excerpt on *white
supremacy and Individuality* out of the updated Okum Article, *White
Supremacy, Still Here*. 2021. For the entire original article, please go to
http://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/.

We will be discussing, in a very structured format, for 20 minutes only,
this excerpt from that article that talks about the white supremist culture
characteristic of individualism, and it includes examples, and suggestions.
Please join us!
Kathleen


"Individualism* and I’m the Only One" (Page 20)

These characteristics look at our cultural assumption that individualism is
our cultural story -
that we make it on our own (or should), without help, while pulling
ourselves up by our own
bootstraps. Our cultural attachment to individualism leads to a toxic
denial of our essential
interdependence and the reality that we are all in this, literally,
together.
Individualism shows up as:
• for white people: seeing yourselves and/or demanding to be seen as an
individual and not
as part of the white group;
• failure to acknowledge any of the ways dominant identities - gender,
class, sexuality,
religion, able-bodiedness, age, education to name a few - are informed by
belonging to a
dominant group that shapes cultural norms and behavior;
• for BIPOC people: individualism forces the classic double bind when BIPOC
people are
accused of not being "team players" - in other words, punishment or
repercussions
for acting as an individual if and when doing so "threatens" the team;
• for white people: a culturally supported focus on determining whether an
individual is
racist or not while ignoring cultural, institutional, and systemic racism;
the strongly felt
need by many if not most white people to claim they are "not racist" while
their
conditioning into racism is relentless and unavoidable;
• for white people: a belief that you are responsible for and are qualified
to solve
problems on your own;
• for BIPOC people: being blamed and shamed for acting to solve problems
without
checking in and asking for permission from white people;
• little experience or comfort working as part of a team, which includes
both failure to
acknowledge the genius or creativity of others on the team and a
willingness to sacrifice
democratic and collaborative process in favor of efficiency; see double
bind for BIPOC
people above;
• desire for individual recognition and credit; failure to acknowledge how
what we know is
informed by so many others;
• isolation and loneliness;
• valuing competition more highly than cooperation; where collaboration is
valued, little
time or resources are devoted to developing skills in how to collaborate
and cooperate;
• accountability, if any, goes up and down, not sideways to peers or to
those
the organization is set up to serve;
• a lack of accountability, as the organization values those who can get
things done on their
own without needing supervision or guidance, unless and until doing things
on "our" own
threatens power;
• very connected to "one right way," "perfectionism," "qualified," and
"defensiveness and
denial."
I'm the only one shows up as:
• an aspect of individualism, the belief that if something is going to get
done "right," ‘I’
have to do it;
• connected to the characteristic of "one right way," the belief that "I"
can determine the
right way, am entitled and/or qualified to do so, in isolation from and
without
accountability to those most impacted by how I define the right way;
• little or no ability to delegate work to others, micro-management;

White Supremacy Culture: Still Here | www.whitesupremacyculture.info | Page
21
• based in deep fear of loss of control, which requires an illusion of
control;
• putting charismatic leaders on pedestals (or positioning yourself as a
charismatic leader on
a pedestal);
• romanticizing a leader (or yourself) as the center of a movement, idea,
issue, campaign
• hiding or covering up the flaws of a leader (or your flaws) in fear that
the organization,
movement, effort cannot survive;
• defining leadership as those most in front and most vocal (thank you
Cristina Rivera
Chapman for these last four bullets).
Antidotes to individualism and I'm the only one include:
• seek to understand all the ways we are informed by our dominant
identities and how our
membership in dominant identity groups informs us both overtly and covertly
(while
realizing too that these identities do not have to define us); understand
how membership
in a dominant group (the white group, the male group, the hetero group, the
wealthy
group) extends psychic, spiritual, and emotional benefits as well as
material benefits;
• seek to understand how these benefits are, in reality, toxic, because our
complicity with
being positioned as both "better" and "normal" requires that we dehumanize
all those
designated as "less than" and "abnormal;"

• acknowledge that all white people have internalized racist conditioning
and that an anti-
racist commitment is not about being "good" or "bad," it's about figuring
out what we are
going to do about our conditioning;
• do our personal work while also bringing focus to cultural,
institutional, and systemic
manifestations of white supremacy and racism;
• name teamwork and collaboration as an important personal and group value;
acknowledge that teamwork and collaboration take more time, particularly at
the front
end and yield a better result with higher buy-in and higher ability to take
shared risks;
• make sure the group or organization is working towards shared goals that
have been
collaboratively developed and named;
• reward people for collaborating;
• evaluate the ability to work in a team as well as the ability to get
things done;
• honor process as much as product (honor how you do things as much as what
you do or
produce);
• make sure that credit is given to all who participate in an effort, not
just the leaders or
most public person; make sure that when you are given credit, you
distribute it to all
those who helped you with whatever was accomplished;
• create collective accountability (rather than individual accountability);
• create a culture where people feel they can bring problems to the group;
use meetings as a
place to solve problems, not just a place to report activities;
• hold ourselves accountable to the principle of collective thinking and
action;
• develop the ability to collaborate and delegate to others;
• in workspaces or movement efforts, evaluate performance based on an
ability to work as
part of a team to accomplish shared goals;
• hold ourselves and each other accountable to a shared definition of
leadership that
assumes a collaborative and collective approach;

• hold ourselves and leaders accountable for mistakes without assuming that
we need to be
perfect to lead; develop collaborative and collective strategies for how to
respond to
mistakes that encourage learning from the mistakes, appropriate boundary
setting, and
restorative approaches;
• realize that leadership is dynamic and does not rest in one individual;
we are called upon
to lead at different times in different circumstances and called upon to
follow or take a
back seat when we are learning or making room for new leadership to emerge.

Kathleen Lowry
MA, LPCC, LMFT
952-270-1654
kathl <kathleenlowryLPCCLMFT [at] gmail.com>eenlowryLPCCLMFT [at] gmail.com
<kathleenlowryLPCCLMFT [at] gmail.com>



On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 3:17 PM Sharon Villines via Cohousing-L <
cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> wrote:

> > On Feb 27, 2023, at 11:59 AM, Kathleen Lowry <
> kathleenlowrylpcclmft [at] gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I am wondering about an online book club on anti racism. Anyone
> interested?
>
> We did this during the pandemic using Zoom and it worked very well in
> terms of discussion. It didn’t continue beyond the reading and discussion
> of Ibram X Kendi’s "How to be an antiracist” which we read chapter by
> chapter. One reason is that a group needs a moderator/facilitator (like
> Fred) who keeps the group going and on pointe. A leader/supporter who
> manages the mechanical issues as well.
>
> This workshop in 2021 was where/when I realized how completely different
> our life experiences are. That in 2021, so many people had not had any
> personal experience with friends of another culture or ethnicity. One
> person was just becoming aware through her church’s program of sheltering
> the homeless during the hot summer weather of the realities of being
> homeless. Part of the surprise was that these were cohousers, not founders
> but people who had lived here a number of years but had so little breadth
> of social exposure.
>
> Several of us continued reading the new titles in the area of antiracism
> and shared them with each other. The website Jude Foster posted a link to
> is incredibly thoughtful and complete. I hadn’t known of it before. It’s an
> example of a person, Tema Okun, working over 20 years to perfect the
> expression and presentation of a subject. It’s incredible how intensive the
> central essay is — how much it contains of assembled wisdom on poor
> thinking presented in a format that makes it an easy reminder to consult.
> The attitudes and behaviors are presented as characteristics of White
> Supremacy Culture, but they are the typical stumbling blocks of all
> thinking about cultures — or in simpler words: daily living.
>
> https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/
>
> I particularly appreciated the “antidotes.” After defining the
> characteristics of a particular characteristic of supremacism — either/or
> thinking, progress defined as “bigger”, worship of the written word, etc. —
> she includes ways to behave to counter/reverse/dilute/overcome these values
> and judgments. Things each of us can do moment to moment to redirect the
> flow in better directions. A stunning compilation from many sources.
>
> In reference to reading about racism, a book I want to mention because it
> was such a surprise to me is “The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s
> Forgotten Black Pioneers & the Struggle for Equality” by Anna-Lisa Cox of
> Harvard’s Center for African American research. It is a remarkable work of
> detailed accounts of the many, many Black farmers who owned large-scale
> plantations and businesses in the 18th and 19th centuries. The scale of
> their work did not protect them from the atrocities of racism but the fact
> that it had existed is not discussed anywhere else to the extent that the
> atrocities are.
>
> I’m not saying that “life wasn't all that bad” but only to focus on the
> dehumanization is to miss the history of human strength, resourcefulness,
> ingenuity, and accomplishment. You see traces of it when reading histories
> of notable Black leaders with mentions of several generations of
> landowners, doctors, etc., but Cox's work includes maps, numbers, and
> original sources which make it more tangible and fodder for more reading.
> She also discusses the daily social life of the enslaved families which
> included visits from one plantation to another on Sundays and holidays to
> keep in touch with those who had been sold away and to find companionship.
>
> “Bone and Sinew" isn’t a whitewash of the lives of formerly enslaved
> people. If anything the extent of brutality against those who had achieved
> success on the "white man's standards” is even more appalling. It was a
> damned if you do and damned if you don’t culture they were living in.
>
> One thing I have to say as a writer is that the book is not as readable as
> the works of many contemporary books on Black history. What I heard myself
> saying as I read was “The author was told by her editors that she had to
> write the book in stories of individual farmers and their families or no
> one would read it.” But she isn’t really a storyteller so some of the
> biography-based stories lack the kind of detail that lends personality to
> history.
>
> It also means that the endnotes are unusually rich in information and are
> well worth reading. To someone who likes reading history the good stuff has
> been relegated to the 50+ pages of closely printed endnotes. It isn’t a
> long book but is filled with information that provides a stronger image of
> Black culture in the 18th and 19th centuries than many do.
>
> Endorsements by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ibram X Kendi, Peter H Wood, and
> Paul Gardullo.
>
> (PS:  This post gives evidence of several attitudes and behaviors that
> Okun identifies as characteristics of the white dominant culture:
> supporting the idea of one central leader, praise of something as
> "superior," personal pride in my own judgment of something as superior,
> references to numbers as proof of value, a personal evaluation of an
> editor’s skill with no professional credentials to back it up, calling up
> endorsements to support my own conclusions. I’m sure there are others.)
>
> Sharon
> ----
> Sharon Villines
> Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
> http://www.takomavillage.org
>
>
>
>
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