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1 – 10 of over 1000M. Candace Christensen, María Verónica Elías, Érica Alcocer and Shannyn Vicente
This study aims to illustrate how white supremacy culture can be produced within nonprofit organizations with a mandate to serve marginalized communities and provide practical…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to illustrate how white supremacy culture can be produced within nonprofit organizations with a mandate to serve marginalized communities and provide practical suggestions for preventing oppression.
Design/methodology/approach
The site of inquiry was a nonprofit organization in south central Texas that provides social support to queer and trans youth. Through critical ethnography, the researchers evaluated the organization's processes and structure (including hierarchy, decision-making, fundraising and interactions between leaders, partners and affected groups) to explore how the organization perpetuated attributes of white supremacy culture.
Findings
Data reveal that the organization alienates the youth, volunteers and employees through defensiveness, fear of open conflict, paternalism, perfectionism and power-hoarding.
Originality/value
A dearth of research focuses on how white supremacy culture manifests in organizations serving marginalized communities. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on a nonprofit organization in central Texas that supports queer and trans youth. The authors offer recommendations for addressing white supremacy culture in organizations and suggest future research opportunities.
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Jessica Denke and Nicholas Cunningham
The purpose of this article is to share a year-long initiative of a predominantly white liberal arts college library that fostered relationality and inclusive culture through an…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to share a year-long initiative of a predominantly white liberal arts college library that fostered relationality and inclusive culture through an understanding and critique of White Supremacy Culture.
Design/methodology/approach
This case study presents the development and implementation of a library-wide reading group to discuss Okun's (2021) White Supremacy Culture Characteristics through relational meetings (Chambers, 2003). Relational-cultural theory provided a guiding framework for implementation of relational meetings in the context of conversations about race.
Findings
After participation in the reading group, participants reported their ability to identify characteristics of White Supremacy Culture in their lives and a greater preparedness to participate in work related to diversity, equity and inclusion. The authors suggest vulnerability, consideration of power and privilege and observations of White Supremacy Culture within the local context frequently occurred in the reading group conversations.
Research limitations/implications
This work operates as an opportunity for library staff to learn about White Supremacy Culture in a way that helps to undermine white privilege and, therefore, holds similar aims to anti-racist affinity work (Michael and Conger, 2009). However, the library staff only has one person of color and, therefore, the authors cannot speak to engaging a more racially diverse staff. The authors include reflections on how their racial identities impact their engagement in this work.
Originality/value
Attention to White Supremacy and white privilege is, according to Gulati-Partee and Potapchuk (2014), an overlooked part of diversity, equity and inclusion work. This case study demonstrates a path toward inclusive culture that focuses on the identification of White Supremacy Culture Characteristics (Okun, 2021) in the authors’ local context and provides rationale for utilizing relational meetings (Chambers, 2003) to emphasize individual and collective reflection.
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David G. Embrick, Simón Weffer and Silvia Dómínguez
This paper examines the Art Institute of Chicago – a nationally recognized museum – as a white sanctuary, i.e., a white institutional space within a racialized social system that…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper examines the Art Institute of Chicago – a nationally recognized museum – as a white sanctuary, i.e., a white institutional space within a racialized social system that serves to reassure whites of their dominant position in society. The purpose of this paper is to highlight how museums create and maintain white spaces within the greater context of being an institution for the general public.
Design/methodology/approach
The empirical analysis of this study is based on collaborative ethnographic data collected over a three-year period of time conducted by the first two authors, and consists of hundreds of photos and hundreds of hours of participant observations and field notes. The data are analyzed using descriptive methods and content analyses.
Findings
The findings highlight three specific racial mechanisms that speak to how white spaces are created, recreated and maintained within nationally and internationally elite museums: spatiality, the policing of space, and the management of access.
Research limitations/implications
Sociological research on how white spaces are maintained in racialized organizations is limited. This paper extends to museums’ institutional role in maintaining white supremacy, as white sanctuaries.
Originality/value
This paper adds to the existing literature on race, place and space by highlighting three specific racial mechanisms in museum institutions that help to maintain white supremacy, white normality(ies), and serve to facilitate a reassurance to whites’ anxieties, fears and fragilities about their group position in society – that which helps to preserve their psychological wages of whiteness in safe white spaces.
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Du Bois's interest in the Japanese empire points us in the direction of examining non-Western imperial policies and discourses and how they relate to racialization. For Du Bois…
Abstract
Du Bois's interest in the Japanese empire points us in the direction of examining non-Western imperial policies and discourses and how they relate to racialization. For Du Bois, Japan was an exemplar of a nonwhite empire. This chapter reconstructs a Du Boisian conception of race that identifies it closely with ethnicity, against the belief that the African-American intellectual held on to a merely biological conception of race. I argue that his thought evolved towards a social-construction approach in which race must be understood historically and in particular global contexts. By analyzing Japan's policies and discourses around the boundaries of the Japanese, I explicate how Japan carried out a process of self-racialization owing to its dialectical relationship with the West. It also racialized its colonial subjects in a process of in-group delineation according to Japan's imperial imperatives. The case of the Japanese empire demonstrates how a global/transnational approach to racialization is valuable. It also evinces how white supremacy and universalism are not the only logics of imperialism. Moreover, it shows that Du Bois believed white supremacy could be transcended. However, Du Bois was too idealistic about Japan's empire, ignoring how oppressive nonwhite imperial rulers can be toward their subjects even when there are phenotypical similarities between them.
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To be actively antiracist requires an internal reckoning, what Chicana activist and scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa referred to as “el arrebato.” Used to describe the first of seven…
Abstract
Purpose
To be actively antiracist requires an internal reckoning, what Chicana activist and scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa referred to as “el arrebato.” Used to describe the first of seven cycles through which conocimiento, or knowledge, is formed, el arrebato presents a shift in the understanding of the world as it has been prescribed by both patriarchy and white supremacy. This paper will use Anzaldúa's Seven Stages of Conocimiento to trace a Latinx librarian's journey in unlearning white supremacy toward a shift to antiracist practices.
Design/methodology/approach
This ethnography follows the author from her time as a Diversity Alliance resident librarian in an R1 library to her current position as a tenure-track librarian in a primarily white institution, outlining how the seven stages have led toward active interrogation of not only library structures but with the legacy of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous discourse within her own Latinx identity.
Findings
As an ongoing reflective practice, this paper presents a journey of learning and unlearning toward critically deconstructing the culture of “niceness” within librarianship, where the principles of neutrality and vocational awe lend to library structures that place responsibility on the individual for institutional trauma rather than rightly examining and reconstructing the environments and structures themselves.
Originality/value
This autoethnography presents the viewpoint of a first-generation Latinx librarian growing up in a tricultural context in the Midwest.
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This chapter explores the concept of allyship in social justice struggles. It provides a road map for self-reflection as well as acquisition of skills necessary for effective…
Abstract
This chapter explores the concept of allyship in social justice struggles. It provides a road map for self-reflection as well as acquisition of skills necessary for effective allyship. It describes appropriate roles for allies in dismantling systems and structures that protect the privilege of the majority in various contexts – privilege often unseen, unacknowledged and/or actively denied. This chapter will examine unique roles of allies in exposing, challenging, and dismantling privilege and white supremacy. Concrete examples of benefits that have accrued to white Americans through privilege – both conscious and unconscious, are assessed. The reader will be encouraged to explore personal areas of privilege and marginalization and acknowledge multidimensional identities (race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, etc.) of individuals and unique lived experiences. Those seeking authentic positions of allyship are challenged to root out embedded privilege/white supremacy through direct action.
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In this chapter, the author critically examines the deeply entrenched practices and theories within counselor education, revealing their roots in historically dominant…
Abstract
In this chapter, the author critically examines the deeply entrenched practices and theories within counselor education, revealing their roots in historically dominant, Eurocentric, and often racially oppressive assumptions. This study brings to light the pervasive impact of these traditional approaches, illuminating their role in perpetuating racial oppression and disparities in mental health care. The author presents a compelling argument for adopting Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an effective pedagogical and clinical practice framework in the counseling profession, a step toward its much-needed liberation. CRT's tenets are examined as a robust alternative, promoting socially just outcomes in counseling and psychotherapy. The article highlights CRT's capacity to address the well-established relationship between racism, white supremacy, and minority mental health. It proposes a groundbreaking model for praxis, predicated on CRT, which holds potential not only to challenge and disrupt oppressive structures but also to pave the way for the liberation of both the oppressed and the oppressor. This seminal work prompts a re-envisioning of counselor education, asserting a call for a transformative shift toward a liberation-based, social justice pedagogy.
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Within North American institutions of higher education, the sociopolitical construct of whiteness comprises an often implicit set of lessons that are reflected not only in policy…
Abstract
Within North American institutions of higher education, the sociopolitical construct of whiteness comprises an often implicit set of lessons that are reflected not only in policy and curricula but also in the teaching practices of faculty. Such lessons perpetuate white centricity and supremacy, at enormous costs to those who have been negatively racialized. Therefore, it is critical for white faculty to engage meaningfully with ongoing processes of self-reflection, self-education, and skill development so that they can contribute positively to the interrogation and disruption of whiteness in higher education. This chapter discusses seven processual considerations for white educators who seek to interrogate and disrupt the problem of whiteness in teaching and learning.
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The postquarantine reopening of public libraries presents an opportunity for resetting the way libraries welcome patrons. Unfortunately, vestiges of inhospitable, white…
Abstract
Purpose
The postquarantine reopening of public libraries presents an opportunity for resetting the way libraries welcome patrons. Unfortunately, vestiges of inhospitable, white supremacist practices experienced in public libraries may accompany the “return to normal.” In addition to emphasizing policies and practices that are unwelcoming to patrons and staff from historically marginalized backgrounds, this article presents actions to be employed in an effort to transition the library to a place of belonging and hospitality for marginalized staff and community members.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper draws on a synthesis of the literature on hospitality in libraries and antiracism as well as the author's experience from professional practice to critique the host-and-guest concept of hospitality, which results in us versus them actions that uphold racism, white supremacy and white privilege.
Findings
Barriers and institutional practices that negatively impact patrons and library workers are illuminated. Recommendations for creating an antiracist “new normal” in public libraries are proposed.
Originality/value
In addition to contributing to the literature on hospitality in libraries, this paper expands the capacity and knowledge base of library staff to call attention to and dismantle barriers and uninviting practices in their own libraries. The paper further advances mutual hospitality as a supplement to antiracism principles as libraries work to eradicate white supremacy.
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