Challenging Re-Enforcing White Supremacist Paradigms

By Dell Gines

During my organizational theory course in my PHD program we are learning the various philosophical ways to evaluate organizations. During the post-modernist perspective of organizational evaluation the author used a specific example of a concept called ‘deconstruction’ which stopped me in my tracks and challenged my whole paradigm on race. In working to provide examples of this post-modernist idea of deconstruction the author used the following example:

~"Take the example of race. Racism (white center, non-white periphery) has been shown to lead to disparities in income, housing, healthcare and education, with whites systematically enjoying more of these benefits than non-whites do. Deconstructive analysis provides an explanation of these and other effects of racism by pointing out that whiteness has been made a focal center within discourse but that its centrality depends upon maintain the difference between white and non-white. Thus the meaning of whiteness provided by contrasts with non-whiteness determines the value of all other races by their proximity to the white center that, in turn, justifies inequality within any discourse community that uses this terminology (Hatch, 53). "~

As I reflected on this statement from my text book and stepped back to take a panoramic view, what I came to understand is that we as blacks are complicit in reinforcing the white supremacist paradigm. We are complicit because we have conceded to determining our relative value in America as it relates to the value of ‘whiteness’. This deductively indicates that we hold whiteness as the superior model of action or behavior as it is the standard by which all other variables and measurements (in America) are compared too. Many of us (if not most of us) fall into this same trap, present author included. We fall into the trap of centralizing whiteness and evaluating everything of relevance against that standard.

In evaluating “black progress” we use the “white standard” explicitly or implicitly as a back drop. Our unemployment rate is 2x higher than whites, our wage rates are 1.5x times lower than whites, our test scores are X in relation to whites. The list of comparables to whiteness is virtually endless. Even in our struggles for elevation we talk about and use terms such as ‘parity’ and ‘equality’. We are struggling to be at parity or equal to what? Whites. The fundamental fabric of our socio-economic identity is rooted in our belief that we “need to be like whites”. Ergo we are inherently positioning our existence as inferior to whites when we compare ourselves against their standards and point out the ways we do not measure up.

What we are doing in effect is the same as what the little black girls who chose the white doll over the black doll did in Dr. Kenneth Clark’s 1940 psychological test. The little black girls overwhelmingly chose the white dolls as the superior standard. We do the same thing collectively only in a much more complex and abstract fashion. Our choice of the white standard as opposed to the development of an independent autonomous black standard is tantamount to choosing the ‘white doll’ over the ‘black doll’.

Until we develop our own independent models, measurements and standards of collective black behavior that we define as ‘acceptable’ we will constantly be reinforcing the white supremacist concept and devaluing ourselves. Why should ‘parity’ which can only be found in relation to whites be the standard and measurement of ‘progress’. Why can not we determine our own acceptable destination and objective as a group in this country irrespective of what the ‘data and statistics’ show whites are doing and how we are doing in relation to whites? The elimination of white supremacy is not simply working to be equal to whites, but it is also the elimination of using whites and the standard of behavior by which we measure ourselves. Until we change our paradigm we will be constantly reinforcing the white supremacist mindset.

Consider ourselves.