List-making
About that “Whiteness” chart again…
One thing to note is that it was compiled by Judith Katz in 1990, and it’s copyrighted by a “consulting group.”
JudithH.Katz © 1990. The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The thing that’s so bizarre and stupid about it is that it’s not about “whiteness” at all, it’s just about a grab bag of tastes, habits, practices, beliefs, ideas, ideologies, fashions and the like, few if any of which are genuinely specific and exclusive to white people. It mixes up class, hierarchy, status, consumerism, and some just plain randomness.
For instance –
Rugged Individualism
Self-reliance
Individual is primary unit
Independence and autonomy highly valued and rewarded
Individuals assumed to be in control of their environment – “You get what you deserve”
But that’s not a racial list. It’s a mix of philosophical and political and sociological, but not racial. And pretty much the whole list is like that – a giant category error, or string of category errors.
The idea seems to be that majoritarian habits and ways of thinking=white habits and ways of thinking…which in a majority-white country is sort of tautological, and not interesting.
Some items on the list are conservative shibboleths, and some are just “you don’t say.” Under religion, “Christianity is the norm” – in other words Christianity is the majority religion in the US. You don’t say! That doesn’t make it white. Also hello? There’s quite a deep tradition of African-American Christianity; do we have to call that part of “whiteness”?
In short it’s just so damn silly, along with all its other faults, that I wonder why anybody ever paid any attention to it.
“I wonder why anybody ever paid any attention to it.”
This is mostly speculation on my part; if anyone really knows this field, I’d welcome their thoughts. But it seems to me like this is one of those rare industries where there isn’t as much pressure to make a quality product, and it’s not entirely clear how you’d measure the quality of the product anyway, and so a lot of nonsense can survive in the market.
Companies hire “diversity consultants/trainers” for one or more of these reasons:
1. Because it’s legally required in their jurisdiction for companies of a certain size.
2. Because they’ve had problems with lawsuits or complaints, and want to appear like they’re taking action to address it.
3. Because they’re trying to build a defense against any future lawsuits or complaints.
4. Because they genuinely want to improve how they treat minorities.
Only the last one of these requires the consultant’s advice or presentations to be actually effective. For the other three, it’s just a “check the box” thing: “did we make everybody attend an annual diversity seminar? Yep. Great. Next item on the agenda?” It doesn’t matter if most of the employees were rolling their eyes throughout most of it. Corporate HR departments just want their diversity consultants to show up on time and stay under budget.
So, you take the fact that (1) it’s a relatively new field; (2) it’s probably genuinely hard to assess quality; (3) the people who are drawn to the field are probably not rigorous data-oriented types, and then add that there is little market pressure to provide a quality product, and you’ve got a recipe for a field where garbage can proliferate.
Screechy, as someone who has sat through any number of those presentations at a series of different jobs, it appears the first three are almost always the only reasons that are important. But by embracing those reasons, they can convince themselves that they are actually working toward number 4.
And they don’t even have to be consistent. I have sat through many presentations about how to teach [some culture, some generation, some disability, some sex] that clearly thinks all non-white, non-male people are a group of monoliths that you can just plug in a series of characteristics and get a proper picture. In short, much of the anti-racist training I have received was deeply racist in its assumptions. All of the anti-sexist training I have received was deeply sexist in its assumptions.
And at the next meeting, a month later or so, the next speaker would say the exact opposite about what we need to do. And the administration never recognized that, because they simply went to a meeting where they saw this speaker, were impressed, and thought “we should bring them to speak to our faculty” and bang, it was done. And these speakers make a good living traveling around the country telling people who actually know how to teach better than they do what they should do to be diverse, or whatever the hot topic of the day is. And when they direct you to their website to view their evidence, all you will find is a series of testimonials, and usually from people who just came out of the lecture, not people who have used their methods and found them worthwhile. And no research…zero. Evidence that people find them stimulating speakers? Yeah, that’s there. Evidence that their ideas work? Nope, not there.
Sort of like the ideas I read that say “Science is white” or “Science is male”. The idea being that we need to abandon science for more “traditional” ways of thinking, or more “feminine” ways of thinking, or more “Eastern” ways of thinking. Because western white males are never right, and all other groups are never wrong (except Karens). I wonder what happens when these ‘never wrong’ groups disagree with each other? I’m guessing astronomical cognitive dissonance.
Yes, I believe that’s exactly the extent of the reasoning. Hence the antagonism toward things that are merely features of a functioning society. From reliability to loyalty to math, if the majority values it, then it’s problematic. Since society functions insofar as the majority values norms that contribute the society, that’s going to be a lot of neutral-to-beneficial things deemed bad, racist, and otherwise oppressive.
And to make it even more maddening – there are things white people should know about racism and slavery and caste, and instead this crap is taken seriously.
Yes, we’re all bible thumping, genocidal, colonizing capitalists. Extremely racist. Misogynist too, women are “homemakers” and “subordinate”? Maybe for a while post sufferage, but in the 90’s? Most of the women I grew up around (in the 60’s) were not homemakers, and certainly not subordinate. This is religious, racist propaganda.
One of the other weird things about that chart was how US-centric it is. British white people would not recognize it as a characterization, not would the French, German, Spanish or any number of other countries who have a large white population.
@twiliter Yeah, definitely not the 90s zeitgeist. Nowadays, I’m not so sure. We are seeing that mysogynistic pushback – shaming women for not staying at home with their kids, shaming them for having kids without the father in the picture, shaming women for not having kids and having a career instead. It seems stronger now than when I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed youngster entering the adult world.
It also seems to be gaining a certain cache amongst upper class women who don’t have to work to maintain their lifestyle but still hire cleaners, childcare, gardeners etc. They want to be glam housewives, doing only the fun parts like baking cakes to post on Instagram or showing off their artisan finds from the local arts and crafts market. Not the actual hard grind of unpaid work a 50’s housewife would recognize.
I think so Claire, it really looks like Americanized Western Civilization, or a rough caricature of it. There is a lot of Hollywood archetypes in play too, whether it being art imitating life of vice versa. All my Aunts and my mother and grandmother not only did the necessary things to keep the household going, but were also gainfully employed. I can’t speak to the wealthy class because that’s not what I grew up in, but I was familiar with farm wives and how very necessary and indespensible their lives and endeavors were, even in the 60’s. Very hard working, very intelligent and compassionate, and very independent despite any superficial appearances otherwise. This list smacks of patriarchal capitalist competitiveness, by way of the archaic and dogmatic horseshit found in the bible.
The terrible thing is that of the virtuous qualities that it may describe, the implication that it is largely a white skinned cultural phenomenon, and therefore the non-whites possessing opposing qualities is patently racist, to the extreme. It’s like Ikn said above, their anti-racist agenda is deeply racist in it’s assumptions (which is very well put by the way). :)
It was explicitly US-centric. The title of the chart is “Some Aspects and Assumptions of White Culture in the United States”. The version that was shown in the previous post even had a flag. I would be surprised if it were not US-centric. I think it almost works better as a description of “some aspects and assumptions of common culture in the United States”.
Except not really explicitly. That’s another way it’s dishonest. The US-centrism is obvious but the label is whiteness. It’s parochial as well as stupid.
In a sense, it reminds me of when Christians make (positive) claims for Christianity that apply perfectly well to humanity as a whole, or at least to decent people. They are claiming attributes for a subset, as if the subset’s defining characteristic is relevant. This list is claiming (sometimes negative) attributes for white Americans, as if the attributes don’t apply perfectly well to all or most Americans.
But I do see the list as talking about white Americans, not trying to make a statement about white people worldwide by using Americans as an example case.
If it were not derogatory, if it were merely descriptive, it might work. It could talk about “German people in the United States” or “English people in the United States”. They could hold views or engage in practices that are shared by many other people, and no one would look at that list and say “Oh, so only German people celebrate Christmas” or “Only English people value the scientific method”. I don’t know that this is possible when talking about “white people”, though; that’s a broad category defined mostly through omission. So maybe it can’t possibly work.