Who Controls the Narrative? When Whiteness Dictates Social Change | HackerNoon

Table of Links

Abstract and 1 Introduction

2. Early Life

3. Whiteness as an Institution

4. The Triple Threat

5. The Academic Plantation Field

6. The Future Is Black Women

7. Imagination as a Tool

8. Imagination through Research

9. Imagination through Play

10. Collaboration as Imagination

11. Conclusions and References

3. Whiteness as an Institution

“Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience”—Bell Hooks (2000)

Before entering academia, I spent the first decade of my adulthood working in various social service organizations for a series of nonprofits and advocacy think tanks. Although the organizations were different in various ways, what was consistent across institutions was the organizational structure, expectations, and implicit punishment and silencing of those who failed to work within the confinements of the ideologies of dominance such as whiteness, coloniality, and patriarchy. Melendez et al. (2023) posit, “Ideologies of dominance at the root of racial-settler colonialism are embedded in all United States institutions”. Each institution I worked at had a commitment to social justice and liberation for all, yet they all perpetuated inequality to maintain power through the enforcement of policies designed to protect dominance through the centering of whiteness. Hess (2007) refers to the functioning of whiteness as “white mythologies” and argues that it functions as the dissonance between reality and what is socially fictitiously constructed. Race is not real; it is constructed. Whiteness is not real; it is also constructed. Somehow, there is a lack of interrogation of whiteness as a construct that ultimately positions whiteness as what is natural and normal, which results in its ability to dominate. Whiteness was created to establish the binary we see today through the formulation of the hierarchy of power, where the top of the hierarchy represents power and privilege, and the bottom of the hierarchy encompasses anti-blackness, serving as the foundation of exploitation. At the end of the hierarchy framework, the binary constructs of structural and systematic inequality functions. On one end of the spectrum, there is whiteness, which has power, and the other end is anti-blackness, which is the anchor of oppression. It is through these two constructs that inequality was designed and currently serves as the root of the United States economy. The economy we have today is a result of racial–settler colonialism and the money that allows these organizations to operate cannot be separated from it. Therefore, the root of the money institutions invest to start their work is at least two times stolen: capital from the stolen land from Native Indigenous people and stolen labor of Black enslaved people.

My understanding of the history of institutional investment is what I bring to every position I have worked in. I operate as if all executives and managers who carry out inequality work are clear about the intentional design of our economy and inequality. I worked in the fields of social welfare and social services. Understanding the construction of the US economy is pertinent to the social welfare field. My experience as a young professional during my first decade of work in nonprofits and think tanks was a form of psychological abuse. In my experience, whiteness showed up in ways that made me question my reality. For example, from 2017 to 2020, I served as a board member at a small nonprofit and raised concerns that leadership did not reflect the community being served. I decided to resign after three years of waiting for promises of equity to be fulfilled. I was promised the first year of my tenure as a board member that the current director of the organization, who happened to be a white woman who was not from the community but had a Ph.D. in social work, would not become the Executive Director of the organization. I was promised by the founder, who was also a white woman, that the board would hire someone from the community to lead the organization. Three years later, the director became the Executive Director, and the justification was “she deserves the job after all of her hard work”. Whiteness builds the game and then dictates the rules of engagement so the outcome can be in its favor. Upon my resignation, one of the founders, who at the time I thought was a friend, responded to my resignation and stated, “I honestly had the vibe that you didn’t want this to work, and this was the outcome hoped for which you can use as a story in your career”. This statement was meant to question my intentions of resignation; it almost got me to question my reality and decision until I could point to the material, tangible fact: the Executive Director did not represent the community as promised. Intention over impact is the result of whiteness. Today, in 2024, the Executive Director has not changed, and she now oversees over eight Black and Latino staff members; all of the children they serve are Black and Latino, and not a single community member has a job within the organization. Whiteness is literally profiting from a community’s harm and marginalization when whiteness is the original designer and benefactor of their hardship. This is modern-day colonialism. Almost seven years later, the leadership has remained the same. I made the right decision. Whiteness is entitled

The cycle and control of whiteness continued as I climbed the career ladder. My tenure working at a national gender equity think tank as the Director of Policy and Advocacy was my entry into the treacherous world of knowledge production. Language is vital in my work as a social policy scholar, researcher, and practitioner. Acknowledging all parts of history so that future scholars and practitioners have what they need to build future scholarship is imperative. As an emerging scholar, I believe it is my duty to be honest in my scholarship on inequality. While that desire might seem evident, it is not practiced by all scholars and practitioners. There is a dominant and intentional narrative framing in both public and private scholarship that centers on whiteness. Whiteness gets to tell the story from its viewpoint. The control of language is one of the primary functions of whiteness. I experienced language control firsthand, guised as a “best practice” skill while working at a national think tank. While drafting a report on the racial and gender wealth gap, I was told I could not use the term “anti-black” in my writing. When I asked the reason, I was told, “the language is too strong” and “it goes against our communication best practice”. My director at the time was a white woman with work experience in “women’s” wealth work (not gender wealth work) and a master’s degree in political economy. At the time, I was in my fourth year of doctoral studies, with two master’s degrees and over fifteen years of work experience. I am also a Black woman who has studied critical race scholarship for a decade. I was hired to work at the national level to center race and gender in the wealth work at the institution. As an emerging Black feminist scholar, I understood that words matter. I advocated for the term and asked for a description of our policies and definitions of “strong language”. I argued that there is a clear distinction between racism and anti-black racism. My director at the time told me I was “new” to this landscape, and she advised me to listen more before I tried to perform “new things”. As a Black woman completing my terminal doctoral degree with over fifteen years of formal higher education, I was not deemed expert enough by my director to use terminology I considered appropriate or lead our narrative work without her approval and comfort of language being used. This is just one example among many of how whiteness sustains itself by spreading falsehoods to shield its own existence.