Grand Rapids Neighborhood Leadership Academy 19′

This was the third year I co-facilitated a workshop on Racial Equity and Inclusive Leadership to participants of the Neighborhood Leadership Academy; an 8-week initiative created in partnership with Stacy Stout: Assistant to The City Manager, Neighborhood Associations, The Division of Inclusion and Equity at GVSU, including my unit: Social Justice Education, and The Johnson Center for Philanthropy.

One of the major impressions I always hope to leave with participants is the importance of critical self-reflection. We need to acknowledge ourselves as racialized people who have been socialized to feel superior or inferior within the system of white supremacy.

We need to understand ourselves as actors with agency to interrupt or perpetuate that system. One of the ways we can do that is to be critical about the messages we’ve received about ourselves and others.

A part of that self-reflection involves thinking critically about the ways we’ve been impacted by cultural hegemony, or what I’ve also heard referred to as the Master Narrative.

For the workshop, I used a definition for cultural hegemony from the text Challenging Oppression and Confronting Privilege: A Critical Social Work Approach:

“Control of a diverse society by dominant groups, maintained through manipulating the societal culture (beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, etc) so that the dominant group’s worldview is imposed as the societal norm, which is then perceived as universally valid ideology and status quo that is beneficial to all of society, when in actuality it really only benefits the dominant group.”

When thinking of dominant narratives, it’s important to consider how power plays a role in what narratives are amplified, vs. those that are silenced, how it contributes to what is widely understood and accepted as common knowledge vs. what is rejected as myth.

Dominant narratives can impact how we understand history. Consider the important history that is erased by this whitewashed version of historical events

The messages we receive as a result of these narratives can also impact the subtle, implicit associations we make when it comes to race about who matters, who doesn’t, who is considered safe, and who isn’t. The images below are from news coverage of hurricane Katrina, where the difference between an activity being described as looting for food vs. finding it was dependent on the race of the people involved.

What do you notice about this image?

Being critical about the messages we’ve received about race also calls for us to consider how the subtle everyday comparisons that equate light with good and darkness with evil collude with perpetuating white supremacy.

We can’t talk about hegemony without examining media, so I focused on how movies and television shows can contribute to the white savior complex.

We touched on examples of media with storytelling that reinforces the inferiority of the marginalized group. White person or otherwise unknown outsider comes into a community in which they have little to no knowledge of, and by the end of the 90 minutes or however long the thing lasts, they become the leader of the group or society. We talked about how this dynamic reinforces white supremacy, and how it shows up in systems like education, philanthropy, voluntourism, and in other areas of the participants’ own lived experience.

I didn’t have this with me then, but shortly after I left, I came across a video that used comedy to make connections to the prevalence of cinema that reinforce white savior narratives. I recognize that an attempt at a comedic take on this might not land well for everyone, but the critiques highlighted in the video capture many of the comments in the room during our discussion.

Looking forward to being in community with another committed cohort this year.

Ubuntu,

From Aspiring Humanitarian, Relando Thompkins-Jones

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