by Rosemary Brown
Desiree B. Stephens whose heritage is bi-racial (Black and Irish), is a decolonization educator and counsellor. and a promoter of whole-self healing.
She believes that “whiteness is more of a mindset than anything else.” However, it is a mindset of which we are often unaware. As part of her own learning process, she has thought long and hard about whiteness and systems of dominance in general, whether they pertain to race, ability, gender, sexual orientation, colonization, etc.
We recently read and discussed her short and thought-provoking e-book Dismantling Supremacy Culture: Understanding and Overcoming Its Fifteen Pillars, which can be found by searching online.
These pillars are Perfectionism, Sense of Urgency, Defensiveness, Quantity Over Quality, Worship of the Written Word, Only One Right Way, Paternalism, Either/Or thinking, Power Hoarding, Fear of Open Conflict, Individualism, Progress is Bigger, More, Objectivity, Right to Comfort.
While I have been aware of many of these pillars as problematic issues, I had never thought of them as a complex web of attitudes and behaviours that support oppression dynamics¬¬—or in Stephen’s words “supremacy culture.”
Her approach in this document is to define each pillar and then to analyze the impact of each pillar from the perspective of intersectionality, community building, de-centring whiteness, and whole-self healing. Then she offers “active steps for liberation” that help us to change our ways of thinking, and organizational ways of doing things. To assist us, she asks a series of questions at the end of each chapter that help us to reflect on how these pillars work in our personal and organizational lives. To disrupt these pillars will be to disrupt supremacy culture and create healthier lives for us and those around us. We are taking this challenge on in The Reconciliation Action Group.
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