Unlearning White Dominant Cultural Norms
Several years ago, during my first year at a new job, an employee received a shout out for staying at work until 11pm the day before. I remember thinking about how scary it would be to have to walk to my car by myself in the dark. But in terms of the late work hours, I simply thought that this is what hard work looked like, and this place had high expectations.
A few years later in a post-work vent session, a colleague-friend and I discussed this situation. In hindsight, we were frustrated by the leadership team not only condoning, but applauding, this dangerous, headed-for-burnout work style. How can we expect to bring our best selves to work when the expectation was to work 70% of our lives? Where was the balance that affords a fulfilling career and a joyful, robust life outside of work
Fast forward to November 2020. The Upstream team enrolled in a Leading for Equity course through Oakland’s National Equity Project. As two white women, we were planning to hire a third full-time employee to our team and wanted to ensure we were creating inclusive spaces. We knew this work needed to start with us.
In the course, we were introduced to the work of racial equity trainers Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones. They’ve identified 1) the norms of white dominant culture in the workplace, and 2) “something different”--antidotes or alternatives to those white dominant culture characteristics. According to the ACCE, the definition of white dominant culture (or white supremacist culture) is “the explicit to subtle ways that the norms, preferences and fears of white European descended people overwhelmingly shape how we organize our work and institutions, see ourselves and others, interact with one another and with time, and make decisions.”
One of the characteristics of white dominant culture is overworking as an unstated norm by “encouraging people to work through weekends and into the night.” The 11pm shoutout is a prime example of this. Also, Tessa--as an entrepreneur and the founder of our start-up--often gets asked the question, “How many hours do you sleep a night?” This question serves as a passive barometer for one’s success and work ethic--as if more sleep meant you weren’t doing enough.
An antidote to overworking as a norm is self and community care by “actively encouraging a culture of self-care and community care in which people care about each other’s physical and emotional wellbeing, support time boundaries and are considerate of time zone difficulties.”
So, how can we apply this antidote at Upstream? When the vast majority of our Denver Public School teachers went back to in-person learning a month ago, we thought back to Okun and Jones’ ideas, and we wanted to be intentional about community care. If we had a meeting agenda with a teacher, we’d push that to the side and hold space for them to share and process their experience being back in the classroom.
Through the National Equity Project, Tema Okun and Kenneth Jones gave us the lens and language to see and push back against this white dominant culture norm (among maaaany others we inherently subscribe to).
Okun and Jones’ framework has been and will continue to be the bedrock for how we operate as humans and how we organize, shift, and create an intentionally inclusive workplace culture at Upstream. To quote Aysa Gray, we don’t want to “[center] productivity over people.”
In future blog posts, we will continue to share our messy unlearning process and the shifts we are making at Upstream away from white dominant culture norms.
