Dr Claire Stewart-Hall unpacks white accountability spaces, our monthly space to form solidarities for anti-racist praxis.
Group spaces to talk about whiteness and its impact on people’s lives is a method developed to address the logics of racism.
What is Racism?
Jones (1972 & 1981) defined racism as:
1. Individual internalised superiority & inferiority
2. Institutional laws created through policies
3. Systemic and structural racism: when multiple institutions overlap
4. Cultural racism: investment in white supremacy culture
What is the mission of white accountability spaces?
- Gather with others committed to racial justice
- Recognise, understand and challenge internalised superiority
- Engage in vulnerable, honest, authentic dialogue
- Recognise how whiteness works through our actions
- Notice and interrupt our investment in institutional structures
- Understand how white group membership affects our behaviours
- Challenge by choice
Whiteness ‘reveals the ways in which Whites benefit from a variety of institutional and social arrangements that often appear (to Whites) to have nothing to do with race.
Bush, (2004), p.15.
What purpose do they serve?
White Accountability Spaces form collectives with the shared intention to understand better how whiteness affects our lives and in doing so aim to challenge its salience. Many dislike the term “ally” in this space – it describes what some people are doing in racially mixed spaces, but if we dig a bit deeper into the power dynamics in white accountability spaces it can be viewed as patronising and reinforcing white-rescue. The concept of ally in this space suggests we need to tweak power imbalances, not reimagine how power can be redistributed. If all people were understood as equal then why do they need allies? Allyship in a shared white space rings of deficit. Allyship is important elsewhere, however, as articulated by Reid (2021), Kendi (2019) or in an educational context Akinde (2024) and Thomas (2022).
Allyship can easily be coopted to mask power dynamics, superiority and legitimise surface performativity. Group work on whiteness is a powerful way to recognise that white people and white passing people need more help to recognise how our behaviours contribute to racism and take responsibility for our own learning. This is not a space to perform ‘allyship’. Instead, people are encouraged to question: who is anti-racism for? What is its aim and who benefits?
Anti-racism as a praxis is a commitment to making our world just. It is feminist and committed to developing ways of being that treat one other humanely. It believes in positive action and is anti-oppressive in all areas of your life. It is not just during the presentation you deliver about anti-racism or the project you start – it encompasses how you treat employees, how you work against hierarchies of oppression so naturalised our institutions. Anti-racism is not suddenly switched on when a Black or Brown person walks into the room or becomes employed in your organisation, nor do only Black and Brown people benefit from anti-racist efforts. It is active and dynamic and is part of your being, your thinking and how you practise your life. It requires questioning your work practices and ways of interacting, understanding your motives and what you gain from ignoring racism or staying silent.
Until people understand the damage whiteness does to people, ancestrally, and continues to do through socialisation, we are unlikely to be able to resource ourselves to change it. People raised in the global north and in settler colonial states inherit and are socialised into cultures of perverse greed, a wedded-ness to hierarchy and assimilation, deep rooted desires for competition and superiority, normalised sexual violence, an unhealthy resistance to empathy and a given acceptance of capitalism. These drivers are evident across most Western governments, even legislated and protected as human rights and framed as delivering equality.
As people who enjoy the fruits of close proximity to whiteness, it takes some investment to resist such norms in your life. White accountability spaces seek to question these implications. The monthly collectives do not work in ways that are self-punishing or traumatise, but in a supportive and transparent way to change the anxiety people often feel when talking about race and racism. We all struggle against these norms – a monthly held-space enables a network of people to re-centre and realign against the challenges of living in whiteness as anti-racists and understand how whiteness shapes our responses. The social norms that centralise systems of domination condition social patterns that normalise racism (Menakem, 2017). White accountability spaces create enduring practices so white people can see how whiteness works through them, in order that such patterns can be interrupted, healed and stopped.
Join here if you need a community to reflect on how to show up as an anti-racist in your life and work.
Image: Source: Medium, (2024) & Wallace, 2005