Investigating Dominant Culture Without Replicating Dominant Culture: An Attempt
Something I have learned to say when approached about possibly offering a workshop related to diversity, equity and inclusion is this: “Thank you for reaching out. Please be aware that I am not a trained diversity or equity practitioner. I am a skilled facilitator with a deep interest in DEI topics and would be pleased to work with you in that capacity.” It’s a distinction that is important on two levels: 1) It emphasizes that there is a difference; that diversity practitioners have a particular training and expertise which should be sought out and compensated; 2) It explicitly clarifies my role. I inform organizers that I will not be providing substantial content knowledge but instead will focus on creating the conditions and containers for participant interaction and learning.
When I recently accepted an offer to conduct a workshop for a full faculty at a predominantly white international school, I emphasized this distinction at several junctures. At the same time, I acknowledged (for myself) the importance of representation — as a Black woman facilitator and fellow international school teacher from the region. It was meaningful for me to take up that space, to lead with confidence and provide an opportunity for the school to elaborate on its DEI intentions going forward. I agreed with the organizers that we would delve into describing dominant culture and consider how that impacts various groups in a learning community.
Why Dominant Culture?
Dominant culture consists of the norms, values and practices which shape and enforce the behaviors that are considered acceptable within an established social structure. (A definition cobbled together from sources here, here and here.) Every established social structure has a dominant culture: Your school, place of worship, your city, your country, your sports club, your college, your neighborhood, your workplace, your political party, your family group chat. Assuming our desire to experience belonging in a given context, we are most likely to do whatever is necessary to adhere to the going norms. We try not to actively offend anyone or commit a grave faux pas which might lead to being sanctioned or even ostracized. But all of this social navigation and calculation mostly goes unspoken. It is rare for us to name the behaviors we adopt to count ourselves among the respected and respectable members of a given group. We just do it (or not).
I chose dominant culture as a focus for a few reasons. In order to address the school’s full faculty it felt important to find a way to encourage dialogue where participants’ relative familiarity with the topic would not determine their capacity to contribute. Also, because dominant culture is deeply contextual, as field of inquiry it offers several possible entry points for individuals and groups to consider. Further, regardless of our various identity markers, we all have experiences as members of and as outsiders to dominant culture in different contexts. For example, young new hires joining a faculty of primarily mid- and late career educators or an immigrant attempting to navigate a host country bureaucracy without access to the local or a shared foreign language are keenly aware of their outsider status at those intersections. In my own case, although I am visibly in the minority on my staff as one of very few Black women, in other areas I am very well in step with dominant culture characteristics through my citizenship, age, first language, educational profile, sexual orientation and ability. Taking this broad-based approach helps participants recognize and acknowledge each others’ perspectives as unique and valid.
Participation Strategies
To set the stage for later group work, I sent the group on a listening exercise: a structured dialogue. In this activity each partner takes a turn either delivering or responding to the given prompts. While one person responds, their partner simply listens without interruption and once the speaker has indicated their conclusion, the partner replies, “Thank you.” There is no cross talk and all the prompts are given in one direction before switching roles. Participants had 15 minutes to complete this task, ideally 2 times in both directions and if desired, while walking. Below are the prompts I offered this group:
A couple of things are important here: the emphasis on uninterrupted listening and speaking from the I-perspective. Both of these elements contribute to an atmosphere of mutual benefit and relative safety. Each person can actively choose what and how much of themselves they wish to share and barring interruption while speaking tends to free up mental space for both parties to remain present throughout. When participants returned to the auditorium an excited buzz came with them. I observed lots of smiles and nods as people took their seats for the next portion of the workshop.
Audience members shared some reflections on the structured dialogue: that it felt unusually calm, that they were surprised at how personal some of their responses were, that they had never had a conversation quite like that with a colleague before. The twin aims of “warming up” our voices and thinking about dominant culture in a low-stakes interaction were clearly met. We moved on to defining dominant culture more clearly and understanding how it operates as a pervasive, usually unspoken set of norms that guide people’s behaviors and attitudes.
I used a brief clip from an interview with racism scholar, Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum during which she describes the “moving sidewalk of racism or white supremacy” as a vehicle on which we are all moving whether we like the direction or not. Specifically she explains that the only way to counteract that ongoing motion towards white supremacy is to move in the opposite direction faster than the pace of the sidewalk. Which is to say that to counter white supremacy and racism, we need to be vigorously active and persistent in our efforts. Dominant culture, which may or may not be tied to elements of white supremacy, works similarly in that it encompasses the context in which it is situated. To be at home in the dominant culture means that its elements are rendered invisible and accepted as “the way things are.”
A participant raised an objection to me drawing a straight parallel between white supremacy and dominant culture, suggesting that all elements of dominant culture need not be inherently bad, harmful or oppressive. On that point I agreed with him and also asked him to be open to the idea that our own ideas of what may be agreeable or acceptable may well be toxic for others; for our students or colleagues, for instance. Which illustrated perfectly the point of our exercise: to uncover the ways in which dominant cultures may impose heavy taxes on those who exist within its purview but who are not accorded full belonging for one or more reasons.
Under the heading of “On the lookout for dominant culture” I shared some excellent, thought-provoking questions from the article, “What Does Dominant Culture Mean In The Workplace?” by Allaya Cooks-Campbell. The questions highlight the need to interrogate dominant culture norms and acknowledge how they may influence members of an organization differently. Here are a few:
Does everyone look the same?
Are people comfortable talking about what’s important to them?
Do you actively encourage employees to participate in conversations for change?
What does diversity look like in your organization? Is it spread across ethnic, racial, gender, and neurodiverse lines?
Who is measuring your success on diversity metrics?
Because the article and these sample questions examine more than one category or aspect of bias, I found it a useful assist in encouraging participants to stay in the habit of examining multiple forms of difference and practice recognizing the ways in which various identity markers can interact to create insiders, outsiders and in-betweeners depending on the specific context.
With these thoughts in mind, we prepared for mixed group dialogue and the following task:
As I observed these pre-assigned groups which included representatives from different divisions and disciplines, I can say that the conversations were lively and focused. While most groups chose to describe the whole school staff, other groups looked at or even compared divisions (primary vs. secondary). When I had the chance to read through each group’s lists and suggestions, I could recognize a sense of possibility. That many faculty members were able to see what had previously lurked beneath or completely off their radar and recognize that they or other folks had ideas about what they might do next to remedy the discrepancy in awareness.
Bringing the focus back onto students and their experiences provided a relatable avenue on which several educators were prepared to travel. And if folks are ready to travel, then we boost the likelihood that we/they will make some change along the way. As a facilitator who is in and then out, I will never know all the results that this series of engagements among colleagues helped produce. While I am present, however, I do whatever I can to enable movement of one kind or another: a shift in vision, a heightened awareness, a push of urgency, a steady gathering of momentum.
Following my presentation, members of faculty who conducted focus group sessions earlier in the year with primary and secondary students on the topics of diversity and inclusion at school shared their findings. Students expressed their wishes for more faculty of color, for more diverse reading selections in English, for teachers willing to listen to them when they describe racist and homophobic incidents, for more opportunities to learn about different religions, for proactive approaches to addressing racism among the student body. If the urgency hadn’t been present among faculty before, hearing students describe their experiences and wishes in their own words certainly underscored the need for the adults to take a more active role in building a genuinely equitable and inclusive learning environment.
Single Example, Wider Implications
My hopes in sharing the details of this particular workshop design are twofold: to offer an example of participatory facilitation that is accessible and replicable; and to suggest an investigation of dominant culture as a useful point of departure for an early foray into institutional DEI conversations. None of this would have been possible if I had not carefully considered the context of my audience (What have faculty done so far in this area? Where does this workshop tie in to the school’s plans going forward? How much time is available? etc.) and plan accordingly. The session took place on the Friday before the last week of school, so I aimed to incorporate movement and plenty of dialogue to keep energy levels up. These are small things that ultimately make (made) a big difference.
For many, the opportunity to actually see the dominant culture(s) they inhabit in a way that some outsiders may view it seemed to be genuinely mind-blowing. Being able to have honest dialogue with colleagues that ventured beyond superficial chatter realigned whole participation patterns. By turning much of the “work” of the session over to participants and trusting them to do what was meaningful to them in the allotted time appeared to run counter to what several were expecting. Without announcing it, we acted outside of a dominant culture norm of sit-and-get professional development and it was very well received.
And with that we have come full circle: Recognizing that the workshop on dominant culture must in its very conception wrestle with its own tendencies (my own tendencies) to reproduce the same norms it is asking folks to rethink. This is our fundamental challenge: to keep recognizing and acknowledging particularly harmful patterns of dominant culture and subverting them, upending them, countering them in ways large and small. I’m reminded of a hint from Alysa Pereras who advises us to say: “I see you white supremacy and I am not going to cooperate.” We can teach ourselves: “ I see you harmful/exclusionary dominant culture norms and I’m not going to play by those rules.” This is how we go from seeing to doing. We really can’t afford to keep our students waiting any longer.
