I have been pondering this for several days now. As I was revolving possible answers to the original question in my mind, how much of Lace’s internalized white supremacy might or might not have driven the development of her method… Something was bugging me. And I couldn’t put my finger on it until Marlise posted about how Lace’s knowledge of her own internalized white supremacy might be a big reason behind the accountability, including for herself, that she has built into her method.
What was bothering me was this. As I was pondering the question, my immediate go to thought process was something like: “White supremacy bad. Lace says she has it and it played in. Must be a flaw, must look for flaws, weaknesses, stumbles in the method.” In other words, I was looking for places Lace might have tripped up, not places where she might have excelled.
Part of that is possibly my engineering brain. I myself was best at debugging, stress-testing, and root cause failure analysis, so that’s kind of just how my mind works. And that can be a blessing. But this way my mind works that can be a blessing… can also prop up some really insidious mental gymnastics on my part, and I came to realize that THAT is the roadblock I was hitting trying to confront Lace’s question. I guess it’s progress that I was so uneasy that I… kind of had a Westinghouse brake effect on my own thought processes? My brain was stopping itself?
Now that I can see what’s going on, I’m hoping I can think about this more productively. I think Marlise has hit on something, that knowing about your own internalized white supremacy, Lace, you’ve built in safeguards, like your focus on the relational and flat and round, to counteract it. You’ve intentionally chose structures and methods that work against the grasping for hierarchical dominance.
But looking for the effects of your internalized white supremacy is REALLY HARD when I’m over here still gunked up and cobwebbed in my own white supremacist tendencies. ?
