The Failed Rehabilitation of "White Supremacy Culture"

Back in the 2020’s polarizing summer of rage, there was a moment of outrage that was uncharacteristically unifying: The Smithsonian’s “White Culture” infographic.

As I wrote at the time, the lessons imparted by this purportedly “anti-racist” infographic are virtually indistinguishable from what real life white supremacists would argue. The List immediately offended everyone and the Smithsonian quickly walked back, claiming it was misunderstood [Edit: Apunaja helpfully pointed out in the comments that the same message is still up on their website, just in a different format].

Fast forward to a few days ago when Ryan Grim published an exclusive interview with Tema Okun, the original creator of The List, claiming that everyone got it “all wrong.” If the goal was to get me to click well it fucking worked because I listened to the entire podcast episode and…I have no idea in what way Okun’s work was at all misinterpreted or otherwise gotten “wrong”.

Let’s start at the beginning. I previously tried to track down The List’s origin but gave up after I only found xeroxed pamphlets. Turns out that Okun wrote The List in a fit of frustration, without any research whatsoever:

I went to a meeting and it was a very frustrating and horrible meeting. And I came home and I sat in front of the computer. And the article literally came through me onto the computer. It was not researched. I didn’t sit down and deliberate. It just came through me. And I’ve never had that experience with my writing, before or since.

So she just pulled this out of thin air, but notice what she considers as validation that she was onto something (emphasis mine):

The tragic relevance of the list was reinforced a few years later when I was co-facilitating a workshop at a national conference of progressive attorneys and law students. We asked participants to work in small groups, looking for ways in which these characteristics show up in their personal and organizational lives. Asked to report, one young student spoke for her group, sharing that the list represents all the characteristics taught by law schools as essential to success in the profession. And that’s exactly the point – our institutions not only value these characteristics, they to some extent require them and constantly reproduce them in order to benefit from them, which is why they are so prevalent in our culture and institutions.

The burning question on my mind throughout, a curiosity Grim apparently does not share, is what makes any of this part of “white” culture? They finally try to address a concrete example, sort of, when they discuss how “urgency” as a value of “white culture” is lampooned. Grim sets the stage by citing examples of how The List is weaponized by bad actors seeking an excuse to shirk at work (e.g. “deadlines are white culture”). But as proof that urgency is a value of white culture, Okun cites a non-sequitur story about how some lawyers at a legal nonprofit got distracted from a anti-racist workshop to address an activist’s arrest. The conceit on display here is jaw dropping, Okun is literally complaining about an emergency interrupting her own anti-racist workshop:

And when we as facilitators tried to say: Can we take a pause, and just sit down together and figure out what we’re going to do in a way that meets this dynamic that we’ve just been talking about? The answer was: No, we don’t have time, we can’t possibly do that, we don’t have time, no, no, no. 

So in the middle of a workshop meant to help and support them to deal with the ways in which their culture was perpetuating racism, they were unable to stop. And that’s what I mean by There’s just the sense that things are so urgent, we can’t possibly pause for anything. So we lose the ability to pause for anything. And people get run over in that situation. And it just keeps things in place.

I don’t know if I’m stating the obvious here, but nothing about this tells us that “urgency” is bad per se, let alone how any of it is a value of “white culture” specifically. It seems at least possible that the activist’s arrest was more important than her training, even from the narrow perspective of “perpetuating racism”, but Okun appears incapable of entertaining that idea.

Ryan Grim is not someone I would have recognized as wary of critiquing leftist shibboleths, but I have no explanation for the uncharacteristic lack of pushback he displayed throughout the interview with Tema Okun. If anyone was looking for evidence that the DEI industry is and has been a sham with self-perpetuation as its primary measure of success, Okun’s own words are the rotary excavator digging its hole.