Getting Beyond Surface Level Activism & Performative Allyship
Performing Anguish, Remorse or Appeal. Image credit: The Progressive Speaker, 1897
The other day I ran across a post about White Urgency, that feature of dominant US culture that favors immediate action. I refer to it as Action Orientation or Action Bias, following the foundational research of anthropologists Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck. The idea is that on the continuum of cultural ways of being, some cultures place a high value on doing, others on being, still others on becoming. They and other anthropologists and sociologists have documented the prevalence of the drive toward getting things done in dominant White US culture.
Original White Urgency post from Courtney Ahn Design, @courtneyahndesign
I traced this particular post back to an original graphic by Courtney Ahn Design, a prolific designer of infographics. Through soft, cartoon-style people and colorful backgrounds, Ahn delivers direct messages and stepwise teachings about racism and other social injustices.
The original posting had been in July of 2021, when the initial tide of support for the George Floyd uprisings was dying down sharply. Ahn created this diagnostic guide to White Urgency from their perspective as an Asian American. It paints a picture of fair-weather White friends that includes:
Obliviousness to historic injustices (“1. White person ‘discovers’ racism”)
Entitlement and White saviorism (“2. Decides racism needs to end now!”)
Shallow and narcissistic behavior (“3. Engages in performative tasks & centers themselves”)
Inability to cope with the marathon time horizon of social change (“4. Gives up because nothing immediately happens”).
This picture may be unflattering, but it comes from observable patterns of behavior. Put another way, these observations are what can be seen at the top of the systems iceberg, from outside the system. And in this case they are from the point of view of a person of color, who states from personal experience that White Urgency is traumatic to BIPOC because it centers whiteness and dismisses systemic racism.
The Systems Iceberg, artwork by Kelvy Bird
As true as this description is, we are left with a surface-level portrait of surface-level activism. I decided to take this as a Call-On, a provocation to think critically and creatively about how this comes to be and how to do better. Following these patterns down into their systemic causes is White people’s work. Our Black, Indigenous and racialized colleagues see the action and its impact, and it’s important to take note when they describe it. What they can’t see is our intentions that have gone so terribly awry, and the structures and mindsets that produced those intentions.
Fleshing Out the Field Guide
Here’s my edited version, from my embodied White perspective:
White person is confronted with an un-dismissable instance of racism
White cultural values & norms kick in
WP jumps into action without taking time for reflection, systemic analysis, or perspective-taking;
Frustration sets in as the ineffective actions don’t get any real traction
The next egregious news story captures attention
To arrive at these 5 steps, I relied on the Systems Iceberg (above). It’s a tool that reveals how behaviors and events observed at the surface are supported by structures, mindsets, and ultimately a source of our consciousness and creativity. A huge clue to what’s going on in individual events within a system is to look just beyond them for patterns they fit into. If we are seeing a widespread pattern - for instance, White Action Bias - chances are it’s supported by a system. Let’s take a look at each step.
Step 1: White person is confronted with an un-dismissable instance of racism
This event needs to be serious and immediate enough to jolt them out of apathy and into empathy: news footage, bystander video, or police dash- or body camera footage. With empathy, unpleasant feelings arise: the pain of the situation, anger at the injustice, horror at the inhumanity displayed, even guilt or shame for not having realized this and gotten involved earlier.
Iceberg analysis of Steps 1 and 2: the Un-dismissable Racist Act Meets White Cultural Norms
Patterns:
The reason that the jolt into empathy can happen is an underlying pattern of apathy. The Greek roots of the word “apathy” are the negative prefix “a-” plus “pathos,” or emotion. Apathy is literally being without emotion, and because it is common, another pattern emerges: our stamina for noticing and staying with difficult emotions and sensations is poor.
Remember, every pattern has outliers. I know plenty of White people who have developed their emotional stamina, and in fact, it’s part of what I teach. Still, the dominant pattern is a lack of emotional stamina. Cultural scholar Gert Jan Hofstede says of dominant culture, “ . . . If you are a part of a society, you’re like one drop in the Mississippi River. You may decide to go another way, but that doesn’t make the river change.”
Structures:
What upholds this pattern? In the US system, both school and work reward thinking and doing over feeling and reflecting. The business world even calls capacities for recognizing and dealing with feelings “soft skills.” In schools, grades given in the academic disciplines count as part of the GPA, whereas grades for things like effort, perseverance, artistry and personal growth do not.
Mindsets:
What underpins these structures? These particular mindsets form the basis of so many of our dominant work values that they warrant their own step in the process.
Step 2: White cultural norms and values kick in
Thinking has been prioritized over feeling in European and US dominant cultures ever since philosopher René Descartes said “I think, therefore I am,” in 1637. Anthropologists would say that we value analysis as our source of knowledge, as opposed to seeking knowledge by integratiing sensations, emotions, perceptions and thoughts. This cultural norm has led to both a devaluation and a numbed awareness of feelings — they have to be strong to be noticed over all those existentially important thoughts. And, once we feel them, we tend not to have much practice in dealing with them.
The preference for thought over feeling makes sitting with unpleasant sensations unbearable, while the preference for doing says subconsciously, “Why aren’t you doing anything about this?”
A second norm that’s operating here values doing over being or becoming. We have little patience for taking time in reflection or gathering multiple perspectives before discerning what to do. When I was a kid and would take a long time to weigh my options, my mom used to say “Do something, even if it’s wrong!” In fact, the dominant culture terms people who do this “indecisive.” Likewise, changing your point of view due to perspective-taking is seen as “waffling” rather than personal growth or “becoming.”
Taken together these two norms conspire to push us into hasty action. The preference for thought over feeling makes sitting with unpleasant sensations unbearable, while the preference for doing says subconsciously, “Why aren’t you doing anything about this?”
Step 3: White person jumps into action without taking time for reflection, systemic analysis, or perspective-taking
Because there’s been no time for research, perspective-taking or self-reflection by the White person, these actions are necessarily White-centric.
Iceberg Analysis of Step 3: Jumping into Isolated Action
Patterns:
Another underlying pattern in this situation is that White people tend to be racially isolated. As recently as 2022, a nonpartisan survey by PRRI showed that White Americans’ friendship networks are 90% White. Hence, multiple racial perspectives are not likely to show up for a White person unless they specifically seek them out; and this is difficult given their networks.
Structures:
This racial isolation is supported by the social media bubbles that most people inhabit. In the absence of a diverse network of friends and colleagues with whom to compare and consider actions, social media algorithms may show us what seems like a consensus “correct” response. Remember all those black squares on facebook profiles? I remember seeing so many of them that I got concerned that I was missing a movement — until I conferred with a variety of Black folks who assured me that they were taking no comfort in the blacked-out profile images.
Because the majority culture is dominant, it places little value on seeking perspectives that are outside its mainstream.
Mindsets:
The dominant US culture maintains a norm of assimilation, wherein the path to the “American dream” of middle class success depends on speaking accent-free English, not bringing the pungently spicy food of your homeland to the office, and conforming to all the other cultural norms. Because the majority culture is dominant, it places little value on seeking perspectives that are outside its mainstream.
Step 4: Frustration sets in as the ineffective actions don’t get any real traction
Patterns: As the original diagram states, “nothing immediately happens.” In my view, the frustration this produces is its own step, with its own underpinnings. The fact that nothing immediately happens is the pattern, seen over and over again.
Iceberg Analysis of Step 4: Frustration
Structures:
The way that history is taught in the US holds up this pattern. By not teaching the history of organized change-making, we don’t give students a window into the hard work and long time horizon typically needed for substantive change. The current wave of curriculum restrictions around “Black History” and other “minority” studies can only exacerbate this pattern.
Mindsets:
The assimilation mindset of Step 3 also plays into the structure of history curricula. After all, if we believe that everyone should assimilate into dominant White culture, then White history is the main history, and “Black History” is a separate course. In fact, the long road to each and every hard-won civil right included in Black History, Indigenous History and the history of all the groups racialized as “nonwhite,” is US history.
In reality both King and Parks were part of a community movement that. . . organized for over a year to walk, carpool, and raise funds to support those who had lost jobs due to lack of transportation.
Along with this, the dominant cultural norm of Individualism is at play – specifically, the way that US culture ascribes achievement to the individual. This is distinct from the way that many Black, Latine, Indigenous and Asian cultures share credit with their communities. Because of cultural Individualism, much of US history is taught through a heroic lens that focuses on kings, presidents, generals, and other individual leaders who get credit for moving history forward. In my own schooling I learned about Martin Luther King as the leader who did this for the Civil Rights movement. In this telling, Rosa Parks was simply a tired working woman who sat where she wasn’t supposed to on that bus. In reality both were part of a community movement that strategically placed Parks on the bus in order to prompt a wider protest that could be leveraged into policy gains. And during the ensuing bus boycott, that community organized for over a year to walk, carpool, and raise funds to support those who had lost jobs due to lack of transportation.
Step 5: The next egregious news story captures attention
Iceberg Analysis of Step 5: Next Egregious Story
Patterns:
As pointed out in the original White Urgency post, there’s a clear pattern of waves of people becoming interested in a current issue, complete with frequent posts about it, partisan profile photos, etc. I’ve noticed a further pattern of these profiles morphing from issue to issue: from black squares/Black Lives Matter, to “I stand with Ukraine,” to either pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian slogans. Looking at the performance diagrams for "Anguish," "Remorse" and "Appeal" from the illustration at the top of this article make me wonder whether this pattern has been going on since the 1800's at least.
Structures:
These patterns are clearly related to the “if it bleeds, it leads” news media maxim. It’s nothing new, but has now been amplified by social media business models whose algorithms take us into more and more graphic and troubling details of world events.
Mindsets:
All of this plays on Catastrophe bias — our tendency to remember dramatic catastrophes but not notice gradual decline or improvement. Catastrophe bias is one of 13 hardwired biases we carry as humans, detailed by author Brian McLaren, each of which influences our basic mindset. This means that the same long time horizon of change that causes frustration to set in, also sets our brains up to lose interest and be ready to focus on the new catastrophe.
A New Diagram, and a Missing Level
A New and Deeper Diagram of White Action Bias. Emojis by antonbelo via Canva
From the iceberg analysis I developed my own graphic of the steps of White Action Bias. It incorporates both the externally visible actions and internal influences. It’s still an unflattering portrait of a fair-weather friend, but points us to mindsets that we can begin to change by the act of noticing them.
Continuing the change to get to substantive outcomes will require going deeper, to the Source level — the one represented by the blank line at the bottom of each of the iceberg diagrams. It is the inner condition from which we operate, the origin of our consciousness, and the root of the creativity to envision something different. Next month I’ll take up how to connect with our source to live into a more lasting advocacy.
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