Reframing the Debate Over "White" Values
Tying specific values and ideas to skin color is harmful and wrong. But if you strip out the obsession with skin color, Tema Okun and her ilk might have an important contribution.
Over the past few years, an entire cottage industry has sprung up on the far-left that's devoted to identifying and criticizing values they see as "white." These values include things like "individualism," a "sense of urgency," and "timeliness" (i.e. "valu[ing] time commitments"). It's hard to overstate how prominent these beliefs are in certain spaces: according to The Intercept, "If you work in an office that has an even slightly progressive-leaning workforce, you’re probably familiar with [these ideas]." The idea that certain cultural attributes are "white" and must be jettisoned has been echoed by prestigious universities, in well-known media outlets, and even (briefly) by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The industry was launched by Tema Okun, an (ironically) white middle-class woman who set out to disrupt and criticize values she saw as characteristic of the "white middle- and owning-class power brokers." Her initial paper (from 1999, updated in 2020) on the topic went mega-viral and launched a thousand copycats.
Critics are quick to point out that Okun's whole concept is racist. After all, it's not far from "urgency is a white value" to "non-whites are lazy." And if you said "only white people value time commitments," a listener could be forgiven for wondering whether you're part of the KKK. Critics also point out that assigning specific character attributes to people of a specific skin color represents sloppy analysis. There's nothing intrinsic in melanin levels that should or does correlate with attributes like "being on time."
Plus, while Okun takes care to specify that not all white people adopt these attributes, it's rather insulting to imply that only white people in the United States can be "power brokers." It unintentionally erases any number of highly successful minorities.
But while these critics make good points, I believe Okun and her followers are pointing us (however clumsily) towards a very important discussion. These cultural attributes—which aren't white, and often aren't even exclusive to the West, but which are relatively common in the United States—aren't unalloyed goods; and there's an important discussion to be had about what attributes we include in our society and the relative trade-offs those attributes entail.
Let's take individualism as an example. In her original paper, Okun argues individualism is a product of "white supremacy." What does she mean by "individualism?" In part, the "desire for individual recognition and credit" and an organizational preference for "those who can get things done on their own without needing supervision or guidance." Okun suggests that, in order to dismantle this belief, we should "make people accountable as a group rather than as individuals."
Essentially, we should be more team- or group-oriented, and less individually-focused.
As a libertarian, I'm very much in favor of individualism. A philosophy of individualism allows each of us to march to the beat of our own drum. In a culture where people get credit for what they actually do and incur blame for the mistakes they personally make, each of us has a lot more freedom to strike out on our own. In cultures in which entire groups are blamed for the actions of individuals in those groups, on the other hand, you get a lot fewer people willing to buck the conventional wisdom. Japan, for instance, has a pretty collectivistic culture. According to Hofstede Insights, which ranks countries on a 100-point scale along multiple cultural dimensions, Japan scores a mere 46 on individualism. It's probably not a coincidence that one of their proverbs is "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down."
By contrast, the United States is the most individualistic country in the world according to Hofstede, with an individualism score of 91. Maybe that's why so many Americans love to quote Steve Jobs: "Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently."
In a highly individualistic culture, I was able to quit a soul-sucking corporate job and start a new career as a professional author. In a culture that values people who don't need much guidance or supervision, I'm free to pursue my own projects without fear of a boss breathing down my neck. That sort of lifestyle is a lot harder to cultivate in a culture that prioritizes teamwork and deprioritizes individual autonomy.
There's also good evidence that individualism leads to material prosperity. In his seminal paper "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Nobel-Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek argues that only individuals have the necessary information to engage in economic calculation. I know what kind of job is best for me, and you know what kind of job is best for you. A baker knows best what price to sell her donuts for, and an artist knows best what kind of piece will sell to his next audience. Or as Hayek puts it, "The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”
If I'm free to reap the rewards and downsides of my own actions, then I'm in the best position to use and build on my own idiosyncratic knowledge. Teamwork is no bad thing, but societies that become too collectivist tend to see their economies contract.
That said, prominent social commentators also argue that individualism can have some drawbacks. In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes his experience of spending three months living in the very group-focused country of India. He saw its ugly side, and how the collectivist culture oppressed women and younger folks. But he also saw a dense web of social connection that discouraged selfishness and prioritized caring for others. He "could see beauty in a moral code that emphasizes duty, respect for one’s elders, service to the group, and negation of the self’s desires."
In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger documents how, when Pilgrims and Native Americans fought and took each other captive, something surprising happened. Native Americans captured by the Europeans were desperate to get back to their tribes. But settlers captured by Native Americans often didn't want to leave. One reason may have been that tribal life represented a much denser weave of social interactions and connections than did settler life. As Junger puts it, "the intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe held an appeal that the material benefits of Western civilization couldn’t necessarily compete with."
Of course, an individualistic culture doesn't have to lead to loneliness and social isolation. I would argue that individualistic cultures can (and often have) countermanded this tendency via a rich web of voluntary social interactions, such as churches and bowling leagues and after-school programs for children. But other commentators might claim that individualism puts us at greater risk of loneliness, and that's a debate worth having.
A similar debate might be useful around another so-called "white" value: a "sense of urgency." Okun decries a "continued sense of urgency that makes it difficult…to think long-term" or "to consider consequences." One of her proposed antidotes is to "be clear about how you will make good decisions in an atmosphere of urgency."
Urgency is an important value in many situations. It's essential when there's a deadline: in a newsroom or political campaign, for instance. If your candidate needs to give five speeches in five days in order to make up a four-point gap by election day, then a sense of urgency on the part of all staff and volunteers is going to be helpful. A sense of urgency can also be a good way to show respect to colleagues. If someone else is waiting on you to complete a certain task before they can begin their own work, then getting your piece to them quickly is a good way to help them out.
However, our societal focus on haste can also lead to problems. We see this in journalism. Every journalist, pundit, and influencer is trying to scoop everyone else. When information moves at the speed of light, the first-mover advantage is immense. The first stories published on a divisive topic earn a flood of clicks; stories published even a few days later can get crickets for reception. When we have a new news cycle every twenty-four hours, publishers who take their time on a story can find themselves struggling to get attention from readers and viewers who have already moved on.
This endless sprint can lead to sloppy reporting as media outlets have to decide between rigorous fact-checking and getting the first-mover advantage. In 2012, after a mass shooting in Colorado, several media outlets—including NPR—provided false information. In the hours after the shooting, they misidentified the shooter, misreported his motive, and missed other key details.
Last month, many news outlets sent out push alerts blaming Israel for an attack on a Palestinian hospital. But in the fog of war, this claim wasn't verified first, and the reality seems to be a lot more complex. As Yashca Mounk, a political scientist out of Johns Hopkins and an Atlantic writer, put it, "it sure looks like the most reputable news outlets on the planet credulously spread disinformation released by a known terrorist entity—with big and immediate geopolitical consequences."
Maybe the rush for speed over verification is part of why just 34 percent of Americans trust the media to report the news "fully, accurately and fairly" according to a recent Gallup poll. And what's true in journalism is true in other industries too: rushed work is not always good work.
"Timeliness" is another trait that doesn't represent an unalloyed good. In an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Aysa Gray criticizes this aspect of "white 'professionalism'" that allegedly "values time commitments."
To be clear, being on time is often a virtue. Keeping our appointments is a great way to show respect for our appointees' time. It's also useful in an industrialized society: it's hard to build a thriving economy if everyone is running late all the time. There's a reason Rick Hess bemoaned the erosion of "being on time" in Education Week: when students are waiting on their teacher, it's important that teachers have the professionalism to show up to teach on time.
But a rigid focus on being on time can also be a vice. When I lived in Kenya, my friends were often late to lunch or dinner. The reason was that many Kenyans adopt the idea that the most important person in the world is the person they are currently talking to. That can cause problems; for instance, the person who's waiting for you to show up can feel disrespected. But it's also an incredible way to show your love and respect for the person you're talking to.
Mónica Guzmán is a senior fellow at Braver Angels, a TED Talker, and an award-winning journalist. Her method of interacting with people feels very Kenyan. As she describes it in her book I Never Thought of It That Way:
"I let conversations generate so much fuel now, it gets me into trouble. But it’s trouble I’d earn all over again: the urgent phone calls I didn’t pick up because someone was in the middle of an amazing story. The checks I wrote to the municipal court of Seattle because I’d rather get a parking ticket than pump the brakes on this awesome, spontaneous debate. The flurry of apologies to someone I left waiting because that last conversation made nothing else matter, including the time."
Not every conversation fits neatly into a prepackaged amount of time, and sometimes it's worth being late in order to mine the gold in a given conversation. It's important that the trains (and the people) run on time, but a rigid focus on timeliness can come at the cost of other values.
Ultimately, then, there's an opportunity to reframe this clumsy talk about "white" cultural attributes into a more useful conversation about what cultural norms will best serve us in the coming years and decades. Many attributes of US culture work well as measured by a broad suite of widely shared values. Others involve more trade-offs. A sense of urgency, for instance, is useful if you highly value productivity and respecting the deadlines that other people set. It's less useful if your higher values involve verification, deep analysis, and saving employees from burnout.
As younger Americans find and cultivate our own values (which may, for better or worse, be different from those of our parents) we may find that certain aspects of our culture no longer work for us. We may start to wonder if we should jettison those aspects and replace them with attributes pulled from other cultures that may (or may not) end up better serving our values. That's a broad philosophical discussion worth having. Folks like Tema Okun and her followers can help catalyze that conversation—but only if they find a more productive way to contribute than by talking about "white" and "non-white" attributes. Trying to map psychological attributes onto skin color was morally wrong and bad science in the 19th century. Many things have changed in the past 200 years, but that has not.
Action item: Pick a belief that you think is wrong, and try to redeem it. Find the value in it. Steelman and starman it. Reframe it if you need to in order to find the kernel of goodness inside of it. And then, have a conversation with someone who holds that belief in which you foreground that kernel.
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