Identity Work and Defensiveness

When I do professional development work, once we start breaking down what it means to be White in the United States, there are always a number of participants in each group who share feelings of defensiveness. This defensiveness typically happens when we talk about privilege, but sometimes it comes up when White participants are asked why they didn’t include their racial identity in their identity list. I’ve heard feedback that what someone learned in a session about understanding their own cultures and their proximity to the dominant American culture was that “I’m White, so I suck, and everything White people do is bad.” or “I don’t feel like I’m dominant over anyone, so I can’t be part of a dominant culture.” This lack of a dominant feeling is a common experience for those of us who fit into the dominant culture (Highwater, 1995; Rogoff, 2003).  Often this defensiveness comes from a place of feeling our cultural ways of being are being questioned. This feeling of having our ways of being questioned is generally a new feeling for White people. Humans often need to contrast our ways of being with others to understand them fully. As members of the dominant Culture, we’re not used to this. Most of the messages we get about ourselves reinforce that our ways of being are the norm.  The process of comparing our ways of being feels judgmental because part of having a cultural identity is feeling an affinity for it (Highwater, 1995).  It makes sense that when we feel that our identities are being threatened or accused, we would feel defensive about them. 

Now that I’ve had some time to reflect on those first communities of practice I facilitated, I think it was a mistake to jump right into the parts of American culture related to White Supremacy and social hierarchies. I didn’t take into account that most of us working in EI are fish swimming in the waters of our dominant culture, so many of us hadn’t taken the time to ground ourselves in the positive aspects of our cultural and social identities. Without a solid foundation of who we were, it would have been almost impossible to build the resilience to take in critical feedback about one or more of our identities. To become a truly culturally responsive early intervention provider, we have to have both a positive foundation and pride in our identities and understand how the sociohistorical context of our country complicates what it looks like to have a dominant cultural identity while working in the homes of people with marginalized identities.

First, we have to build resilience by building a foundational understanding of the good parts of our shared dominant culture.  After all, so much of what I like about myself (including having the grit to tackle hard things like racism in my early intervention practice) comes from dominant American cultural values. As you engage in the work of understanding your own cultures and identities, I encourage you to remember that all cultures have positive and negative aspects. We can take pride in who we are while also acknowledging and working to change the parts of our culture that can hurt others.

Another reason that I sometimes feel uncomfortable or defensive when I engage in this work is that it’s really hard to sit with knowing that because for so much of my career, I carried an ignorance about my own identity, the privilege that came with it, and my relationship to the dominant culture,  I harmed the families I worked with. As Yap and Ichikawa (2024) wrote, “Human relationships are complicated and difficult, and well-intentioned people sometimes make harmful mistakes.” Accepting this fact about myself pushes up against my core identity as a good person who does good things in the world. It is antithetical to why I went into the field in the first place! This recognition that I may have done harm in the past to those I worked with is one of the many reasons that I believe we have to remain mindful of the sociohistorical context in which we work. The context does not give any of us a free pass to continue doing harm by providing culturally unresponsive services once we know better. However, it can certainly help to lessen feelings of guilt or shame that may come up when we are confronted with the ways we have perpetuated oppression. As you will learn in Chapter Five, having grace for ourselves is a key factor in building the resilience it takes to be a reflective practitioner.