Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging.

Culturally Competent Capacity Building:
A Black and African American Perspective

Posted by [email protected] on $$DATE$$  /  Inspiration & Empowerment  /  Subscribe 0

Monika Moss-Gransberry Tells Us Her Story

African American, Black, Negro, Afro American …What to call People of African Descent is a controversial topic and its complexities only begin to illustrate the diversity of thought, heritage, values, philosophy, the impact of slavery and oppression that informs any individual, group, or community that might bear the label African American or Black in the United States.

One of the most important aspects of cultural competence is understanding the ground and cultural context that belong to that particular group and how that intersects with your own cultural, racial, gender, class and sexual identity. In this section of the paper, the intention is to offer the reader a framing perspective of the impacts of our complex historical and cultural context. I can only share what I know, have experienced and observed. My own life experiences, values, and world view frame the approach to this section of the paper. My hope is that the reader will view these words as one way of making meaning of a world which in the words of one young woman of African heritage that finds her current day experience oppressive – she writes: “I am constantly being forced to live a life that is un-accommodating to me in many ways.”
My Personal Journey

I am a practitioner. I am privileged in many ways, one of which is that I am able to be a capacity builder and entrepreneur. A healer of sorts, offering support and permission to individuals, groups, organizations and communities to do things differently and to envision a different way of being. I am a smart, 6’1” tall, very educated, powerful, African American woman. I am the fourth generation emancipated from slavery and the second generation college educated. I am southern which brings its own unique culture, customs, perspectives and awareness of oppression.

I am the daughter of a civil rights worker. My memories of race and integration are images from my childhood. I remember being in the car with my mother in Washington DC during the riots and a man in another car telling my mother to turn her headlights on so they wouldn’t turn over our car. I am a mother, a sister to many siblings some biological, others chosen family. I am a play daughter, play niece and play cousin to countless Black people with whom my relationship was too impactful and too love-filled not to be considered family. My religion is that of my oppressors, Catholic. My spirituality connects me to my ancestors, my African and Native roots and traditions, dances and music in ways that sustain me and scare others because they do not remember. I have the mixed heritage of most Black people whose ancestry is connected to slavery in the Americas. Our family on the slave owner side was Irish and French, on the black side, African and Choctaw. It is the heritage of many people in Louisiana. But the law of the land says “one drop of black blood” and my upbringing, my spirit, and my culture support my Blackness as my primary and leading identity.

My mother was the first Black women to be hired, as well as the first black and first woman to become department chair at the University of New Hampshire, where I spent much of my early childhood. We were one of two black families in the school district which encompassed about 3-4 small towns. Upon moving to Louisiana as a teen, I was truly foreign as a black hippy in the south and I felt a huge sense of deprivation at not having had the experience of growing up in the black community and the black church.  I entered Howard University and Columbia University seeking truth, and ways to make a difference through the theatre and the performing arts as an artist, manager, and producer. This desire would shape my career paths and current work.

I moved into consulting as a economic strategy to supplement my burgeoning theatre career and then later as a strategy to be able to be home and parent my children while supporting my family. In addition to those practical answers, I had a deep want and intention to do my part in making the world a better place. I felt that my work as a consultant with multiple organizations and communities, would have a greater impact than if I worked within one organization. My gift for process design and facilitation has helped people not only create a road map to their vision but find ways of hearing and seeing others and being heard and seen that brought tremendous healing to the individual, the group, and the organization in ways I will never know as they experienced new ways of communicating and interacting with themselves and others.  

Lay of the Land

There are as many views on the historical and cultural “lay of the land” for the Black community as there are Black people to speak them. This description or overview, I want to bring fresh attention to the impact of white supremacy and American slavery, as a way of making meaning of our current situation in this country as it relates to Black people. I chose this topic because it is the most pervasive issue in our history and culture. It crosses class, educational, political, and religious boundaries. And it is the piece that is least discussed when it comes to being culturally competent.
White Supremacy
In his book, the Racial Contract, Charles Mills describes race as an artificial construct that divides the world into white and non-white, a strategy for perpetuation of white supremacy and the continued justification of the conquest of the world’s land, people and natural resources by a small minority of the population. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) which divided the world between Spain and Portugal; The Valladolid (Spain) Conference (1550-1551) to decide whether Native Americas were really human, the later debates over American Slavery and abolitionism, The Berlin Conference (1884-1885) to partition African and various inter-European pacts, treaties and informal arrangements on policing their colonies.  

….the legacy of this world is, of course, still with us today, in the economic, political and cultural domination of the planet by Europeans and their descendants. Globally, the racial contract creates Europe as a continent that dominates the world - locally, within Europe and the other continents in designates Europeans as the privileged race. (Mills, pp 30-33)

This historical context is critical to beginning to integrate complex connections to the many events from the smashing and pillaging of Egyptian pyramids by the Romans to the rape of natural resources in Africa today that have brought us to this point in the cultural history of Black people. It is also critical to understand that the history, invention and thought of Black people which have contributed to every aspect of our modern life, has been purposefully and systematically suppressed in order to justify and maintain white supremacy. This is in part the reason addressing the institutional racism is so elusive. It would require that we dismantle the entire global economic system and create a new way of approaching how to meet the multiple needs of every individual on the planet. And since capitalism has almost become synonymous with democracy, it is politically dangerous to even discuss it. But in a world where there are more than enough resources for every human being to have enough food, clothing and shelter, the fact that less than 20% of the population control over 80% of the resources to the detriment of the rest of the population is inhumane. This also explains why the contributions of Black people and other people of color are missing from the history books and thus the consciousness of most human beings. 

The Enslavement of People of African Descent in America
The great suffering or “Maafa” forcibly took over two-thirds of the African population into slavery in the Americas over a 400 year period from early 1600s to 1800s until the practices of breeding and the domestic slave trade had become more efficient and cost effective and importation of slaves into the United States ceased.

Understanding of the horrors of slavery in America for black people, its generational impact and the current manifestation of that system in today’s world is key to connecting, understanding and valuing black people. A common psychological belief is that it takes seven generations to overcome a family trauma i.e. incest, violent death, abuse, etc. When I apply this same principal to Black people in the US, my conclusion is that there has not been a generation of Black people in the country that has not faced societal trauma perpetrated against them by white society. First, slavery, then reconstruction, Jim Crow, and segregation, then Vietnam, integration (my generation), the war on drugs, and the prison industrial complex – often called the new slavery. Not to speak of welfare reform, and the dismantling of civil rights in the name of the war on terrorism. We may not be able to document the impact of these modern traumas for many years, but if you talk to people you discover every black family and community has been impacted directly. So as far as I can see there has not been one generation of blacks in this country that has not been traumatized by one or more of these societal traumas, not to speak of individual and family traumas in each phase of this horrific history. It amazes me that black people are able to get up in the morning, much less find a way out of no way in a hostile environment to educate ourselves, raise families, support our institutions, start businesses, invent things, create brilliant art, perform extraordinary feats on any playing field that has been open to us and raise our oppressors offspring with the love and care that we would our own.

In fact, many of the modern day social ills and challenges in the black community can be directly traced to the trauma and behavioral responses to slavery. For example the modern day concept of “the sprayer” in Black communities, the phenomena of black men who have babies by multiple women in the same community or neighborhood that is currently judged as dysfunctional and irresponsible, through this lens of slavery, we see the perpetuation of the behavior created by the breeding of slaves. During slavery, the common practice of breeding was as follows: a male slave that was deemed valuable was forced to breed (impregnate) other female slaves on the plantation just as a farmer might breed cows or horses. The breeding process did not allow black men to form bonds with their offspring or the woman that bore that child. The slave owner was responsible for the care and feeding of the child until which time he might decide to sell the child to a neighboring farm. The current child welfare system mirrors and perpetuates these family traumas of loss. Current statistics show the over-representation of black children in the child welfare and foster care systems. Over two-thirds of all children in foster care are African American not including children who have been removed from their parents and are in the care of relatives. Regardless of the circumstances of right and wrong, these systems recreate the trauma of child loss when they forcibly remove children from their biological parents as punishment. The children are then given to strangers who are paid to care for them. In all too many incidences the children experience further abuse that is often more severe than the neglect poverty brings. Thus, the trauma of loss is perpetuated each day on a new generation of children and parents just as it was during slavery. We now have three and four generations of children who have few if any family ties or connections because of the child welfare & foster care systems. The impact is that these children grow up without any felt experience of mattering to anyone, often not even to themselves. In the cultural context of people of African decent where the principle of “I am because we are” as the underlying identity development process, these children have little or no identity other than the labels of government systems have placed on them. 

The rhetoric of the foster care system is all too similar to that of the slave trade. “There are four siblings in this family, we hope to place them together but we know we might have to split them up to find suitable placement,” says the social worker. “A valuable negro woman, accustomed to all kinds of housework. She has four children…two of the children will be sold with the mother, the others separately, if it best suits the purchaser.” Reads the advertisement for the Public Sale of Negro by Richard Clagett, March 5, 1833 in Potters Mart, Charleston SC.

The new slavery is the crimilization of black people that feeds the prison industrial complex. A current article in the New York Times entitled “Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn” By Erik Eckholm (March 20, 2006) states:  

Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

And we must remember that drop out rates in most urban cities soar upwards of 40-50%. It is profound that almost 65% of African American males under age 30 are involved in the justice system. It is the direct result of federal policies like “3 strikes you’re out” and other get tough policies including ‘No Child Left Behind’ that feed this system which puts prisoners to work at wages so low that they might embarrass other third world nations who accept corporate outsourcing.

The impact of racism and oppression in America shows up in my work in many ways. One of the most profound lessons came as I entered a strategic planning process with a group of Black leaders in rural Georgia that was being funded by a regional funder. Their first battle was getting the funder to let them hire me; I was not on their approved consultants list nor was any other person of color. Then came the work. It took three sessions to create their vision. The first session the group could not get past their current reality and crisis response to the oppression they were experiencing in their communities from white folks in school systems, the courts and other realms. Essentially, my work became giving them permission and supporting them in remembering and for some learning how to dream about the future. The second session they dreamed so big and so wide that they had essentially envisioned solving the worlds racial problems and all of the issues that racism had created for Black and other oppressed people. They needed to do this and be validated for it. It would have been inappropriate to tell them when they had finally allowed themselves to dream that something was wrong with their dream. So in the third session, we ‘chunked’ down their big dream. The focus question became: Given the dream you have about the change you want to create, what can be accomplished in the next 3-5 years that moves your bigger dream forward?

For me, so much of cultural competence is about being non-judgmental and understanding the ground or context of the group that you are working with. It is also acknowledging that I will never know enough to be able to say what should be done and thus must trust the wisdom of the group to map their own future.

We recently have been working with a domestic violence group. They are looking at how to move their empowerment philosophy into the infrastructure of their organization by first empowering the staff and looking at their policies and procedures. Their lens asks “does our current policy or practices perpetuate the abuse cycle that these women have managed to escape from?” So they are evaluating the impact of locked cabinets and the doling out supplies and food by staff to residents of their shelter in the context that many these women had to go to their abusers for permission to do everything often even to get food or clothing within their own homes. Their challenge is how to manage supplies in the context of their limited resources in ways that don’t perpetuate the control experienced by abused women and their children.

Implications to Capacity Builders
As capacity builders, it is incumbent on each person to educate themselves about their own heritage and the impact of white racist oppression on their lives both from the barriers it creates to their well being or from the privilege and back lash it creates for them, their family and their group.

It is incumbent on capacity builders to educate themselves about their own triggers, biases and prejudice by learning about other groups. We need to understand the lay of the land – that of white supremacy, and its impact on each capacity builder whatever their background. Black people are the most studied race in the world. We are the subject of literally thousands and thousands of studies, articles and books. Many of which were written to justify our second class citizenry. And there are equally as many books, articles and studies written by Black authors, scientists and scholars that provide a non-Eurocentric view of the world and Black people’s history and place in it. For experiential learners, just go hang out and begin to integrate yourself in the community knowing that each community will have different values, definitions of Blackness, different language, etc. But the experience will teach you a lot about yourself if you are open and pay attention. I have learned so much about my own privilege of being a black educated female from working in low-income black communities. It is a humbling experience that has been priceless in my own development and ability to show up more fully who I am and allow others to show up more fully who they are.

Capacity builders must pay attention to both the relational issues and the systemic issues of racism and white supremacy. For me to really make a difference in the world, I must support organizations addressing both sides of the equation, the relational and the systemic issues imbedded in the unspoken intentions of policies, procedures and practices. The critical question goes back to the domestic violence organization’s framing. 

“Does this policy, procedure or practice perpetuate racism or white supremacy?” It is my role to support organizations and their leaders in looking at what the impact of their policies, procedures and practices are. As a culturally competent capacity builder, it is incumbent upon me to point out other choices that organizations have in solving or preventing problems in ways that are not oppressive. This pushes the envelope of trust and the paradigm that says “workers are inherently dishonest and will abuse the system.”

The challenge of cultural competency and cultural immersion is the meaning making. The meaning outsiders make of actions and events is usually very different from the meaning insiders make. The idea of a right way, the normal way must be placed in the golden box of illusion. The idea of embracing each way of being as a choice chosen out of the context of experiences, history and context of each person or group of people is needed in order to see the creativity in the adjustments that any people especially Black people have made for their mutual survival in a hostile world. Speaking dialects and slang for instance, was a creative way for slaves to talk in front of their masters without being understood. It is still a useful strategy in a hostile environment. Corporate speak, the language of the board room, serves a similar purpose. It makes sure that those without a certain type of education and positional status cannot engage in the conversation. To judge either language or way of speaking and being as right or wrong, proper or ignorant is to minimize the value each have for the user. Every organization and group have their own way of speaking, their own values that are unique to them. It is the capacity builders work as a guest in the system to find the value in these differences and raise their awareness about the impact without valence of bad or good. It is simple what is.

The other issue of importance is level of system and cultural concepts of individual and group relationships. In many indigenous cultures, the hierarchy is group or community before the individual – we are therefore I am. The Eurocentric perspective puts the individual concerns or wants higher than those of the group. This paradigm causes people to miss each other in interracial discussions. Many people of color focus first on the system level when it comes to race. This may be because of the combination of this cultural stance and the recognition that the inherent racism inside large systems greatly impacts their survival as a group regardless of their individual ability to navigate those systems safely. And Katrina taught us that class and privilege will not save us when race is the criteria.  

Most white folk want to engage Black folk at the individual level of system in their effort to connect personally to the issues of race relations. It is this framing that causes them to say “I am not racist.” And then wonder why someone wants to hold them responsible for what others in their group and their ancestors have done. Recently, I was engaged by a wonderful, white female executive. We continued to miss each other until I heard myself say I can’t go to the individual level with you until you understand and acknowledge the impact of systemic racism on me and mine. Finally we were able to get unstuck and I obliged her by connecting at the individual level of system. It was excruciatingly painful for me. She left the conversation having recognized my humanity in a new and deeper way, with having found a way to join her struggle with mine and felt satisfied in the interaction. I found myself pained and weeping spontaneously for several days. This brought on new understanding why I do not go to the individual level of system often - it is terribly painful, it leads to no new understanding for me and I am challenged to function and engage afterwards. It leaves me in a very hopeless place. This is not helpful for me in my war against oppression.

The implications of cultural competency in capacity building are as vast as you have vision. Including the lens of culture, racism and other isms that impact our internal and external environment can only create stronger more strategic and informed leaders, organizations, and communities. Honoring culture and valuing the cultural wisdom and processes in communities of color goes a long way to healing the wounds of oppression and validating the experiences of these communities as well as finding sustainable solutions to community challenges. The goal is not to make race and culture a non-issue in that it does not exist or impact our lives and organization. The goal is to value the impact that it has and reduce the negative repercussions of white supremacy and racism. The brilliance of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X at the end of their lives was their great appreciation for the value of moving this discussion beyond the Black-White boundary to the boundary of human rights. The competence that is needed to successfully raise the issues of white supremacy to a human rights platform are a highly complex set of skills that require the leadership to honor and value the individual and group contexts of cultural identify and differences and how they all come to the table to strengthen and improve our world. It is that energy that has the potential to create the innovation needed to solve the complex issues and problems of our world, create peace on earth and good will to all (wo)men. Thank you for all that you do to contribute to our moving as a species toward peace. 

Return to list