Whiteness as Narcissism

In today's episode Race Reflections' Membership Engagement Coordinator Janedra Sykes talks about Whiteness and White Supremacy Culture as narcissism in (and outside) the workplace.

She starts by reflecting on her personal experience in relations to this topic, how she came to consider racism through a public health lens and how her work on this takes Black women as her primary audience and aims to give them toolkits to use to navigate this terrain. She outlines Christina Sharpe's concept of anti-blackness as the climate in which we all live. Then she looks at the ways in which using narcissism as a lens for dealing with whiteness in the workplace has been helpful for her within this work.

She then explores some case studies, looking at how Black organisations and individuals are treated by White organisations.

Then she runs through some people and places to find tools from. From Doctor Ramani she takes documenting your work, understanding a narcissist won't give you anything back, forming healthy relationships inside and outside of your organisation (if you can) and recognising patterns of narcissism. From Dr Nathalie Martinek she takes ways to help hack narcissism in the workplace and the ways in which these dynamics are racialised. And then she expands on all this with her own thoughts and experiences.

She ends by outlining how White Supremacy as narcissism is not a new concept it having been already touched on by Dr Karl Bell in the 1970's and even by W.E.B. Du Bois, and she ends with summing up how exploring racism in the workplace through the lens of narcissism can help by de-personalising it, distancing it as well as that the act of naming something both takes some of it's power away and gives you some power back.

Christina Sharpe: The Weather https://thenewinquiry.com/the-weather/

Doctor Ramani's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/DoctorRamani

Nathalie Martinek: Hacking Narcissism https://nathaliemartinekphd.substack.com/

Janedra Sykes: http://arboretagroup.com/staff/janedra-sykes/

Narcissistic Racism: Revisiting Carl Bell by J. Luke Wood: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-psychology-of-racial-equity/202305/narcissistic-racism-revisiting-carl-bell

Race Reflections AT WORK was recently named as one of the Feedspot Top 15 Inequality Podcasts on the web! https://blog.feedspot.com/inequality_podcasts/

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