Racist and Anti-Racist Framing: What’s Really Going On Here?
Racist and Anti-Racist Framing: What’s Really Going On Here?
By: Justin Laing | September 10, 2020 | Antiracism, Critical Philanthropy, Racial Capitalism
I think a lot about “framing”. “Framing” is what we do every day as we position our ideas with a particular rationale and context. It’s how we try to get people to see it “our way” and how others try to get us to see something “their way”. It’s the work of definitions. It’s the work of narrative. It’s the work of propaganda. The frame that an organization or person uses is an indicator of the mindset with which they approach their work and/or a topic. This approach can be seen anywhere from how we facebook to mission statements to marketing. According to Erving Goffman, who did a lot of work on the issue of frames in a book titled Frame Analysis, trying to figure out the frame of a message, situation or organization is to ask the question, “what’s really going on here?”
Thanks to organizers, there are a lot of discussions today about “systemic racism” and what we can do about it. I think developing and implementing anti-racist framing in organizations is one of those things not only because from framing comes activity, but also because the frame itself serves as an organizational product. And frames beget more frames. Argentinian writer César Aira wrote in his 2001 “Cumpleanos”, “Any change is a change in the topic.” (this, quote, which I love, is on the inside cover of The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein and that’s the extent of my knowledge of Argentinian literature).
According to Donella Meadows, a popular system-change writer and thinker, changing the mindset of a system is one of the most powerful levers of system change. It is from the mindset that other key aspects of a system, like its rules and goals, emerge. An organization’s plans emerge from a frame, and so an anti-racist frame might name and seek to restore imbalance or correct an injustice in regard to ways whiteness is advantaged by the organization in its communications, mission. Etc. As whiteness is inextricably woven into American capitalism, an anti-racist frame might even name and create reforms, re: the ways the organization benefits from capitalism itself. Using Ibram Kendi’s definition of racist policy as anything that leaves racial disparities in place, a frame that does not challenge the legitimacy of racial disparity, but rather names the benevolence of the giver and neediness of the receiver is a racist frame.
I work mainly in the nonprofit sector, a sector that can’t be analyzed and imagined for systemic anti-racist work without considering philanthropy. Most proposals to foundations use a racist frame, or what we know Paulo Freire would call a “false generosity” frame. To make my point maybe in the extreme (but not so extreme), this frame creates a project that “constrains the fearful and subdued ‘the rejects of life,’ to extend their trembling hands.” Often Black hands. Of course, the work described in the proposal is usually not an attempt to create a reform that could model a more radical change (see earlier posts on non-reformist reforms) but instead allow the present circumstances to continue so that the “generosity” is continually needed. In this way, the whole process of conceptualizing, writing and submitting the proposal, and the follow-up report, serves the function of reproducing the frame of the capital class that they are where they are due to simply “winning at the game of life,” i.e. that America is a meritocracy where we get what we get “by the dint of our own work”, but it is also a place where someone will lend a helping hand and provide you an opportunity. This “dint of our own work” is also a subframe of whiteness and “opportunity” a subframe of America. In this way, proposal writing is also about perpetuating the narrative of America as essentially not racist, but with a need of tweaking. This would also be a racist frame since it does not suggest the need for systemic change or what is also called anti-racism. “Charity” or “False Generosity” frames align well with frames of Whiteness, since, in the frame of race, White people are superior. So, false generosity frames also serve as a means to reproduce frames of Whiteness. At either the nonprofit or foundation level, we often find that the activity of supporting Black people or BIPOC is fine and even encouraged as long as the organization’s charity or “false generosity” frame is not disturbed, either internally or externally, in the program’s languaging.
However, if a charity frame is sought to be replaced with an anti-racist frame that suggests debt to Black people and implicates the organization, that’s often where the contest begins. Nonetheless, that contest for framing is an important part of anti-racist work, which I also see as the work to replace capitalism with Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics). Because, when it comes to racism and the nonprofit sector, it’s always a good time to ask “what’s really going on here?
