Decolonizing Design by Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall

Decolonizing Design by Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall

Author:Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall [Tunstall, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Design; decolonizing design; decolonization; decolonize; DEI; organizational change; change management; BIPOC; IBPOC; Indigenous; Indigenous design; Black Lives Matter; Black design; design justice; pluriverse; diversity hire; inclusion; equity; advertising; colonization; design history; Bauhaus; reparations; activism
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-01-13T00:00:00+00:00


The effects of the laws, which are still built into North American institutions, were that white Christian bodies, white voices, and white choices were protected by law and given higher value than those of Black, Indigenous, and non-Christian peoples. White supremacy became the law of the land of the colonial settler states, such as Canada, the United States, and Australia. And while European nations continued to jockey for supremacy over each other in colonial proxy wars, they were generally united in their sense of superiority over Black, Indigenous, and non-Christian peoples.

It is important to note that not all of the people who are considered white today were included in this power positioning. Jewish people, as non-Christians, were structurally excluded from white status until white Christian guilt allowed them into the club after the exposure of the Nazi concentration camps and genocide. As a target of white supremacist hate groups, Jewish peoples still have a different positionality in relationship to white supremacy itself, although those with greater proximity to whiteness are provided some privileges compared to other groups. The Irish, because of their Catholic opposition to the British, became white only by out-oppressing the British oppressors in their relationships with Black, Indigenous, and Asian folks. A must-read account of this history is How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev. Southern European groups, such as Italians and Greeks, were also only deemed white in the United States after their mass immigrations of the 1900s when they served as a buffer against growing Black and Indigenous populations.

White superiority manifests itself in two ways: first, in the protection of fragile white Christian bodies and, second, in the normalized set of values that white supremacy propagates. The Colonial Assembly's laws set in motion the legal protection of the white Christian body by prohibiting its beating in public and thus protecting its fragility, exempting it from legal prosecution for infractions against Black and Indigenous Peoples, and shielding it from the fear of death at the hands of Black free persons by prohibiting their gun ownership. In his book My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Resmaa Menakem argues that the unprocessed trauma of Europeans over the brutality of the feudal regimes going back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries still resides in the bodies of white Europeans and their diaspora. We understand this white-on-white brutality when we watch Game of Thrones, which is a fictionalization of European dynastic history, or read Charles Dickens's descriptions of how poor British people were treated in the countryside as well as in urban workhouses and orphanages in the 1800s. What Menakem makes clear is that Europeans learned their colonial violence against Black, Indigenous, Asian, Middle Eastern, and other non-Christian peoples from centuries of practice on each other: “Throughout the United States’ history as a nation, white bodies have colonized, oppressed, brutalized, and murdered Black and Native ones. But well before the United States began, powerful white bodies colonized, oppressed, brutalized, and murdered other, less powerful white ones.



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