Thread by @aansari86

White supremacy & epistemic colonialism in design discourse, scholarship, & practice: a basic primer (thread)

Historically, design scholarship, like design practice outside of the academy, has upheld white supremacy and epistemic colonialism. This is true of many of the 'seminal' texts one often finds being cited by designers to this day.

Before I delve into this, I'd like to first clarify: white supremacy exceeds racism. Whiteness and white supremacy work covertly even when one is not being explicitly racist, which is intentional, explicit, and targeted harmful behavior and speech towards non-whites.

White supremacy manifests in texts, in discourses, and in everyday speech and action. Yes, it has been and is a part of the scholarship that many (mostly white and male) prominent designers and design scholars have produced over entire careers.

Many aspects of theory, principles, methods, assumptions about the world and people that inform 'design thinking' today are based on white supremacist foundations.

For example (and I'm just going to pull from a few here from my own readings), not many people know that many of the seminal texts in design research coming from the Design Methods Movement were deeply orientalist

in how they posed 'modern', Western societies that had developed 'design' against 'traditional' societies who practiced 'craft'.

Some of the DMM folks appear to valorize or admire non-European societies. This is a ruse for anyone who has engaged substantively with postcolonial or decolonial literature.

White supremacy constructs the non-white other as 'exotic', 'authentic', 'mysteriously productive' etc. while at the same time asserting itself as the non-mystical, 'rational' self. This is orientalism at work through knowledge production.

Similarly, the repeated claims, across many texts on 'fundamental' design principles, about how 'universal' design principles, theories, and methods are, or even that people are the same.

This is something that underpins much of the claims for design thinking made by major design agency, consultancy, think tank and public figures for decades now, especially for projects done in the Global South.

More on the impact of this propagation later. But for now, I'm just going to point out that 'universalism' is white, Eurocentric, settler logic playing through all the way.

There is a wealth of literature across many fields and disciplines that debunks these myths of universality and you don't even need to go to post\decolonial arguments for that,

just read anthropological or historical accounts that use clear empirical evidence to show that through history, there were and are no universals (at most, commonalities) of human experience or interaction, but plural experiences, perspectives, and being.

Colonization, globalization, and 'development' (which design has played a large role in over the last century), have rendered many of these different ways of being in the world and being in relation to artifacts extinct or endangered;

white supremacy and colonialism have attempted to 'flatten' and homogenize the world, partly precisely through claims to universalism, claims that have also supported neoliberal development and modernization.

Any design text that doesn't first contextualize and render specific where it is speaking from, and who for, and makes claims that can be read as universal, is upholding white supremacy.

This includes works that base themselves on assumptions of human psychology as being universal. There might be commonalities, there are no universals.

More (recent) examples: the very common practice I see these days in design of not acknowledging or referencing prior work by non-whites, women, or other marginal groups, in work that talks about issues relating to ethics, social justice, empowerment, and now, decolonisation.

This is all lip service and bullshit if you haven't done your homework, haven't made efforts to educate yourself, haven't committed to critical reflexivity, are not making actual, sustained, continuous efforts to learn, check yourself, and grow.

I've seen a lot of people talking about designing for social justice, empowerment, decolonisation etc. who were selling the usual uncritical 'design thinking' bullshit, supporting white supremacy, neoliberal capitalism, globalization and development etc.

I have no reason to trust you if you spent your career preaching one set of discourses about design and now use another to further your own career because it's now the hot thing (this applies to non-whites too). You need to earn trust from those who were doing the work before you

Citing and referencing people who have done the work before is one way to do this. Promoting them instead of yourself and giving them a platform and a voice is another. Not doing so is silencing them and erasing their work, which is upholding white supremacy and coloniality.

White supremacy upholds whiteness, but another dimension to how it operates, especially globally and particularly through discourses, practices, and projects when white designers and academics go to other countries to preach, is epistemic colonialism.

Epistemic colonialism, which is more complex and nuanced than how I'm reducing it here (as with the above), is the colonization of thought and knowledge itself; conditioning (non-white) people to believe the assumptions, beliefs, and logics, on which white supremacy is founded.

White people going to parts of Asia, for instance, to teach 'design thinking', with all of its problems, teaching American and European ways of doing things without contextualizing them in relation to local sites, and prescribing principles, methods etc. is modern day colonialism

If you are not situating your claims in their original context and against local contexts, acknowledging the work that local designers and educators have done and are doing in their countries and citing or supporting them,

and going there to preach and propagate, instead of listen, learn, and support, you are engaging in epistemic colonization, you are upholding white supremacy.

Texts do this too, especially in this age, where texts often flow from one part of the world to another in the blink of an eye. Many of these texts are taken up by people uncritically around the world, leading to the colonial worship of the 'white designer'.

I have personally seen, in my home country, the damage that foreign design consultancies have done with their shallow versions of design thinking, as well as the disproportionate impact that 'seminal' design texts have had,

stymieing original growth and thought and erasing decades of local work. 'White savior' complexes are endemic in South Asia. White designers and their colored accomplices are invited to give keynotes while local scholars and designers are ignored.

Foreign design degrees from Anglo-European universities and design programs are valued more than local ones; knowledge coming from Europe and North America written by white designers is more 'true'. I can go on about this.

A new generation of design scholars, widely and deeply read, very critical of colonialism and white supremacy in all its forms, is now emerging around the world. They are the hope.

We need to hold the white history of design accountable, and place it in its proper place, as being of a specific time, as the views of a specific perspective coming from a specific civilization that enjoys dominance today.

This means dismantling and revealing the ways in which Anglo-European logics, assumptions, and concepts have shaped and molded design practice and theory into what it is today.

This will necessarily mean decentering and questioning many people considered to be hugely important and influential figures in design canons, many of whom are still alive today.

They don't have to go, they don't have to be 'cancelled', but the cult of personality worship needs to end. Their work has to be known as limited and fallible, problematic in many ways,

and the negative things it has wrought acknowledged in addition to the positive things it has brought into the world.

If we do not do this nothing in this field will change. We cannot begin to decolonize knowledge production and practice in design without taking measures that are harsh, necessary, and uncompromising.

Everything I have laid out above, including the definitions of white supremacy, racism, and coloniality I have outlined, are bare basic - they are reductive, for Twitter, and not nuanced. They are not exhaustive. But they are a few points I wanted to make to get people thinking.

I wish I could enshrine this for everyone who comes: Go do the work. For and on yourself before others. Find ways to do it. Do it constantly. Be vigilant and critical always.