D.J. Trischler

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How's the White Habitus?

DJ Trischler

Good question.

I had never heard the term white habitus before pastor/sociologist Oneya Okuwobi introduced me to the idea this past Sunday at church. I was telling her about my theory that company brands are modern-day receptionists. Like a receptionist, as Don Draper advises in Mad Men, a brand's job is to “manage people's expectations” (Weiner and Cleveland, 2008). During the Madmen era, that meant literally hiring women to mediate between the creative director and clients, ensuring everyone felt happy in toxic office cultures. Today, we're a little more woke and place the labor on the many people who mediate the company ideology through the many manifestations of a brand's identity. Brands lean toward aesthetics and language that signify diversity, equity, and inclusion, while strategically appropriating feminine and multicultural voices and looks (replacing the work of the receptionist). However, behind the veil, their real company culture is more like a generic white male. I don't remember precisely what Oneya said after I finished sharing my hypothesis. It was some like, yeah, that's the white habitus. And I said something like, oh yeah, Bourdieu, and went off to search for term on my phone. 

Habi-what?

Habitus was spread by a French sociologist named Pierre Bourdieu, but according to Wikipedia, it goes back to Aristotle (“Habitus (Sociology),” 2021). Dylan Riley, writing for Catalyst, interprets Bourdieu's idea of habitus to be "a set of preconscious dispositions, including tastes, a sense of the self, bodily stances, and, crucially, skills or 'practical mastery.'" Habitus "produces patterns of behavior that reproduce the social agent in the position he or she currently occupies." And that it "translates different class positions, specified by different forms of capital, into observable behavior." In layman's terms, our habitus influences who we are, how we act, and, as designers, what we produce (more on that later). The habitus itself is shaped by the home and neighborhood we grew up in, schools we attended, churches we go to, the friends we associate with, and so on (Riley, 2017). The context can be as banal as the language is exchanged at the dinner table between parents and children (Ochs et al., 1996).

Getting warmer.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, in Racism without Racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States, defines "white habitus as the uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites' racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters" (Bonilla-Silva, 2006, pg 2). A white habitus, they goes further, "creates and conditions [a person's] views, cognitions, and even sense of beauty"(Bonilla-Silva, 2006, pg 16). It fosters "a sense of group belonging" (Bonilla-Silva, 2006, pg 2) between white people and others who do not share the same habitus. 

From my own experience, white habitus includes growing up in a lovely white family, living in white neighborhoods, and predominantly white primary and secondary schools. While my college experience had pockets of alternative habitus, those islands existed within the ocean of whiteness. That's pretty much true of my life today, as well. There are islands, but I'm mostly floating in white habitus.

Warning signs.

Last week, two major tech companies, Salesforce and Mailchimp, were in the design news because of ongoing complaints by women and minorities who worked or worked at the companies. In an open resignation letter posted to LinkedIn, Vivienne Castillo compares the culture of Salesforce to a coal mine and minorities to the canaries that raise awareness that the oxygen isn't right. (Castillo, 2021) The canaries know there's something wrong. The miners don't. Why? Because the kind of challenges (gaslighting, microaggressions, pay gaps, racial slurs, segregation, stereotyping, etc.) that minorities experience in these spaces doesn't exist within the white habitus. How can we (in the white habitus) understand when we spend most of our lives around people who share the same experiences (Bonilla-Silva, 2006)? Sure, reading through book lists and watching shows about the lives of minorities is a start, but is it enough to neutralize our engrained white (in this case, male) habitus?

But they look so "good."

I know, right? I have a pair of wacky purple Mailchimp socks and a beloved blue Mailchimp t-shirt. When I wear them, I feel like I'm extra creative and part of the cool club (compared to people who use Constant Contact). While Salesforce's brand identity, in my opinion, doesn't compare to the aesthetic sensibilities of Mailchimp (complements of Collins, who also helped make yogurt cool again). Still, one look at their .org site, and I get all warm inside (I don't even know what they do). There's all kinds of diversity, equity, and inclusion happening on the page from top to bottom. I get why Vivienne was "sold on their value of equality" (Castillo, 2021), as she stated in her letter. That's the power of design. Design makes boring companies that do boring things, like sending emails, appear beautiful. Not only that, design, with a bit of communication, can help the company appear ethical towards women, minorities, and the planet. By the way, there are economies for that (Ahmed, 2004) (Arvidsson and Peitersen, 2013). Often, I wonder why people buy into the product or company. Is it because of the boring function or service? Or, is it the feelings and promises delicately mediated into the brand ideas and design elements?

Beautiful contradictions.

While it's easy for me to point the finger at big companies, does what they reveal about the white habitus at a macro level exist at a micro level? Remember the white habitus I illustrated earlier? In what ways does it manifest itself in the spaces I shape within local design culture? As a teacher, what are my socializing processes for young designers within the classroom? As a graduate student who aspires to neutralize capitalism's dominant narrative, how might my white habitus negate my efforts? How do other enthusiastic design-led activists deal with this paradox? Along those lines, I see books, specifically about design activism, using dichotomies like Beautiful Strangeness (Faud-Luke, 2009) and Beautiful Trouble (Boyd and Mitchell, 2013) in their titles. What do they mean by beautiful? Is it, as Bonilla-Silva stated, conditioned by a white habitus (Bonilla-Silva, 2006)? Personally, I think I need more strangeness and trouble in my habitus. It's too easy for me to cling to the safety in my notions of beautiful and good design. However, I’m confronted with the question, what if design crafted with the best intentions, filtered through the white habitus, is self-serving? Shalini Shankar reveals in Advertising Diversity that "Despite all this work focused on diversity, advertising worlds still remain fundamentally steeped in whiteness" (Shankar, 2015). In Abstract Barios, Joha Londoño "examines how Latinized urban landscapes are made palatable for white Americans" (Londoño, 2020). Additionally, in an article titled, The Co-Constitutive Nature of Neoliberalism, Design, and Racism, Laura Williams asks, "how can we move away from innocence in design practice" (Williams, 2019)? Williams calls for "something far more critical, culpable, and unsettling about the ways we practice design” (Williams, 2019).

New ways of being.

There's no simple answer to the assortment of questions above. However, it's clear that beauty, aesthetics, or looks filtered through a white habitus lens, which is easy to perform through design, isn't reality. Our habitus shapes our behavior (Riley, 2017), and behavior shapes reality (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). Perhaps, we need to examine and redesign our habitus toward new ways of being? I imagine that will be unsettling (Williams, 2019) or ugly compared to white habitus's dominant standards (Cottom, 2018). Maybe it's not for everyone? Another option is to be more honest about the habitus that shapes a product, service, or design intervention. There's nothing inherently wrong with an open group of mediocre white males starting a company. It becomes a problem when they hire others to help them pretend to be something they are not, especially at the expense of women and minorities.

  1. Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective economies. Social text, 22(2), 117-139. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/55780/summary

  2. Arvidsson, A., & Peitersen, N. (2013). The Ethical Economy (NOTES). Columbia University Press. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=ANFcukOr_BoC&source=gbs_api

  3. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=HKJE4rVZG1EC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=Racism+without+racists&ots=leBXAOJ1S3&sig=xHjD875BshRXF7YdE8aw90mQrFM

  4. Boyd, A., & Mitchell, D. O. (2013). Beautiful Trouble. OR Books. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=vi73AgAAQBAJ&source=gbs_api

  5. Castillo, V. (2021). Resgination Letter. Retrieved February 25, 2021 from https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vccastillo_vivianne-castilloresignation-letter21521-activity-6770470033694035968-sWJR

  6. Cottom, T. M. (2018). Thick. The New Press. https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=teyADwAAQBAJ&source=gbs_api

  7. Habitus (Sociology). Retrieved 2021, March 3 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitus_(sociology)

  8. Londoño, J. (2020). Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities. Duke University Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=GRH2DwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT3&dq=Abstract+Barrios:&ots=XjFKp6Lbx_&sig=-ORatyQqPHHjkYwav10bwmxtne8

  9. Ochs, E., Pontecorvo, C., & Fasulo, A. (1996). Socializing taste. Ethnos, 61(1-2), 7-46. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.1996.9981526

  10. Riley, D. (2017). Bourdieu’s Class Theory. Retrieved March 3, 2021 from https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no2/bourdieu-class-theory-riley

  11. Shankar, S. (2015). Advertising diversity: Ad agencies and the creation of Asian American consumers. Duke University Press. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=McHFCQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT6&dq=Advertising+Diversity&ots=sRU0ll6WPr&sig=nVjRrkxXRjZAqh8Cm9b-tR7iJdU

  12. Weiner, M., & Cleveland, R. (2008). The Benefactor Episode 3. Retrieved 2021, March 4

  13. Williams, L. (2019). The Co-Constitutive Nature of Neoliberalism, Design, and Racism. Design and Culture, 11(3), 301-321. https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2019.1656901