Unmasking White Innocence: How Family Stories Can Foster Understanding
"Explore how a Family Portrait Assignment disrupts white innocence and encourages decolonial thinking in community psychology."
In an era where the permanence of racism casts a long shadow over society, understanding the subtle mechanisms that perpetuate inequality is more critical than ever. Within the intricate systems of power, the legacies of racialized coloniality remain deeply entrenched, often obscured by discourses of colorblindness and historical amnesia. However, the rise of movements advocating for social justice underscores the pressing need to confront and dismantle these structures.
As allies in the pursuit of liberation, individuals with privileged positionalities must actively engage in dismantling systems of power that perpetuate inequality. In the classroom, these encounters are further complicated by the sociopolitical context, including the contradictions of purporting diversity in an increasing neoliberal education that upholds the status quo, rugged individualism, and colorblindness. Therefore, it is essential to explore pedagogical tools that challenge the coloniality of power embedded in whiteness.
This article delves into the implementation of the Family Portrait Assignment, a pedagogical tool designed to facilitate decolonial thinking among students. By examining their family's im/migration story through a critical lens, students engage in disrupting white innocence and fostering a deeper understanding of power dynamics within community psychology. Drawing from a critical discourse analysis of student essays, this exploration offers insights into decolonial pedagogy and its potential to promote social change.
Understanding White Innocence
Gloria Wekker describes a central paradox of Dutch culture: denial of racial discrimination and colonial violence coexists with aggressive racism and xenophobia. The Family Portrait Assignment was used to facilitate white students' decolonial thinking and encourage them to engage with and disrupt white innocence. The Urban Indian Health Institute emphasizes that decolonizing data requires reclaiming traditional data practices and recognizing that data is more than numbers and statistics. Together, these sources frame family narratives and contextualized knowledge as tools for examining race, power, and historical denial.
What is Decoloniality and Why Does it Matter?
Decoloniality challenges the structures that organize and categorize people, creating forms of Othering that perpetuate disenfranchisement and oppression across generations. Decolonization involves dismantling power relations and knowledge systems that reproduce racial, gender, and geopolitical hierarchies. Therefore, deconstructing the coloniality of power requires dismantling the assumed normativity of whiteness.
- Transnational and multidisciplinary lenses.
- Grounded in critical race theories.
- Methodologies that challenge legacies of coloniality.
Recent Decolonial Scholarship
A 2026 longitudinal scoping review cites Jesica Siham Fernandez's 2018 study, "Decolonial pedagogy in community psychology: White students disrupting white innocence via a family portrait assignment," published in the American Journal of Community Psychology 62: 294-305. Recent scholarship also examines Whiteness within decolonial theory and emphasizes decentering White and Western discourses. Decolonial thinking rejects oppressive rationalities and challenges dominant disciplinary and academic categories of knowledge. These reviews position the Family Portrait Assignment within broader efforts to rethink how knowledge and power are organized.
Limits and Responsibilities
The Family Portrait Assignment study used critical discourse analysis of students' essays to examine decolonial thinking, including sociohistorical attention to colonialism, racism, and Whiteness. Scholarship on complicity argues that people have a political responsibility and intellectual imperative to understand and contest systems of domination in which they are enmeshed. It also stresses the importance of respectful engagement with people whose experiences, knowledges, and forms of authority participants do not and cannot possess. Decolonial teaching therefore treats confronting epistemic colonization as a necessary step, while recognizing that the process involves difficult questions of responsibility and positionality.
Comparing Reflexive Approaches
A study in Indigenous and cross-cultural psychology invited students to complete written reflexive exercises at the beginning and end of a semester; 44 participated initially and 23 at the end. Researchers analyzed the reflections qualitatively using a four-category coding scheme and causal layered analysis. Gloria Wekker's decolonial, intersectional reading of the Dutch cultural archive examines how an imperial racial economy, including gendered, sexualized, and classed intersections, continues to shape dominant ways of knowing, interpreting, and feeling. Comparative education scholarship similarly calls for challenging generalizations, binaries, and contestations in decolonial thinking and theory.
Towards a Decolonial Future in Community Psychology
As community psychologists, it is essential to stand firmly grounded in social justice values and engage in decolonial and liberatory work. By developing curricula, assignments, and tools that facilitate decolonial thinking, and by learning how to foster critical reflexivity in relation to a sociohistorical analysis of the coloniality of power, a decolonizing standpoint in community psychology pedagogy can be developed. Through multidisciplinary approaches, critical sociohistorical analysis, and the deconstruction of whiteness, it is possible to reflect, problematize, and deconstruct the racialized coloniality of whiteness and meaningfully engage in a decolonizing standpoint that confronts and disrupts whiteness.
Imagining Decolonial Futures
The War Prevention Initiative describes decolonization as a source of inspiration because it stands in friction with existing ideas and structures. It also cautions that looking only to what has existed can limit the ability to envision different futures. The American Planning Association defines decolonizing the future as questioning the continuation of past and present systems and envisioning multiple futures through diverse perspectives. That approach also requires translating those envisioned outcomes into action.