Reckoning with inequality in the context of “diversity, inclusion & belonging”
by Dr. Kristen Liesch, co-CEO of Tidal Equality
I’m sure you know this, but I’ll say it nevertheless:
Anti-black racism has always been killing, oppressing and discriminating against Black bodies. And police services across North America and beyond have been cultivating cultures of inequality and discrimination largely unchecked.
And yet,
Has the conversation ever been as salient as now?
If you nod your head “yes”, then you likely live in a non-black body. And the fact that you don’t eat, sleep, breathe, and dream “the conversation” is a privilege of living in that non-black body.
But white folks aren’t the only ones just now really confronting the issue of systemic racism. The salience of this conversation is being felt pretty acutely by corporate leaders (most of whom, okay, are white and male) who now find themselves scrambling.
“Chief Diversity Officer, get out of the way! … Er, I mean, here… stand in front of me.”
This week, we’ve seen a plethora of corporate statements, new advertising and marketing campaigns. Practitioners in the “diversity & inclusion” space are seeing a dramatic spike in requests for racial equity education, unconscious bias training, and digital workshops.
(Consider: Between 24-30 May, our site had 151 reads of our article “Don’t do unconscious bias training.”
Between 31 May to June 5, we’ve had 1,174 reads of the same article.)
But, I’ll venture to say it, the majority of what we’re seeing is performative allyship.
Take, for example, the fact that, with the onset of the pandemic, D&I budgets across North America were gutted and their figureheads were told to “get out of the way so we can take care of business.”* Because, fundamentally, equity, diversity and inclusion efforts were never really seen as core to business. And if it was seen as “the right thing to do” before, it was seen as not “right” enough to double down on in a time of uncertainty.
One message was: “We’d been working on a D&I strategy prior to COVID, then had to put that on pause..”
[But then there were George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and all of a sudden…]
“…now the urgency has been escalated.”*
(Corporations seeking opportunities to appear anti-racist like…)
Has D&I always been mostly performative allyship?
In too many ways, it has.
Let me be clear, there are millions of people who observe and/or experience inequality and want to - or try to - do something about that inequality. Those people seek to educate themselves, in millions of (imperfect) ways, they use their voice or cede the floor, they advocate, they raise consciousness, all with the common cause of one day co-creating a world where equality is the new status quo and everyone can achieve their full potential.
And those people work in organizations where, if they’ve got a D&I leader, give them an often paltry budget, then expect them to turn the organization into one of the next “Top Diversity Employers”** or “Most Inclusive Workplaces”**. It’s no wonder that so many organizations’ primary D&I activities include celebratory events and tick-box training.
We know, for a fact, that tick-box activities like bias training don’t work.
There have always been organizations happy to purchase window dressing, to tick boxes, to avoid bad pr, to mitigate risk and to avoid litigation.
Very seldom do we find an organizations with leaders courageous enough to actually empower their people to make structural change to create greater equality of opportunity.
Leaders aren’t saying, “We’ve probably got some pretty bias-ridden and discriminatory processes and policies here. Let’s roll up our sleeves and empower our people to get to the root of these issues and really co-design an organization where we tackle prejudice and inequality with curiosity, courage, candour, empathy and a vision for equality.”
No. But we have a lot of glitz and glam and “woke” social media posts and back-patting and palatable conversations.
(Oh! And let’s not forget the benchmarking and the translation of bodies and lived experiences into data sets and metrics that assuages the guilt of one inequitable organization because their “diversity numbers” are better than their competitor’s. But that’s a topic for another day. Literally. I’m working on it - so sign up for the newsletter if you don’t want to miss it.)
All the while...
The Amy Coopers of the world - and let’s not fool ourselves, there are a lot of them!
The Amy Coopers of the world have always been working in our companies, voting in our elections, and policing our communities.
When we settle for window dressing, we refuse to name and put front-and-centre the inequalities that plague us. And then we don’t have a hope in hell of fixing them.
And when we use the “tools” that were never designed in the first place to create greater equality, we don’t make a dent.
As Dr. Janice Gassam writes,
“No amount of unconscious bias trainings will be impactful if organizational policies, procedures, and practices are not addressed.”
Unconscious bias training doesn’t convert an Amy Cooper into an equality champion. Unconscious bias training doesn’t prevent Amy Cooper’s organization from empowering her to make promotion and hiring decisions, making strategic partnerships, leading on investment insurance policy, and so on.
Sensitivity training doesn’t make a cop like Derek Chauvin care more about the life of a black man.
Sensitivity training doesn’t touch the policies and processes that enable a cop like Derek Chauvin to continue policing his community despite a file full of complaints.
Sensitivity training doesn’t transform the culture of paramilitary institutions steeped in racist patriarchal traditions.
The fact is: Sexism, racism, discrimination and prejudice of all kinds… these don’t appear in a vacuum. We are socialized - and we socialize our children - into these paradigms, paradigms that infect us in implicit, unconscious and insidious ways. And have deadly consequences.
And that’s an uncomfortable fact.
But if there’s ever been a time to sit in discomfort...
To my fellow white people. It’s time we sit in our discomfort for a good long while. Because we really haven’t felt discomfort yet. Because black folks have been sparing us. As Resmaa Manakem says,*** they “genuflect to white comfort.”
Why?
“Because we know when white people get nervous, people lose their jobs. When white people get nervous, people get hung from trees. When white people get nervous, babies get put in cages.”
In the corporate arena, sitting in discomfort means naming the problem.
We have racism here.
We have sexism here.
We have homophobia and transphobia here.
It’s time we stopped using euphemisms.
Did you notice the rhetorical shift? Did you notice when the words equality and equity took a back seat to “diversity, inclusion and belonging”? Maybe you didn’t. As a student of social movements, I can tell you that in the second half of the twentieth century, what got us equal rights legislation in regards to race, gender, and sexual identity wasn’t euphemistic or tied to subjective sentiments.
Pride was a protest. Women’s marches were protests. Martin Luther King, Jr. led protests.
And these protests made a lot of people (white people, white men) very uncomfortable, because their demands were loud and clear:
“Equality now”
“Free abortion on demand”
“Equal pay now”
“Equal educational and job opportunities”
“Respect and equality for all trans people”
“Civil rights for all”
“desegregation”
There was no room in that conversation for responses like,
“Okay, but how would you rate your sense of belonging?”
“Okay, but do you believe we value inclusion?”
Do you think people experiencing inequity and discrimination were the ones to say, “I think we should really deemphasize this inequality thing. It’s really making folks uncomfortable. Let’s focus instead on inclusion and belonging… we’ll get back to inequality some other time.”
No.
And so, again, I’m speaking to fellow white people: Let’s sit in discomfort and demand that our organizations do so, as well. And we can start by putting equality front and centre in our conversations and asking questions like,
“Does everyone have an equal opportunity to succeed here?”
“Do we have pay equity here?”
“Do we penalize people who take parental leave?”
“Do we have policies that support trans people here?”
We can also begin defining what we mean by “D&I”, because, as Manakem says,
“If you don’t define what ‘DEI’ means, it can mean Taco Tuesday, it can mean Collard Green Wednesday,... it can be anything that’s kind of cursory.”
And it can’t be cursory if it’s going to make change.
So let’s start by rejecting window dressing and box-ticking.
We owe it to the world we’re designing, whether we know it or not, to finally confront the fact that the vast majority of our organizations and institutions have inequality baked in.
Inequality in the NDA.
Black folks know this. Other marginalized and underrepresented groups know this.
It f*cking sucks.
And it is the motherlode of opportunities for reform, for (r)evolution, for re-design, for co-creation.
So let’s do that. Let’s demand that our leaders do that.
Leaders: empower your people to do that! Take the $10B you all invest annually in trying to de-bias your people and try for once to get the bias out of your blueprints!
Take courage, because it won’t be comfortable, but it will be right.
*These are paraphrases from communications we’ve had with actual D&I folks.
**Ever wondered how a corporate gets its designation on a list of “Diversity Employers” or “Inclusive Workplaces”? Do your research and pull back the curtain.
*What Resmaa Menakem talks about is “bodies of culture,” not “bodies of colour” - I invite you to listen to his fascinating interview with Krista Tippett on the “On Being” podcast here: https://onbeing.org/programs/resmaa-menakem-notice-the-rage-notice-the-silence/ . You can also take his FREE 5-Day Racialized Trauma Home Study Course HERE.
Let me also add, I think the pursuit of inclusion is a valid one, and I don’t mean to diminish the work of people who embark on that pursuit. However, in my opinion, there can be little - if any value - in cultivating inclusion, diversity and belonging without a foundational and prioritized pursuit of equality.
Equip yourself with the EQUITY SEQUENCE™
At Tidal Equality, we believe that inequality is at the root of problems, a lot of problems. Problems that are expressed in our communities and our organizations. Solving those problems, then, necessarily looks like redressing inequities and inequalities. And we’ve designed a way to do that.
A way for you to do that. And it’s called the Equity Sequence™️. It’s a series of 5 questions that you - that anyone - can ask to increase equity and inclusion.
The Equity Sequence™ is like a practice - like yoga, or meditation - if you want to think of it that way.
Or, it’s like a decision-making and problem-solving tool - if you prefer to think of it that way. Either way you think about it, you bring to the process a curiosity and a willingness to apply the Sequence, and you - along with others who practice it - begin changing the system(s) from the inside up, one question, and one decision at a time.
Are you planning an event? Setting a budget? Drafting a communication? Designing a policy? Creating a product? Organizing a meeting? Designing a strategy? Evaluating a process? Marketing a service? Pitching a client? Curating a collection? Culling inventory? Evaluating performance? Whatever you’re doing, it can be made more equitable. More inclusive. Less biased. And you don’t need a Master’s degree in gender theory or a PhD in social justice theory, in the words of one Equity Sequence™ student,
“the questions all resonate and they seem so simple! I am in awe of how intuitive the questions are, and seem to get immediately to the heart of equity and equality. They feel like we should have always known them but have probably never used them.”
We created the Equity Sequence™ so you don’t need a leader to give their permission or award you a budget to begin creating more equity. You don’t need to wait for a social movement or a new political party in power or a mandate or enough expertise or the right kind of language.
You can learn how powerful simple, carefully crafted questions can be in the hands of those who observe or experience inequity and care enough to do something about it.
