In 2023, I thought a lot about my employer’s bullshit approach to diversity and inclusion

Published on 1 December 2023

Dear employer,

I need to talk. You need to listen.

It feels cheeky to tinker with Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw’s words, but I’ve edited a sentence from her TED Talk. She says, “when you can’t see a problem, you can’t solve it.” I’d say, “if you don’t want to see a problem, you can’t solve it.”

Police officers in Scotland don’t want to see the problem that is institutional racism. In May 2023, they claimed their job would be made more difficult after the Chief Constable labelled the force as institutionally racist and discriminatory. So, 30 years after Stephen Lawrence was murdered, the accusation that racism is baked into their organisation still prompts pearl-clutching from members of a UK police force. Despite figures showing that Black people are more than twice as likely to die in police custody. 

Is this a surprise? Not to me. We still live in a world where calling someone a racist is worse than being one.

Don’t get comfortable.

This isn’t a piece aimed at huge public institutions that are incapable of self-reflection. This is about you, dear employer and your 300+, workforce. Specifically, your inability to recognise anti-Black racism and address it effectively. Instead, you display a staggering amount of defensiveness, ineptitude and learned helplessness. It’s exhausting and makes this organisation unsafe for people like me.

You confuse being nice with not being racist.

But as Austin Channing Brown says in her book I’m still here: Black dignity in a world made for whiteness, this is self-serving and naive:

“When you believe niceness disproves the presence of racism, it’s easy to start believing that bigotry is rare, and that the label racist should be applied only to mean-spirited, intentional acts of discrimination. The problem with this framework – besides being a gross misunderstanding of how racism operates in systems and structures enabled by nice people – is that it obligates me to be nice in return, rather than truthful, I am expected to come closer to the racists. Be nicer to them. Coddle them.”

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, a shedload of books about anti-racism populated the bestseller lists, and countless ‘how to be less clueless about race’ articles were shared. You should know. You leaped on the bandwagon and dutifully shared them. But you still don't know how to make your organisation more equitable for your Black employees.

I'm going to have to stop you before you start your spiel about your:

• unconscious bias training

• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) surveys

• lunch and learn sessions

• woolly, commitment-light social media statements

They do nothing concrete to improve Black people’s experiences in the workplace. You give anything that might the widest of berths because you can’t tolerate any race-related discomfort. As progressive, right-on white people, you won’t let your self-image be punctured by reality. I’ve seen you repeatedly silence Black people and put your fragile egos before their wellbeing and safety. You think it's fine to ask them to mine their trauma and share painful experiences to educate their colleagues. But taking action to address the root causes of racism in your workplace is not.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “you can’t be what you can’t see.” You also can’t change what you won’t say. Most of you can’t bring yourself to use the word ‘racism’, so you cling to terms like ‘inclusion’, ‘diversity’ and ‘belonging’. They mean you never have to deal with nasty labels that name what’s going on. What’s happening is that some people glide through their time working for you, like olympic-standard ice skaters. And for others, it’s like wading through golden syrup wearing wellies filled with gravel. By “others”, I mean staff who aren’t white, non-disabled, middle-class, university-educated cheerleaders for your worldview.

All of this means I have 2 jobs. The first is the role you pay me for and the second is playing a never-ending game of Let’s Pretend. It goes like this. Let’s pretend that:

• Rent-A-Minority isn’t one of your approaches to DEIB

• those microagressions didn’t happen

• you’ll do something about racism at work

• all our senior leaders aren’t white

• hiring from your network, who have similar backgrounds and identities as you, isn’t related to the aforementioned lack of diversity at senior levels

• a group of overworked and well-meaning volunteers, with minimal time and zero budget, can address the company’s inequities

• this is a meritocracy

Keeping my job is dependent on not poking holes in this tissue-thin veneer of equity. So I stay in the Sunken Place, nod, smile and self-censor.

I and others like me, listen to what you say and watch what you do. We see your apathy, lack of understanding, warm words followed by inaction and the denial and downplaying of your privilege, and we judge you for it. Harshly. I’d have more respect for you if you kept schtum instead of gaslighting current employees, and catfishing new ones by pretending that you believe that Black Lives Matter. 

This is why from now on, I’m no longer talking to white people at work about race.