1,000 Cuts: The Toll Of Racism In The Workplace
Soledad O’Brien knows a powerful story when she sees it.
As a participant in ServiceNow’s Knowledge21 Think Big series, the award-winning journalist and entrepreneur recalled a company workshop on racism where one of the Black participants stood up to speak. The experience he shared was “breathtaking,” she said.
It falls upon the shoulders of leadership to create an anti-racist organization. GETTY
“One night he went down to his basement, he heard a noise.” O’Brien recalled. “And when he got downstairs the basement door was open. And he stood there thinking, ‘Did somebody break into my house? Should I call the police? Or did the wind blow it open?’”
He eventually closed the door and went back to bed—because he wasn’t sure he would survive an encounter if he called the police to his house at nine o’clock at night.
“His colleagues were just stunned by that,” said O’Brien. “And I think he was saying to them, ‘You have to understand the world that I live in, and I’m not sure you see me in that world.’ They think of him as a high-ranking executive and he was saying, ‘I am a person who navigates a very different world than you think.’ And I think that kind of storytelling was very helpful to his colleagues.”
For O’Brien, those conversations are more useful than pointing fingers. “I think understanding history and understanding where people are coming from is much more valuable.” With this in mind, here are a few highlights from other Think Big sessions with leaders who have unique perspectives into the impact of racism in the workplace and beyond.
Creating anti-racist organizations
What does it take for organizations to make the leap from well-meaning ally to being actively anti-racist? Professor Courtney Cogburn, associate professor at the Columbia School of Social Work, has some solid guidance based on a career researching the ways in which understated forms of cultural racism shape norms and ideology. She is also the lead creator of 1,000 Cut Journey, an immersive virtual reality racism experience developed in collaboration with the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University.
“The cultures that we build within organizations play a big role in how people feel when they talk about issues of race and racism,” said Professor Cogburn. “A critical step is creating an organizational climate that supports having difficult conversations, acknowledging our personal barriers that get in the way of meaningfully and deeply engaging these sorts of issues.”
“I think a lot of people are tired of only talking about this or symbolic gestures to address these issues,” she continued. “It’s on the backs of leaders in organizations to think carefully about how they are going to translate what they learn in those conversations. What are they going to do with that data? What action steps are they going to take?”
It's time to move beyond discussions or symbolic gestures when it comes to addressing racism in the workplace.. GETTY
Professor Cogburn suggests one way for taking meaningful action: Instill the importance of diversity at the highest levels of leadership. “Those roles need to be in your C-suite,” she said of the need for a chief diversity officer. “They need to be in your most senior levels of leadership so that you can give that person the resources and power they actually need to help shape the organization as a whole.”
Cogburn also discussed the role of data as being a way to measure anti-racism within organizations.
“Think very broadly about the types of data you already have to help you understand what’s going on in your organization specifically around race,” she said. “You don’t only want to look at the groups of people in your organization who are underrepresented. You also want to look at those who are overrepresented in your organization or particular roles.”
This means that to get a full picture of what’s happening in your company, you need to assess and analyze what is happening with the overrepresented white racial group. “We can’t talk about racism and an anti-racist practice without naming whiteness as a part of that problem...We’re thinking about the ways we’ve built organizations, we’ve built cultures, we’ve built practices around the norm of whiteness.”
Cogburn suggests approaching anti-racism as you would address any other business problem. “You need to analyze and understand the problem before you jump to a solution,“ she said. And yet, as when tackling any challenge, leaders should adopt a bias toward action. “Even though we’re thinking about structural problems and those are complicated and difficult, there are short, mid-term, and longer-term plans we can implement...Without that, it will feel like an endless conversation about something we can’t really do anything about.”
Overlooked and undervalued
Arlan Hamilton knows what it feels like to be on the outside looking in.
“90% of venture funding goes to white men in the United States. Fairly and economically, it doesn’t make sense,” said the author and entrepreneur.
As founder and managing partner of venture capital firm Backstage Capital, she is dedicated to investing in startups led by women, people of color, and LGBTQ founders. “I was homeless and on food stamps before I started raising millions of dollars and had the idea of looking for companies in places other people hadn’t necessarily been looking,” she said.“They were there, they were just overlooked and undervalued, and again, underestimated.”
Part of Hamilton’s unique success draws upon a philosophy of abundance. “I think that, as underrepresented, underestimated folks, we’ve been convinced that we have a small stake over here in the corner that we have to fight tooth and nail for and it is a zero sum game,” she says. “What I’m saying is that if we all stopped doing that and just turned around at an angle, we’d see all this open space, and we could just all run toward that abundance. It’s the same reason I want to see a thousand millionaires made over the next five years as opposed to one billionaire.”
Opening doors for tech careers
Penelope Prett has been a champion of inclusion and diversity throughout her career.
As Accenture’s CIO, she has come to understand that not everyone has the same access to the education and opportunities that can grow into tech careers. “As a leader, I think it’s incumbent upon me to find new doorways or make new doorways to help bring a whole new generation of leaders into the field of technology—particularly diverse leaders.”
One way she sees this happening is through the democratization of technology and the rise of low-code platforms. “I’ve been watching these trends for two-and-a-half decades,” said Prett, “and it’s only recently that we see the advent of technology products that drop the barriers for entry for anyone into a career in technology.”
Prett has happily observed how low-code capabilities are “knocking down barriers quickly, so people who wouldn’t normally have a chance to access a career in tech can do so.”
She has this advice for business leaders: “Act to the scope of your authority. If I simply reach within the scope of my authority and act, I can make visible change and then other people can see that change and follow it.”