This Is What Racism Looks Like
Dear Reader,
I am a young Black woman, and immigrant to Canada, a person who has experienced poverty, a person who has had a lifelong battle with mental illness, a high achiever, and a person who has been part of the workforce since the age of 18.
If you’re keeping score, by this point, I’m about third in line for the oppression awards. And this is exactly why I built a business to tackle the oppression and discrimination that people like me face in the world of work - without ever actually having to talk about the oppression and discrimination I have personally faced in the world of work.
When I first came to Canada, I had two experiences where I was hired by large companies for part-time work, and when I showed up, I was immediately fired because, as one of the managers said “I didn’t know you were African. You people steal”. This was my introduction into the world of work in Canada.
When I was in university, I opened, and a won a case with the Human Rights Tribunal against an employer. The managers in that workplace mocked me a number of times about my hair, their interpretation of what “my language probably sounded like” and eventually, their decision to have me continue working with a colleague, who in their presence, confessed to me that he slept under a confederate flag and that his “family hunts people like me for sport”.
Once I was out of school, I worked with a lot of liberal, well-meaning white people. These were people who never told me I was making less than most of my colleagues, who occasionally confused me for the other Black person, who asked me to speak about the experience of Black women in South Africa (I am not from South Africa), shared stories about their racist relatives, showed me the very progressive books and podcasts they were listening to, and other things well-meaning white people often do.
Bear in mind, I am a visibly able-bodied, I have a Canadian accent (years of practice), I don’t speak in ebonics at work, and years of living in economically unpredictable situations taught me how to fit in and present myself in a way that was palatable. I am by all accounts - a good immigrant, and Black person that’s “not like those other ones”. And yet, that did not protect me from experiencing discrimination that ranged from irritating, to straight up illegal.
The two facts we often don’t hear in public discourse about work and oppression are:
Discrimination is not the problem of the discriminated against, it is a problem of the most privileged. In other words, racism is a white people problem, ableism is an able people problem, etc.
Folks who are discriminated against, for the most part, don’t really want to talk about it, especially in the workplace. We don’t set out to build careers in the hopes that we will become the office specialist on anti-Black racism or on discrimination as a whole.
At a first pass, these two things are counterintuitive coming from someone who has built an entire business on tackling inequity at work. But when you look a little closer, it actually makes complete sense. First, let me tell you a little bit about my approach.
My agency, QuakeLab focuses on the structural and systemic. We run rigorous assessments across an entire organization (from finance, to communications, to HR, to programs and projects), in an effort to understand where inequity is embedded into the very core of an organization - meaning their documented policies, procedures and ways of working. We rely heavily on secondary data to create a baseline - although in Canada, demographic data, especially in the world of work is very sparse. We collect a tonne of primary data, including conversations with staff, although we have a strict policy against trauma-mining. Then we work with the organization, using design thinking frameworks and results-based management to collectively design a solution to the challenges the data revealed to us. We ensure that our clients not only design for the challenge, but commit the resources to see it through and agree upon the method in which they will measure and iterate the success of their designed solution(s).
You’ll notice that at no point in this session do we run workshops or training sessions to fill perceived knowledge gaps. We don’t host unconscious bias training and anti- racism training or anything that falls under that umbrella. Not only do we know that these sessions, when you drive right down to the bone of it, are created in service of the most privileged, but even the very little research that has been done to assess the success of this method shows us that, at best, it is ineffective, and at worst - it causes harm.
What you’ll also notice, is that at no particular time in our engagement with a client, will our personal identities take center stage. My team is made up almost entirely of women of colour, the majority of whom are Black women. This omission is by design.
I began this article by giving you just a glimpse of the kinds of overt and explicit discrimination I have experienced in my life as a member of the work force. This retelling, however many times I do it, is extremely onerous. Often, when telling these and other stories - some that I’ve buried in the deepest parts of my mind - I have to stop, catch myself, breath, talk myself through it. This happens whether I’m writing it in the comfort of my office, or in the middle of a conversation where I didn’t expect my traumatic experiences to be water cooler talk.
When you ask ‘What does racism look like’ either in the workplace or otherwise, I recommend being very mindful of who you're asking, and what the unsaid request is. Often, to people like myself, it is read as a demand for proof - especially in Canada where we have sanitized the history of oppression, slavery, genocide, and occupation. When you ask a Black woman, a person of colour, an immigrant, a visibly Muslim person, a woman, a disabled person, what their experience of trauma is, you are essentially asking them to do two things:
Perform labour for you that is onerous and unearned. Remember, discrimination was not designed by the marginalized - but somehow the onus is put on them to explain it in ways that are compelling and beg for change;
Show you their scars, so you know it’s real. Our trauma, shame, fears, and stories in this moment are treated as party tricks. In that moment, there’s nothing anyone can do but offer their condolences, take you to task, ask what you did to deserve the discrimination, or explain to you why it was, in fact, not discrimination, but just a misunderstanding.
The most ridiculous part of this song and dance, is that we have decades upon decades of these stories at our fingertips. We have data.
And this is exactly why, in an effort to completely upend the traditional DEI space, and more personally, to never have to talk about the discrimination I have experienced at work, I started QuakeLab.
By couching the work we do in existing data and demanding tangible action from our clients, we moved away form a model of behaviour change that requires us, as women of colour, immigrants, queer people, etc. to use our own trauma as the carrot on the proverbial stick towards slight progress. When we work with clients, we don’t talk about how as women of colour, we personally have been paid less than white men, Black men, and white women, we show them the secondary data.
When we work with clients, we make it very clear that our personal stories of racial and gendered trauma will include many more zeros on an invoice then they’ll know how to wrap their heads around. This not only protects us from the violence of having to beg for equity - it allows us to use big data to illustrate a pattern, one that shows them that our experiences are not unique - but systemic.
What we’ve also learned using this method - the QuakeLab method, is that it makes it very difficult for a client to respond to specific, data-informed challenges with toothless responses.
For instance, if we show a client that in Canada, Indigneous women make around $0.62 for every dollar made by a white man, and in your organization, the 3 Indigenous women working for you are actually making less than that abysmal baseline in comparison to their colleagues, it would be incredibly difficult for the client, with a straight face, to say “that’s awful, maybe let’s do some unconscious bias training and have a team conversation where we talk about race.”
Our method relies on specificity because marginalized people experience harm in shared, but also unique ways. Organizations cannot put out blanket solutions to such diverse groups, especially with so many intersections. They are forced to think deeply, research, collaborate, and create targeted solutions. And design has taught us that when you build for the most marginalized, you essentially build for everyone. And this is the case across the board. In Canada, only 3.2% of people with invisible disabilities will disclose this to their employer - so a comprehensive benefits plan with mental health support, accessible work-from-home policies, and clear performance management process will be good for everyone, but especially for the 96.8% of the workforce who are struggling in silence. Millennials are the largest population in the workforce, but also the most debt-ridden. A benefits program that includes loan repayment, a finance department that measures salaries and raises not just on market standards, but on the reality of the potential of so many of their team living in poverty, is good for everyone. But it’s especially good for those likely to be the most marginalized (Black, Indigenous, Trans, and disabled).
These solutions are not quite as thrilling as having organizational wide sessions where someone cries and talks about reading White Fragility. But they are the most effective because the reality is that racism exists most insidiously in our structures.
We have learned that the gender pay gap doesn’t happen when a group of men sit in a room and collude to pay their female colleagues less. It happens when women take on the majority of child care and cannot move up as quickly as their male counterparts, it happens when women have to take parental leave and miss out on years of progression, it happens when women are encouraged to pursue lower paying opportunities within a sector. In other words, it is structural and steeped in historical context.
The same is true for racial oppression in the workplace, it exists in the very walls, hallways, policies, procedures, and expectations of your organizations. A racist institution doesn’t require a racist person in the room to continue being oppressive and discriminatory.
The stories I shared earlier in this article are mostly about the interpersonal discrimination I faced. That is often the only stories we can clearly articulate because a single individual could not lay out the inherently racist structures within their organization that has seen them and all other people of colour remain at an administrative level. They cannot give a quick story to explain why they mentally could not handle the weight of this structure and had to leave job after job. So by asking people of colour, Black people, Indigenous people, what racism looks like in their organizations, you are asking them to dilute the systemic, colonial roots of an industry, into a quick story of how their manager called them the ‘N’ word.
Love,
Sharon
Black hand on a laptop with the text ‘QuakeLab DY Inclusion Strategy
Interested in making actionable change in your organization?
Consider QuakeLab’s DIY Inclusion Strategy: an online self-guided course that will support you to go all the way from audit to evaluation as you develop your own inclusion strategy based on design thinking and results-based management.
