Opinion: How to get your organization's anti-racism work unstuck

We formed task forces. We reviewed hiring policies. We made strategies and 100-point action plans. After the public extrajudicial murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020, our organizations employed all we had in our toolboxes to address racial injustice in the international aid and philanthropy sector.

The trouble is, our toolboxes are inadequate for that job.

George Floyd’s murder, along with the murders of so many other Black and brown people in the United States and other countries, ushered in a worldwide reckoning. We were faced with the truth that imperialism, patriarchy, and colonialism have created a global system of white supremacy, and no longer could our sector deny that this system is alive and well in our organizations, as well as in ourselves, despite our good intentions.

We started right where we are with the typical nonprofit skill set, and rightly so. Suddenly, our sector experienced a surge in demand for the “products” of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.

As individual consultants and as the advisory circle of Healing Solidarity, we ourselves worked with many organizations over the past year on anti-racist practice — from networks of foundations to nonprofits and international NGOs big and small. From our observations, we offer here four reasons that typical DEI investments may be faltering and how leaders can shift their approaches to challenging racial injustice, helping them get unstuck:

People chose ambitious plans over deliberate or feasible ones

Taking action is the default state of our sector. Undoubtedly, the bias for action ensures that we get things done. We value that striving and solving energy amid the urgency of the issues we face, but also the internal atmospheres of urgency perpetuated by unrealistic time frames in our sector. That rush to take action means we risk upholding the status quo when we hastily drive progress on racial justice forward in a similarly deterministic, linear way.

Organizational leadership must make time and consciously give energy and room for consent, disagreement, and discernment between options, failure, celebration, confusion, grief, and repair. Anti-racist practice requires all of these things. Fundamentally changing our ways of working means slowing down and paying more deliberate, devoted attention to the culture we are building, not just the strategies and plans we make.

Anti-racism is not teachable

The intellectualization of racism, or approaching it as something to be understood, is part of the “white gaze” and comfort in our sector — and in our world — that must be disrupted.

Poorly facilitated anti-racism sessions have the impact of re-traumatizing Black people and other people of color, while leaving white people with more confusion or more language to approach racism in a performative manner or on a purely analytical or rhetorical basis. Of course, there’s book learning on white, male, and human supremacy to be done. But it cannot stop there.

Luckily, we do not have to approach anti-racism work purely from the modalities that the sector and the dominant culture lay out — i.e., information-sharing, policy development, project management, and training sessions. Our organizations can and must embrace approaches focused on building emotional resilience and collective power.

These include somatic practices and ancestral inquiry, as well as healing, creative, and spiritual work — all rooted in learning from other people’s lived experiences and all needed for the depth of reflection and change in our practice that can shift organizational culture in a lasting way.

There’s not enough trust

By talking about racism, sexism, and other oppressions, we are inviting conflict to arise. Yet rarely are people and teams equipped to sufficiently handle the difficulties that are part of tough dialogues about race. This gap leaves decision-makers unchallenged and patterns undisrupted. Job dependency is a valid reason that many people stay silent about issues they witness in their hierarchical institutions. However, if we don’t interrupt the overt, mundane, or unconscious ways that systemic racism is perpetuated, nothing will change.

Let’s view anti-racism practice as messy, uncomfortable work that requires honesty, courage, and an acceptance of not being able to be “right” or an “expert.” DEI committees can become unstuck when the risk or discomfort of speaking up to people with more positional power is weighed against any discomfort people experience in having more truthful and vulnerable conversations, let alone the harm of racism. These are not comparable, and they never will be.

We must talk about what’s needed for continuous, braver conversations that set a new bar for a sustained dialogue on racism.

This work is never done

Long-term structural and cultural changes within our organizations require pace, patience, collective responsibility, and continued maintenance — all of which are deeply undervalued in systems shaped by racialized, patriarchal capitalism.

Let’s understand that we're calling for a kind of accountability that doesn't yet exist in our sector or wider culture. While leadership and individual actions within complex systems are needed to shift hierarchical structures and the dominant culture’s ways of working, we must also recognize that addressing personal biases alone won’t dismantle systemic racism. We need each other, and we must remain accountable to Black people collectively, not our own egos.

The violence continues. Clearly, this work will remain unfinished in our lifetimes. We can be resolved, however, to build the world — among ourselves — right now.

How will you ensure your organization gets unstuck?

This piece was written with the support of the Healing Solidarity advisory circle. Healing Solidarity is a collectively led annual online conference and online community focused on re-imagining the international aid and philanthropy sector. Its advisory circle members are: Mary Ann Clements, Swatee Deepak, Esua Goldsmith, Jennifer Lentfer, Pontso Mafethe, and Roshni Nuggehalli.