How Progressive Talent Recruitment Promotes Racism
written by Audra Grassia, edited by Loryn Wilson Carter
Series Note
This is the fifth post in a series about racism in the progressive political ecosystem. You can read my previous posts on my medium page, here. There you will find some definitions and explanations of the point of view I bring to this writing.
My focus is how we — in the progressive and Democratic political ecosystem — reinforce racism by virtue of how we recruit people; how we promote (or fail to promote) people; and how we retain (or fail to retain) people.
In each part of this series, I’ll be diving deep into a particular issue that generally follows a campaign career life cycle. I’ll endeavor to offer ideas and solutions on how we can start to address and work towards creating more antiracist policies.
Irresistible…side note
Last night, I watched the movie Irresistible, produced and directed by Jon Stewart and starring Steve Carell and Rose Byrne. It was great — I highly recommend it. Though, you may want to wait until it doesn’t cost so much to rent on AppleTV.
The premise was basically about a Democratic strategist (Steve Carell) battling with a Republican strategist (Rose Byrne) in a small-town Wisconsin setting over a mayoral race.
I thought it was interesting that early in the movie, Steve Carell is in his office with 6 staffers who are discussing strategy (image above — one staffer is off to the side). All but one of the staff members are White men. The one Black woman, is taking notes and then a few minutes later revealed to be what appears to be an administrative assistant.
There’s another funny scene in which Carell is presenting his case to The Democrats (Democratic National Committee). I won’t go into it here, but it just underscores some of what I’m trying to convey through in a much funnier way.
This fictional depiction is sadly just not that far from reality.
Mid-level Talent Recruitment
Last week, I specifically wrote about how unpaid internships — a pivotal entry point into politics — are racist. But how we find people to fill mid-level and higher-level positions is also problematic.
We rely so heavily on our personal networks to recruit talent into our organizations. People who are well connected are more likely to get a job and people who are White are more likely to be well connected.
All too often, because we don’t invest in appropriately staffing our talent acquisition teams, we are left short-circuiting those broad, more expansive search methods in favor of referrals from friends. Research has shown that our social networks tend to include people who mostly look like us and who come from similar social and economic backgrounds.
Relying on referrals, therefore, coupled with rampant unconscious bias (also left unchecked due to lack of thoughtful HR/hiring/organizational development systems and processes), leads to and reinforces racism.
What’s more, the progressive political ecosystem is comprised of many related, but unaffiliated entities and organizations. There is no overarching HR department. There is no talent acquisition and management team that spans across all of the organizations. There is no one ensuring that we’re all following best practices when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion. There is no one who makes sure we’re even following best practices when it comes to general anti-discrimination policies.
All too often, White-led campaigns and organizations put DEI work on BIPOC employees. They then make it difficult for them to keep leadership accountable or they target the person of color as if they are the problem and push them out. The Center for Community Organizations paints an excellent picture of how this problem can manifest itself.
I used to work at an organization, where the senior leadership was all White. When members of the staff asked questions about how the organization was being intentional in recruiting Diverse talent, they left it to those mid-level and junior staff to form a committee. But then they never implemented any of the committee’s suggestions. Token actions like this can be incredibly frustrating and almost more counterproductive than doing nothing at all.
How We Move Through Our Space
There’s a piece of context that’s important here. People who work in the progressive space tend to move between organizations (candidate campaigns, electoral committees, PACs, advocacy orgs, Labor Unions), like they might move between departments in a large company.
Some of the more established and long-standing “departments” (i.e. organizations) may do better when it comes to exercising good diversity, equity & inclusion practices. However, unless the entire “company” (i.e. our ecosystem as a whole) buys into these practices, the problems will persist.
In the last 2–4 years, organizations like The Blue Leadership Collaborative, The National Democratic Training Committee, Organizing Corps 2020, The Arena Academy, Change the Game, Inclusv and others have come on the scene to attempt to help fix the talent pipeline, by recruiting more diverse staff to work in politics and training people of color to do all kinds of jobs on a campaign.
While these — and many other recruitment and training efforts that Democratic organizations have stood up in the past few years are all truly amazing, they only start to scratch the surface of deep and long-standing inequity that has been promoted through our history of unpaid internships and through our networking model of talent recruitment.
I’m not so naive to think that we will magically eliminate our way of doing business through personal and professional networking
I do think that any organization who purports to be progressive should endeavor to do the hard work of professionalizing how we build our talent pipelines. That includes posting jobs widely, including salary ranges, doing the work to minimize unconscious bias that happens during a hiring process, de-valuing nepotism and purely-relation-based talent recruitment. And so much more.
Conclusion
I think there are a million ways we can address the issues I laid out above, but investing real resources into talent acquisition, management and development are chief among them.
Colleagues at Cultivate have also written about the hidden cost of not investing in progressive talent and lack of diversity is one of those costs.
What if we had an entity that acted like a highly functioning organizational development team at a large company?
Groups across the ecosystem would need to buy-in, both financially and in terms of exercising the entity’s recommendations. Further, it would need a sustained and long-term source of funding that was protected from the whims and rollercoaster of the traditional election cycle.
While there are some organizations working to solve pieces of this issue, an overarching entity can help more clearly identify the gaps, while acting as the connective tissue between across the ecosystem and amplifying and providing resources to scale the work of organizations already investing in solving this problem.
Ultimately, we’ll need to put our money where our mouth is if we want to really make this happen.
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