Recommendations on fixing our Racist progressive ecosystem

These recommendations follow my medium series on racism in the progressive political ecosystem. You can read my first post, which includes definitions and the reasons I am writing this series, here

This is a running list of recommendations for people who exist in our ecosystem to consider, as they think through how to build anti-racist organizations.

This list will be updated regularly. Please dm me on twitter if you have recommendations to add. This list draws from best practices identified in many other places.

For Elected Officials

Candidates and elected officials must drive the change we need. As I said in the first post, I know I don’t have all the answers. But I have a few suggestions to start:

• Pay your interns and full-time volunteers.
• When hiring a campaign manager or chief of staff (or really any senior-level managerial role into your campaign or legislative office), understand how they are as a people manager, not just a project manager. There are a lot of very technically skilled operatives in our space. But they often haven’t been trained, mentored, or coached on how to manage people. This, IMHO, is a root cause of the infamously toxic campaign work environments we hear so much about.
• Ask any hires specific questions on how they would manage a team from diverse backgrounds; how they would support staff at the end of a campaign cycle; how they would ensure BIPOC voices were being heard in the development and execution of the campaign strategy. Ask them specifically about their thoughts on White privilege, white supremacy, and what intersectionality means to them.
• Promote junior level people within organizations and ensure your young, Black and non-White organizers have the support, mentorship, and resources they need to be successful in this business. Beyond resources, ensure they are actually set up for success in their roles and positions. Make sure they are afforded the opportunity to learn, ask questions, and improve their skills.
• When you hire your consultant team, look closely at their senior leadership teams — if there are no Black people on their team, ask them pointedly why. If there are no other people of color in their senior leadership teams, ask them why. Then seriously consider whether hiring predominately White firms is consistent with the values you are trying to promote with your candidacy. It’s incredibly important for White people and White privileged people to do this work, especially. It’s unfair to place the burden on our BIPOC colleagues to be the ones “calling out” racism when and where they see it. We need to be better allies.
• When people of color are at the consultant teams, make sure they are not being tokenized. Ask what their role is. Pro-actively ask for their opinions and be ready to show that you value their voices with your words and your actions. Observe whether the other consultants are listening and valuing them — or if they are just included for appearances (e.g. tokenism).
• If you already have your consultants, ask them how they plan to develop talent within their firm and how often people are promoted from junior roles to more senior roles, what kind of professional development opportunities they are afforded, and details on how they recruit talent. Ask them for written DEI plans and then ask them for progress, throughout your engagement on DEI benchmarks.
• When you hire your campaign team, post jobs broadly to HBCUs, colleges serving predominately Latinx populations, community colleges, common job websites, LinkedIn and other places that aren’t exclusive to progressive professionals. Commit to interviewing as many people of color for senior leadership roles as you would for organizer roles.
• When your campaign or legislative office is hiring for any position at any level, ensure a thoughtful recruitment and interview process that helps to mitigate unconscious bias.
• Once elected, work with the National committee elected leadership to direct them to have stronger DEI practices that permeate throughout. Then, hold them accountable by demanding annual diversity reports that are both quantitative (to understand representation by the numbers) and qualitative (to understand the culture of the organization). (Original Source: Inclusv)
• Include DEI services as a part of core campaign services that National committees offer to their campaigns.
• Hire people between cycles. The campaign never stops — set up a staff infrastructure that doesn’t, either and offer opportunities for people who can’t afford to be unemployed for months on end.
• Prioritize hiring organizers who come from the communities within your district v. importing young college grads into your district. If you can’t easily find people from the community to hire at a time when unemployment is at an all-time high, ask yourself why not?

For Donors:

• Hold organizations, candidates and consultants accountable. Make your money contingent on them having thoughtful and actionable plans to make their organizations reflect our party.
• Fund organizations that are actively working to promote antiracist talent management policies and practices within our industry.
• Fund long-term infrastructure that will support antiracist talent management systems and do it in a way that won’t allow for recipients of that funding to re-allocate money to short-term, campaign-cycle needs.