Avoid Re-Traumatizing Your Black Employees: A Three Step Guide to Safely Launching An Affirming Corporate Anti-Racism Program
Racism is a chronic, generational, lifelong trauma that pervades and invades the daily lives of Black Americans. Acute traumas like the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks lay on top of the chronic trauma, reactivating emotional wounds that constantly lurk under the surface. The last eight weeks have been an emotional whirlwind for Black Americans, fraught with the lowest lows as we watched George Floyd’s life fade away under the police officer’s knee, yet sprinkled with hope as we watch white America undergo what genuinely seems to be a mass awakening to the pervasive and devastating effects of racism on our lives.
As a Black woman, and Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Eleanor Health, a company that cares deeply for our people, I find myself in dual positions. One as a Black wife, mother, daughter and sister, navigating the pain and anger of acute racist trauma; the other as a healthcare executive leading our company’s corporate anti-racism response. I feel deep gratitude to my fellow Co-Founders and Leadership Team who showed up as staunch allies, enthusiastically jumping in to the movement with two feet. We acted quickly. Within a few days, we crafted our Black Lives Matter Anti-Racism Statement. The message to our team members was simple: We care too much about you to ask you to pretend you’re ok just because you’re at work. A few days later, we held a company-wide town hall meeting after which we quickly conceptualized a framework for our anti-racism work going forward. A book club sprang up organically and chatter began about what book the club would read first. We released an application for the Black Lives Matter committee — designed to hold us accountable for an ongoing, sustained anti-racism response that would persist beyond current tensions. Galvanized by the opportunity to raise our voices against injustice, we acted quickly, and as a unified force. Honestly, it felt good — or so we thought.
I was admittedly surprised to receive a hesitant instant message from one of our Black women team members. She tested the waters — “Wanted to shoot you an article that I came across last night and get your thoughts on it.” I said, “Of course. Send it on over.” As a Psychiatrist, I recognized something heavy about her message. She sent over an article titled “When Black People are in Pain, White People Just Join Book Clubs.” Shortly, thereafter, I received an email from another one of our Black women staff. It started with “I wrote and deleted this message 50–11 times,” a colloquialism meant to reflect just how unsure she was about raising her voice, as a result of how dangerous doing so had been at past companies.
I realized, despite knowing that racism is an ongoing trauma, and despite being a victim and survivor of the trauma of racism myself, and despite being in the middle of my own emotional storm (perhaps as a result of being in the middle of my own emotional storm), I had forgotten SAMHSA’s 4Rs of a trauma-informed organization: Realize, Recognize, Respond and Resist.
I realized that we were falling short on the 4th R. Despite best intentions, we were re-traumatizing many of our Black team members by moving too quickly without first providing a safe space to process the acute trauma they were experiencing. As a leadership team, we recognized we needed to take a step back, and listen. We created Black Eleanor, a support group for those of our team members who identify as Black. We put every other initiative on hold. During our first Black Eleanor meeting, as Chief Medical Officer, I listened. As a Black woman, I realized just how much I was in need of that safe space.
After our first Black Eleanor meeting, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I’m a psychiatrist for goodness sakes! When caring for individuals who have experienced trauma, we take an approach that, for this purpose, I’ve simplified to three steps. First, create a safe space. Second, allow time for intense emotions physiological responses caused by acute trauma to settle down. Lastly, spring into action, empowering the survivor’s voice and engaging allies. As a company, we had made the mistake of skipping over the first two steps, and springing directly into action. In doing so, we had unintentionally marginalized the very people we needed to support, embrace and empower during a time of acute trauma.
As we were learning these lessons at Eleanor, several friends and colleagues were reaching out to me about their experiences at other companies. One story in particular stood out to me. A fellow Black female physician shared that her job was holding company-wide conversations on race. She and a group of her Black colleagues took the risk of raising their voices to say it may be too painful for some to be mandated into race listening sessions for all. Their clinical expertise was discounted. They felt compelled to attend in solidarity and in support of others who were not comfortable raising their voices. Inadvertently, just as we had at Eleanor Health, her company skipped over the critically important first two stages, and as a result had thrust their Black employees into emotionally unsafe, traumatizing spaces. I can only believe this was not their intention.
And so that brings me to the 3 step guide for safely launching an affirming corporate anti-racism program.
Step 1: Create safe spaces. Importantly, Black people are not monolithic. Rather, we are a diverse group of people with varied life experiences — some born and raised in America, others born and raised in other countries; some raised in suburban communities and others in urban cities or rural farmlands; some identifying as cis-gendered heterosexual and others identifying on the LGBTQ+ spectrum; some Republican, some Democrat and others Independent. In short, the diversity among Black people is infinite. However, during periods of acute trauma, for many Black people, for whom code-switching and moderating our Blackness are required survival skills that we’ve developed in response to implicit and explicit racism and discrimination throughout our professional experiences, mixed-race spaces by definition are not safe spaces. Though a difficult metaphor, imagine asking a woman who was recently assaulted by a man to join a mix-gendered support group. Though the men in the support group are not the man who assaulted her, their very presence is triggering. To avoid violating the 4th R, dedicate time during the work day for safe spaces.
Step 2: Allow time and support grounding. During our first Black Eleanor meeting, several of our Black team members shared that they felt their voices had been co-opted. They described being injured by what felt like a race to get to the finish line of a 100yd dash, when in actuality, we were just suiting up for the swim leg of an Iron Man. It seemed that, as a leadership team, we believed a few rapidly-implemented initiatives could fix the wounds of generational injustice, with one of our strategies being an anti-racist book club. Instead, what our Black team members needed from us was time and support to engage their grounding processes — physical, mental and soothing techniques designed to reduce the negative emotions associated with trauma. My counsel here is that there is no need to rush your organizational initiative — this is a long game, and your employees need time.
Step 3: Spring into action. The most important part of Step 3 is empowering the voices of survivors. That empowerment must reach beyond the executive level to ensure a diversity of Black voices are leading the company’s anti-racism program. Companies must strike the balance of engaging and galvanizing allies to lift the burden of this work off the backs of Black colleagues, while ensuring Black voices remain at the very core of all initiatives. You definitely need expert support to successfully strike this balance. Hire a consultant.
We are in the midst of what feels like the most unified anti-racism movement I have experienced in my lifetime. It is my hope that those of us in leadership positions, regardless of race or ethnicity, embrace the responsibility not only to create anti-racism programs, but to do so in a way that is affirming and safe for the very employees on whose behalf we are advocating.
Nzinga Harrison, MD is Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Eleanor Health, an innovative network of physician clinics that cares for individuals affected by addiction and Host of In Recovery, a podcast dedicated to changing the conversation around addiction.
