Fighting biases and racism, part 1.
When I was a child my parents moved to Algeria, North Africa. This was roughly 10 years after the bloody wars the country fought for independence from Imperialist France. I was only four so my first memories are of life in Algiers. I remember distinctly the beauty of the land and the people. I also remember the palpable anger and wounds left by those years of colonialism and war. My parents had protested the violence and called for an end to imperialism, just like their US counterparts had done with the Vietnam war. They marched, donated, volunteered, educated, and more importantly practiced what they preached.
And yet, 20 years later, when my grandmother heard I had been dating a black man, she counseled me not to marry him because of the color of his skin. I was devastated and crestfallen. It seemed behind her liberal veneer, racism lived within her.
A few years ago I attended a session at SXSW lead by Ken Burns and Henry Louis Gates. Ken Burns had just released a documentary on Jackie Robinson, which was essentially an expose of racism in America, while Henry Louis Gates had released a documentary on African Americans, and the institutionalized racism they face. What Henry Louis Gates said then profoundly struck me and is relevant today:
“ If America was a house, all you’d have to do is remove a floor board and you’d find racism right there, running through the foundation.”
This perfectly describes my own experience with my grandmother and many other experiences I’ve had since. Racism is often hidden, but it always only a floor board away.
We find ourselves in a moment now where the floor boards are being ripped, exposing the ugly underbelly below. As it comes into view, so does the tragic enormity of its toll — the lives of young black men and women interrupted, the dreams and hopes of generations of African Americans consistently dashed, the reality that being black in America is not safe.
“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” Says the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The question of course is what do we do about it? What is our role as small business owners and leaders?
As a creative agency we thrive on diversity and inclusion. The juice of creative ideation, the fertile ground of new ideas appears when each unique individual can express themselves fully as their whole self.
The challenge with unconscious biases and institutionalized racism is that we are not aware of the many ways we make it feel unsafe for a person to be and to express themselves. Subconsciously influenced by our bias, we copy and paste (quite literally actually) our previous ideas about gender, race, religion, politics onto individual people. This process is deftly described in the book Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow. He explains that as humans, we make up our mind about a person’s credibility, intention and personality based on their appearance and our history or misconceptions.
To overcome these biases, the first step is to understand that we all have them.
They have been handed down from generation to generation. But, we can break the cycle by taking a second step. By education ourselves about it, we can challenge our prejudices, leading us to the third step, where we put them aside altogether, replacing them with open-mindedness and acceptance.
Ghandi famously said “Be the change that you want to see in the world”. If we want to see an end to racism and biases, we each have to start with ourselves.
As business leaders we can also offer these tools to our teams by bringing awareness and fostering dialogue.
We at Struck began our journey towards Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in 2016. We accomplished a lot in 4 years. Our big focus was on recruitment and training. We implemented EEOC Compliance on all job applications and developed new language for job posts, social media and RFP responses. Our new agency process was focused on Diversity and Inclusion through empathy methodologies, and building diverse teams. Our new values focused on D&I and we underwent a powerful D&I training, followed by Struck Ed emails and sessions. These things paid off in increased diversity of our talent pool, diversity numbers and overall employee satisfaction.
But, while we made progress, we know that it’s not enough. That’s why we’ve renewed our focus. In July of 2020 we expanded our EDI efforts, taking the pledge to report our numbers and improve them. We have ramped up ongoing internal training with our first session addressing inherent bias.
Here are our numbers in 2020:
While I am glad to see our female representation grow, we have some work to do at the leadership level. We are also looking at ways to improve our recruitment and retention efforts of minorities as we have either plateaued or lost some of the ground gained.
One thing that we have learned from our past efforts is that consistency and transparency are key.
We are committing ourselves to both and I look forward to reporting our progress in 6 months along with additional insights. I’d love to make this a dialogue so please don’t hesitate to contribute your own findings.
As we work toward our goals, I find inspiration in the words of psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler Ross:
“There are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt. It’s true that there are only two primary emotions, love and fear. But it’s more accurate to say that there is only love or fear, for we cannot feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They’re opposites. If we’re in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we’re in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear.”
And so that is our challenge today, as we face the reality of institutionalized racism, widening gender inequity and ongoing biases in the workplace, will we choose love or fear?
