Are you ready to talk about whiteness?

We all know what happens. An organisation wants to ‘do’ diversity. Figuring that awareness is the first step to change, queue the insertion of a “diversity” week or three, scattered throughout the year. First ‘gender week’, of course, where panelists speak of women’s lack of confidence, unconscious bias training, the need for women to seek promotion, ask for raises and in a nod to structural factors, suggest that the workplace be more ‘flexible’ to accommodate childcare. (That the ‘woman’ everyone refers to on these panels is presumed a homogenous block is for another post).

Next, ‘race week’, where panelists talk of unconscious bias some more, mentoring for people of colour and the need for more role models who are “people of colour” (because, of course, people of colour are just hiding away. If you’d just been clearer on the need for role models they’d spring into action, naturally…).

What’s strikingly absent in all these discussions about race is the elephant in the room: White People.

I am a White woman. I’m mixed Algerian and British, of which I’m incredibly proud. But I am White. Before engaging in the work of social justice, equalities and transformation, White People, was an unspoken concept (by White People), presumed the norm, and in many spaces is the norm in our unequal world. Whiteness, the dominant mode of seeing and being in the world that has all the power. So powerful is whiteness that White People don’t even know it’s a thing. That’s what we call in the business, White Privilege.

What we do know, however, is that Whiteness isn’t spoken about in the workplace because that might upset White People (read more on white fragility here). And diversity and inclusion isn’t meant to be upsetting! It’s meant to be happy! White People might get upset that people of colour think they are racist. And of course, practising racism (no matter how unintentionally) and being made aware of it is far more upsetting than experiencing racism… (Not).

So in pretending that racism is a thing of the past, because real racism is what nasty (maybe, uneducated?) people do, we move from working to solve a problem that we can assume is in everything and everywhere, to focusing on the perhaps easier task of managing discrete, pin-pointable unconscious biases. In doing so, these ‘race’ discussions during ‘race week’ can become the lighthearted demonstration of progress that means White People don’t have to engage in the reflective, demanding and critical work required of them. Because the worry for those with organisational power is that if the truth was articulated, White People might feel marginalised. And because organisations continue to prioritise the needs of White People over others, rather than doing the courageous work necessary to bring about genuine change, we remain in stasis.

See how many times White People have been the focus of this writing?

Diversity initiatives spend energy protecting and prioritising the feelings of the privileged group(s), avoiding potentially ‘awkward’ situations and patching up the dysfunctionality with mentoring schemes rather than what is actually required to get moving: transforming racial power relations.

And for that we need to look at who and what has power: and that is white people and whiteness.

What does this mean for those who care about diversity and inclusion? It means that we need to powerfully engage White People in the serious work (in the workplace and everywhere) of unlearning that whiteness is worth more. It also means understanding our social location, across the many ways our identities interconnect, and deconstructing the ways we are afforded (or not) societal power every single day. Without this, we cannot build meaningful community and human connection.

If you’re white reading this and it makes you feel uncomfortable, then great. Because this is necessarily uncomfortable work. You cannot have reconciliation until you have truth.

And you cannot begin to engage in genuine transformation starting with your ‘race week’, until you’re prepared to talk about White People and Whiteness.