Unconscious Bias isn’t Enough: 7 Tips for Transformative Racial Equity Trainings
By Jocelyn Garibay, Director of Company Culture Transformation
Today, Starbucks is closing all of its stores to host a one-day training on unconscious bias. This is part of their company-wide response to the backlash they received after two black men were arrested at one of their stores in April for #LivingWhileBlack.
At Code2040 we don’t do unconscious bias trainings; instead, we do racial equity trainings to push attendees into self-awareness of their biases and how those biases can impact others’ lives. Solely understanding the idea of unconscious bias — that is, stereotypes about groups that you hold yet aren’t consciously aware of — and acknowledging that you have it helps no one, including yourself, your company, and the black customers and employees who are being harmed by your policies. We’ve trained over 1,000 people over the last three years on our curriculum. We hope that by speaking more candidly with you about our tips for leading transformational racial equity trainings, we have a chance at making real impact on the racial bias that is hurting communities of color not only in our workplaces but in our world.
First, start by building a comprehensive training plan and strategy. Bringing in racial equity trainings requires a company to do the same exact things it would do if it were rolling out a company-wide policy or releasing a product: a needs assessment to figure out what the actual root causes of your problems are; a market analysis to see what’s out in the world to help address those problems; clearly outlined intentions and outcomes you want to achieve; and an assessment to see how things went so that you can pivot and iterate the next time.
Some simple questions to consider when you’re looking to bring in or build impactful trainings:
- What are you trying to achieve by bringing in trainings?
- Is content being designed with your vision and problems in mind?
- Lastly, but honestly most importantly, did you include communities who are affected by (in this case) racial bias in this conversation?
You cannot build impactful racial bias trainings without including the communities who are disproportionately affected by the thing you are trying to make an impact on.
Push attendees beyond acknowledging their unconscious bias. Attendees need to sit in deep reflection about how their bias IMPACTS people’s lives. And where their fears push them into inaction. They need to go from placing the blame on others: “Well if Starbucks did X, if HR did Y, then this would all be better” to owning where they are not showing up for others: “If I did x, then this could be better. Because I am a flawed human and bias shows up for me around socioeconomic background because I grew up upper, middle income. And around race because I grew up white. I will never understand what it’s like to not have a financial back up plan or have the police called on me because of the color of my skin but I can do my damn best to educate myself on how those things would impact a human life and heart.”
I am a queer, Latina, who has struggled with depression off and on my whole life AND I have light skin and was socialized in a white household. All of those things are true at the same time. I have bias that shows up for me around beauty standards centered in whiteness, and I don’t know what it is like to be a dark skinned woman but I will read their stories, follow instagrams of dark skinned women to diversify my daily celebrations of beauty, and check myself when I find someone attractive or unattractive.
This work is deeply personal and if you’re not owning where you have gaps of awareness, you’re not doing it right. Too often trainings around unconscious bias are shallow. Things need to get uncomfortable to drive long term change. Discomfort is a sign of learning.
Hold people accountable to make a change. The collective feeling of accountability drives change. Attendees should understand how their position in the world and in the company grants them a certain amount of power to make change. For example, if you are a manager, how do you apply what you learned to your team meetings, check-ins, and expectations for performance?
Use basic change management tactics to weave accountability into your trainings by having attendees choose accountability partners at the end of trainings, creating check-in points after the training, and bringing your cohort back together to talk about how the training has affected them OR NOT. If it didn’t affect their daily behavior that’s a great data point for you to have on the effectiveness of your content. You as a training facilitator or designer need to also be held accountable to those outcomes you outlined back in step one of this article.
Make sure employees feel, at a base level, connected to the reason WHY you are running this training. Speak out about your training strategy and generate buy-in from influencers at your company so that they’ll show up ready and eager to participate. If and when people voice their discontent for having to attend, you want people who will speak to their own personal why and be willing to sit in a conversation about it.
Do not have a white person lead a training on racial bias alone. If you are leading a training on bias with a racial lens and the perspective of a person of color is not represented in the facilitation and design of strategy, you are doing it wrong. You don’t want to kick off a training process rooted in the very thing you’re trying to correct. By excluding the perspectives of those affected by racial bias, you are actually not moving forward the conversation on bias, instead you are signaling to your attendees that people of color’s experiences are not valid even in the process of addressing something that directly impacts their lives.
Unconscious bias training needs to be led by someone well-versed in racial equity. Hire your facilitators and curriculum designers accordingly. Your role in HR, or your personal relationships with Black and Latinx people, does not inherently make you qualified to facilitate a racial bias training. In these trainings, we push participants through a journey around our nation’s complex relationship with race, which is a tough process and critical skill requiring understanding not just of race but of how people learn. Invest your money (not just your time) in organizations run by and trainings designed by facilitators of color with racial equity expertise.
Finally, one day of training is not enough to eradicate racial and implicit bias. There is absolutely no possible way to heal racial trauma through an authentic, vulnerable, deeply personal, intentionally designed journey to empathy, self-awareness, and the restoration of Black and Brown people’s humanity in one day.
For this type of training to be effective, one day is a good start AND you need to ensure that you’re thinking about this as a journey: there is pre-work before the training — do you have a strategy? Do you fully understand the root causes of the issues? — and post-work — how are you holding folks accountable to their commitments? How are you leveraging people’s willingness to learn with your next steps?
While the United States is watching Starbucks on how they’re addressing racial bias and its long-term impact, as an industry, we can use this moment as an opportunity to creatively vision how we weave racial equity into our trainings. In doing so, we can move our employees through a transformation journey, not just centered in short-term objectives but achieving long-term equity in our workplaces. This hard work of undoing racial bias will force folks to push past their fear of black bodies and rebuild spaces that are rooted in equity and inclusion. The goal is not just feeling better but dismantling systemic racism to dramatically alter the world we live in.
If you’re interested in bringing Code2040’s Racial Equity & Inclusion trainings to your company, send us an email at info@code2040.org.
Jocelyn Garibay is a queer, feminist-af, Aquarian, Latina. When she’s not dreaming of a racially equitable tech industry where Black and Brown folks thrive, she’s probably off reading a book, dancing to house and soul tunes, doing some light community organizing, or watching trashy tv with her partner. Chopped, anyone? Jocelyn’s the Director of Code2040’s Company Culture Transformation program that envisions a world in which workplaces center their Black and Latinx employees’ experiences when designing solutions, policies, processes, and systems. Where our joy, brilliance, history, accomplishments are celebrated and amplified for the whole industry to see and feel. Come work with us!
