1 Year On — When an Idea Becomes a Collective
On 3 July 2021, the Racial Equity Index will be celebrating our 1 year anniversary as a collective. This past year has been nothing short of difficult for so many members of our collective and for the community at large — but the work that we continue to produce and the intention and values that we continue to uphold are incredible to witness.
The Racial Equity Index started as an idea that was born out of frustration, trauma, anger, and disbelief that a women’s rights sector working to promote and uphold women’s human rights was with the very same breath, gaslighting and causing so much trauma to BIPOC people in the sector. I had witnessed for too long in the women’s rights space, the championing of gender equality with zero acknowledgment of racial equity. There are a good number of gender equality indexes (note not equity) in the global development space. Some of these indices work to promote the idea that if the sector moves forward using feminist leadership principles then we can one day, hopefully, achieve gender equality in the sector. This narrative is problematic and shortsighted because it fails to acknowledge the immense harm that white feminist leadership and white feminism, in general, have caused in the global development sector. This narrative has continued to been amplified — most recently by WILD, who were held accountable by the Racial Equity Index for their completely white panel on feminist leadership (in 2021), and who only added people of color to the panel after this Twitter post by the Racial Equity Index.
If the gaze of feminist leadership continues to be publicised and promoted as white, without talking about the real harm that white women and white feminism have caused to BIPOC folks in this sector*, how then do any of the gender equality indices that are based on this gaze and narrative, promote justice and equity for BIPOC folks in the sector?
When I sent out a Tweet and LinkedIn post on 23 June 2020, asking if anyone would want to join a working group led by BIPOC people to work to develop an index for racial equity — I didn’t expect a huge response. Because the reality is that the continual racial trauma and every form of racial violence that BIPOC people face in this sector is incredibly exhausting.
But, the response was immense. Within one week we had our first welcome call set up. Within one month we had a working group established and had collectively agreed on a decision-making framework that we continue to operate from to this day. Within two months we solidified a structure that remains malleable to the changing needs of our collective. Within three months we held strategy sessions for branding, communications, and theory of change led by members of our working group. Within six months we launched a peer-reviewed Global Mapping Survey — the results of which will be fully released in mid-July 2021. And now at the one-year mark, our collective — still all volunteers, still BIPOC led, still peer-reviewed, still intentional, still anti-racist, still built and centered around collective care — is holding a week-long anniversary event full of urgent and overdue conversations, to mark this immense milestone.
In the past year our collective has held very difficult conversations around our own privilege, our biases, our intentions — we have felt the burden of this work multiple times over, we’ve felt the scrutiny of others who look at our collective as somehow not having the expertise to do this work. We’ve been hit with the reality that white-led racial equity initiatives and funder-led racial equity initiatives are easily funded and “believed in’’ while our deliberate and intentional approach is somehow too radical, too much for a sector that continues to harm BIPOC people on a daily basis.
In the past year, we’ve seen members of our collective struggle to find work while white executives who have caused so much harm in this sector, move from one bloated salaried executive position to another without any modicum of accountability or self-assessment. We’ve seen others in the sector continue to uplift these same people as “feminist leaders we should learn from” without acknowledging the massive gaslighting and racial trauma this promotes.
I’ve heard many times in the past year when talking about the work of our collective, “Uma, you can’t be so negative — you have to trust in the capacity for change.” I find this line of reasoning manipulative on many levels. Trust without self-accountability and acceptance of the fact that this sector does indeed have a problem is meaningless. White feminism would have us believe that through the simple push for gender equality we can achieve the amazing feminist ideals we are fighting for. For our collective — our positivity lies in the fact that we BELIEVE change is possible via accountability and reckoning with the immense work that needs to be done around racial equity. That positivity is what has continued to fuel our sweat equity.
The Racial Equity Index, was an idea that I initiated one year ago and through the work of 12 dedicated working group members and 6 amazing peer reviewers, we have built a collective that centers care and love for each other so that we can move through this very difficult work of building an index that is overdue and urgently needed in global development. We have built a space for each other where we can be heard, seen, listened to, where we can grieve, uplift each other, remind each other that we are not machines in white supremacist capitalism, where rest is vital and collective care is paramount. We have built a collective that is working to build an index for the very people that the global development sector continues to harm.
To all my colleagues at the Racial Equity Index — thank you for your love, commitment, voice, vision, community, and friendship. The Racial Equity Index is because of all of you — and we will, together, hold the global development sector accountable for the racism it was built to uphold.
With Love and In Community and Solidarity,
Uma
We Need to Talk: Talking Truth on Racial Equity in Global Development is a week-long event hosted by the Racial Equity Index on the one-year anniversary of the formation of our BIPOC-led Collective.
