3 Questions to Answer Before Trying to Address Racism Around You

The following is adapted from What About Me.

If you had a pipe leaking under your sink, would you put a bucket under it and declare it fixed? Of course not. You’d find a YouTube tutorial or call a plumber, and you’d stop the leak at the source.

Yet all too often, this is exactly what people do when trying to address racism. They jump into action before they’re ready, latching onto the easy “solutions.” A company promotes one Black person without revamping the underlying hiring and promoting practices to ensure diversity at all levels of the organization. The government provides food stamps without enacting policies to correct racial income inequality. 

People like easy solutions because it makes them feel like they’ve done their part. They can metaphorically check off the box and move on. They haven’t actually addressed the problem, though. They’ve just placed a bucket under the leak. The real work of addressing racism is longer, and it’s harder. 

If you want to effectively address racism and discrimination at work, in your personal life, and online, make sure you can answer these three questions before you act.

#1: Do You Understand the Problem?

I understand the temptation to jump immediately to solutions—when something is broken, we want to fix it. But until you have a deep understanding of the problem, your solutions will not be as effective as they could be, and they might even do more harm than good. Therefore, education must be your first step. 

Facts are always needed to solve problems. Just look at algebra, calculus, chemistry, and physics. These fields help us solve very complex problems in today’s world in every aspect of life. Yet in order to arrive at these solutions, we first have to agree upon and understand certain sets of facts, whether it’s that pi equals 3.14159265359 or water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit and boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. 

The same is true with racism and discrimination. These are very hard problems to solve, and we need to start from a foundation of facts and history in order to make strides toward a solution. You may not like what you find and what the results show, but that is all a part of truly understanding the problem and finding the right solutions.

Most people are oblivious to the full history and realities of racism. By focusing on facts, you can begin to better understand the problem, seeing the ways racism has evolved over the years and been embedded systemically in our country. From that lens, you can then begin opening up a dialogue with people of different races, allowing an even deeper understanding of the problem.

With this understanding, you’ll be better equipped to find solutions that will make a real, lasting difference.

#2: Have You Built Trust and Allowed Time for Healing?

To properly address racism and discrimination, we need to collaborate. Before that can happen, we must build trust and allow time for healing. 

We all like results, but you can’t expect quick solutions when dealing with racism and discrimination. The wounds of racism are deep and have built up over many years. 

Simply put, racism is trauma. All racism is trauma. If a Black man has a gun pulled on him in a routine traffic stop, it’s clearly traumatic, but subtle racism, like microaggressions, is also traumatic, because it’s cumulative. If someone told a Latina woman, “You’re smarter than I expected,” or asked whether she was “legal” only one time, the wound would be easier to heal. But it happens again and again, and the wound gets deeper and deeper each time.

In addressing racism, it’s not just about preventing further wounding (though that is of course important). You must allow time for the past wounds to heal.

You must also work to build trust. It requires vulnerability for people of color to open up about their experiences, feelings, and perspectives. In all likelihood, they have previously faced retaliation for doing so. People they thought were friends may have turned on them, or they may have been labeled as “difficult,” leading to an unwelcoming work environment and making it hard to move ahead in their careers.

As a result, it will take time for them to open up. Be patient, and respect and appreciate the vulnerability they show you. Work to create a safe environment, so that trust and healing can take place.

#3: What’s Your Plan?

Once you understand the problem on a nuanced level and have allowed time for trust and healing, you can begin to find real, effective solutions. However, you’re not going to get far without a solid plan. Remember that there are no one-time solutions to racism. You need to engage in forward-thinking, long-term action planning.

The action you take will vary depending on the situation, but the foundational goal is to answer the question, “How do we come together to make this world better?”

Think both big and small. Having small, actionable steps will let you make steady wins and keep you from being overwhelmed, but larger changes are needed as well. 

If you’re feeling lost, think about questions like this:

• How do I engage more in the fight against racism?
• How can I make my neighborhood more welcoming to people of color?
• How can my company increase diversity and inclusion?
• What systemic structures do we need to change—from housing, to education, to banking, to the criminal justice system—to further equality? 

Answering these questions and planning a course of action need to be collaborative activities. Make sure to engage in conversations across racial lines, and focus on listening. But don’t expect people of color to simply tell you what to do. Racism is not a minority problem; it’s our problem. We must work together to find the right solutions.

Take Action

History tells us that nothing good can come from racism. Racism ruins countries, destroys families, destroys people, and destroys hope. Racism has always existed and had a horrifying effect. 

The time to act was a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, and right now today. But taking action doesn’t mean jumping to the easy solutions. It means doing the real, hard work that is necessary to create lasting change.

We’re not going to fix racism and discrimination overnight. Understanding, trust, and healing are long-term pursuits, and we must constantly be coming up with new solutions and plans of action. We will need to continue acting a month from now, a year from now, ten years from now. 

Yet with a continual commitment to long-term, institutionalized changes, we can make the world a little better, one step and one day at a time.

For more information on how to better understand and address racism, you can find What About Me on Amazon.

D. John Jackson is a Fortune 50 leader with global responsibilities that include strategic planning, engineering, data science, and artificial intelligence. A creative visionary, he’s an executive producer of documentary films, an author, a strategist, a futurist thinker, a lecturer, and a motivational speaker. His speaking topics are diverse and range from leadership and world history to emerging technologies, economics, and competition in the global marketplace. He is also the founder of 5J Entertainment, a company committed to educating, informing, entertaining, and promoting positive images of African Americans through various forms of media. Its first film documentary, What About Me, explores the untold, unheard, distorted, and misunderstood stories of Black men in America. Learn more at https://5J-Entertainment.com/.