Learning To Be An Antiracist: Part 1

Let me start by saying that I don't fully understand what it means to be an antiracist. However, I believe that people of color are disproportionally disadvantaged in many ways and that efforts to protect the status quo tend to lock in those inequities. I'm making a commitment to learn more and hopefully take some actions that will make a difference.

This is the first of many posts where I plan to share highlights from my journey.

I thought that I was one of the good guys. I grew up with a very diverse set of friends and was very confident that I've never been a racist. What I am just recognizing is that my comfort with "not being a racist" is in fact part of the problem. This point of view allows me to ignore, and therefore reinforces, my disproportionate privileges of being a white male. So I've recognized that I need to do more.

I'm part of a discussion group at Qualtrics, where five of us get together weekly to cover an antiracism curriculum that is also being used by similar groups across the company. This process provides a venue for us to explore this difficult topic with our colleagues. None of us are people of color, but we all share a desire to learn new concepts and to unlearn some old ones.

At today's discussion we went a little off script and looked at this video that was brought up by a member of our group. It does a great job of showing the crushing power of institutional disadvantages.

We discussed applying the metaphor of this race to corporate opportunities. Even if you recruit more people of color to a predominantly white company (which is like bringing more to the starting line of the race), they will continue to lose. You have to change how the organization operates in order to provide a more equal playing field. Recruiting alone is not the answer.

So what needs to be done? Like many of our discussions, we don't know the answer. So I'll just pose it as a question and see if people want to share their ideas:

How do you change an organization so that more people of color can win?

Part of the solution is for more of us to openly discuss these types of questions.

One of the other things that I'm doing is offering to coach some #XM professionals of color. I've already had some pushback from people who think that my decision to only coach people of color is in fact, racist. I expected this type of reaction, and might have felt a little bit that way before I started on this journey.

That's all for this first post. I hope that you found it valuable in some way.