Racial Microaggression

Why organizations are failing to retain Black (ACI) employees.

Microaggression is a fancy name for Covert Racism coined by psychiatrist Dr Chester Pierce in the 1970s. Because as always, marginalized groups need to create more palatable terms to even start the conversation to hopefully address unfair treatment.

The textbook definition of Microaggression is “an indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group”. By adding unintentional, its easier to excuse the behaviour and thus forcing the receiver to somewhat negate their experience for the sake of peace.

Some examples of how this show up, even in the workplace:

• “No-Coup-Lew-Lay-Koo” (Nonkululeko) “Ohh gosh your name is too hard to pronounce, can I just call you K or something”

And some personal favourites from lived experience:

• “Wow you speak so well”
• “So how often do you wash your hair…. Can I touch it”
• “Back in the days …. Nowadays with this government”
• "But your people....." - trust me, anything that comes after this is an incoherent mess.

Two weeks ago, a white colleague meeting a black CFO for the 1st time – asked if they were the PA to the CEO. Honest mistake, right?

Same person in trying to address the disparity in performance ratings between White & Black employees (In the South African labour law context: Black = African, Coloured, Indian) responded with: We need to focus on developing them.

Nonetheless, the behaviour can be and is often shrugged off (to protect one’s mental health and not be labelled as “sensitive” or the new pervasive term: Angry Black). ?However, we cannot be indifferent to the day-to-day torment and the underlying impact on the progress of marginalized groups within these structures.? When leaders allow for such utterances to continue, it does not only foster but also embeds a culture of institutionalised racism.

To paraphrase, Institutionalized Racism is a failure of an organization to detect the processes, attitudes and behaviours that amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotypes that disadvantage already marginalized groups.

The impact in the workplace:

Regardless of the industry, unless an organization can operate without any human intervention, People Matter (Strategy). Most (to some degree – All) organizations offer a homogeneous product, and the differentiator is Service. In other words, your competitive advantage is quite literally your people, and their level of engagement has a direct impact on your company’s growth (Culture&Engagement). Plus: the cost of recruitment due to turnover added to the average tenure of your workforce means you are spending more time recruiting and training new people versus driving your strategy.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (Transformation) – this cannot only be viewed from an Employment Equity numbers game but touches across an organisation's Way of Work especially with Digital Disruption. If an organisation has an expectation that everyone must Assimilate to the status quo – you will be the next business case study such as Kodak & Blockbusters.