How to Talk to Your Boss About Race: Speaking Up Without Getting Shut Down - Hardcover

Hutchinson, Y-Vonne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593418093 ISBN 13: 9780593418093

Verlag: Portfolio, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

An indispensable practical toolkit for dismantling racism in the workplace without fear

Reporting and personal testimonials have exposed racism in every institution in this country. But knowing that racism exists isn’t nearly enough. Social media posts about #BlackLivesMatter are nice, but how do you push leadership towards real anti-racist action?

Diversity and inclusion strategist Y-Vonne Hutchinson helps tech giants, political leaders, and Fortune 500 companies speak more productively about racism and bias and turn talk into action. In this clear and accessible guide, Hutchinson equips employees with a framework to think about race at work, prepares them to have frank and effective conversations with more powerful leaders, helps them center marginalized perspectives, and explains how to leverage power dynamics to get results while navigating backlash and gaslighting.
 
How to Talk To Your Boss About Race is a crucial handbook to moving beyond fear to push for change. No matter how much formal power you have, you can create antiracist change at work.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Y-Vonne Hutchinson is the CEO and founder of ReadySet, one of the country’s leading diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting firms. Through ReadySet, she partners with Fortune 500 companies, tech firms, universities, government bodies, political leaders, sports teams, and entertainment and media giants to increase representation, reimagine their culture, and optimize their impact. Prior to launching ReadySet, she worked as an international labor and human rights lawyer for nearly a decade. When she’s not thinking about racism, she can be found watching a bad action movie, planning her next trip, or struggling to bake the perfect Southern biscuit.

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1. Reading the Room

 

 

Spotting the Signs of Racism

 

Language is a challenge when it comes to the words we use to describe race and racism. It's constantly evolving to become more specific, expansive, and inclusive. It's also constantly being co-opted or weaponized to undermine its effectiveness.

 

Just look at what happened to the word "woke." The word comes from the phrase "Stay woke," a longtime rallying cry of the Black American civil rights movement. That cry was a reminder to Black Americans to remain aware of the injustices they faced and the dangers posed by White people. It was a warning against complacency during a time when complacency could mean death.

 

Consider the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

 

There are all too many people who, in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in our world today. It is a social revolution, sweeping away the old order of colonialism. And in our own nation it is sweeping away the old order of slavery and racial segregation. . . . And so we see in our own world a revolution of rising expectations. The great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake through this social revolution.

 

Appropriately, the phrase "Stay woke" reappeared in 2014 as Black death started to fill our Twitter timelines and Black citizens took to the streets in Ferguson, Missouri. It became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement, and the hashtag #staywoke encouraged people to pay attention to the atrocities happening in Ferguson and the larger specter of impunity for officers who killed Black people.

 

After being featured in popular music and film, the term eventually entered the mainstream and, of course, became the source of political backlash. "Woke" became a shorthand critique of performative allyship, or just of people who were annoyingly insistent about those pesky civil rights. Today, if we're not careful, we can be tricked into engaging with "wokeness" solely on those negative terms, instead of striving for it as Dr. King asked us to.

 

Language is fluid. It evolves, gets appropriated, gets weaponized, is reclaimed, and on and on. Nowhere is this more true than with words and ideas that have been politicized.

 

With that caveat, I thought it best to start with a primer, introducing language and clarifying some of the concepts I utilize when I talk about race today.

 

What Is Race?

 

Before we define racism, we should first define race.

 

It would be fair to say that when it comes to defining the word "race," I am not sure how exactly to do that. It would be fairer to say that I have been wrestling with this question most of my life and I still feel like I come up short.

 

I know race is the thing that made all of the difference. I know it is often the first aspect of my identity that people refer to when they describe me. I know it helps me create community with some and puts me in danger with others. It is my hair, my skin, my butt, my nose, the origins of my ancestors, our history. That much I know

 

I also know I learned I was Black in first grade.

 

That year, my mother pulled me out of my small Christian private school and put me into public school. Prior to that transition, I had been sheltered (though not in the way that you might think). My private school was incredibly diverse. My mother was a substitute teacher there. I never had cause to interrogate my identity or focus on my racial difference, because no one else did either. Not so in my all-White public school, where I both stuck out like a sore thumb and seemed invisible at the same time.

 

I struggled to understand why things at the school I was so excited to attend felt so different . . . so much worse.

 

A boy named Scott helped me solve that mystery. We were on the playground doing some activity that required us to hold hands. Scott refused to hold mine because I was Black. I tried not to cry. The teacher pretended not to see. And that was the day I learned what Blackness meant.

 

Today, I very much know I'm Black. I'm a girl who will never pass. I'm Blackity Black Black. Society told me I was Black. My parents made sure I never forgot it. But that knowledge wasn't inherent. I wasn't born knowing it. Sure, when I was younger, I knew I was different from my White classmates. I knew my skin was darker and my hair was kinkier, just as I knew some of us had brown eyes and some of us had blue eyes. I just didn't know it was a thing that couldn't be ignored. That race was the difference that mattered. It was something that I had to be taught to see. I had to be told I was Black. I had to be taught what that meant, told the ways in which it would impact my life. Schooled on how to survive it. Admonished when I wasn't performing it correctly.

 

I was born knowing my father, my mother, our family, our culture. But that's different from race. Race is in the eye of the beholder. My racial identity was constructed by those around me-their reaction to me and treatment of me, and my reaction to that. My Blackness isn't static. In some countries, like Ghana, Uganda, or Nigeria, where everyone is "Black," it doesn't exist at all, or at least not in the same way it does in the United States. Blackness is relative. Race is relative, which makes it hard for me to say definitively what it is.

 

Luckily, smarter, far more eloquent people than I have taken a stab at defining this elusive concept.

 

In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi writes that race is "a power construct of blended difference that lives socially." According to Kendi, our science, policies, ideas, and cultures animate and solidify race. Reflecting back on its original function-to justify the trading of enslaved people-he argues that race leverages difference to categorize, elevate, and exclude, all in the pursuit of power.

 

The elusiveness and subjectivity of race is a powerful mirage, writes Kendi, made up of the images that we have of ourselves and the images that others have of us, but not actually rooted in what really is there.

 

Kendi and other thinkers are not alone in emphasizing the social construction of race. Geneticists agree; many insist that race is a poor marker for the relationship between ancestry and genetics. For instance, there are more genetic similarities between some West Africans and Europeans than between West Africans and East Africans. And there is no single genetic variant that separates all Africans from all Europeans.

 

Because racial difference isn't itself a fact rooted in biology, there is a school of avoidant thought that says it doesn't exist, and therefore we should all ignore it so it goes away. But this is too simplistic. Race is real because we feel its effects. It affects our economic security, our physical health, our psychological well-being, and even our life span. That difference, the difference of impact, can't be ignored.

 

A quick note on how to refer to your fellow human beings. For some people this may be the hardest part of the conversation. What do people like to be called these days? As I said earlier, language is a moving target, but here's where I land. Generally, I call people of African descent-whether descended from enslaved people or not-"Black" with a capital "B." "Black" is always used as an adjective ("Black people"), never a noun...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593418093
• ISBN 13: 9780593418093
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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