I certainly don’t want to compare or prioritize collective trauma and oppression. Truth #4 – Gender and race discrimination are not “essentially the same.”
#Workplace xt image viewer pro render image issues how to#
You Probably Need More Friends-Here’s How To Make Them Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Why Are All The Black Kids Siting Together In The Cafeteria: And Other Conversations About Race. For more on the psychology of self-segregation, consider reading Dr. I actually think it’s fairly natural for humans to seek out others with similar experiences and backgrounds (which is the premise behind many corporate Employee Resource Groups), but I do think that we often need to make more of an effort than we might think to truly develop friendships in the workplace with those who don’t look like us. This in and of itself is a pretty normal process and not at all problematic in my view, but I think it’s a very tangible demonstration of the fact that working on a task or participating on a team with someone doesn’t necessarily make you “friends.” To be clear, I’m not suggesting that there’s a correlation between the number of black friends a white person has and their likelihood to be racist (or anti-racist for that matter), but I do think that oftentimes workplaces can give us all a false sense of security in terms of how diverse or racially balanced our lives actually are. People will tend to self-select into groups where they feel most comfortable and at ease, and for black employees this often means huddling or chatting with other black employees.
break room discussions, lunch rooms, conference socializing, drinks after work). The truth is that many workplaces are “socially segregated” meaning work projects and teams may look pretty diverse, but an interesting thing often happens once focus shifts from work to social time (e.g. While genuine friendships that cross racial lines absolutely develop in the workplace (thankfully), there seems to be a tendency for white people in particular to misinterpret work or project specific affiliation with broader friendship with black colleagues. Truth #3 – Every black person on your team is not your “friend.”
The truth is that if just one of those other three officers had decided to act, George Floyd would likely be alive today. Kendi insists, “There’s no such thing as being ‘ not racist.’ We are either being racist or antiracist.” In business parlance, I like to say that you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. My previous article, “Dear White People: Here Are 10 Actions You Can Take To Promote Racial Justice In Your Workplace” concludes with the Martin Luther King quote, “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Arguably, the bigger threat for racial justice in the workplace isn’t the rampant, overt racist who is more likely to be an obvious, easily detected “enemy”, but instead the more likeable workplace “friend” who just chooses to look the other way, not get involved or rationalize inappropriate behavior or unjust systems or processes (“Well, we’ve always done it that way.”) As executive director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center Ibram X. Truth #2 – Even if you personally haven’t offended anyone (that you know of), you may indeed be part of the problem. So in this vein I’m sharing five critical “truths” that I feel many black people in corporate settings would vehemently discuss in “private” but not necessarily assert in “public.” To be perfectly honest, as a black woman who has worked in and around corporate America for nearly 30 years, I’ve typically only been privy to the black side of the conversation, but I think in this moment where everyone is looking for opportunities to either teach, learn or grow, it’s instructive if not necessary to break down the traditional siloes and speak the unspeakable. The baseline uncomfortable truth is that blacks and whites in corporate America often maintain their own subcultures – including very different informal conversations in the workplace - with surprisingly little overlap at times. While no one has a precise prescription for how to eradicate racial injustice in the workplace, I firmly believe that a critical first step is embracing the difficult conversations and uncomfortable truths that we’ve become too accustomed to avoiding.
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