Talking About… Performative Allyship, part 2: At Work
By: Maggie Knoke
Tags: Talking About, Anti Racism

image by S. Parikh on Canva

In today’s conversation, Maggie and Sarita talk about how they’ve seen performative allyship show up at work. This conversation is from mid-June, 2020.

Maggie: We’ve been talking about performative allyship. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, there was a rush from many companies to put out statements or supportive tweets, but a lot of folks are asking if there is substance below those statements.

Combined, we have four decades of corporate experience, and anyone in corporate has heard forever that quote often attributed to Peter Drucker, “What gets measured gets managed.” We know a lot of companies haven’t been measuring or managing their approach to diversity, inclusion and equity at all. (Let alone measuring how they deal with “anti-racism”… that term certainly hasn’t been corporate-speak.)

Sarita: From the first time we sit in a cubicle, at age 22 or whatever it is, we see the standard corporate response to large-scale injustice. The pattern is: 1. A heartfelt response from the top execs, 2. followed by all-employee emails and town halls, maybe listening sessions and a new ERG, 3. followed by the inevitable fade into the status quo.

Maggie: That happens so often after a horrific event, like this murder. (Unless the company has an aversion to openly talking about race and they stay completely silent.) We see a lot of leaders hand-wringing and, “I don’t know what to dooooo.” Ensuring they’re seen in the act of caring.

Performative allyship is also often one or a few very surface-level actions, isolated from company policy or ongoing business practices. Like publishing a statement with a nice graphic put out by the marketing team, then a return to light indifference. There’s been a lot of dialog lately on LInkedIn and Instagram about that kind of isolated action.

The difference here in June 2020 is that there’s no sugarcoating happening anymore. Folks are calling out. “Oh, that’s a nice graphic you’ve put out, but show me the diversity makeup of your board members and your top 200 vice presidents. Let us know what your white executives really think; don’t task the one or two Black executives with the added job of being a spokesperson.”

“Show me your retention metrics and your promotion and career-growth metrics. For Black and Indigenous and other people of color categories, LGBTQ.” A lot of companies don’t have the metrics to back it up. That needs to change. You’d think it would change rapidly at this point, given the critical mass public dialog on the subject. But it’s easy for me to say that because I’m not in the executive suite trying to drive the change. I’ve got a friend who’s head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in a Fortune top 50 company, and she’s dealing with intensely resistant senior executives in departments like HR, departments we expect to be very open to driving true anti-racist change. Still resistant even now, right after George Floyd and the protests and the uprisings nationally.

Sarita: I see so many parallels between that and gender equity. Equity metrics on leadership, economic opportunity, politics, education. We know this. Everyone’s heard this. But despite how much attention equity and inclusion gets, the pace of change has been slow. Based on the current trends, there won’t be gender equality for at least a hundred years.

Maggie: Ridiculously slow!

Sarita: I had a conversation about racial equity in the workplace with my husband and another close friend of ours; both are male and white. They are both successful corporate people, and both took a measured, objective approach toward the topic of diversity and inclusion at work.

All three of us are engineers by training, so of course the conversations went toward the root causes of racial inequity at work. Side note — if an engineer talks about a problem, he or she will always explore the root cause. And the biggest root cause, they believe, is with education. That it takes time to develop opportunities and it takes time to develop the workforce.

They are both system thinkers. Their point was that this kind of cultural change needs continuous improvement. Anything that involves people and behavior change, change in a positive direction, is almost always through small incremental change. Their key point was that we need to focus on the education pipeline, we need to focus on the root issues of racism, and this takes time.

So, here is where I struggle: Here are two people, both of whom I deeply respect. There is nobody whose perspective I find more objective and open-minded than my husband’s. But as I listened to them talk about education and opportunity, I thought, “That’s something comfortable for you to say, because you aren’t directly impacted. Your life doesn’t change. But if you are someone impacted by it, the idea of waiting for small incremental change that might take generations, well that doesn’t feel good at all.” I voiced that perspective, and of course, they were open to it and took it to heart, because that’s who they are.

It does make me wonder if this distanced, almost academic approach is where some of the workplace reluctance to deal with race head-on comes from. It is a deeply entrenched cultural problem. It is true that inequity starts at birth and carries through education and opportunities. When I put on my objective-look-at-the-root-causes-systems-thinking hat, I think yes, “Correct, I get that.”

But then I put on the human-who-wants-fairness-now hat and I’m thinking, “This CAN’T be okay. It can’t be okay that Boardrooms look the way they look. It can’t be okay that my coffee mug with pictures of the American presidents looks the way it looks.”

I say all that because I can imagine these conversations are really hard at the top-most executive levels. Even believing that something meaningful and effective can be done, is hard.

Maggie: Sounds like you’re very willing to lean in and understand others’ point of view and to confront these difficult questions directly.

You described barriers that became clear in the conversation, like the time needed for incremental change, and the seeming trade-off between addressing entrenched root-causes vs getting swift results. What are the ways we can start to reframe or approach those barriers and tradeoffs?

It’s part of the work of being open and learning, to get ourselves to a place where we can reframe. I wonder if there’s a benefit of processing, of figuring out how you want to reframe, that you might be getting in your conversations with your husband and executive friend. Certainly they are probably getting a benefit from you!

I want to note, it’s particularly important for white people, affluent people, or really anybody who cares about this conversation, when processing out loud to do this with other white or affluent people so that we’re not putting the burden on educating us onto Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, poor folks. Because we’re always putting that burden onto folks to educate us about the ways we’re oppressing them.

Sarita: I know I need to do a much better job about understanding my own unconscious biases and how they show up in social norms and workplace norms. I don’t know my blind spots. Learning different perspectives is so helpful. One thing I’ve also tried to understand is what it feels like to be white while all of this is happening. Trying to understand the idea that “all lives matter” is a response to Black Lives Matter. I want to understand more deeply, because I’ve been on both sides, too. I’ve been a propagator of racism — both deliberate and unintentional, and I’ve been the recipient of deliberate and unintentional racism.

Maggie: Both of those things can be true simultaneously. I’ve got a white friend who posted on social media acknowledging this about herself. And Ibram X. Kendi, in How to Be an Antiracist, digs into the very same thing, that he has perpetuated racism and at the same time obviously he’s experienced racism.

We can all move to choose to perpetuate anti-racism instead of perpetuating racism, and to support and put into practice anti-racist policies instead of racist policies. But it takes mindfulness, effort, paying attention, and then choosing to act with intention.

Sarita: Questioning those unconscious biases, interrupting them when we find them in ourselves, that kind of stuff.

Next time we talk, Let’s dig further into what substantive allyship and anti-racism at work looks like.