How organisations undermine anti racism work, even while they’re doing it.

Written by Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg
August 2022

In the last two years at Hue, we’ve learnt a lot about the climate of anti-racism work with organisations. We’ve discovered patterns across organisations that we see again and again, that continue to undermine anti-racism work. These behaviours derail meaningful conversations, devalue people of colour and waste time and resources. Training and consulting is just money down the drain if it isn’t done meaningfully. We want to share with you five of the ways we see organisations undermining antiracism work, even when they’re doing it - so you can meaningfully invest in anti racism work. 

ONE: Not giving anti racism work the time it deserves and requires

Most of us are conditioned into the racist systems, ideologies, cultures and practices we participate in, over the course of our entire lives. For the people we work with, this can be upwards of 30, 40 or 50 years, for organisations it can be even longer! One workshop program at Hue, runs for 3 hours. If you engaged in all 5 of our programs (which few organisations do), you’d be participating in about 15 hours of training. That’s 15 hours, to unpack, debunk, unlearn and relearn the racism we have been taught over our entire lives. It’s indisputable that our facilitators have a colossal task, in a very tight time frame. Our facilitators do an incredible job not just at relaying information, but also holding space for fragility and defensiveness. Doing this in ways that are safer and trauma informed also takes time. 

So you can imagine our frustration, when we receive enquiries asking us to condense our training programs to 45-60 minutes. 

This happens far more often than you might think. Organisations often have tight budgets and timelines for this kind of work. Sometimes they want to slot you in during a packed training week or for a particular event. But when we receive these requests, they tell us that this work is not a priority, and that the organisation doesn’t understand the investment that is required to do anti racism work meaningfully.

Image Credit: Lexy Potts

TWO: Booking anti racism training as a reaction to internal racism issues

For many organisations, the decision to tackle racism arises at a crisis point. While it’s disappointing that this is the case, it’s also very common. Many organisations don’t realise racism is an issue at their organisation until someone makes a complaint, someone experiences harm, or the political climate makes it impossible to ignore (requests for workshops increased by about 500% during the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement and media coverage and contributed significantly to our growth). 

While asking for help when these issues arise is appropriate, this environment is not ideal for meaningful antiracism work. 

The best environments for growth are where people feel safe, supported and have strong trust established. They’re workplaces with strong communication practices, a thirst for feedback and meaningful relationships. When an organisation is booking a workshop in reaction to racism issues, they are already flagging a breakdown in organisational culture that is not a fertile foundation for growth. This distrust is often projected onto Hue, our facilitators and consultants. 

Furthermore, some organisations look to Hue’s workshops and consulting as a band-aid or one stop solution to these issues of racism in their organisation. In reality, this work is deep culture work that calls on all areas of the organisation like policy, HR, recruitment, senior leadership and board level decision making, and our workshops are just the starting point.

THREE: Unwillingness to change their whiteness workplace culture

Whenever organisations are embarking on antiracism work, they have a major challenge they are contending with: Whiteness Workplace Culture. Whiteness Workplace Culture is the dominant culture we see reflected in our colonial society, and in our workplaces. This culture can derail even the most well meaning efforts towards racial justice and can manifest in a range of ways.

Cultural traits like ‘Sense of Urgency’ and ‘Quantity over Quality’ will often rush antiracism efforts and make them less meaningful. Many organisations we’ve been working with have insisted on major hiring efforts or embarking on strategic planning mid way through consultation work, rushing before they can draw on the learnings and recommendations.

Similarly, traits like ‘Worship of the Written Word’ and ‘Only One Right Way’ can make their ways of working rigid and inflexible. This can make organisations unwilling to try more collaborative, inclusive or creative approaches to their work - approaches that often facilitate the participation of marginalised people.  

Image Credit: Rio Withall

FOUR: Insisting staff look at the strengths of the organisation, rather than interrogating the ‘problems’

The work of reflecting on and interrogating our organisational practices can be challenging. We all have work to do to manage our defensive response when we are told our behaviour or practices might be harmful, but we need to ensure that our desire for comfort and our defensiveness (also traits of whiteness culture!) don’t pull us away from interrogating the issues. We notice this particularly from senior leadership in workshops and when consulting on organisational culture. 

We’ve been in multiple workshops and conversations with different organisations, where fruitful discussion about organisational issues have been interrupted by (white) CEOs, who’ve asked the team to “not just focus on the problems” and “remember all the great things about their organisation’s culture / purpose”. As well meaning as these notions might be, they derail team momentum and distract from important conversations about what can be changed. Identifying issues in your organisation is not inherently negative. Identifying issues is the start of all growth, and when organisations limit this, they limit their opportunities for transformation.

FIVE: Ignoring insights from staff, and then ignoring insights from consultants 

While Hue provides expert anti racism educators and consultants to deliver our training and consulting work, we don’t believe the knowledge and experience held on our team is totally unique. Often organisations may have this expertise among their staff and what is actually lacking is the organisation’s willingness to listen, and take meaningful action based on their staff of colour’s experiences. 

I have been in meetings with entirely white boards, who have paid us tens of thousands of dollars to analyse and report the issues in their organisation, who have shouted us down at the claim that racism is present in their organisation - arguing with us about information that their staff of colour had already been reporting for years. 

This resistance to change is an issue, no matter how many workshops or consultants you pay for. Real movement towards racial justice starts with a genuine commitment to change.

While these challenges have been frustrating they are not surprising. Many people on our team have come from these organisations and experienced first hand the uphill battle of working towards antiracist organisational change. But we are doing this work because we believe in it so we want to see it get done right. 

What we need is organisations who are fully committed to making change happen, and who are willing to invest the time and resources needed to do so. We need leadership with a hunger for growth, who are not afraid of radical change, even when it means relinquishing power and control. We need deep listening and reflection at all levels of our organisations, who are not afraid to sit in discomfort, acknowledge harm, and take accountability. I hope that we can see more of these things going forward so that organisations can embark on change, and make it happen.

Click here to learn more about the Hue team.