America’s Racial Miasma
By Matthew C. Whitaker, Ph.D.
"Inspiring, Achieving and Celebrating Inclusion"
“We must balance our need to get as many white people on the racial justice freeway as possible with the need for drivers to be safe and skilled. Untrained, unlicensed drivers do a lot of damage. Unfortunately, it is all too common for white people to act as though a minimal amount of consciousness equals sufficient expertise for successful action. A sense of overconfidence mixed with lingering white fragility makes for a dangerous situation. Whether the feedback is coming from other white anti-racists or people of color, it is essential that we listen deeply to messages that we are causing harm and then seek additional learning so we can improve our engagement. This kind of license require continual renewal.” – stochluk
I have applied for, been hired to, and created positions and offices charged with, advancing equitable and inclusive environments. I have conducted training with law enforcement, students, educators, c-suite executives, large employee pools, non-profit leaders, faith-based groups and college and professional athletes. Each group, particularly those looking to hire inclusively, place a premium on “building trust,” and finding the right” persons. These individuals are usually White women or persons of color (POC).
Great rhetorical efforts are made to assure applicants that most predominantly White hiring authorities are “affirmative action” and/or “equal opportunity employers." More informed and politically astute institutions will describe themselves as "equitable." Diversity is the mix, inclusion is making the mix work, and equity is making the mix just. Often, however, White leaders and hiring personnel are the bucks that stop the DEI needle from advancing. Time and again, White leaders make safe hires as opposed to the right ones. DEI work, however, is anything but safe. It is disruptive by nature. In fact, opposition to DEI hires and initiatives lie in wait even before associated mission statement and job posting are written. The question is not if, but when and how, the enraged birds will sing.
To mute these voices, White authorities often search for acceptable POC, especially when hiring Black people, to mitigate resistance to DEI through acceptability optics and politics. Indeed, the hire cannot be too "intimidating" or “polarizing.” Obsequious and accommodating is preferred, and "team players" (silent and affirming), are always optimal. Black job candidates and employees, therefore, have to, as Dina Gerdemen writes, "whiten" their resumes and behaviors. Black applicants "tone down mentions of race" and racial organizations. Some "bleach out this information" to avoid "coming across as politically radical or tied to racially controversial causes. 'People...want to have an awesome black worker but they want one who fits within a certain box and will conform and lay low,” a black college senior said. Black people are suffocated under the weight of low and unattainable expectations. We “can’t breathe” metaphorically (the asphyxiation of our spirits), and literally, when we step into our offices and the streets.
Anti-Black ideas and feelings are often subconscious, but their nefarious effects are the handmaidens of disingenuous DEI efforts. They conceal a shallow desire to de-center White worldviews and voices, while pretending to spotlight and uplift those of POC. These acceptability politics are a thermostat for White sensibilities and a form of racial quality control. Many White leaders want the legal protection and social cache of having E&I initiatives but prefer to keep everything room temperature. While most White leaders are methodical, political, cool and comfortable, however, POC and their most passionate allies are feverish with frustration. POC understand gradualism, as they have been waiting for equity five hundred years. They are presently, as a result, committed to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “fierce urgency of now.” When their problems are not given high priority and just treatment, they under-perform, washout, and rage in a cathartic haze in the streets, as captured in the recent and ongoing George-Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks protest from Minneapolis to Madrid.
The maddening reality is that White leaders often abandon and abuse melanated groups when our political temperatures rise, when the burdens of being people of color—dealing with White fragility, micro-aggressions, political pushback, and outright hostility and violence—seek to discredit, undermine, obstruct, dilute or destroy individuals and movements. These are perhaps the most benign responses. Many White leaders will also go from channeling John Brown to Jefferson Davis, when powerful oppositional forces flex their muscles. The former does this, in part, because they were not qualified to lead POC in the first place. Their relation to the DEI, and its leaders, is usually transactional, not relational. It certainly was not cultural, and our cultures, like our lives, matter.
Now by qualified, I am not simply referring to pedigree. I am alluding to education and training, as well as race, cultural background, and personal and professional relationships. Most White leaders, including equity and inclusion hiring authorities, have the requisite degrees and titles. Often the most “progressive” among them, however, have never had deep and abiding, let alone compassionate, respectful, loving, and loyal relationships with POC. POC often think communally. We tend to see our shared past, present, and future, in the faces of each job candidate, colleague, student, customer, comrade in custody, and each equity and inclusion effort. These are not “jobs,” “interactions,” and budget items for POC, they are matters of life and death. African American leadership and excellence in particular, therefore, when emancipated from White fears, fragility, micro-management, and withdrawal, is among the most authentic an inspirational on earth.
We generally evaluate everyone and everything with a critical eye, but we also realize that no person of color comes to us personally and professionally unscathed by Whiteness and racism. Every Google search is taken with a grain of salt—a pound of it if you have been a Black, Brown or Indigenous in some states and locales. In other words, POC are not merely names on paper, candidates without context, employees without community, and residents without rank. They are racial change agents, no matter their station, in one of the most racially retaliatory times in recent history. If you, as a White supervisor, are not aware of this, and are not prepared to listen and lead accordingly, you are not qualified to lead POC. You are not qualified to lead POC if you will not allow them to breathe, feel, speak, and do what they were hired to do. The key here, is that White leaders must be willing to surrender to the cultural and moral authority of POC, on matters of race, if they want to lead POC.
Our experiences must be contextualized. Our accomplishments must not be minimized. Our knowledge is not “condescension,” and our confidence is not “arrogance.” If White people want to lead POC, they must see us, trust us, defer to us, and know that their high school teammates, college buddies, ethnic studies, Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates reading groups, and graduate degrees in DEI, do not qualify them to be arbiters of our issues and advancement. To be qualified to lead POC, White people must first know and accept that they are not.
Failure to accept this truth will hasten the undoing of our institutions and society. POC are already numerical majorities in many locales. By 2050 or sooner, they will outnumber White people nationally. This means that the fortunes of predominantly White institutions, the quality of White lives, and the future of the United States, is inextricably linked to White people’s ability to share power, and develop the individual, familial, and systemic capacity to adapt to our cultures and, when necessary, especially in the area of race work, be led by POC.
Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker is the Founder and CEO of the Diamond Strategies, LLC (DSC). He is also the AGC Collectors of Arizona 2020 Frederick Douglass Equity and Justice Award winner, and the 2016 Arizona Diversity Leadership Alliance (DLA) Diversity and Inclusion Leader Award winner. Whitaker is a decorated educator, author, community engagement specialist, motivational speaker, and founding director of the Office of Equity and Inclusion at Brophy College Preparatory, and the founder of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, winner of the 2014 DLA Inclusive Workplace Award, at Arizona State University. He can be followed on Twitter at @Dr_Whitaker and DSC can be followed on Twitter at @dstategiesllc.
Source: The term racial “miasma” was introduced by Ancella B. Livers and Keith A. Caver in Leading in Black and White: Working Across the Racial Divide in Corporate America. (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2002).
Images: iStock, DreamsTime, WorldReports and John Minchillo AP.
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