How to become an anti-racist leader

What’s exciting about this course, is that it’s held in an environment where we recognize that most people are going to be at the beginning level of understanding what it means to even be an anti-racist. The idea of anti-racism is a pretty new concept. A lot of people that I’ve spoken with who are my clients or my students say, “I’m not racist. I’m a non-racist.”

However, that’s actually different from being an anti-racist. A non-racist is passive. It’s maybe recognizing that there is a problem with racial injustice or lack of racial inclusion, but without speaking out or taking action. Being hush-hush actually isn’t neutral; it works to uphold the systems as they are.

On the other hand, anti-racism is about action. It’s understanding that there are problems of racial injustice and inequities in your workplace and you must actively work to create a more equitable and inclusive space.

While the term anti-racism is gaining more traction today through renewed interest in books like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti Racist and other bestsellers like Me And White Supremacy, this course is not a book club or a repeat of these books but it is complementary to them.

The guiding questions we’ll be exploring over our four-week course are:

1. What does it mean to be non-racist vs. anti-racist?
2. How is ‘equity’ (vs. equality) a better model for antiracism?
3. How do race-neutral or non-racist frameworks promote exclusion?
4. How do I begin integrating anti-racism practices into my professional life?
5. What are a few first steps for beginners?
6. How can I continue the work of anti- racism beyond “first steps?”
7. How will I know if I am succeeding in this work?

What this course will teach you is how to begin to understand the policies, practices, and structures that create a racially exclusive environment in the workplace so you can create a more inclusive environment.

One example of this starts at the very beginning of a workplace relationship – writing job descriptions for recruiting.

Many of my clients will give my team a job description to review. After a first pass, we’ll recognize that there are particular words that are more exclusionary. In one instance, a client was looking to use the phrase “influential networks” as part of the candidate requirements.

Usually, it’s not the case that in historically marginalized communities in terms of race and ethnicity that you’re going to find a high number of people with these conventional influential connections. So we then discuss if there is a way to reframe this so that it’s not off putting to those historically marginalized, Black, Indigenous and People of Color, who may not have those types of connections, but still have expertise.

Examples like this demonstrate that you may not even recognize certain words and phrases that can be exclusionary. It isn’t that you or the client in this example don’t have good intentions about wanting to have a diverse pool of candidates. They just don’t have the tools yet to frame a job description that will garner a more diverse candidate pool.

When you become more literate in what it means to be anti-racist and you start reading or creating things like job descriptions, you’ll become more aware of the political, economic, and social factors that have suppressed or denied resources and privileges for certain racial groups.

In taking this further, it’s not just about creating a way to recruit, but then how do you create policies, practices, and strategies to retain these particular diverse candidates?

Anti-racism has to be something that everyone takes on within an organization. It’s not one thing that’s relegated to human resources – it’s a shared responsibility. How it shows up across departments and leaders may differ, but there is a role for everyone.

Dr. Walden and I are here to help you inspire anti-racism as a leader in a way that’s not cancel culture, with the understanding that most of us are at a beginning level in literacy around what we mean by anti-racism, in creating an inclusive environment. As one of our first course participants said, “This is the best structured and most informative anti-racism training I’ve done.”

This course, for leaders at every level of the organization, included four, one hour live sessions and that leveraged Torch’s platform for contain additional material to support the time in between classes and provide the ability to communicate with other course participants.

Together we can be on the more just side of history as we enter this period of anti-racism and how to integrate it as a professional in the workplace.