How To Ensure Your Company’s Anti-Racism Work Is Effective Not Performative

Following the 2020 globalisation of the Black Lives Matter movement, companies the world over jumped to express their support. This, for some, led to exposure for being institutionally racist – something that wasn’t merely embarrassing but detrimental. Leaders stepped down; jobs were lost, businesses folded – and rightly so. There was – and remains – much work to be done. Those that survived quickly reassessed, drafted anti-racism policies and hired Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) experts to help them become more inclusive. The sincere frankly assessed their own company cultures in order to weed out the racism and oppression. The insufficient just made social media posts. 

But one year on, even some of the most enthusiastic uptakers have lost momentum. “We’re certainly not getting as many training requests as we were last year,” observes EDI expert Dr. Joanna Abeyie, MBE. “There are definitely some leaders who saw anti-racism work as a tick-box exercise – something that, once done, didn’t need to be revisited again.” 

With 57% of Black and ‘ethnic minority’ professionals reporting that company efforts towards EDI had stalled just three months after the movement and an inquiry by the UK government finding that institutional racism “no longer exists”, many Black people, says Abeyie, have been left feeling forgotten. It begs the question: did Black lives only matter last summer? And how can you ensure your company’s anti-racism work is not merely performative, but effective?

These are the issues Dr. Abeyie’s diversity and inclusion consultancy practice, Blue Moon, aims to tackle. By assessing companies’ infrastructure and culture, it builds inclusive environments from the ground up by placing diverse talent, putting strategies in place to increase equity for all and analysing existing pay and diversity. As an EDI expert and leader, Dr Abeyie has placed more than 3,000 people from diverse backgrounds into work. An award-winning journalist and broadcaster, she’s also an expert Advisor to UN Women UK and Co- Secretariat for the Creative Diversity All Party Parliamentary Group. 

For Dr. Abeyie, certain issues have cropped up repeatedly since the 2020 BLM movement. “Over the last year I’ve had discussions with several CEOs who are keen to make positive change but are nervous about saying or doing the wrong thing and causing offence,” she observes. As a result, she says, the onus is often put on staff to either come forward when they’ve experienced racism or act as a spokesperson for their entire race.

“With the explosion of emotion and demand for change around BLM, many people reacted in a knee-jerk way, which is too ephemeral. Leaders might have made a statement to staff, provided some training, created a library of diversity reading and, in some cases, run an ad campaign to reflect the issues. But whilst these are promising, if they were just temporary reactions that’s a problem.”

So what can a company do to ensure they don’t fall into this trap? 

“A longer lasting approach is to look at what you have introduced that challenges every behaviour, process, procedure or microaggression that keeps ‘ethnic minorities’ and your Black staff in a place of inequity.”  

Here are just some of the ways in which Dr. Abeyie believes you can ensure your company’s anti-racism work is actually impactful. 

Ask your staff – but through a mediary 

Seemingly, the quickest and easiest way to work out the impact of your anti-racism efforts is to ask your staff, but you’ll only garner useful feedback if you do so thoughtfully. “Questions such as ‘what is your experience of working here and how can we make it better?’ are a good place to start, but they need to be asked by someone external, objective and impartial,” Dr Abeyie explains. “That way, people can speak freely and without fear of any consequences.” It’s worth employing the same mentality to the questions themselves also, by asking this external mediary what the right ones are. 

Do your own research 

 No company can truly create effective change if its decision makers aren’t even aware of their own blind spots or the current vernacular surrounding such a sensitive topic. So how do you overcome this? “Do your homework,” says Dr. Abeyie. “Remove the burden from your under-represented staff by reading, listening and learning independently.” She suggests turning to field experts for their reflections on the progress made since last year, too. “What are reputable authors and academics saying? How are EDI experts and consultants discussing and challenging the efforts of the last 12 months? What have the latest reports on racial disparity taught us?” This information can then be used as a basis from which to explore ways you can create safe spaces for further discussion – “both open and facilitated” – in the workplace.  

Use these analytics to create a longterm plan

Many of the first responses that came following BLM, says Dr. Abeyie, were more concerned with pointing out in what ways they (companies or individuals) were not racist than actually focusing on longterm, impactful and structural change. “True equity, diversity and inclusion is a journey, not a destination.” 

She suggests taking the feedback from your staff and using it to create an action plan. “Unconscious bias has been written about frequently in regard to inequality, so instead of a leader’s gut feel, use analytics to get a clear idea of your EDI gaps, pay/promotion inequities and challenge bias everyday not just once a year. From there, you can create meaningful goals designed to develop a fair and equal organisation and take sustained action towards a sound plan to achieve them. By tracking regularly, you’ll see whether an activity is succeeding or fizzling out.”

This, she says, also equips you with an informed response if and when your staff ask you how you plan to keep up momentum. 

Her suggestions include the following: book clubs – in which works from a diverse range of authors on a diverse range of topics (not just racism) are discussed – as a means to open the mind to the nuanced and varied experience of Black and other marginalised people, thus helping to break down the idea that they are a homogeneous group; events in line with a diversity calendar; lunch and learns and facilitated discussion groups of current cultural events that make space for different points of view.

Tackle the root cause of microaggressions 

Most of us are familiar with the concept of racial microagressions nowadays – those subtle comments, views and actions that highlight racial differences in a negative way. The issue Dr. Abeyie is finding now is that they’re becoming harder to spot – “some of the more typical microagressions, such as commenting on how ‘well spoken’ a Black colleague is, have been highlighted so most people now realise not to do these things. What we don’t want is to start training people in the specifics of microaggressions without tackling the root cause. The risk there is that people just get better at not performing those microaggressions but don’t actually tackle their underlying prejudices, so the real problem of racism gets harder to spot.” 

She suggests rather than providing lists of typical microaggressions, providing expert-led training on where they come from in the first place and why people enact them. 

Cultivate Allyship  

Understanding what it means to be a true ally, Dr. Abeyie says, plays an important role in effective anti-racism work. This starts with accepting the ways in which you and your white staff have contributed to Black and brown colleagues’ marginalisation. “It’s hard for [white colleagues] to believe it’s happening, because it jars with their self-image as decent people. But it’s about making visible what has so far remained hidden in their own experience.” 

This starts with educating yourself on the experience of your marginalised colleagues – calling out microaggressions when you witness them, taking the time to understand what adjustments a disabled or non-binary colleague might need and going out of your way to provide these. 

“Cultivating allyship is about embracing other people’s differences by opening up to them, understanding them, and harnessing them to build a stronger team. It’s also admitting you are wrong, holding a mirror up to yourself and saying, I didn’t get this right, but I will work to know better so I can do better.

“Reni Eddo-Lodge said it really well in her book, ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’: a real ally is someone who supports and defends marginalised people when there is no reward, praise or attention to be had from it.”

Lastly, get out of your bubble

“As a leader, you probably like to hire talent that reminds you of…you. I get it, you’re great. But as brilliant as you are, society is not composed of your clones, so neither should your organisation be,” explains Dr. Abeyie. 

One of the main barriers she sees is time. “Many organisations are up against it to fill vacancies quickly, so they choose the quickest and easiest route – which is to go to the same recruiter, even if they don’t particularly recruit inclusively.”

Creative recruitment is one of the key strategies her consultancy, Blue Moon, uses to ensure companies hire diverse talent. It helps to create new entrant opportunities and hiring programs that provide a funnel of talent that may have been overlooked in the past, such as hackathons and offering recruitment managers the chance to watch candidates at work in situ. She also suggests speaking to your current ‘ethnic minority’ staff about their own recruitment process and asking if there were any notable barriers. 

“Businesses need to work on changing structures that keep Black, ‘minority ethnic’ and marginalised people disempowered. That’s how company culture gets changed. That’s how we ensure anti-racism work is effective.”

For more information on Dr. Joanna Abeyie and her company Blue Moon, visit her website here.