Real Wins by Michelle Moore

Author:Michelle Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: -
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2021-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

The people or the organization?

I often hear organizational leaders, especially those working in sport, say that when racism and discrimination are gone from society then organizations won’t have a problem anymore. John Barnes, a former professional footballer for England from the 1980s, is famous for saying that racism is not football’s problem but society’s ill. It’s always frustrated me why this is such a popular statement; given the cultural capital of sport, surely it should be leading the way? Why do we have to wait for society to change first? Surely, sport can and should play its part, be proactive? I don’t think this is an ambitious ask.

The fact is, organizations are made up of people who make up society, and people spend a lot of their time in organizations, so it stands to reason that we have to tackle the issue at an organizational level. Both systems and processes need to be in place to ensure that there are consequences to overt and covert forms of discrimination and incidents like the one I’ve described. Often, an organization can have all the policies and procedures in place and yet when confronted with the issue it fails to enforce them. This is especially the case when it comes to race. The real fear of being called a racist has white people running to the hills. If organizations followed their own procedures in the same way they do with any other complaints, issues could be resolved more efficiently.

To be antiracist, white people have to refrain from centring their own whiteness and accept that they have to seek to understand the experiences of Black people. This has to be done without making Black people responsible for their own education. I’ve worked closely with white leaders inside organizations and on boards who say they are committed to tackling racism, and yet there have been a number of occasions when they have outright not believed me when I have raised an issue of racism, be that stereotypical marketing campaigns or outright racist statements.

On one such occasion I was giving the leaders of a large charity feedback regarding the lack of ethnic diversity on a national judging panel; the leaders did not accept my insights and chose not to follow my counsel. Six months later, after having read an article by a white academic who writes about white fragility, the leaders took on board my insights and to their credit recognized their defensiveness, apologized to me and redressed this in their company policies. When Black people raise issues about discrimination they must be believed. White people must recognize that they have no lived experience of Blackness. They must rise above their defensiveness and acknowledge that Black people have the knowledge and expertise they do not have. This is absolutely not to say that white people can’t have empathy, but no amount of empathy or proximity to Blackness will provide white people with the lived experience of being Black. Having Black friends, a Black partner or Black children does not enable you to experience having a Black identity.

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