Silence is the Voice of Complicity: 3 Ways to Unmute Systemic Racism

The framing of this moment around police brutality is galvanizing for many reasons.

It’s overt.

It’s harrowing.

It’s visceral.

It’s inexcusable.

It’s undeniable.

More than anything: police violence is photogenic.

We cannot look away, cannot un-see the brutality in action.

The case is being made as we witness the response to demonstrators.

The case is clear.

It’s also galvanizing because it offers a target around which we can rally: the police.

More provocatively: it provides cover, a scapegoat.

When all eyes are on the police, they’re not on the rest of us and the inequities in the organizations that we build, live in, lead, grow, and perpetuate.

Police brutality reveals the extreme end of a continuum of pain and inhumanity. What I’m interested in is all those other pain points lurking along that same continuum.

These inequities are subtle.

They’re covert.

They’re murky.

They’re excusable.

They’re plausibly deniable.

Those are the hidden corners that implicate far more of us than the .0024 % of us in law enforcement. (Current data suggests that of the 330 million Americans, just 800,000 are law enforcement officers.)

These injustices are more difficult to capture and in turn more incognito. It’s tougher to “see” the inhumanity built into the policies and practices guiding our classrooms and hospitals, our transportation systems and financial institutions, and neighborhoods and businesses. They’re tougher to see because they exist on the quieter, subtler, more insidious end of this same continuum of inhumanity and violence.

Two orienting ideas about the work of leadership:

1. When we don’t know what to do, we do nothing. Which is doing something.

2. The best interpretations about the challenges we face implicate the most people; so do the most powerful interventions.

For those who say, “I don’t know what to do”: not knowing what to do has rarely stopped those of us with power, privilege, authority and access in the past.

We’ve been getting it wrong for far too long.

(I’m living that fear of getting it wrong here and now.

As I write and share this piece.)

But that’s no excuse.

Let’s get it wrong on the way to getting it right, in the service of justice, in remaking the world for more of us to live fully in it.

Here are three next steps for every organization to adopt:

1) Create holding environments for your people to reckon with their privilege. For most white folks, our understanding of race is developmentally adolescent—often characterized by dichotomous thinking, naivete, and resistance to challenge our own beliefs. Thanks to the privilege that comes with the skin we’re in, we haven’t had to learn much on this front. It’s not up to people of color to teach us; it is on us to learn. One way to learn: with a book club for white people to identify and make sense of what it means to be white. Robin DiAngelo's What Does It Mean To Be White? is a great place to start.

2) Conduct a brightly lit inventory of the policies and practices that drive how you do business. In How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X Kendi offers a filter for this inventory. In short: every policy—and the beliefs that uphold those policies--is either racist or antiracist. He draws a crystal clear line in the sand. While that line may initially be jarring, it’s refreshing to see the world through this either/or lens. Once you’ve applied Kendi’s antiracist lens, follow through with a time-bound commitment to flip from racist to antiracist policies across every facet of your organization: hiring practices, decision-making, leadership development, cultural norms, promotion processes, KPIs, corporate giving.

3) Embed diversity equity and inclusion into the very fabric of your culture, rather than creating a position or two in an area of the organization insulated from the business. Hiring a DEI coordinator is one step. At the same time, this approach surreptitiously—perhaps conveniently— locates a much more widespread, complex, and deeply fraught problem in an individual or department who is then tasked to fix that problem, again leaving the majority off the hook. Tiffany Jana & Michael Baran offer a powerful framework for building a more just and equitable culture in Subtle Acts of Exclusion. They’ve reframed microaggressions as subtle acts of exclusion, shifted from a call-out culture to a call-in culture, and root all of their work not in blame or threat but rather in love and purpose. They’ve also quantified the ROI of DEI.

That there has been an uprising around racial justice while in the midst of a pandemic is apt. We are collectively facing our mortality. We are sick. Our organizations are unwell. In this existential moment, we are called on to diagnose our maladies, to take care of one another, and to shore up a system that has long been resistant and immune to the changes that will allow more of us not merely to survive, but to thrive.

What will you commit to unmuting?