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agonyaunt2021-12-01 11:30 am
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2021-12-01 11:30 am
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Dear Prudence: "I’m a White Person Who’s Tired of Working on Diversity Initiatives at Work."
Rejected: I work for a large national nonprofit. About 95 percent of the clients we serve are people of color, while about 60 percent of the staff are people of color. I am white and possess underrepresented identities (obviously unrelated to race).
For the past year and a half, I have spent about 50 percent of my time working on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. I engage in this work nearly every day—running and project-managing large national initiatives to attract and retain employees of color, and to address racist incidents that have occurred in our nonprofit’s past.
I am so ashamed and embarrassed to say this, but I am getting really burned out at work, and working on these initiatives is contributing to that. I engage in so, so many conversations about retaining people of color—increasing their pay, engaging in “stay” conversations with them, being flexible with their hours and work location to ensure they stay with the organization—and no one is having these conversations with me! I constantly hear things like, “we need to make sure there are people of color in the finalist pool” for jobs that are posted, or “she interviewed well, but we really want to hire a person of color for this role” and between that and hearing about how damaging white employees are, I feel like I’m no longer wanted at this organization. No one is checking in to see how I’m doing or ensuring I want to stay. Meanwhile, my administrative work is really the backbone of making sure these employee-of-color-centered initiatives are even getting off the ground in the first place!
I know it’s so important that our organization reflects the clients we serve. But I’m on the verge of quitting to work somewhere whiter, because hearing all day every day about how we don’t really want to hire white folks if possible, as I spend hours of overtime on DEI-related tasks, is taking a toll on my self-esteem and self-worth. I know I’m being overly defensive and taking this too personally. But I can’t help it. Do you have any ideas on what I can do to fix these feelings within myself?
A: It sounds like you should move on. Apply for new jobs. This work isn’t rewarding for you, and there’s no way you’re as effective as you could be if you’re approaching every day with resentment and defensiveness. Your organization deserves someone who is on board with its mission. Meanwhile, you should sort out for yourself whether your commitment to diversity ends when you begin to be inconvenienced or made to feel uncomfortable, or when people like you aren’t prioritized—and whether you want to change that. It’s definitely something worth exploring. But do it while you’re not on the clock.
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But if a white person's employer is saying "we need to increase our ratio of employees of color to white employees" or "we need to increase our racial diversity in hiring", then they are, in fact, saying they want fewer white employees. Like, literally, that is what that means!
That doesn't meant what they're doing is bad, or racist, or even unfair, because a lot of employers *do* need to improve their ratios!
But it's still tough to be constantly hearing "We need fewer people like you around here." Even if you agree with them (especially if you agree with them!) Not as tough as what a lot of POC have to deal with every day, but still tough. And I think it's fair for LW to ask "how do I deal with these feelings of being unwanted?" Some bits of their letter could be phrased better, but they're acknowledging that the feelings are making it tough for them to be fair about this, and they want to know how to stop doing that.
Re-reading my original comment my tone is hard to read, but I wasn't meaning to be sarcastic there. If they're in a nonprofit organization that is serving a 95% POC client base, and their employee base doesn't reflect that, they probably are actively trying to have a lot fewer white employees, and that's probably what they should be doing in order to better serve their client base! Like, I'm not saying LW is ethically obligated to quit or anything, but if the message they're internalizing is that fewer white employees would let the organization be more effective, and they don't have any good counterarguments, then maybe rather than going to a lot of therapy to deal with the cognitive dissonance, they *should* just look for jobs at places that don't have that level of imbalance.
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I still feel queasy at saying, "Well, yes, being around POC is clearly bad for you [and that's clearly our fault], go find an organization that doesn't hire us and work there," especially considering what it would indicate about such an organization," but considering the only response I have now is "how do you think we feel? Could you not respond to being unhappy by cultivating becoming racist?", maybe the former would be better advice.
Ugh.
I do think the people in this discussion who have pulled apart being unhappy at working for a nonprofit (famously bad employers in many ways) vs being unhappy with working to improve POC's place in society (in a word, racist) have a good point at the least. Maybe a better piece of advice can be found in there.
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But idk, would it still make you queasy if it was phrased at "if the POC around you don't want white people outnumbering them in an org that's about them, maybe you should listen to them for once?"
If what the person is really considering doing is finding an all-white workplace so they don't have to deal with POC anymore that's clearly racist and bad.
But I've seen a lot of thinkpieces lately from antiracist white people that basically follow the narrative "I built my nonprofit career working in organizations that were meant to help communities of color, but I've realized that what I was doing in that job was speaking over the people I though I was helping, so I've moved to working in nonprofits that address racism by trying to change white communities, instead". Like I think that narrative has problems too (that's basically the same thing inside out, "I'm moving to a mostly-white workplace so POC don't have to deal with me anymore"), but if LW is doing the work they describe, they've probably also seen a *lot* of that narrative in the course of their recent work, presented as something admirable and good.
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Yeah, the way you're saying that is definitely yucky,
ahahaa. Yes, I phrased it that way deliberately, but I didn't get that phrasing from thin air -- I think that is what the LW wants to be told, based on statements such as " I engage in so, so many conversations about retaining people of color—increasing their pay, engaging in “stay” conversations with them, being flexible with their hours and work location to ensure they stay with the organization—and no one is having these conversations with me! "
LW actively resents that their nonprofit is helping POC and feels that they are actively losing out because of this . I don't think moving to a nonprofit that "addresses racism by trying to change White communities" is what will satisfy them -- certainly, if they've heard of the idea you described, wouldn't they have mentioned it if that were something they wanted to do? LW sounds like they just don't want to deal with POC as human beings or waste their energy working against racism anymore.
Argh. I feel like I'm failing to convey how threatening I, as a POC, find LW's attitude, nor why I find it so threatening, and that some POC will suffer down the line if I can't get this across. I look at LW's attitude and I immediately cannot help but wonder how LW treats their POC colleagues and clients, if they resent every brown face so much. People are much more porous than we think, and not nearly as good at keeping our attitudes out of our actions as we might want.
Also...
""if the POC around you don't want white people outnumbering them in an org that's about them, maybe you should listen to them for once?""
Aside of communities that are majority POC (which in my ezperience tend to have be gun as places where POC were relegated to when we aren't allowed anyone else) I doubt that we expect to be the majority -- we're literally a minority. I think this compares to the factoid that men think women are "taking over" whenever women are more than 1/3 of a group or say more than 1/3 of statements in a discussion -- majority people view minorities in much the same way. I doubt the POC want to "take over", but rather want to be *heard*.
"If what the person is really considering doing is finding an all-white workplace so they don't have to deal with POC anymore that's clearly racist and bad."
Isn't that what LW says they want, when they say, "But I’m on the verge of quitting to work somewhere whiter" Someplace Whiter will not just have fewer POC by headcount, but by its nature will disprivilege and disempower those POC relative to their White coworkers. That's what LW desires. So I don't think a solution that involves anything good for POC will satisfy LW.
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I think we basically agree anyway - and the people who are saying that LW needs to address the burnout and lack of support issue separately from the diversity one are probably most right.
(I would absolutely be saying very different things if LW was talking about a majority-white organization in a majority-white community. I've lived my whole life in a white-plurality-but-not-majority area - probably similar in demographics to LW's org - and I often need to be kicked in the head to be reminded that most places in the US are in fact still dramatically white majority and it skews the way I experience white privilege here.)
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I'm so insistent about this stopic because I have seen so many times whhen people blew it off and so helped Awffulnesss to commence. Anyway, I am half asleep but I wanted to acknowledge what you said before I went to sleep.