Diversity – in the workplace and beyond

Image by Alexas_Fotos on Pixabay

This is a short article following my attendance to the RSA’s event on 10 October 2019 titled “Antiracism and the Politics of Diversity” delivered by sociologist and author Keith Kahn-Harris, and presented by Rosie Carter from Hope Not Hate.

Diversity and Inclusion (D&I), as far as business goes, is the subject I feel most passionately about simply because I have always felt like a bit of an outsider. I won’t tell some tear-jerking backstory because I simply don’t have one, but I can say that, when in Spain, I am seen as the foreign Englishman, and, when in England, as the exotic Spaniard. And even this ignores the 50% of my genetic building blocks that are Algerian. Whilst it is a subject very close to my heart, however, I find D&I to be most difficult to write about. I won’t delve into why this is, as this is one of the reasons I can’t write about the subject (endless procrastination). What I will do is comment briefly on the talk given by sociologist, lecturer and author Keith Kahn-Harris at the RSA, and relate his accounts with concepts from the world of business and organisational ethics.

Keith began his talk by making it clear that the fluffy, rainbow-filled portrait of diversity, as viewed through a quick Google image search for “diversity”, is not to his liking. To be more precise: engaged, excited, colourful hands and drawings do not represent the true challenges of diversity and inclusion. And this to me is a key aspect where companies fail. Diversity and inclusion is deemed a journey towards some greater good where all humans of all backgrounds work together in harmony on some Excel spreadsheet or sales pitch. This has always smacked me as cringe-worthy or simply missing the point. At the origin of D&I is a dark, putrid aspect of the human condition whereby we accept those who look and behave like us, and refuse to accept those how do not. Racism, ignorance and hatred are what bring D&I into existence. After decades and centuries of belittling, punishing and outright discriminating against those who are not a part of the white-straight-male patriarchy of the West, D&I is depicted as a ray of sunshine on a somewhat cloudy day, ignoring entirely the terrible condition it is trying to combat.

Keith’s talk continued by making a strong case about the antisemitism row within the Labour Party during the summer of 2019 (and ongoing). I limit my public views on politics to a few tweets every so often, so I will not get into politics here. But a fascinating point Keith made was on the existence of minorities within minorities. That is to say, in very simple terms, that not all individuals within a minority will view racism in the same way. He then described what he views as the two forms of racism: consensus racism and selective racism. On the one hand, consensus racism is directed at a broad minority group; on the other hand, selective racism will target specific stereotypes within minorities. Keith further argued that antisemitism in particular can be extended to racism in general, in its ignorant approach to categorising others as just that: others.

The spread of racism is enabled, in Keith’s view, by three factors:

1. The unspeakability of racism: by society deeming racism a taboo, tackling it as a social issue becomes even more difficult.

2. Superdiversity: a concept sociologists work with and which describes modern societies as much more diverse, both in terms of the variety of foreign cultures and the variety within each of these cultures.

3. Knowledge in the age of social media: we can now learn about other cultures and peoples online — we can gain exposure to them and have our prejudices shattered or voiced back by the echo chambers of our online comrades.

Bringing this back to our realm of D&I initiatives, point 1 resonates with the purely positive view of D&I — it’s not about getting old, white, privileged males off the board, but showing that some collective “we” is open to bringing “other” people into the executive team. What companies can learn specifically from this is the need to nudge staff in the direction of calling out foul play. If an organisation is truly engaged with the D&I agenda, they will not call it an agenda, but make it clear that staff are in a safe space to speak about racism and discrimination, and enable them to voice concerns and engage with solutions. Language is crucial, of course. It will be up to the internal comms team to determine whether corporate double-speak terms such as “D&I agenda” are conducive to real change.

Superdiversity then resonates with something I have found in different companies, and that is calling “BAME employees”, well, “BAME employees”. The role of language appears again, and here shows an oversimplified view that there is some “other” category of people who fit into “BAME”. Not only is it a neat category for people to refer to “diverse people” (whatever that means), but also a way to completely throw out the individual complexity of each of those (basically) non-white people. This is called intersectionality and it portrays us as more than just the colour of our skin, as we all have a sexuality, a gender, an age and, ultimately, a history. Education will here play a crucial role within the organisation, either by having a D&I forum that can learn together or a D&I manager or even D&I training providers — just make sure the trainers believe in change and are not there to tick boxes. There was a further point Keith made that sociologists may have fallen into a trap of analysing people as identities and ignoring personalities — so do not take the intersectionality debate lightheartedly — but we will leave the matter of sociologists for the philosophers of social science.

The third aspect that perpetuates racism was the role of social media platforms and the internet. We can now interact with people who we identify as different. We can even enjoy their online activity without knowing them personally. We can then have our most deeply held prejudices shattered when we learn that they are “different”. This can end up in heated arguments held online, which outsiders can watch and find their voice in others, reinforcing whatever views they had, rather than rethinking their own views. The point I took from this aspect of racism was that the veil of ignorance is now lifted and unavailable as an excuse to hold bigoted beliefs behind. We can access seemingly infinite opinions online and speak with people from all over the world. Unfortunately for the bigots, what we learn online is that “most people are pretty nice”, regardless of background. Once again, fostering communication in the workplace and holding D&I forums where controversial views can be shared, challenged and guided professionally towards a more respectful view of people can help solve otherwise internalised disputes. As Keith put it: “seek online restraint and offline dialogue”.

The most difficult-to-defend view that Keith shared was the very conclusion he has reached: that antiracism should not be upheld by love. This is consistent with the view that D&I isn’t as fluffy and happy as corporations make it out to be, but it goes a step further. Keith’s conclusion amounts to treating others with blind love as a flaw: by doing this, we open ourselves up to disappointment when we meet somebody from an “other” community who we do not like. This also resonates with the fact that there are minorities within minorities and that people are far more complex than the colour of their skin. And whilst people are generally nice, it is not hard to see from the internet that there are people we will not like. In contrast to blind love, Keith calls for what he calls sullen solidarity. He admitted it is not the greatest slogan to market his worldview, but to learn more about it, his book “Strange Hate” will define it a lot more in-depth.

Ultimately, Keith’s view that the mainstream portrayal of diversity ignores the stark realities that lead to the need for change is a fundamental shift that may indeed be necessary to truly make a positive impact. His account is complex enough to even call for a redefinition of antiracism. I don’t disagree with this, but I would push back on his conclusion regarding love. I would call for a clearer definition of love, rather than that of antiracism. If we take love as a more constrained concept, limited to the respect of others regardless of background, our biases wouldn’t be an obstacle — a cause of fear for what we may discover in others —, but an aspect of our human nature subdued by our very awareness of it. Maybe blind love towards others is wrong to start with, and we must treat others simply with respect by default, be aware of our intellectual limitations as humans and be open to new representations of reality by accepting that, lo and behold, we are not alone on this planet.

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This was the first event I attended at the RSA (The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), but I will certainly keep an eye out for more!

For a fascinating piece on echo chambers (and their distinction from epistemic bubbles), see this article by C Thi Nguyen, assistant professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University

And thank you to Jonathan Schulte for your helpful proof-reading and semantic suggestions, most of which I took on board!