Guided by many motivating questions, our August dialogue will explore our struggles for racial and gender justice in our workplace settings.  Whether we work at an explicit racialjustice organization, a largely white, “a-racial” institution, or somewhere in between, we want to use this dialogue to examine the unique challenge of managing workplace relationships and institutional power while also struggling for workplace justice.

What roles do we hold in our workplaces, and what barriers do we face to dismantling white supremacy and patriarchy within our institutions?  How do the real risks of losing or compromising our employment influence the ways we bring racial and gender justice into our workplaces?  How do we maintain boundaries and take care of our personal needs while also making individual efforts to compensate for the impacts of institutional white supremacy?  How do we complicate interpersonal conflict in our workplace to name racewhen it is in operation without ignoring other forms of power that are also impacting a dynamic?

This dialogue will be built largely from our lived experiences in the workplace.

Some additional resources that may be useful include:

Everyday Feminism’s You Call it Professionalism? I Call it Oppression in a Three Piece Suit and Feministing’s Women and Minorities are Punished for Promoting Workplace Diversity.

Dialogue Notes:

Check-in Themes

• At an organization that aspires to non-hierarchical that ends up as implicit hierarchies, seen as boss even though i’m not, but have to enforce expectations of behavior that feel really white supremacist and capitalist (even though i don’t believe in them), don’t have clear institutional power, but certainly do have power, leads to complicated relationships
• Grappling with – feels very interpersonal, white are the implications and impacts of white folks getting paid for racial justice work, what are uses and where is it not a good idea
• In a predominantly white organization that is just starting to address issues of race
• Awkward when POC boss makes anti-semitic comments
• Only female employee, everyone there to heal, but noticing slightly misogynist dynamics
• How to discern what is an issue around women’s rights/roles and what is my own hypersensitivity
• Grappling with ways i respond i react differently when white supremacy comes up – create a binary in my mind – how to have paid work that i feel good about
• Clients noticing lack of POC in mental health setting – asked boss and boss blamed it on lack of POC applicants, growing whiteness of staff, ends up having lack of staff that clients can relate to
• Co-worker with male privilege oblivious to possibility that clients have had experiences of sexual harassment
• Work with homeless and formerly homeless folks and run a gallery, always in position of taking on too much responsibility, but wanting to not get taken advantage of, boss is white man with 2 adopted Kenyan daughters, struggle to watch that, don’t think he respects me as Black woman but respects what i can do
• One boss is white deaf man who talks over me (intersection of male privilege and disability) – see his frustration, try to be understanding, but sometimes feel steamrolled
• Do I be an HR problem and bring it up – or let it go?
• Work with POC men out of prison mandated for therapy, work with 3 white women – part of really big system
• Only white person except for ED at a local nonprofit, what’s my role when… the ED responds poorly, how are clients being empowered, interpersonally with POC/immigrant co-workers, always very aware of my whiteness – buffer zone – all the harm that can be caused with good intentions
• Just switched from being only white woman in small office, very little conversation about race happening – but good to sit in that discomfort, and now working for very homogeneously white organization
• When to speak up/take space and when not to
• Layers of ways social racism limits access POC co-workers have access
• Everything every day!
• Dynamics of being white women working in jails – no structures of accountability around gender or race are ones i’ve pushed for, especially around gender/masculinity and violence, not just at women’s relationship to being victim
• All leadership is white women. Implicit power but no institutional power. POC co-workers not wanting to bring up issues due to fear of retaliation, so bringing up things with my power, but not wanting to speak for POC
• What does it mean to serve/give access, how do i speak about my work?
• Uncomfortable in my role, tried talking to boss about discomfort, don’t trust her politics
• Going from charter school where i was just swimming in issues related to identity politics in multiracial classroom, but difficulty getting support from male boss, now moving to private school – wanting to get support i need, but complicate it
• Complicate this idea of being problematic no matter what i do because of my whiteness
• Work for corporate hospital, very hierarchical structure, organizational dynamics – white “professional” folks who make a lot of money, POC making a lot less money. Looking at how all of that plays out.
• Noticing pattern of seeing myself about to or just doing something f*ed up, trying access how much of a choice i had, how to take time to process it, up against scarcity of time
• Can never get everyone in the safe place at the same time, so can’t ever really talk about things
• Working with clients, sometimes against their will

Taking a moment to sit with everything everyone brought

Noticing bigger themes:

• Lot of people in the room working with folks with less social/institutional privilege = gatekeeping/buffer zone/socializing white supremacy/keeping the hope of upward mobility alive
  • System of white men demolishing communities and bringing in white women to service them
  • White women not usually conscious about it – trying to “help”
  • System consciously designed to give limited options, feel trapped, even when conscious of problems
  • Struggle of how to not be dehumanized working in the buffer zone while also recognizing the need to provide for oneself
  • Challenging the transactional nature of many interactions in the buffer zone
• Dynamics when working across race and gender with boss/co-workers/clients
  • Throwing people under the bus
  • White guilt showing up in the school system- recognizing the ways that we relate within group and across difference
• What is my role – when to use power/privilege, when not to take up space
  • Flexing our privilege to get into a role to challenge an oppressor- is that more strategic
  • Decentering paid work as the definition of self- the conflict of striving towards professionalism having been raised with lower income where that’s the goal
  • Questioning how all these complications come up in unpaid work as well (including allyship)
  • Role/structure/ability to subvert questions keep coming up- the larger question is what if this all doesn’t matter?
    • What are the ways that we can plug into community/our humanity and subvert the productivity narrative
    • Letting go; recognizing that we just don’t know; slowing down
  • Accepting no right answer and trusting that your work fits into a larger strategy of change
  • Right and wrong dichotomy- pervasive in white western culture; tied to religion (the idea of objective truth); tied to colonialism
• When power structures aren’t defined and arise through socialization
  • Difficult situations/conversations: one strategy is to role play
  • Development of hierarchies: when you have the answers you are “given” power
  • Subverting challenging situations with humor- when male coworker said bosslady, try calling him bossman
• Consent – working with clients who may or may not have consent
  • Co-workers not wanting to lose their job means they don’t have choice about behavior – wealthy clients have power
  • A lot of us don’t consent to our jobs
  • Some of our clients are forced to work with us (issues of class and choice)
• Working with adults vs young people
  • Being a young person working with adults, being looked at as someone with knowledge and authority to say how a community should be run or how to process your emotions, hard to create complexities and not be seen as experts but as collaborators
• Diversity in workplace – tokenization
  • Emphasis on hiring folks who are POC and formerly incarcerated, but they aren’t given roles of strategy development
  • Everyone in “non-leadership” professional positions are college educated, everyone doing the manual labor are not. Trying to review and strategize together and build team culture. My socialization/have practice coming to a meeting and know how to be in a meeting. Not everyone has skills in facilitation. I don’t even know how to create the skills and structures to change these dynamics.
  • Culture of professionalism – starts in school, from day 1 – learn how to speak academic english like your white female teacher – social currency of accessing professional jobs. We all feel it, not one fits in the box except a few white guys somewhere.
  • Why aren’t there POC/diverse applicants? Because barriers the whole way to the interview.
  • Validating when clients are “right” but reframing to support them in being successful
  • Hardest part of the “suit” for me is being emotionless, told I’m too passionate
  • Plays into complexity – “radical act for white people is to act out, for POC it’s to fall in line” – explaining to young POC boys in juvie- yelling at the guards is not radical, it’s expected of you, keeps you here. By getting out, you are challenging the system.
  • Naming that white supremacy is always in the room- how do people play the game to then rewrite the game?
    • Conforming to professional titles/licensing to then speak out against the professional hoops
  • Joanna Macy- 3 spheres: band-aids (definitive responses/action), deconstructing/reconstructing (cultural work, challenging hierarchy), changing mindsets (need to talk to white kids about whiteness)
    • All happening simultaneously
    • We are all part of one organism (the earth) and all the attempts to help, to create change are in the service of healing the organism’s immune system
  • 4 Rs of racial justice movement work: reform, resist, recreate, reimagine
    • Different strategies can lead to disagreements but each one is valid and useful in collaboration with the others
    • Recognize individual strengths in an area and that the movement builds with all 4
    • Can we build capacity to do all 4 simultaneously?
    • How do we see the arc of our individuals lives acting in community
  • Naming that we are all judgemental of ourselves, each other; this is all incredibly complicated shit
  • Productivism- I’m only as valuable as my output
  • The frustration when your work is only a band-aid
  • Consent-

Dialogue participants would be interested in exploring the real-life situations through pair+share, TOPs, or difficult conversations

Closing:

• The false narrative of right and wrong and how it’s tied to religion
  • Looking for the answer is gendered
• Recognizing how we accumulate power without having positional power and the harm that comes in transactional, semi-competitive spaces
  • Interested in exploring vulnerability to shift cultural dynamics
• Connect to good intentions- how to do that as a white person
• Sitting with slowing down and the ways that gives us more access to our feelings
• Self-advocate while also learning from others
• Self-reflection of feelings vs fact and knowing when to act
• Discerning when to speak up and when to sit back and slow down
• Complexity of power (and having capacity) and self-deprecation; conflict of feeling like I’ve got too much power while also feeling worthless
• Changing the questions we’re asking so they’re less binary
• Spontaneity and responsiveness to trauma- focusing on community/relationships
• Ease of authentic relationships based on positional power- how to extend authentic relationships across difference
• Recognizing the value of processing in community