A few weeks ago, I had a 1:1 Zoom meeting with our company’s CEO. It was a little strange. The request came out of the blue, as he normally asks my opinion about topics ranging from company morale, New York City office morale, how I think the customer success organization is performing and what could be improved, to where I think he should travel next for vacation. He wanted to ask my opinion on what he could be doing as the company’s leader to create a more diverse and inclusive environment that is ultimately anti-racist.
Our conversation was supposed to be only 30 minutes long, but it ended up going for about 45. We discussed what I’ve read in the How to be an Anti-Racist book, as well as the White Fragility book. He made a verbal commitment to me that he would at least download the White Fragility audio book and listen during his daily exercise. But the part that he seemed to miss the most is that he did not understand the inherent fact that I’ve mentioned a number of times on this blog: that it’s impossible to have a conversation about racism and have everyone in the room be comfortable or feel included. The whole idea of discussing “third rail” topics as he likes to call them is to be confronting, unsettling, to spur one into action. He disagreed. “The whole idea of diversity and inclusion is to be inclusive,” he insisted to me. “If we are not being inclusive, then this is not what we want.”
I paused. He still didn’t get it. How could I make him, a wealthy, privileged white man living in one of the most expensive suburbs of Northern California in a $12 million+ mansion, understand the crux of this issue? I elaborated on the background of Robin DiAngelo, the anti-racism educator and author of White Fragility. I told him that she has specialized in researching and educating on this area for nearly three decades. She has workshops every single day with people who seek to be more anti-racist, but fail miserably because they want to speak in generalizations as opposed to zeroing in on their own actions and what they can personally change in their day to day life. To ask someone to change their daily behavior, daily thoughts, is EXTREMELY challenging, if not impossible. And if she, as a 25+ year educator on this topic, still manages to “upset” and “exclude” people due to their white fragility and self implosion when confronting these issues, is the problem really her, the educator, the one prompting these questions, OR, is the issue the people who she’s attempting to reach who refuse to be reached due to their white fragility? When I said this, our CEO’s face suddenly changed. He appeared more contemplative, a bit more empathetic, a little closer to realizing that maybe, just maybe, it’s not the educator’s fault, the one posing the question’s fault, that maybe, the audience who is crying their white tears is actually at fault.
I’m not sure if I really reached him. It may all have been an act on his part. It may have been his way of weaseling himself out of the conversation to seem like he could be bendable, amenable to tangible change. Or maybe, just maybe he actually wanted to see some real change, something really move within our predominantly White company. I will never know for sure. But what I do know for sure is that most CXO teams across organizations around the world now are facing the same issue: they all want to participate in this:
“We at [Brand] are committed to fighting injustice by posting images to Twitter that express our commitment to fighting injustice.
To that end, we offer this solemn white-on-black .jpeg that expresses vague solidarity with the Black community, but will quietly elide the specifics of what is wrong, what needs to change, or in what ways we will do anything about it. This is doubly true if [Brand] is particularly guilty of exacerbating these issues.
We hope this action encourages you to view [Brand] positively without, you know, expecting anything from us.
-[Brand] (credit to Chris Franklin via Twitter)
For us, specifically, our CEO added a blog post to the company website noting that “Black Lives Matter,” that the leadership team would be encouraging employees to donate to these organizations as well. No monetary donation on behalf of the company would be given. No real changes made internally would be communicated via the blog post. It was an empty blog post that, around the same time, was also launched with BLM messaging added as a banner (which links to donating to Color of Change) when customers login to their accounts). At the same time, this organization is also happily taking money from organizations that support the Trump administration (many people in our sector of tech were happy and quick to point out this hypocrisy on LinkedIn posts that went viral). How does this organization reconcile this hypocrisy, if at all? Or do we just continue the BLM messaging on our blog and user platform while at the same time oppressing the lives of people of color?