WINSight: Anti-Racism 101
A defining shift in the status quo, Black Lives Matter united millions around its mission, and committed many more to tangible change. Though we have started to make small steps towards normality, despite its initial momentum, we risk a rise in apathy and a return to complacency. So, as we begin to re-think the ways we live and work, there is no greater time, than now, for our global community to come together to re-ignite the conversation.
As innovators we strive to build better, more equitable futures for all, and this should start within our very own workplaces. We’re all advocates for inclusive thinking within our industry, but that means getting the foundations right. Every individual should have belonging and freedom within their organisation, no matter their identity and positionality. If we truly want to celebrate and facilitate diverse ways of thinking and being, we need to start designing more empowering and inclusive experiences for our Black colleagues.
In late September, WIN partnered with Fearless Futures in an interactive workshop to enable challenging and delicate conversations about race, inclusion and allyship. Immerse yourself in our workshop learnings below to understand how we can create workplace and societal equity. Through adjusting our everyday ways of being, thinking and doing, it’s possible to fight against racism to achieve real, transformative change.
“Lived experience and emotions count as valid data”
Fearless Futures
The workshop focused on engaging with data, revealing and reflecting on individual and shared narratives of racism, before engaging with the tools to actively dismantle it.
Designing for different ‘-isms’.
Our understandings of racism and systems of inequity today can often sound quite theoretical. But it’s just as important to examine what inequity looks, sounds and feels like in the day to day.
Inspired by this, our workshop moderator, Sable, encouraged attendees to discuss various examples of racism and how they related to one another.
There are numerous, in-depth ways to look at such narratives. But just as there are different ways in which we feel these events could take shape, systems of inequity take on a different and very particular shape for the people of colour who experience them.
Throughout discussions, it became clear that racism cannot be understood without considering one fundamental principle: intersectionality. A concept by Kimberlé Crenshaw, it’s the idea that even shared occurrences produce different and unique experiences. When you layer different struggles, different ‘-isms’, different systems of inequity on top of one another, it creates a unique, individual and particularistic lived experience.
Experiences of racism at the intersection are felt differently; for different classes, genders, and disabilities amongst so many others.
“Intersectionality is a game-changer, but also makes solutionising a lot more complex...When we think about being anti-racist, it’s not just dealing with racism, it’s recognising all the ways in which these systems interact”.
Our workshop moderator, Sable Lomax
When navigating the complex and expansive system that is racism, each experience is as different as another, yet just as valid as the next. So, when we design for an anti-racist future, we design for all of the different ‘-isms’ this touches.
Re-negotiating shared narratives.
Experiences of inequity are unique for each individual, though it’s important to acknowledge our understanding of racism as shaped by our own shared narratives too.
Many attendees reflected on their lack of awareness throughout their years in education around racist events in history. A lack of information and misinformation shape a different, collective experience of racism. And one that forces us to reflect on the future we want to be complicit in.
“If you don’t know about it, you don’t look for it and you don’t learn about it.”A workshop attendee
Although mechanisms and manifestations of racism evolve through time, its roots remain the same. Sable revealed that in order to disrupt these patterns, we need to confront our own understanding and ask; “What is it that we don’t know, and why don’t we know it?” So, when we re-negotiate for an anti-racist future, we must re-negotiate our own shared narratives from the start.
Committing to active allyship.
But from intersectionality to shared narratives, what does inequity and racism look like in a workplace context? And what can you do to disrupt that?
Questioning how we determine value and place our own values onto another, attendees reflected on their own experiences of navigating racism in the workplace. We explored the ways in which our own definitions of success interact with generalisations and assumptions to create a damaging experience for minorities in life and at work.
How can we transform this passive reflection into active allyship? It’s one thing to recognise racism, but it’s another to name it and to ask, considering your positionality, what you can do to counter it. What can you do to ensure someone’s dignity, freedom and belonging in an organisation?
Could you amplify the ideas of your Black colleagues?
Might you call out micro-aggressions and challenge overt acts of racism?
Would a workshop help drive anti-racist ways of being and doing throughout your workplace?
“You have so many ways in which to explore what it means not only to be anti-racist in your thinking, but what does it mean to be anti-racist in your doing.”
Fearless Futures
As we commit to designing new workplaces, new systems and new interactions, it’s crucial that we design for equity. This means revealing, reflecting and revising our understanding of racism as a system built both from unique, individual experiences, as well as a singular yet systemic, shared narrative. But by first exposing the foundations of racism today, we are in a stronger position to dismantle it.
Frameworks, processes and methodologies alike, are the hub of our everyday work as innovators.
And now, we have a new lens. With this understanding, we must engage new ways of thinking, being and doing to be active as allies to our Black colleagues. It is time to commit to building more diverse, equitable and anti-racist places and spaces to live and to work.
Editorial: Lucia Corry
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