Abstract
Despite expensive investments in DEI programs, research within a non-profit reveals rhetorical race-consciousness rather than real-deal change.
Marco Verch Professional Photographer, Flickr CC, foto.wuestenigel.com
“…Getting to know what dominant culture is, is great. It makes perfect sense. And I can see how dominant culture plays a role in EFA’s productivity and deadlines and all of that, and that’s all great to know, but we’re not actually gonna change anything based on the fact that dominant culture requires that line…. And you’re not gonna change that, ‘cause you do have a bottom line…. ’Cause dominant culture, for better or worse, is society.” Like other employees of the education non-profit Education for All (EFA), Mira was introduced to the concepts of “White supremacy culture” and “White dominant culture” during my three years of fieldwork among their ranks.
In this effort, EFA followed many progressive organizations, relying on Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun’s (2001) Dismantling Racism. The resource details the characteristics of White supremacy culture and what it can look like in practice—for instance, how it manifests as a sense of urgency, power hoarding, and paternalism. These characteristics, Jones and Okun write, are “damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen by the group.” Paired with each characteristic are “antidotes” that reduce or move away from White supremacy culture. The authors describe paternalism, for instance, as “those with power think[ing] they are capable of making decisions for and in the interests of those without power.” Their suggested antidote is decidedly affirmative: “[I]nclude people who are affected by decisions in the decision-making.”
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or anti-racism work is rarely this progressive, especially at White-led organizations like EFA. While diversity is often conflated with affirmative action policies, it has evolved into a billion-dollar industry focused primarily on issues like exposing unconscious bias, making hiring processes more equitable, and providing better resources to staff, such as through Employee Resource Groups (ERGs).
Despite significant investments in DEI efforts, little has changed. “Success” is often defined by women and BIPOC representation—and even by those metrics, most industries are failing. Currently, about 90% of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are White men. According to the American Bar Association’s Profile of the Legal Profession, in 2020, only 14% of lawyers were non-White. Big tech companies, like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, have made dismal progress in increasing the share of their workforces that are Black. Facebook, for example, reported a measly 0.8% increase from 2014 to 2019. Even if we assume that these companies are only striving for the bare minimum of representation, they are barely succeeding. Further, though representation is undoubtedly important, it will not fix inequality.
Again, money is rarely lacking. In the wake of the 2020 uprisings surrounding racial injustice, Black Lives Matter, and the high-profile murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd especially, organizations across industries have seen the need—if only for public relations purposes—to devote time and money to DEI initiatives. They are spending billions of dollars on this work, yet have little to show for it beyond neatly worded diversity statements.
In fact, critics of DEI argue that its role is to maintain that status quo, giving it a new gloss, rather than to challenge, dismantle, or replace it.
Unlike other companies, EFA went beyond thinking about DEI success through racial representation and diversity statements, and they started working through DEI-initiated change before many other organizations. During my time conducting fieldwork from 2016-2019, they were crafting a diversity statement and were taking the work to a deeper, more critical level by naming White supremacy and identifying its operations. It seemed to me that, though they had not created “success” metrics for decentering Whiteness, EFA understood that diversity was something beyond measuring percentages of different racial groups—on this alone, they appeared to be leagues ahead of other organizations. Over the next three years, I witnessed a noticeable shift in how employees talked about the culture; staff were utilizing the lessons from their White supremacy culture work. Even so, I noted that, in interviews, when employees described what a “culture fit” looked like at EFA, many of the characteristics of a successful employee they noted were, in fact, exemplary elements of White supremacy culture.
The DEI work created an organization with a positive external image and progressive discourse, while internally, most staff of color were paid less, expected to work more, and embedded within a culture that maintained inequality.
Through my interviews and observations, I uncovered that despite how well employees—especially White employees—could talk about DEI and White supremacy culture, that new vocabulary did not translate to more equitable practices and policies. I found that staff shifted how they talked about their workplace and the role of White supremacy within it, yet the workplace itself remained substantially unchanged. In fact, all the progressive DEI work did was help improve the image of EFA while still maintaining the benefits of Whiteness. What resulted was an organization with a positive external image and progressive discourse, while internally, most staff of color were paid less, expected to work more, and embedded within a culture that maintained inequality.
White Culture Revealed in Practice
I interviewed 49 staff members at EFA and conducted hundreds of hours of observations. I was able to observe the workplace and talk with staff about how they experienced and felt the impact of the organizational culture on their work and relationships before and after the introduction of the concept of White supremacy culture. Even before many of the employees had the language to describe what White supremacy culture looked like, they were describing characteristics like a sense of urgency and paternalism.
When I asked interviewees to imagine EFA as a person and describe their personality, they used words like “extroverted,” “passionate,” and “fun.” However, when asked how one fit into EFA’s culture, many people mentioned the ability to “hustle” or put in long hours, because of their commitment to the mission and doing it “for the students” or “for the kids.” These seemingly neutral ideas, however, can have a detrimental effect on employees and on organizational culture. David, a White director, was succinct: “We favor the folks for whom the cultural work dynamic is already inherent to them, or that they are comfortable with or able to flex around.” While culture is often crafted through material items, such as tastes, clothing, and hairstyles, it also is created through worldviews and belief systems. As David understood, it is easier for some employees to understand the unspoken norms or rules of how to work at a company or in an office than for others, and those are the workers who get ahead. As their earlier DEI training had helped reveal, those norms and ways of working were rooted in White supremacy culture.
Further, as scholar Joe Feagin has shown through the concept of the “White racial frame,” cultural ideas and markers shape not just the ideologies of people within a given culture, but how they navigate that space as well. In organizational culture, that presents as how people approach their work, collaborate, and share information. The preferences and values shape both the material aspects, such as dress code, and how employees are expected to perform their work.
Relying on the idea of “a good fit” within existing workplaces, no matter how committed to diversity, effectively ensures the status quo and leaves power structures unchallenged.
Marco Verch Professional Photographer, Flickr CC, foto.wuestenigel.com
For those who were very comfortable in the dominant “cultural work dynamic,” fitting and belonging is much easier. When I asked Jordie, a Black manager, if he thought he was a “culture fit” at EFA, he responded, “I’d hope so. I think I do, because I very much do love the work, and I’m very intentional and very passionate about creating avenues to best serve our students.”
For Jordie and for many others, a person who fit into EFA’s culture was one who was passionate about doing it “for the kids.” Valuing the mission is not unique; being “mission-driven” is a hallmark of most, if not all, non-profits. Working long hours and doing work quickly are similarly lauded traits in this and other workplaces. Here, I learned, people felt they were formally and informally assessed in terms of how late, long, and quickly they worked. Staff member Holly, a White employee, said of her manager, “She’s gonna assess the value of someone based on like,… what she thinks is valuable, which is like, you work hard, and you work fast, and you work as late as possible no matter what. For, like, the kids… you know what I mean?”
Caring about students is undoubtedly important. However, as Holly shared above, using “for the kids” as a reason to encourage staff to work later or longer hours is exploitative. It uses guilt to motivate, and it relies on an implicit notion of who the kids are and what they need. These kids, the ones EFA serves, are positioned as in “need” of saving because they are low-income or live in “bad” neighborhoods. Masking White saviorism as “doing it for the kids” and deploying that as a manipulative tool to extract more labor out of staff highlights the contradiction in EFA’s DEI work.
This was not a surprise to everyone at EFA. When I asked Marilyn, a White director, about organizational expectations around putting in extra hours, she said, “I think if you’re in a higher position where you’re getting a six-figure salary, it’s one thing to be doing the extra hours, but if you’re making… And I think people in our organization are making less than $50,000 a year, and if you’re making that much, and you’re being expected to work 80 hours a week, I think that’s where the DEI issue comes, in terms of the money that we’re making.” She went on to describe how the mandate to “hustle” fell especially heavily on certain departments, like Program. “Yeah, they could have classes all day, and then you have an event that night, and you’re supposed to start at nine and you get home at 11 o’clock at night. And now they’re having more events at night and talking about maybe doing things on the weekends. I think there’s definitely an expectation that you need to be there for all those hours.”
The Program department is home to Case Managers (CMs). CMs, as a group, have the largest representation of non-White employees at EFA. And, as Marilyn hinted, they are among the lowest paid. These staff members are hired to work in schools and are expected to teach classes, attend EFA meetings, and often work evenings for program-related activities. They were repeatedly asked to take on more work, often under the guise of DEI. Because these employees worked closest with students and were a racially diverse group, they were also frequently asked to give their input on important organizational decisions (usually when decisions were already made) and serve on new committees and working groups. Getting “CM representation” became a ubiquitous practice across teams at EFA. The result was an unequal expectation that CMs would spend more time at work, take on extra projects, and provide diversity input without additional compensation. This practice—demanding more time from only a certain group of staff—limits the agency of staff members by controlling how they can use their time both in and out of work, a trademark characteristic of a “racialized organization” as defined by sociologist Victor Ray. Time use was dictated by EFA, and its internal policies and practices were enacted along racial lines.
EFA’s work culture, as defined by the staff members I spoke with, is rooted in urgency and paternalism. As David Brunsma and colleagues have demonstrated in their work on White spaces, places like organizations utilize culture to maintain the dominant racial hierarchy—that is, to secure White interests. In a White organization and space, not only do the cultural characteristics govern how work gets done and who is valued, but as seen in Marilyn’s example, they also can reinforce inequality. The unspoken norm that CMs must work longer hours and take on more work simultaneously reinforces EFAs culture and reproduces a racial hierarchy.
Performative White race-consciousness is kind of like fool’s gold: it’s shiny and attractive and often very convincing—you might just mistake it for the real thing.
White Performative Race-Consciousness
Coupled with the White cultural characteristics that governed how work got done at EFA was a progressive performance from White staff—something I observed and was discussed by many of the employees I interviewed. I argue that the cocktail of well-intentioned staff members coupled with the introduction of anti-racist and progressive trainings on White supremacy culture resulted in a paradoxical response to the DEI imperative. Rather than remake organizational culture, I observed the emergence of a performative and false race-consciousness wherein individuals tried to convey, both externally and internally, that they, individually, were not racist.
This performance, or diversity theater, can also include the symbolic representation of staff of color, specifically to signal their progress and “wokeness” externally (which EFA also took part in). However, this project focuses primarily on the performance of White staff. In several interviews, staff of color described how their White colleagues behaved or said certain things to signal that they were well intentioned and “not a bad White person,” yet did not truly engage in the DEI work. As Sarah Mayorga-Gallo has demonstrated in her work on how Whiteness is centered in diversity ideology, employing diversity theater not only creates a convincing performance to other individuals or organizations, but also helps foster a positive construction of the self. Participants of color described seeing these actions from White staff as an act; that these employees are purely actors, and the diversity discourse is merely a script. However, for those who do not realize this, the same words and actions can construct a convincing and inspirational story of a progressive organization with progressive staff. That obfuscates organizational inequality.
White leaders at EFA were in prime positions to display this false race-consciousness. Not only were they often speaking to and in front of all staff, sharing updates on projects and strategy, but they were also making decisions and steering the organization. When called out on inequitable practices, Ava, a Latinx manager, shared that White leaders’ performances could be harmful non-responses: “…[Tjhere is no action plan or real accountability on it. It’s like a display of like, ‘I am so sorry.’… And it’s like that exhibition of like, ‘I’m so sorry that I did this to you. I’m going to do better.’“ To her, and to other non-White employees, it felt meaningless. “We’re like, “Okay, well then this self-castigation is just for show. It’s not authentic. It’s not meaningful. We’re not seeing….’ And so, we’re like, ‘Okay, here we go. Here are the crocodile tears, but I’m gonna see this shit again in a week.’“
Ava made explicit that the White staff were prone to public displays of apology to show that they were aware of their privilege and felt guilt around it. But it felt to her and others like the behaviors of White leaders were “for show.” Nothing substantive would change.
Not only leadership participated in the performativity. White staff at all levels could and did use semi-public opportunities to demonstrate their race-consciousness. In one meeting, Leigh, a White staff member, brought up wanting to focus on “decolonizing professionalism.” Earnestly, a fellow employee asked if someone could define decolonization. The meeting room, including Leigh, went silent. When pressed, neither Leigh nor anyone else could define the important topics they brought up; Leigh could convincingly recite her lines without understanding the take-home messages.
Accountability, or a lack thereof, is a strong theme in this performative race-consciousness. Part of the reason it can be a performance is because there is a lack of accountability, specifically for White leaders, in terms of actual change. Deploying diversity or DEI in this rhetorical, surface way allows for White staff to discuss racial inequality and Whiteness but maintain the status quo that centers their own comfort and power.
Performative White race-consciousness is kind of like fool’s gold: it’s shiny and attractive and often very convincing—you might just mistake it for the real thing. However, those who have a trained eye can see it for what it is: fake. As the examples above highlight, there is a strong performative race-consciousness that some employees at EFA engage in, specifically White staff attempting to show that they “get it.” However, this display negatively impacts staff of color as well as does nothing to structurally change the organization to be more equitable.
Getting Past Performance
In this piece, I highlight that the introduction of a very progressive DEI training on White supremacy culture—to a workplace champing at the anti-racism bit—resulted in little organizational change. Unfortunately, the unintended outcome was that EFA appeared to be more progressive, anti-racist, and “further along” than other organizations while never actually challenging and pushing back against the identified characteristics of their culture that were harmful and toxic. They shifted the language to be more progressive sounding and to enhance their image, while maintaining all the social and systemic benefits of Whiteness. White spaces are created and preserved through culture, which is why a critical examination of organizational culture, especially White organizations like EFA, helps us understand how DEI work, even work that attempts to interrogate Whiteness, becomes limited in its effectiveness.
In addition to being an interesting examination of organizational culture and DEI work, these findings have important implications. When you see hints of progress, such as White staff talking about race and racism, it is easy for leaders to “tick off” the box of doing DEI. It is far easier to stop investing resources in improving structures and working toward anti-racism when you think the goal is already achieved. And when these small signs of improvement become the solutions and are routinized within an institution, far less focus is placed on the real underlying problems. Furthermore, organizations and institutions are known to copy each other in a process termed “mimetic isomorphism” by scholars Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell in 1983. While many staff that I spoke with did say that EFA was “better than anywhere else,” it is likely that everywhere else will eventually look very similar, having implemented comparable practices. This would only further institutionalize and make durable diversity practices that appear progressive yet maintain the status quo.
It is also important to point out that even the shift toward more rhetorical progressiveness is not all bad. Understanding how White supremacy shows up and is manifested at work is a key conversation that many organizations are not ready or willing to have. Equipping staff with the language to talk about their workplace in a critical way is phenomenal progress. It is equally as important however, to highlight how it can go awry, like in EFA’s case, remaining mired at a shallow, performative level.