Inequalities and double
standards are prevalent even in diverse and inclusive environments, and, often,
it is necessary to police the treatment of the unprivileged to identify the
subtle and insidious trickery of tokenism, slithering and secreting itself
under the cloak of diversity. Diversity must never be allowed to become a
numbers game, where the unenlightened may check boxes, put down their pens and
go home, without any genuine intent or attempt to create an all-inclusive
culture where all rank equally; where each person's voice carries equal weight
and gets equal sympathy.
Yet, the experiences of
many 'diverse hires' in the corporate space, America and beyond, show that tokenism is widespread;
not only, or merely, in terms of who is in the room by comparative numbers, (one Black male, five East Indian females and
seven White Europeans of any gender - check, check, check), but also in terms of who gets what privilege while sitting at the table. What? With the preponderance of eLearning courses
and corporate retreats that teach us not to call each other fat? Or not to make
pejorative references to each other's background, nationality or culture? Like
not to call Kyrgyzstan a 'shithole' country on the job, where a
Kyrgyzstani may be present? Or not to complain about the exponential increase
of Chicken Thika Marsala dinners in the office refrigerator since 2010? Or not
to refer to Jamaicans as 'weedheads' who listen to Bob Marley all
day, because, you know, Jamaicans are everywhere and always 'mellow'? No way.
Actually, yes way. Way
way. eLearning courses are mainly a compliance tool; and a
nuisance to the impatient. They do play an important role in sensitizing staff to the
requirements for appropriate behavior on the job, but who cares? Who doesn't
flip through them and guess the answers to the assessments? Or cheat? And,
perhaps because of how we treat these courses, they rarely ever change
mindset in fundamental ways. (You may not call me fat for fear of losing your job, but you
still think it and act it, and I am your default dumping ground for leftover
cupcakes).
The real problem with
hidden biases that create double standards is however more invidious. It is how
unprivileged persons are subconsciously viewed in a negative way and, ultimately, prejudiced by that view: prejudiced in career mobility; prejudiced in their
scope for easy integration and assimilation into the job environment;
prejudiced in their opportunities for participation in social events; prejudiced
in their opportunities to share in available but scarce perks and novelties;
prejudiced in their ability to claim normalcy, take ownership and exercise
agency on the job - to be considered as much the default as everyone else. That is, everyone with privilege. (The default for persons with privilege is a White person. However, non-White persons may also benefit from privilege of one sort or another, including privilege occasioned by historical social class structures). The truth is simply that in diverse environments, what is sauce
for the goose is not always sauce for the gander; and sometimes the gander gets
no sauce at all; equally egregious, in either case.
Sauce discrimination is
best illustrated by actual personal experiences of 'diverse hires' in corporate
environments dominated by the privileged. These illustrations show how
prevalent these double standards are, and, what is more, how subtle and deeply
entrenched they are as mindsets or heartsets. All the illustrations are set in
environments where eLearning courses on ethical conduct and
diversity trainings abound; hence the wisdom that eLearning courses
per se cannot change mindsets and heartsets, and the imperative that
organizations be deliberately mindful and focused about inclusionary policy,
and jealously watchful of the consistent implementation and follow-through of
action steps to protect the vulnerable. Cause, let's drop the BS for
a second, we may never really be able to do anything to change a heartset - and
we really do not care; that is why we have rules and insist on maintaining them, and employing watchdogs (sometimes
called HR) to do so. All the
following anecdotes are true, though the names used are fictitious.
1. Canada, c. 2013. The precious moment when you’re
literally called ‘token’
Basil was working for
a consulting firm where he was the only minority in his service group. Everyone
else was privileged. Basil made friends and got along famously with his
colleagues. He was invited to dinner, house parties and social clubs. He
socialized and integrated, even dated among the privileged, and in every
respect felt like the default - like everybody else.
Then the bubble burst. Reggie, a privileged friend, confessed that other privileged colleagues from another group had referred
to Basil as ‘the token Black guy in tax.’ Gasp. Further, they had expressed
surprise that Reggie and Basil were friends.
The use of the word
token to describe Basil was classic racial microaggression:
- His name was erased and replaced by an offensive
description that re-identified him as an abstract entity (token Black guy), belittled his worth as a professional, and ignored
the eminence of his qualification for the job he held. It suggested that
he was a statistic, and not there to add substantive value.
- It would have been easy for those persons to find out
what Basil name and background were, if they had that interest.
Instead, while it is clear they had an interest in him (they surely knew who he was), they chose to be dismissive and condescending,
flippantly stripping him of personhood, rendering him a curiosity and an
experiment for enquiry from Reggie.
- It revealed their sense of entitlement and ownership
to the exclusion of those whom they othered. This was their turf and Basil had merely been brought there as a wall accent - to make them feel
magnanimous in giving the poor token an opportunity.
- It created uncertainty within Basil about his place
in the organization and how he should relate to his colleagues. Was he a
mockery at their parties, with privileged persons snickering behind his back,
chatting about him and calling him names, while, to his face, piteously
smiling with 'the token Black guy'?
In the end, Basil dismissed
them as dumb, and moved on. Perhaps there had been some redemption for privileged persons in the fact that Reggie had seen it fit to
separate himself from the sentiments expressed by his colleagues and to take the active step of reporting their
crudity, not as a joke, which was an option, but as an outrage. Ultimately, it
is the organization that would suffer in its mission to cultivate the kind of
workplace environment that was a melting-pot of inclusion.
2. New York, c. 2015. When everyone does not get the same privilege
of access.
A New York consulting
firm appeared to have a policy of openness and free access. There was
sufficient evidence of that in how some young privileged female associates dealt
with partners: they sent the partners emails and instant messages at will, called them
on their mobiles at will, pursued them tirelessly over outstanding deadlines
without shyness, had coffee or salad all cozied up in a cafe, chatted about the
boat trip to or from Boston, or wherever, and, you get the picture. Micah, a person in the minority, was told as an
experienced hire that the firm wanted consultants who could get work done and
keep things moving, so, with the examples around him as precedent, he felt
confident about the aggressive approach that he would employ to achieve success.
And then he was given
conduct of a project with a tight deadline, with a mandate to see it through to
expeditious completion. So Micah did what he had seen young privileged female
colleagues of his do. Micah followed up frequently with all
stakeholders in the matter, including persons senior to him. And when things
were not moving apace, he ‘hounded’, that is, followed up and monitored non-stop,
as politely as he could, according to the precedents set around him. Micah ‘pissed-off’ senior people who did
not like being hounded (no physician likes her own
medicine), and then he did the
unthinkable. He sent an external partner, a person of privilege, an email, with information requested by that external partner. Gasp.
All hell broke loose.
One privileged female partner,
not on his team, but someone involved in the matter, complained that Micah did
not know his place (not her words but that
is how it translated to Micah). No one had given him
permission to send an email directly to the external partner. Add to that the fact
that he had been hounding persons senior to him to get work done on time. He
was clearly out of control. Never mind that his polite persistence had paid
dividends in that the work was completed within deadlines. Never mind that the
data requested by the external partner was Micah’s work, and the request would
ultimately have to be handled by him. Never mind that privileged associates sent emails of the kind to internal and external partners all the time. If Micah did not send the
information directly, he would have had to send it to someone else who would
simply click the ‘forward’ button to send it onward to the requesting partner.
No one seems to have
informed the external partner (she didn’t get the memo) that she should not communicate directly with Micah. Somehow they
both did not know the rules. She wrote back to him saying thanks, and a few
days later, followed up with him to ask for additional information and
clarification. On those subsequent occasions, Micah sent the information to a
partner in his service group who simply hit the forward
button. So much for the hullabaloo.
The end result was that Micah
was asked by his own team to take a backseat for a bit because, obviously, the
complaining partner had issues with him. He had never seen that happen to
anyone else on the team. He thought the
real message, which his team had seemed to tolerate, was that he should know his place
and, metaphorically speaking, not 'look privileged women in the eye,' an unfortunate inference to make which may not have been true, but certainly an excusable inference open to him in the context of the double standards he faced, and against the background of a history of discriminatory treatment in his cultural DNA which resembled his current experience.
In the long run, Micah
did not think it was an environment he would continue to feel comfortable in, so he left
the job. At the very least, it would be too confusing – he could never be sure
after that incident, with whom he was allowed to speak or interact, and he could
not use his privileged colleagues as good precedent. Further, he was not about to know his place. Micah
was brilliant and hard-working. The firm lost. Happily, not all privileged partners in the scenario felt the same way, or showed the same double standards.
3.
New York c. 2014. When you are subject to
greater suspicion and scrutiny because of your origin.
Dwight came from
Jamaica. Whether it is related or not, he appeared laid-back. He would walk
through the office, not run or scurry like the rest of his colleagues. He took
his one-hour lunch rather than ‘grab a salad at Choppt’ and quickly return to his
computer to eat and un-digest. He never appeared stressed, never ripped his
hair out and always wore a smile, even laughed loudly at times. He was extremely smart and
well educated and had made it far up the ranks because he had proven himself.
That is how he got his job in a New York consulting firm. But it appeared he
could never prove himself enough – to some.
'Some', in this case, turned
out to be a Taiwanese project manager he had to work with on a big project. Right
out of the blocks, their interaction was interesting. She was fascinated with
the fact that he was Jamaican, and constantly told him that he reminded her of
the Jamaicans that work on her car in Yonkers. 😦 In fact, so satisfied was
she that she knew Jamaicans, by virtue of employing Jamaican mechanics, that her interaction with mechanics became a standard for all her assumptions about him – including her
perception that Jamaicans always 'know everything' even when they do not know
what they are talking about. (Pretty sure the eLearning course counsels against making assumptions
– but she does have a point about Jamaican mechanics. Shh!).
Dwight worked hard but
found that she would dismiss his ideas and work-products summarily without
giving him a chance to make the sale. One week or so later she would suddenly
come up with (some of) his ideas in a different template, by which time the ideas had
become brilliant, and more importantly, hers. She would
also brush his ideas off in discussions, but when the (White) partner on Dwight’s
team mentioned the same ideas, Taiwanese would immediately call them brilliant.
Dwight could not do
anything right. If he was proactive and tried to push the project along, he
would be told to wait for her directive because she was in charge, and she
thinks in a linear manner, not one that is haphazard and all over the place.
She meant she could only deal with one thing at a time. But if she saw him
looking out of a window, she would immediately accuse him of gazing and not
working. If he left early one day, he was not invested enough and showed signs of
laziness. (She was clearly unaware of the troubled historical relationship between Black persons and that adjective. Or, maybe not). She saw him hard at work, but would still question his diligence if
he was wearing head phones and looked ‘too happy.’ She, in fact, told him he was
‘too happy.’
Luckily, the story has a sort
of good ending, maybe thanks to Dwight’s personality, but more his competence.
Eventually they encountered an aspect of
the project that Taiwanese had no experience in nor talent for, and she was forced to
rely solely on Dwight to handle that aspect. And handle it he did – so brilliantly
that the clients commended the team for the work. She came to respect him , told him she was impressed, that he had
far exceeded his level, and that he was ready for promotion. Slight twist to
the end: when she had to put that recommendation on paper, she toned it down to say he was ‘partially ready’ for promotion, because she feared going out on a limb for this Jamaican (well that seems to be the
best inference for her lack of conviction).
Dwight eventually left
the firm. The firm lost.
4.
Jamaica, c. 2010. That priceless moment when
you are literally called ‘the hired help.’
Maurice, a Black
Jamaican, was partner of a firm of attorneys contracted to a group of Canadian tech engineers pursuing profit in Jamaica. Maurice was famous for the quality of
his work and was much in demand. So in
demand was he that he often had conflicting commitments on his calendar – not just
an oversight in booking, but also because he was overbooked and had to ‘juggle’.
So he was inevitably running
late for a meeting with his Canadian employers one morning and as a result
they were forced to reschedule the meeting. They were not happy. Eventually, a manager reached out to Maurice to transmit their displeasure. She mistakenly
messaged him by forwarding an email trail which contained a rant from
the engineers expressing their displeasure to her. (It is in fact uncertain whether
she was being careless, or deliberate). In the rant, Maurice saw the following statement
from his White counterparts: “It
is not our custom to wait for the hired help.” Gasp.
It is quite possible
that those privileged persons who wrote that statement still do not appreciate how
it is read and received by a Black professional. Notwithstanding purported
apologies, ('sorry, it was not meant for you to see that'), Dennis terminated the relationship. The engineers lost.
5.
New York, c. 2017. When speaking truth becomes
aggression.
Kent, a minority, was smart and knew
it. And he was not shy about it. He set a high standard for himself and, as a
manager, held everybody to that standard. He worked in a very diverse
environment, with various diverse groups well represented; except at senior leadership
level. He was definitely no 'token Black guy.'
Shortly after Kent joined the organization, he started receiving complaints about what was perceived as his aggressive
tone in emails and calls. Aggressive? Kent had a habit of telling the
truth. He pointed out incompetence or lack
of leadership particularly where persons were in the habit of making excuses
for not doing their jobs. Senior leadership and others appeared to take offense
especially when Kent’s criticisms related to their team. No one accused Kent of being inaccurate or
mistaken, however.
Meanwhile, throughout
the organization, Kent saw privileged persons doing the same thing he was called
aggressive for doing. Some members
of the senior leadership team were very rude. They yelled and demeaned staff
when they felt like it. Even junior members of staff were curt when they got
the chance. In other words, nothing that Kent did was out of the ordinary for
the organization. Why, then, was he the only one being referred
to as aggressive, and being maligned for speaking the truth? Perhaps it did
come across as aggressive, but if so, why were other 'aggressive' privileged persons not subject
to the same reaction? Kent also noticed that some of his privileged counterparts
appeared to resent his authoritative exercise of leadership and complained that he was 'full of himself' and inflexible. Again, no one complained that he was inaccurate
or misguided. And again, many privileged persons were authoritative with these same complainers but were not subject to resentment for doing so. Altogether, it was a strange experience that only a minority professional
seemed to have.
Kent still works for
the organization. He appreciates the general diversity and did not let that
incident color his overall view of the organization. But he is still speaking the truth, and still being called aggressive.
6.
Canada, c. 2014. When natural hair becomes
activism.
When Courtney started his
client-facing job, he was clean-shaven with a bald head. About two years later, he decided to grow an 'afro' and a prominent beard, a la James Harden. This was
just before the long beard became a fad for everyone.
 |
Stock Photo |
Courtney’s neat,
perfectly-round afro grew to the extent that his hair stood out among his colleagues,
for sheer beauty and uniqueness. But it was certainly not the longest. Many of
his client-facing privileged colleagues had long hair, some in a periodic pony tail,
some shoulder length, long enough to simply rest on the shoulder, some thick,
some thin, but all noticeable in one way or the other.
And the questions or comments
came. Was he growing an afro for a cause – as against simply grooming his hair
in his preferred style? Was he part of a Black Power movement - as against
simply grooming his hair in his preferred style? Why was he growing an afro –
because he could not be simply grooming his hair in his preferred style? Did he find it appropriate for the office –
because grooming his hair in the way it grows naturally like any privileged person could possibly be inappropriate for the office? And so on. He did
not hear similar questions being asked of his privileged colleagues.
 |
James Harden |
Then one day he cut his
hair. His manager looked at his new low cut and remarked that she thought that the
low cut was a better way to keep his hair. He got the hint, though he did not
take it fully. He kept his beard growing even though the afro was gone. One day, a new privileged colleague, seeing his beard for the first time, described it as a dirty
beard. Undeterred, he kept growing it longer and longer and kept it looking
neat and managed. That is, until a client came to the office to meet with him and his privileged manager, saw his beard and said aloud in everyone’s presence, ‘You’re going to scare them.’ They all laughed it off.
Courtney kept his beard
growing until a few years later when the trend for long beards picked up. Then
he cut it. He has never been an activist a day in his life. Well, not the kind
his colleagues think. The client had captured the real underlying issue. Aspects of Black bodies and expression (as a cultural phenomenon) 'scare' some privileged persons and that fear manifests itself in policies enforced by corporate organizations dominated by persons of privilege.
7.
United Kingdom, c. 2017. Sauce for the privileged Goose not sauce for the minority Gander.
Sharif had worked for
over 15 years in the banking sector, in various service groups and at increasing
levels of management. He was well known for his competence on the job – he was
in fact the go-to person in his current role. He sought a
promotion to a role for which he had already had
significant exposure. He was confident he could handle the role given his
breadth of specifically relevant, as well as general, experience. But, the bank
turned him down for that position, citing various excuses and insisting that he needed more years of experience at that level. They did not refer to his fifteen years of experience working
in the bank in various groups, his thorough knowledge of the bank’s systems and
processes, nor his qualifications, which, on paper, were extremely impressive.
Then Nataly, a Russian
expat, was appointed to role, similar to that which was sought by Sharif, but for which she had no knowledge or experience.
None. She was a total novice. She had served a similar level of seniority but in role which had nothing to do with the new role in which she was appointed.
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