If your organization is like many of the ones I’ve worked with, the commitment to DE&I and racial equity work is facing a lack of prioritization, clarity, and alignment. DE&I gets sprawled out across centralized human resource teams, councils, business units, and passionate individuals. You might find yourself overwhelmed and discontented by the duplicative efforts and high resource demands that aren’t producing high-impact results.  

When you try to influence in ways that lead to unified efforts you come across rigid organizational boundaries, and conflicting values, beliefs, and motivations. It can get dispiriting when you’re giving all that you have. 

When you’re in meetings with executives who have the institutional power to loosen rigid organizational boundaries and align on competing beliefs, you might see that racial equity competencies don’t fall along the usual lines of hierarchy. Executives and other colleagues behave in ways that lead you to conclude they don’t have the skill to understand and take action. 

They are missing an important skill - race analysis.

It’s a tough place to find yourself. And, there’s a way out.

By the end of this post, you’ll learn:

• what race analysis is
• the value of being able to do race analysis
• what happens when racial equity and DEI work is done with race analysis vs without race analysis

If your DE&I work is stuck in neutral and your racial equity work is a nonstarter, introducing race analysis to your approach can be the difference between another year of stagnation vs progress.

If you work to align and cohere a group around a shared purpose for racial equity, you need race analysis skills. 

If you want to facilitate a process where a group “gets it”, you need astute race analysis skills. 

If you desire to shift a group from disengaged and indifferent to engaged and caring, astute race analysis skills are a high leverage tool. 

If you’re looking to shift superficial DEI work to substantive racial equity work, use race analysis skills to transform disposition.

Before hopping into the value race analysis brings to minimizing racism in the workplace, let’s calibrate on what I mean by race analysis.

What is race analysis?

Race analysis involves 5 ways of seeing.

1. Recognizing that some organizations’ practices sift and sort who gets advantaged and who gets gridlocked out of opportunities. Think of who gets to be promoted, hired, positioned for a flashy project, retained.
2. Seeing the organizational practices that arrange people of different racial/ethnic groups into the organization’s hierarchy. Reflect on the demographics at every level of your organization. A whole host of organizational processes create this representation by level.
3. Discerning how race operates. Shift from thinking of race as a noun - identify or category and consider as a verb - kinetic and moving through the interactions and operations of an organization (McAfee, 2014)
4. Decoding what makes a process racial
5. Observing how spaces get raced and engaging in a spatial analysis connected to the health of the racial climate of the organization. Think here of how and why climate survey data outcomes vary by race and gender.

<<Related: Don't forget to click here to download my free guide on how race moves through the operations of organizations. >>

What is the value of being able to do race analysis?

Race analysis accomplishes at least four essential tasks that minimize racism in the workplace. 

With race analysis you can:

1. Influence in high-stakes meetings for the most adversely impacted
2. Name racially-gendered elephants in the room and earn, rather than lose, social and political capital
3. Take smart risks, smartly
4. Shift the disengaged to engaged, and shift from the superficial to the substantive DE&I

If your organization is anything like the ones I’ve navigated, we value insight and nuanced analysis.

 With race analysis, you name what few can perceive and connect dots very few see. With race analysis, you add to your capacity to influence, persuade, guide, and discern.

Change-makers who enroll in The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership become exquisite at this. If you’re interested, consider joining the waitlist.

DEI strategy outcomes without race analysis

Equity leadership without race analysis leaves your hard work without reward.

I hear from too many DE&I practitioners who are burned out, over-worked, exhausted, and overwhelmed. There’s so much outside of our locus of control to temper this, that it's absolutely critical to think strategically and utilize high leverage points as guided by systems thinking models to distribute the load. Without race analysis, we do DE&I with a constant leaky faucet effect - a slow drip of results that eventually wear down BIPOC retention.

1. DEI work without race analysis leaves your efforts stuck in neutral, high resource demand with little impact
2. Biased behaviors remain and so discrimination does as well
3. Biased processes that seemed “neutral” or “objective” continue, maintaining inequity
4. DE&I practitioners and the colleagues who rely on their analysis long for the insight that the absence of race analysis leaves behind
5. Without race analysis your DEI strategy is anemic and your response-ability is severely limited

DEI strategy outcomes with race analysis

Make your DE&I count.

Race analysis provides the capacity to notice subtle racial dynamics surrounding seemingly race-neutral work tasks and business operations. 

With race analysis skills, you:

• assess why, in one organization, few progress in one racial group and many in other racial groups advance.
• read the texts, contexts, and subtexts of seemingly neutral organizational processes and decipher in what ways is race acknowledged, ignored, articulated, and interrogated? Overlooking and not noticing doesn’t mean it isn’t there
• detect what makes a process racial? In light of the answers to questions one and two
• and discern what BIPOC, NBPOC, and white employees' experiences teach us about how race may function in the organization?

So remember… if your DE&I work is stuck in neutral, and racial equity work is a nonstarter, introducing race analysis to your approach can be the difference between another year of stagnation vs progress.

Racial equity work is difficult enough. Make your DE&I count. Ensure your DEI strategy is robust enough to generate more equitable results with less burnout using astute race analysis. Systems change is formidable work that can wear out the best of us. Use strong race analysis as a critical part of your racial strategy. Let it carry the load that’s too much to do alone.

If you liked this post, please share it with a friend. And, download these free guides and workbooks as gifts from me to you. 

Now you know the value that race analysis brings, but what about when to apply it? I’ve got Race in the workplace: The 10 most useful interactions at work to use race analysis for you to read next to help you with that.

I help trailblazing leaders like you, who are stuck between mainstream minutiae and resistance from status quo keepers, pivot organizational systems from unfair to equitable.

When you enroll in The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership you shift from:

• Risk aversion to fortified, unshakable leadership
• Mainstream generic approaches to unprecedented models for more racially equitable outcomes
• DEI burnout to tenacious healing and growth
• Martyrdom , reactivity, or inaction to honorable gamesmanship
• Misaligned and unclear to found providence
• Being an isolated load bearer to cooperative command

Work with me to expand your leadership capacity in care-curated leadership crucibles, sustained coaching, community, and battle-tested curriculum. If you want help applying these concepts, enroll in The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership.