Why your DEI strategy needs race analysis to be effective

Have you ever started your workday in a room with other DEI practitioners listening to the latest outcome metrics on company culture experiences? As you listened to the data get shared, alarms sounded off in your head? Were red lights flashing?

And when you looked to your left and right, no one else seemed to notice. People were busy responding to emails, looking at their appointment calendar, or planning their next unrelated contribution to the dialogue.

When you seemed to be the only person in the room who GETS IT…do you wonder…are they accustomed to the data, desensitized somehow? Unaware of what this data signal?  

Ever wonder, what do I have that others do not? Why was I the only person for whom alarms were sounding off, and lights were flashing?!

Well, I've walked in these shoes before and found that astute race analysis skills were one of the significant differences between them and me. Without race analysis skills, there isn't a noticing, a compunction to move, a motivation to act, or an impetus to pivot.

In this post, you'll learn how DEI fails without race analysis. And why your DE&I efforts need race analysis to be effective.

Before we begin, let's level set on my definition of race analysis.

Race analysis involves five ways of seeing race in the workplace.

1. Recognizing that some organizations' practices sift and sort who gets advantaged and gridlocked out of opportunities. Think who gets hired, promoted, and retained.

2. Seeing the organizational practices that arrange people of different racial/ethnic groups into the organization's hierarchy. Think of demographics by level in the organization.

3. Discerning how race operates. Think of how seemingly race-neutral processes yield racially gendered outcomes.

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. Look to your climate surveys for a strong signal about the racial climate of your organization.

Now that we've level set on what I mean by race analysis skills let's talk about the general approaches to DEI strategy.

Prevailing DEI strategy does not include a race analysis in three ways

1. Many unconscious bias trainings shield its trainees from responsibility and accountability for racial harm. Much of the curriculum tells participants that because this kind of bias is unconscious, the work is outside of everyone's awareness, out of anyone's control, and involuntary. In effect, the content recognizes harmful and adverse impacts while rendering it unfortunate, inevitable, and no one's responsibility.

2. Nonviolent communication training often takes a color-evasive approach where race effects aren't acknowledged. While the curriculum tends to mention MLK and the civil rights movement, it doesn't unpack what it means to be raced, use nonviolent communication, and still experience attack and threat, with your humanity denied and overlooked. It can, at times, take on what a former colleague refers to as "hokey hope."

3. Prevailing DE&I frameworks position the unit of analysis as a psychological phenomenon inside the head, where there's some preoccupation with who and who is not racist. To understand race only as a psychological phenomenon narrows the range of interventions we can imagine. The frame limits interventions to being of a psychological nature. Meanwhile, it makes a severe oversight - race operates in the interactions and operations of organizations. It hangs out in structures and processes, not only as psychological phenomena in someone's head.

Do these types of DE&I learning seem familiar? Have you seen them occur without race analysis though they might be intended to address an organizational race issue?

As you reflect on what resonates in these questions, let's pivot to how race analysis yields better attainment of DEI goals

Achieve your DEI goals with race analysis

One of the best ways to show you how race analysis can lead to better results is to share how I've used it.

Several years ago, I shared my race analysis with a cross-functional working group across five out of 16 verticals in a 3000-person HR department. It allowed us to begin to reimagine a performance evaluation process. We assessed the assignment of managers' high- and low-performance ratings and the extent to which it varied by race. 

I modeled how to read the texts (formal policy), context (norms in organizational sub-climates), and subtext (informal policies, norms, and meanings) to decipher non-obvious ways that race showed itself. Though some believe organizational processes are inherently neutral, race and its intersections can influence decision-making in performance evaluation. This level of sensitivity and discernment requires years of training. I could see what's invisible to the untrained eye. Want to develop this level of race analysis skill too? Change-makers in The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership develop this kind of astute racial analysis. Learn more about it below 👇🏾.

I showed how to detect what makes a process racial - elements like subjective reasons given for a rating, coded language, and the knowing that a low rating could be assigned to a specific racialized group without interrogation or request for responsibility.

I analyzed qualitative data that captured employee experiences and survey responses (quantitative) to gauge fairness in performance reviews. It shed light on how race imperceptibly moves through the operations of the organization (McAfee, 2014).

The outcome of this work was game-changing. 

So remember…race analysis is one skill every effective DEI team uses that ineffective DEI teams do not.

You're already burning the candle at both ends. Invest in making sure your DEI strategy is robust enough to yield you better results and better work-life balance. Yes, the system is big and yes the work is arduous. But, the race analysis embedded in a robust racial strategy should be helping to carry the load that's too much to humanly do alone. Not exacerbating it.

If you liked this post, please share it with a friend. And, download these gifts from me to you. See exactly what I mean: it's one example diagram of race in the workplace, of many instances.

Now you know exactly how race analysis yields better attainment of DEI goals, what about its relationship to unconscious bias trainings? I've got Unconscious bias training hasn't achieved your DEI goals? Build race analysis skills instead 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 join 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.