What is a Racial Equity Strategist?

What is a Racial Equity Strategist and How Can One Improve Your Organization?

As organizations continue to search for support in developing racially equitable practice, they wonder how to tangibly benefit from racial diversity. Whether it’s sales outcomes, market positioning, efficiency, revenue and profit, or public sector initiatives, achieving organizational goals in relation to the state of internal diversity is an important step for growth. A racial equity strategist helps organizations navigate these issues and find tenable solutions.

What Does a Racial Equity Strategist Do?

On a basic level, a strategist builds on specifics by designing focused objectives. A racial equity strategist creates a tailored approach to help organizations find solutions to racial and ethnically based challenges, and develop processes for innovation, as opposed to pushing organizations to align with externally-driven agendas.

They do not interrogate potential racists and racism by overly addressing broad issues of inequity and bias. Instead, they examine areas of instability and operational weakness with the goal of helping organizations identify where opportunities exist to increase effectiveness, and unlock strengths and capabilities in relation to race.

Racial equity strategists explore future opportunities as a result of understanding the intellectual and creative wealth of racial as well as ethnic diversity. Organizations with a diverse workforce can miss long term opportunities by relying on generic representations of racial groups, and underutilizing the experiences and cultural connections that multiracial work-teams possess.

How Are They Different From DEI Practitioners?

The history of racism, racial bias and racial discrimination is apparent in most societies around the world, even amongst populations that seem racially homogenous. Resolving issues of racial indifference and violence is fundamental to nurturing a world of collective growth and stability. 

Diversity, equity and inclusion work identifies and examines harm as a fundamental principle. Practitioners then construct restorative practices, as well as legal, to foster an environment of healing and restitution. This work is vital, but can lack clarity and focus, and present an ambiguous approach to adjusting organizational processes. This leaves organizations with little to show regarding a trajectory towards organizational growth and elevated performance outcomes.

In peculiar contrast to diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners a racial equity strategist probes organizational dynamics and cultural norms to support organizations who want to adjust workflow, decision making, and other operational features through asset-based racial equity strategies. Diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners may examine outcomes, then look for internal racial problems. Racial equity strategists search for opportunities for innovation, then focus on internal strengths and capabilities based on racial and ethnic diversity.

Although historical knowledge is important, racial equity strategists mainly focus on the here and now within organizations and avoid being bogged down in historical racial discord. Diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners typically examine the history of legislated racism and discriminatory reforms along with legal cases to serve as guideposts to recognize where and how racial bias causes harm. History is factual; however, studies have shown that bias and racism training doesn’t change behavior over time (Dobbin and Kalev, 2018). 

Diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners can focus too much on anti-bias and stereotype training and potentially over-activate biases in people and conjure a stagnating effect inside an organization. Studies have shown that bias is a natural safety mechanism that protects principles and values within individuals and communities by providing a sense of self. When healthy bias is vilified as inherently harmful, and victimization is weaponized, a heightened state of fear and psychological defenses can cause teams and employees to disintegrate. Racial equity strategists keep bias training to a minimum and increase the support for organizations to examine their processes and inner workings as ways to develop innovative change that results from racial and ethnic advantages.

How Do You Advance Racial Equity Strategies At Your Organization?

People want and need to grow. Systems and processes bring value to innovation, which in turn brings value to stakeholders, investors, employees, customers and constituents. You can depend on a racial equity strategist to build out a collective process that pushes teams and organizations to identify paths towards operational change. Rather than overemphasize an organization’s social deficits and force people to sit in reflections of pain and trauma, they help organizations to accelerate its bottom line and performance level without falling into external quagmires. 

Marketing and communication strategies, brand messaging, policy management, stakeholder development and process improvement are examples of organizational aspects that a racial equity strategist can help you navigate.

Talk Racial Equity Strategy With Us

There are countless examples of externally-motivated organizations with failed racial equity strategies. Contact us today – start leveraging your organization’s racial diversity proactively.

Practicing Social Justice Inside Your Organization

After the calls for change and the reaction to gross racial injustice, there comes the time to develop new approaches to organizational performance. Social justice is a principle that will have to clearly manifest within organizations. Without a close look at the changes needed in leadership practices there will be continued delays in reforms across a broad spectrum of internal departments. Processes will not change, and systemic inequality will remain. For now, discard the complex discussions about SMART goals, data or policy jargon, let’s address some key questions.

What is social justice leadership in organizations?

In practice, there’s not one definitive answer. What’s fair is fair, what isn’t fair, is not fair. However, institutional racism and discrimination are a handicap in organizations, because one of the fundamentals to this type of injustice is the suppression of ideas. You need good ideas to surface in order to solve problems, innovate or grow. To get the most out of a multicultural/multiracial work force and high-level team, leadership cannot demand or expect that ideas will be explained or articulated in a uniform or standard manner. Ideas will be explained differently across cultures. If leadership has shown a preference for ideas to be explained in a certain way, or has developed a habit to only respond to a culturally specific method of articulation, then injustice is alive and well in your organization. As a leader you must be able to galvanize the full potential of your teams. One strategy to address this problem, is after listening to ideas that come from a normed hierarchy and the typical racially specific sources or individuals, reflect heavily on those ideas and look for critical feedback on those ideas from others who have been marginalized. Include those who have never had their ideas be considered for solutions. At your next meeting, after you’ve gained an appropriate level of permission from those people and set the proper ethical conditions, share with your teams who the individuals were who helped you move forward. Give credit where credit is due. Then, invite those people to other meetings or spaces where they haven’t normally been included for opportunities to collaborate. As a leader you’re charged with drawing on all sources of knowledge throughout your organization.

How do I avoid being accused of favoritism when I’m giving space for new voices?

Fairness is a subjective outcome. Most of the time people whose ideas are typically always used will feel that fairness does exist, at least for themselves, individually. This is one of the many problems with institutional racism in particular.

Those who are racially favored can easily feel that things are not fair when historically unfavored people become favored. As a leader, explain that there’s been a change in direction that will feel unfair to the racially favored, but that this change will create opportunities for the entire organization. Be clear that racial fairness is an asset, and that racial unfairness is a deficit. Be innovative and discuss racial fairness as a moral and strategic change that aims at broad positive outcomes. Talk about how racial fairness is key to the survival of your organization. There may be some scaffolding required in this process especially when racial injustice has been a hardened norm in your organization. Cultivate the understanding that racial justice is not about one race taking away from another race, but that it’s about balance and stability. Racial justice as a strategy, albeit the right thing to do, goes beyond having a conversation, it transforms the dialogue into initiative and vital action.

My teams agree that we need social justice in our organization, but they will not work together, what can I do?

There can be many different underlying reasons for this. There are too many possibilities surrounding organizational dysfunction to discuss in this short piece. Racial justice issues are a very sore spot for many individuals depending on the context and framing for engaging the dialogue. For those who benefit from injustice, some will feel that they’ve done nothing wrong as individuals and will be apprehensive about being judged or accused of wrongdoing at any time. The degree of fear produced from this sentiment will cause avoidance when it comes to working within teams. For the victims of racial injustice there will be ebbs and flows of distrust and some will be sensitive to the slightest indication of racism, regardless of the evidence of intention. Remember that racism causes injury, and injuries produce sensitive nerves. That is a natural result.

As a leader, if you’re experiencing this dilemma, you must do more to facilitate productive and fulfilling interactions. You cannot simply tell people louder or more often to work together. You have to be creative and set the conditions that a) enables the team to draw on each other’s strengths and pushes them towards a collective outcome, b) communicate to teams that it’s ok to have fears, apprehensions and mistrust, and that these are natural human emotions in this circumstance, and c) they are expected to take care of themselves well enough to follow through with the team-based expectations for social justice.

These suggestions and examples are only a small part of the entire work towards building a more just organization. Take time to improve your capacity to implement change with creativity and the will to commit to the long work of social justice.