In the months following George Floyd’s violent and tragic death, companies — especially nonprofits — have used the social unrest building across the country to initiate projects that more closely examine racial inequality in the workplace. Corporations are now engaging in a new kind of philanthropy — leading the charge to finance “racial justice” and promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” While these efforts appear to be a sensible step forward, they do not actually reduce violence against minoritized populations. In fact, they reproduce it.
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Development (HUD), “Diversity encompasses the range of similarities and differences each individual brings to the workplace, including but not limited to national origin, language, race, color, disability, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, veteran status, and family structures. We define workforce diversity as a collection of individual attributes that together help us pursue organizational objectives efficiently and effectively.”
This laundry list of various minoritized identities is a short-sighted acknowledgement of the ways in which people are categorically harmed. These identities are subject to violence carried out through the “systems of oppression” you hear about at your workplace and in the media: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, classism, ableism, etc.
HUD then defines “inclusion” as “the process of creating a working culture and environment that recognizes, appreciates, and effectively utilizes the talents, skills, and perspectives of every employee; uses employee skills to achieve the agency’s objectives and mission; connects each employee to the organization; and encourages collaboration, flexibility, and fairness.” It further defines inclusion as “a set of behaviors (culture) that encourages employees to feel valued for their unique qualities and experience a sense of belonging.”
These definitions assert that diversity (having different kinds of minoritized people present) coupled with inclusive practices (creating a sense of increased belonging and upward mobility) will achieve a company’s objectives and mission more efficiently and effectively. When you break it down, these definitions of diversity and inclusion propose that companies bring minoritized people into certain spaces (jobs) so they can make more money by using them.
The inclusion of minoritized populations in a workforce does not necessarily prioritize them; their inclusion simply allows companies to better monopolize resources, like labor, time, and money. Put simply, diversity and inclusion enable companies to continue to profit off minoritized employees without addressing and abolishing the core practices that maintain labor inequality. Companies exist to make a profit and create a culture in which money and material wealth are prioritized — not to advance the empowerment of minoritized people.
These definitions indirectly emphasize that in order to achieve their bottom line, companies should ensure that employees who fall outside of the norm can successfully assimilate. Inherent in discussions of diversity in the workplace is the focus on bringing more outsiders (minoritized people) into white-collar workspaces for the mere appearance and aesthetics of progress. When a workplace commits to more diverse hiring practices, they are essentially pledging to allow minoritized people to feel closer to power, which historically has been rooted in whiteness. By offering “a seat at the table,” companies offer minoritized folks the opportunity to assimilate into whiteness.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture defines whiteness as “the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups are compared. Whiteness is also at the core of understanding race in America. Whiteness and the normalization of white racial identity throughout America’s history have created a culture where nonwhite persons are seen as inferior or abnormal.”
While this definition superficially breaks down what whiteness means, it fails to admit how whiteness informs every aspect of our contemporary existence. It’s important to understand that whiteness does not simply manifest as systemic oppression or institutional discrimination.
What we view and understand as whiteness is most often characterized by physical features on a person. Because of this, whiteness as a violent entity is identified through symbols, like white nationalist movements, racially-motivated hate crimes, the use of slurs, and police brutality. The popularization of this overt imagery (in Hollywood, news media, curriculums) hides less noticeable examples of violence, like punitive justice (prisons, fines, surveillance), food consumption, access to housing, standards for health, professionalism, and how we determine “objective” truths.
However, in order to understand the all-reaching violence of whiteness in its most complete analysis, we need to acknowledge both the obvious and subtle expressions of it. When we fail to do so, whiteness escapes accountability by being difficult to identify, relying on both implicit and explicit violence to perpetuate itself.
At its core, whiteness embodies the ability to ethically engage in violence and perpetuate harm without being held accountable by the state (via laws and punishments). Historically exemplified by chattel slavery, whiteness enables white-majority societies to impose and map a hierarchy of value and worth onto anyone or anything. To that end, whiteness has even warped our perceptions of things we don’t think twice about — like the seemingly neutral realities of time and space.
We have been conditioned to view workplaces as “objective and unbiased,” celebrating workplaces that seemingly remain apolitical through their commitment to “nonpartisanship.” However, time is political.
With the advent of industrialization, white-majority cultures have given time tangible value. When we hear people say “time is money,” what they really mean is time can be used to measure your capital or monetary value within society, which in turn determines your ability to exercise control over your body. Time is commodified through labor and physicalized through calendars, timesheets, and clocks. Viewing time as linear enables its commodification. White cultures tend to view time as going from point A to point B to point C with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Inversely, many nonwhite cultures view time as cyclical, existing outside of a confined space with no clear beginning or end.
When time is commodified, it becomes a resource. Our economy monopolizes time and centers it as a necessary vehicle for revenue generation, enabling companies to restrict the bodily autonomy of employees.
Because time is finite, the more of it you use in one instance, the less of it you have in another. So when you’re busy working, you have less time to take care of yourself. And if you’re responsible for others, it takes away from the time you need to look after them too. Time also determines where you can afford to live, thereby dictating your access to basic necessities, including getting to work. By defining and enforcing time as a limited resource, a company’s control over time takes away from a worker’s ability to obtain resources essential for survival, well-being, and the overall longevity of their life.
When we consider time in the context of a workplace, we see it manifest as “professionalism.” The standards of professionalism center and privilege whiteness through dress code, work style, speech, and most importantly, concepts of time.
Your job controls when you wake up, eat, travel, and go to sleep. But what makes this construction of time so insidious is its ability to determine your existential stability. When you look at the big picture, how society reinforces the relationship between labor and time decides how well we live and, as a result, when we die.
But what does all of this have to do with diversity and inclusion?
Most diversity and inclusion efforts focus on “obvious issues, such as workplace microaggressions and discriminatory hiring and firing practices.” Workplaces try to diversify their aesthetic by increasing the number and presence of minoritized bodies and narratives while encouraging a “sense of belonging,” i.e., assimilating minoritized people into the dominant [white] culture.
Companies attempt to make workers feel more included in the workplace by creating a culture in which employees can feel like a community and aspire to leadership. This is accomplished in part by providing company swag (encouraging physical uniformity) and offering professional development opportunities (encouraging employees to climb the corporate ladder, which translates to an increased proximity to power). It’s easy to understand why this all sounds so enticing. The higher up you advance in the company hierarchy, the higher you advance in your “real-world” economic status. Higher status equates to more money, which leads to stability, better life expectancy, and more time.
Diversity and inclusion often translate into “equitable” initiatives, such as employee resource groups (ERGs), also known as “affinity groups” — which offer spaces for minoritized people to feel more seen and heard at work. However, these efforts reinforce exclusion through tokenism. Instead of creating a workspace that empowers workers, employers focus their efforts on diversifying their workforce as much as possible. Tokenism only serves to give “those in power the appearance of being non-racist” and falsely presents them as “champions of diversity because they recruit and use [nonwhite people] as racialized props.” When employees are tokenized, they are only seen for their monetary and social value as opposed to their inherent worth as living beings.
Tokenization relegates a person to a single identity, which can negatively affect their sense of self and thereby their mental and physical health. As a result of this objectification (or depersonification), tokenized employees experience much higher rates of stress, anxiety, guilt, depression, and suicidal ideation. And while violence is often popularly portrayed and understood as explicit, numerous studies have shown that implicit violence can take a toll on your physical health. When minoritized employees are repeatedly exposed to nonphysical violence in the form of emotional abuse, their mental and physical health deteriorate over time.
Such abuse occurs within a workplace in a number of ways:
- Companies denying minoritized employees a liveable wage.
- Managers discriminately surveilling (“micromanaging”) minoritized employees, hovering over their shoulders and constantly questioning their ability and value.
- Companies asking minoritized employees to do additional work around diversity and inclusion to help them navigate racial tensions in the workplace and in broader society.
- Workers observing hostility towards other employees that repeatedly and intentionally goes unchecked.
These instances of implicit violence depersonify minoritized employees, negatively affecting their self-worth. Diminishing someone’s self-worth can have biological consequences. As mental health deteriorates so does a person’s physical health, resulting in the development of physical ailments, such as hypertension, loss of appetite, fatigue, and insomnia — all of which are underlying determinants of premature death.
Fundamentally, projects of diversity and inclusion rebrand colonial violence innocently as the linear passage of time. Companies’ efforts to diversify and be inclusive only serve to offer the appearance of progress in order to pacify aggrieved and traumatized populations. Part of the way capitalism and whiteness monopolize time is by telling us that money is urgent but progress is slow. We are told that minoritized people must put their peace on hold to prioritize the peace of someone else’s pockets.
Continuing to push diversity and inclusion in workplaces is not just unhelpful, it is inherently violent. These projects obscure implicit violence by only acknowledging the linearity of explicit violence, summed up by the dead bodies of minoritized people — a definitive end. By situating these “anti-racist” projects as responses to explicit acts of phsyical violence against minoritized populations, companies deprioritize and even erase the deep-rooted violence underpinning the standardization of whiteness. Diversity and inclusion efforts force assimilation into the status quo [whiteness] and escape accountability of the real issue at play — the supremacy of whiteness.
If we continue to accept reformist policies like initiatives of diversity and inclusion, we will never have justice — only the illusion of peace.
