Episode #22: Say You'll Speak Up

against racism in the workplace by taking a strategic approach.

On a United Airlines flight I found myself reading a short article written by Ayo Osobamiro in Hemispheres magazine. The article featured an interview between Osobamiro and diversity expert Y-Vonne Hutchinson.

The problem they identified in their conversation that caught my eye, and I thought worth sharing with you, was named by Hutchinson in these terms:

“if work is toxic and poisoning, that’s an incredible scale of violence that we don’t really think about.”

I found the descriptors, "toxic, poison, and violence” memorable because those words are the types of conflict outcomes I try to address by preaching the gospel of productive conflict. After reading the interview it occurred to me that I needed to say more about productive conflict as it applies to issues of race and racism in American culture.

Hutchinson’s message should resonate with many of my readers. To address a toxic, poisonous, and violent workplace, she suggests that people

“approach equity conversations as they would any other aspect of their career—strategically.”

A rhetorical approach is also necessarily a strategic approach, and so I thought I would find out what this blog’s perspective might have to offer the conversation. After all, so much of our conversations—or lack of—about race in American society is driven not by productive conflict but by conflict avoidance.

Talking about race from a strategic perspective offers a much needed framework if the difficult conversation is to shift anyone’s way of thinking.

While the article didn’t have the space to explain what a strategic approach to speaking up about race might look like (I’m sure Hutchinson’s forthcoming book has more to say on the topic!) I suggest we stop to reflect on what strategy looks like for any of us when we go about tackling complex problems.

For me, by virtue of my scholarly training, strategic problem solving follows a method more or less informed by the Enlightenment’s scientific method. It goes a little like this:

1. Identify premises (things we take to be true and stable).

2. Ask a question (about things whose truth is undetermined and instable).

3. Form a hypothesis (a testable guess that answers that question).

4. Determine a systematic way to investigate the question (a method).

5. Test hypothesis using method.

6. Revisit hypothesis.

7. Share findings with others.

8. Repeat as needed.

There are variations on this approach, but when I think of strategic problem solving, the scientific method is the approach that makes sense to me. You might have a different set of steps to take strategic action as a business person, club leader, coach, knitter or candle-stick maker.

The basics are the same: you have a plan and you evaluate your reasoning and choices as that plan unfolds.

A strategic approach to problem solving seeks to find ways of naming the problem in order to determine what might change, what’s working or not working, and what next steps might be.

In short, strategy is the opposite of randomness. Strategy is structure.

When talking about racism I can see how having structure can be incredibly helpful to hold conversations as a way to lower temperatures in the room and move closer to the ideal of productive conflict.

Example premises to establish at the start:

1. Racism is real and evil.

2. People do not want to called or see themselves as evil.

3. People will defend themselves if called or associated with evil acts or beliefs.

Example question for the group to consider:

• How can we talk about racism in the workplace that won’t get people into defense mode—where one’s sense of identity is attached to the immoral act of racism?

Testable hypotheses:

1. Naming these premises outright will help people proceed in the conversation by lowering their defensive guards and help them talk openly.

2. Pairing the conversation with a lesson on the very real, very present, and very powerful concept of what a “social construct” is and how racism is an example of such will help people see racism as part of our shared social fabric.

3. Only then can people see the ways in which their choices and actions perpetuate or dismantle the that fabric.

Not the most elegant hypotheses from a scientific perspective (how can we measure these?) but you get the gist of what I would hope to achieve in a workshop or series of workshops looking at the issue of racism.

Whether or not these hypothesis hold would depend on the method used for the conversation and the agility in which that conversation is handled by a facilitator or workshop leader.

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The takeaway:

You may not feel as though you have the words to speak up about injustice—or see yourself as a thread in the inherently racist fabric of Americana—but by approaching what seems like a difficult and conflicted issue strategically—by making a plan and evaluating outcomes—you may find that engaging racism through conversation can yield valuable learning moments about yourself, your society, and how the shape of both items (self and society) are determined by what we say and do just as much as by what we choose not to say or do.