Corporations Compassion Culture

Chapter 2Uncomfortable, but NecessaryConnecting Racial History to Racial Injustice in Corporate Structures

When people on management teams plan and strategize to provide a good or service, they discuss expectations for the future while also examining the lessons of the past. They want to understand what led up to the present moment in the marketplace or how they built a certain reputation in a specific region or within the industry. They talk about what the marketplace expects of the brand and how they can improve marketplace engagement.

Unfortunately, when examining the relationships among groups of people who make up their organizations, they often don't take that same analytical approach. They don't, for example, probe past injustices to learn what went wrong and how they might create more equitable outcomes today. They don't explore what led to the massive levels of distrust within certain demographics toward corporate culture. In particular, an honest investigation into the history of “working-while-Black” makes corporate America deeply uncomfortable. That discomfort has stalled awareness of the perspectives of people of color in general—and Black people in particular—when it comes to their histories in the workplace. It has also stalled progress toward equality.

The discomfort is understandable but unproductive, because these explorations are valuable to understanding our perceptions of each other in the workplace, as well as how we choose to validate our experiences ...