The Anti-Racist Organization

4Starting from Where You Stand

You can't fix what you don't understand. Jumping in with half‐baked ideas or co‐opting your current D&I activities and tweaking them to fit doesn't work. Speak to the companies who did just that and you'll find they discovered that it made little to no difference.

Exploiting diversity and employing more Black people does not show either yourself or your organization to be anti‐racist. It does not enable inclusion. And it doesn't mean you don't have a problem with systemic racism.

This is the crux of the matter, and this is why I wrote this book.

The Easy Solutions Are Rarely the Right Ones

Representation – more Black people – has no correlation with the presence or lack thereof of racism. Nor does the sudden proliferation of Black people smiling on corporate websites and brochures, or leading anti‐racism commitments with quotas and targets.

We want our company to reflect the communities we serve.

Inclusion is important to us.

These tropes have been used for decades and yet this has never translated into actual action, not really. You can still work in a corporate office in London or many other large cities and see only a handful of Black people in senior positions. If they're there at all, they tend to be concentrated in front‐line operational roles, applying for internal roles and getting nowhere whilst at the same time watching their peers leap to new and different roles with dizzying frequency.

There are also companies who claim they have ...