How to Write a Brighter Collective Reality
Diversity and inclusion are more than an action that corporations can cross off their to-do list. The question is, how do we tackle unconscious biases?
From the archives: Written by Roshni Goyate at The Other Box for The Annual Digest.
Roshni Goyate is co-founder and head of communications at The Other Box, and one-quarter of the poetry collective 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE.
At The Other Box, we get messages every day from people who know they need to be doing something about diversity and inclusion but they’re not sure what. Often, they’ve heard of unconscious bias training and think it will be the quick fix they need so that they can tick that box and continue with a shiny new D&I halo glow around their business.
We’ve sat through enough unconscious bias workshops to know they are dusty, irrelevant and ineffective. Slides of stats, research, facts and figures that fail to get to the root of oppression or show the structural reasons most boardrooms are still overwhelmingly white. But as of yet, no one has figured out that one of our most basic and essential ways of connecting with each other as human beings, is by making room to share stories.
Let me tell you a story:
There was once a 17-year old young woman who, for her English A Level creative writing coursework, wrote a semi-autobiographical piece about her first leg-waxing experience at the age of 12. Now 12 might seem young, but she was of South Asian heritage, and pretty much anyone from that background would tell you: body hair on women – and it’s removal – is a perennial obsession. This young woman’s creative writing piece was ridiculous and hyperbolic but it was also funny and nuanced and culturally specific to her lived experience.
But when she submitted it, her teacher told her it wouldn’t work, that she needed to try a different approach. So she wrote a piece with a white, male, blue-eyed protagonist and got the highest grade in the year.
Other perspectives will always be prioritised over our own. It happens in the mainstream media. In politics. In history. And it happens at work too.
In case you haven’t clocked yet, that 17-year-old was me. And yes, my teacher was white. I had forgotten about this incident, until a few years ago when clearing out my stuff from my old room, I came across the piece that got me an A. Over a decade later it showed me how, institutionally and culturally, women of colour like me are told from a very young age that our stories and experiences are not relevant enough. Other perspectives will always be prioritised over our own. It happens in the mainstream media. In politics. In history. And it happens at work too.
We need to look to these everyday stories of people from marginalised backgrounds to understand that even today, certain people are direct beneficiaries of a system that values their world experience above others’ and therefore rewards them with positions of power and leadership.
In order to move away from the box-ticking of unconscious bias training, leaders (and those aspiring to lead) in the industry need to ask themselves what kind of legacy they intend to leave behind. What kinds of teams do they want to build? What story do they want people to tell about their leadership, especially during a historical moment where it is no longer acceptable to sit back and accept the status quo. And as technology, markets and communities change, we all have the opportunity to ask ourselves: how can we make room and elevate the stories that have up until now been pushed to the margins?
From the archives: Written by Roshni Goyate at The Other Box for The Annual Digest.
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