Being Brown in a Black and White World. Conversations for Leaders about Race, Racism and Belonging

Annemarie Shrouder

• Publisher: See More Publishing
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780995829268
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Annemarie Shrouder has written a book to help leaders step into awareness of the damage "race" and racism cause and have caused. Her journey illustrates the deep divide that this social construct has created in bodies, in societies-and the world as a whole. Annemarie shares her pain, searching, and ultimately, the beginnings of healing of this divide in herself while chronicling what this divide can look like in companies and organizations. She masterfully illustrates the cost of not having these conversations, of not building community and the healing of stepping into both/and in order to see more.

CHAPTER 1
EITHER/OR (WHEN YOU’RE NOT ONE OR THE OTHER, WHAT ARE YOU?)

This book started many years ago as a title and an idea, or rather a feeling of not having a place to belong.

I was born in Montréal, Québec, Canada, in 1970 to immigrant parents.

My mother is from Austria. My father is Jamaican. Both had found their way to Montreal in their early 20s, for different reasons, to “start a new life.”

As someone who is “biracial,” I was never black enough for the black kids, and I wasn’t white. What that has meant for me is an energy of either/or—an energy that to me, for most of my life, felt like nothingness.

Nothing

As a kid

I think I’m nothing

not black enough for the black kids

Not white

Too brown for Austria

Too light for Jamaica

I race back and forth

trying to find a place

that is mine

that will claim me

“Come and rest,”

it will say

“Here

with us.

We want you…”

It’s a place I never find

Tired

weary

feeling empty

and never enough

Unless I am nothing

And then I can manage

to float

unseen

But that hurts too

In my family, “race” dynamics played themselves out between my Oma1 and my dad. I could feel the divide as a very young child and took it upon myself to fix it in the only way I knew how.

Do You Like…?

One of my

childhood pastimes

is running

between two sides

Checking to see

if the animosity I feel

is real

or imagined

If it’s safe

If there will be peace

“Dad, do you like Oma…?”

But the bookends

of my life

(one black,

one white,

both forces

to be reckoned with)

are not in accord

“Oma, do you like Dad...?”

Each time

the answer is yes

or sure

or a laugh

meant to dismiss

I know it isn’t real

If they like each other

I won’t have to pick

a side

What I am coming to understand, through the work of Isabel Wilkerson,2 is that the structure of the racial divide is about caste. Reading about history with this lens has shed a deeper and clearer light and insight into human behavior and interactions around “race”. It is also helping me to further my understanding of that knot in my stomach as a child, and that almost imperceptible (and not articulated) contempt I could sometimes feel in my Oma.

Picking Sides

Ultimately, my life experience has been about feeling like I have to pick. The result has been a life-long ping-pong game trying to align myself with each side, in turn, and depending on the context.

Culturally, this has been easier than visually. My mom was a stay-at-home parent for most of my life. This meant that I learned German (Austrian dialect, actually), and we spent whole summers in Austria every five years or so when I was a child—long enough to cultivate relationships with my cousins and become pen pals in a pre-internet world.

We always lived in neighbourhoods with predominantly white demographics. I went to schools with mostly white student populations. In fact, I distinctly remember wanting to go to the local public high school when we moved to Mississauga when I was 12. It felt like it would be more exciting, which for me was all about the fact that the building looked like the high schools I saw on TV and that there were more black kids. My dad told me in no uncertain terms that I would not be going there. Instead, he registered me in a separate school with a uniform because he felt there would be more discipline. He was probably right, but what that meant was that I was one of a handful of kids of colour. I’ll write more about that later.

While this is my story, my father was also finding his way in the corporate world as a black man. This meant experiencing subtle and overt racism in the workplace in the form of lower expectations, enduring racist comments, and having his knowledge questioned and his capabilities challenged. He also faced several barriers in finding work when we moved to Ontario in 1982. A few years after that move dad eventually ended up in the C-Suite. Based on the numbers today, I believe he could even have been one of the first black people to be C-Suite in Canada.

But it didn’t come without challenges.

“Among Fortune 500 companies, less than 1% of CEOs are black. Today there are only 4, down from a high of 6 in 2012, according to Fortune. And over the past two decades, there have only been 17 black CEOs in total. Of those, only one has been a woman -- Ursula Burns, who ran Xerox from 2009 to 2016.

But among Fortune 100 companies this year, black professionals account for just 3% of CEOs, 1% of CFOs and 3% of profit leaders like division presidents, according to the Stanford Corporate Governance Research Initiative.”3

Living in a White World

White is a world I was and am comfortable in; I get how it works. That may sound strange to you if your skin is white, but if you are a person of colour or black, I know you’ll understand what I mean.

The world people of colour live in, especially people who are black (North American or Caribbean, given my context and experience), has always felt foreign to me. And it has been a source of private pain and even shame.

The Bus Stop (Things You “Should” Know, if You’re Black)

Grade 3

My best friend

is Nicole

She is black

She introduces me

to the Jackson 5

and

The Little River Band

which we sing

at the back of the class

when the teacher isn’t watching

“Friday night, it was late, I was walking you home…”

Her parents are from Trinidad

her home is an oasis

New smells

hair products in the bathroom

a joy I can’t place

an energy I drink in

musi...

Table of contents

• What People Are Saying About Annemarie Shrouder
• Title Page
• Copyright
• A Note from Annemarie
• Foreword By Rodney Patterson
• Foreword by Candy Barone
• Contents
• Why This Book is Right on Time
• Why this Book? (The Sh*t just got Real)
• What This Book Is…and Isn’t. And Who It’s For.
• Chapter 1 Either/Or (When You’re not One or the Other, What are You?)
• Chapter 2 Microaggressions and Systemic Racism: Messages that Tell You what “Side” of Either/Or You are On
• Chapter 3 Not Black Enough
• Chapter 4 Neither—I’m not Black or White
• Chapter 5 On a Mission: Find Some Black Friends
• Chapter 6 I Don’t Want to Have to Prove that I’m My Daughter’s Mother (We Still Group People by Skin Colour)
• Chapter 7 New Mission: Be More Black
• Chapter 8 “Mom, I Want to be White”
• Chapter 9 Cracking Open (What if I Can Just Be Me?)
• Chapter 10 A White Man Taught Me that “Race” Isn’t Real
• Chapter 11 Coming Home…In Austria?!
• Chapter 12 Both/And
• Now What?
• Acknowledgement and Thanks