• discusses how black people learn, from their first employment, to navigate race at work;
• explains how black leaders use the SCAN model to deal with race “in the moment”;
• explores the impact of a decade of reports on race in the workplace; and
• raises the challenge of talking about race at work – why do we still find it so difficult?

Everybody’s got a mother, or a father or brother or sister, and so on and so forth. I think the problem with race is that the other side of the line lies behind an opaque curtain. You literally don’t know what’s on the other side of that curtain – and by and large, how would you? Neither you nor I have ever been, by definition, in a circumstance where everybody in the room is white.

Sir Trevor Phillips, OBE, Writer, Broadcaster and Former Head of the Commission for Racial Equality

People aren’t actively excluding people, not consciously necessarily, but the behaviours and what they expect of people, thus, by implication, they’re excluding people. So, this exclusion occurs often by accident . . . the majority of [white] people that you’d encounter that are professionals were actually good human beings who wanted to see people succeed.

Michael Sherman, Chief Transformation and Strategy Officer, BT

You could just have a simple, zero-tolerance rule, that says, “Every time I experience racism of any type, I’m just going to go full-out and confront it.” Or you could have another simple rule which is like a lot of recent immigrants have done over the years, which is, “I’m going to keep my head down, and ignore it all. I’m just part of it. Grin and bear it.” There are two extreme rules. Neither of them, in my experience, work. In the middle, is me trying to figure out, on one day, I’m going to confront that . . . the way in which you respond – and this is the difficult part of the quiz show – the choices you make affect how people perceive you.

Paul Cleal, OBE, Former Partner, PwC

It seemed like in the UK, no one even talked about race. The only thing that people successfully talked about in the boardroom or the executive meetings would be gender. We actually had what I consider progressive discussion around gender and gender equality. Gender is easier: Even broaching the subject of race was taboo which was quite shocking because, in America, it’s front and centre.

Anon, Senior Executive, Technology

Everyone sees colour. You may not act on what you see, but you do see colour. It’s just like saying, “I don’t see sexual orientation,” or “I don’t see gender.” Those are all lies. Don’t perpetuate those lies and tell those lies to your colleagues because it just makes the mantra that makes it harder for your diverse colleagues.

Anon, Senior Executive, Automotive

LEARNING TO NEED TO NAVIGATE RACE AT WORK

I got my first job in 1979. I was 16 and in need of a job to supplement my meagre income from pocket money. The previous month of Saturdays had been a steady routine of “get up – get dressed – head to the market” and then spend the next few hours asking stall-holders for work. I was prepared to begin work that very day, I would tell them. Every time I would get the same reaction: a brief glance but no work available.

I was delighted when I got a job in the branch of a national supermarket chain. Forty years later, I still remember the interview: a lengthy one-way conversation with a personnel lady in a small but clean upstairs office. After rattling through the standard questions, the interviewer, satisfied with my answers, laid out the terms of employment – £12 for 11 hours of work per week. I vividly recall her smile; she wore it throughout the interview, from beginning to end. It was a just-warm-enough professional upward curve of the lips, painted with pink lipstick. She probably wore that smile even when she fired people.

Nothing was said about my race, apart from one thing.

“You’ll be treated exactly like all the other Saturday Girls,” the personnel lady said. “And you can do everything the white girls can – except work on the meat counter.” I blinked. Her smile didn’t move. “It puts the customers off,” she said by way of explanation, totally matter of fact.

There was no tension, ill will or any kind of emotion between us. In the moment, I didn’t think much of this information. Like many teenagers (both then and now), I was just happy to have a part-time job. No nonsense comment about meat counters was going to discourage me.

My interview took place at a point in history when male store managers still openly and overtly slapped the ladies’ bottoms to speed up shelf stacking. So, when I shared what the personnel lady had said with my friends, both black and white, we all treated it as a joke. Without overthinking it, we laughed about the possible unpleasant connections between a black shop assistant and the meat counter. Would a cut or plaster on my finger make people think a piece of my finger had fallen into their meat? Did they think I was dirty? Or muddy?

I enjoyed my time as Saturday Girl. To me, aged 16, the role was sufficiently exciting and varied. I trained on the tills, finding immense satisfaction in being able to punch in numbers without looking at the keys, and I got real energy from talking to the customers who passed through, taking what felt like several minutes to write out their cheques. My customers were, on the whole, engaging and positive.

On one occasion, one of my teachers (a vicar, who taught religious education) came through my till with his shopping, chatting away. Noticing he had forgotten his jelly babies at the back of the till, he grabbed the packet, laughing gleefully.

“I enjoy biting the heads off the black ones,” he grinned, adding them to his shopping. I thought it was a stupid comment. Again, though, I didn’t feel any anger or emotion or anything that the 21st-century Barbara suggests I should have felt. At that stage of my life, I was accustomed to teachers and others in authority making ignorant and offensive comments about my race. That was part of my daily life. So, this was the behaviour of a stupid, ignorant man. I shrugged it off. My job was to work on the tills, not discuss black jelly babies.

Unconsciously, I was navigating race in the workplace at 16 years old. And without ever making a purposeful choice, I had developed a strategy for doing so: keep my head down, work hard and ignore any comments about colour.

On reflection, I can now view the time at the store from two different perspectives (Figure 1.1).

Optimistic Barbara felt fortunate to be employed. I was truly grateful. When my parents first tried to enter the UK job market, they were subjected to deeply offensive name-calling and even physical violence. By the time of my supermarket chain interview, groundbreaking legislation, including the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and 1968, had banned discrimination in public places, ended legal discrimination in housing and made the promotion of hatred on the grounds of colour, race, ethnicity and national origins an offence. So, optimistically, there I was, a black British daughter of black immigrants able to work anywhere – except the meat counter! Would I permit a handful of ill-informed comments to get in the way of my progression in British society? No, head down, press forward, be grateful. I would work hard and succeed through my own efforts.

Pessimistic Barbara would be disappointed to discover that racism was still so embedded in British society and institutions. How sad, I would think. How sad that the organisation and structures in society and my workplace made the continuation of discrimination and preservation of white privilege inevitable. Would I always be at a disadvantage? Was this simply the way the system worked, and would I be on the wrong side of it regardless of how hard I tried?

These two perspectives resulted in an ongoing tension that has stayed with me throughout my working life. Teenage Barbara hoped that navigating the workplace was as simple as balancing sufficient capabilities and the agency to succeed. However, the reality might be that she would need to overcome systemic constraints that would obstruct her progress.

These two standpoints resonate with Cornel West’s¹ “two camps” of how people interpret the reasons behind the lack of upward mobility of African Americans. One camp includes the conservative behaviourists, who focus on values and attitudes and personal agency. This camp suggests that if black people want to succeed, they only need a good work ethic, to be responsible and to try hard enough. West’s other camp is composed of liberal structuralists who highlight political and economic structural constraints, discrimination in jobs and housing, poor healthcare and education. This camp typically believes that success for black people is determined by more equitable access to jobs and housing through strategies, such as targets for the number of black employees and government funding of health education and childcare programmes. West himself suggests that behaviour and structure are inseparable – the way that people act and live is shaped by the larger circumstances in which they find themselves.

Like West, I now know the reality is not individual agency or structure but far more complex and nuanced. Individual agency and broader systemic issues both have a role. What I do believe is that black people working in organisations need to develop the ability to navigate this complex reality. They must make conscious choices: Do they rail against systemic organisational issues and advocate on behalf of others, or do they keep their head down, often ignoring overt or more subtle racism, and focus on working hard believing that will ensure their personal success?

The leaders I interviewed for this book suggest that these choices were not limited to my youth. These choices are very present in the current workplace. Successful black leaders talked about the need to weigh up decisions about how to respond to perceived racial intolerance in the moment, often on a daily basis. This is an integral part of navigating race at work. An understanding of how black leaders navigate race in the moment is essential for understanding the process that black colleagues go through on a daily basis. The SCAN model describes a process used to navigate these choices.

THE SCAN: HOW BLACK PEOPLE NAVIGATE RACE IN THE MOMENT

Successful black leaders have learnt how to navigate race in the moment. This process has four stages.

The first stage is to observe the SITUATION. The situation might be subtle, like the look that someone gives you during a meeting or how someone interrupts or talks over you. It could be more overt, like the gorilla emoji response to your “good morning” message on MS Teams. It might be more blatant, like using the phrase “N in a woodpile.” These are all recent examples from black leaders.

The next step is to CONFIRM. Did I really see or hear what I thought I did? Did they really say that? Do I want to clarify whether I did hear what I thought I heard?

The third step is ANALYSIS. “Who” did/said what matters a lot. Was it a superior, a peer, a direct report, a client? What level of importance does this person have within the organisation? What is the nature of my relationship with the individual? Is this a friend or foe? The next part of the analysis is to ascertain their intent. Did they mean it? What was the intent behind the comment? Should this person know better? Are they actually educated with regards to what they should or should not say? Has this person done/said something like this before? Is this part of a pattern? In this step many leaders also look inward: What might I have done to trigger that response in that individual in that moment?

The final step once a black leader has experienced a situation, confirmed with themselves what happened and analysed the moment, is to decide on what happens NEXT. Do you respond and call it out here and now, in the moment? Or is this something you want to pick up on later? Responses might take the form of clarification, either with the person(s) involved or witnesses to the situation, or a leader might simply ignore the situation altogether. Some leaders choose to make notes so that they can return to it...