Advancing Anti-Racism Policy Means Creating Anti-Racist Organizations
Environments that are infiltrated by racism are likely to create policies that perpetuate racial discrimination or other manifestations of our society’s views on racial hierarchy.
The policy process takes place within and across organizations – a seemingly simple statement, but also a reality that is often overlooked as a central factor in shaping policy decisions and outcomes. Governments at the federal, provincial/territorial, and municipal levels are all comprised of organizations that function as a whole through networked governance arrangements. Policy implementation occurs through ‘delivery chains’ that are also often distributed across organizations, sometimes in different sectors and industries.
Recognizing the key role of organizations as a major part of the ecosystem that surrounds the policy process immediately shines a powerful light on the ideologies, structures, and practices that can potentially impact the quality of policy-making.
Situating Anti-Racism Policy-Making Within Organizations
One of the most consistent observations and findings across domains, across time and experiences is that racism proliferates in and is perpetuated by organizations. Yet, as we know, organizations are the entities that create and implement policies, both public policies and corporate policies.
When we take a further step back and recognize the various ways that racism lives and proliferates in organizations, we see more clearly what this all means in terms of systemic racism and its interactions with policy-making. It becomes more clear how ideas, beliefs, and behaviours around race can become embedded in agenda-setting, policy formulation, policy adoption, policy implementation, and policy evaluation. The organizational environment around policy-making has a powerful influence on the outputs of policy processes.
In other words, the success of anti-racism policies and related initiatives depends heavily on the leadership, governance, culture, processes, and practices of the organization(s) in which they are developed. Similarly, organizations that are involved in the implementation and evaluation of anti-racism policies also impact the eventual effectiveness, impact, and success of these policies. Note that I define anti-racism as the action-based practice of dismantling and eradicating racism in all its forms.
All organizations that are involved in the phases of a policy process must be anti-racist, or must be working towards becoming anti-racist, in order to best support the effectiveness of anti-racism policies. Without this re-orientation, the energy of racism may continue to find ways to infiltrate the policy process, even if we are not consciously aware of this happening.
Insights From the Literature: Racism, Racialized Organizations, and Anti-Racism
In 2022, I came across Victor Ray’s Theory of Racialized Organizations, which has had a significant impact on my understanding of how organizations interact with race and racism. Ray’s theory says that organizations are racial structures that reproduce and challenge racialization processes – that they are not race-neutral entities. Ray asserts that organizations are social structures that in practice, limit the personal agency of some racial groups while magnifying the agency of others, based on processes of racialization.
A central observation of this theory is that organizations become racial structures as cognitive schemas about race are connected to resources in ways that differentially advantage racial groups. Essentially, it says that organizations have an important role in the production of racial ideologies, as they institutionalize the social construction of race itself through racialized access to power and resources.
I have found this theory to be a powerful explainer of how race and racism function in organizations, opening my eyes more to how organizations themselves become racialized entities – that is, entities that take on the characteristics of racial dynamics, including racial hierarchy. It has also made the mechanisms of institutional racism clearer for me, as it helps to illuminate how policy processes are affected by these processes of racialization, which can become embedded in the very make-up of policies themselves. To be very clear, policies made in organizations that are infused with cultural and cognitive schemas of anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, or other forms of racism, are likely to perpetuate systemic racism and racial discrimination.
This is a window into how racism and racialization become rooted in policy-making, and how policies become a reflection of the environment in which they were created. This perspective also highlights why anti-racism policy analysis, and anti-racism principles in general, are so important in our society, and makes it even more clear why it is so important for organizations across society to be anti-racist.
I’ll share more about two additional articles that are particularly relevant to understanding the dynamics of racism and anti-racism in organizations. First, in their 2014 paper, “Maintaining Hierarchies in Predominantly White Organizations: A Theory of Racial Tasks,” Adia Wingfield and Renée Alston carefully outline how organizational hierarchies are often racially segregated, and that the expectations of employees at different levels of these hierarchies include labour that is racialized and perpetuates inequality. The authors explain a typology of racialized tasks in such organizations – ideological, interactional, and physical – which are often allocated based on a racialized hierarchy of jobs that benefits Whiteness. This paper helps us to enhance our understanding of how organizations become racialized, which further highlights the importance of ensuring that corporate and public policies are created in anti-racist environments.
Another key perspective is shared in a 2018 paper by Anjalé Welton, Devean Owens, and Eboni Zamani-Gallagher, as it focuses on anti-racist change in educational institutions and provides important insights on taking sustainable, systemic action. The authors note that while individual commitments to anti-racism are necessary, commitment must also exist at the systemic (or institutional) levels to ensure that an entire organization is moving in anti-racist alignment. This article is particularly interesting as it brings together concepts from the anti-racism literature with the organizational change literature to develop a framework that provides guidance on putting anti-racist institutional change into action. The authors of this article remind us that in moving towards becoming anti-racist, organizations must commit to transformational, sustainable change at all levels, including in leadership and governance.
Advice for Policy-Makers and Community Members
Where relevant, I’ll end my blog posts with practical advice for the people who are most directly involved in policy decision-making and for people in community.
As the discussion above highlights, there is an expanding body of work that is exploring how racism operates in organizational settings and how anti-racism can be used as a tool to remove racism and harmful racialization from places of work. For me, this is an important line of thinking as it emphasizes a highly significant observation for people in policy communities, networks, and organizations: environments that are infiltrated by racism, however subliminal it may be, are likely to create policies that perpetuate racial discrimination, or other manifestations of our society’s views on racial hierarchy.
With that said, here is some high-level advice for policy-makers:
1. If your organization is involved in making anti-racism policies (policies designed to eradicate racism and racial discrimination in all forms), or any type of policy, your organization also has a responsibility to be anti-racist in how it functions, in its leadership, in its governance practices, in its organizational culture, and in its overall identity.
2. Let go of the resistance to anti-racist change. Resistance to this necessary change wears employees down (I have experienced this first-hand) and can lead to employees losing faith and trust in their workplaces. It plants the seeds of doubt on whether a spoken or written commitment to anti-racism is actually something that will materialize in our lived reality.
3. Pay close attention to how your organization’s relationship with anti-racism influences the content and quality of the organization’s policy-making. There is much reason to believe that there is a significant relationship between organizational anti-racism and the ability to develop, formalize, and sustain anti-racism policies.
For community members:
1. Stay committed to your anti-racism priorities. You may encounter resistance, criticism, and distractions. Systemic racism and other intersecting forms of discrimination have been around for a long time; advancing anti-racist change is a process that requires focused and committed action.
2. Do the internal healing work that will sustain your advocacy. Anti-racism work has a way of bringing out some of our deepest traumas and insecurities. Taking time to heal emotional and spiritual wounds (some of which are generational and very challenging to identify, let alone heal) can support your resilience, self-love, and compassion for yourself and others.
3. If you work in an organization, feel empowered to talk about anti-racism with your colleagues – while staying mindful of your personal and economic safety. Anti-racism is often seen as the work of organizational leaders or experts, but I see it as a grassroots movement that is advanced, step-by-step, by each of us.
This advice can help with building an anti-racist organizational identity, in alignment with policy-making that prioritizes anti-racism. This also recognizes that anti-racism is carried out by individual people who are all around us in our communities. In doing this work, we should keep in mind that anti-racism is a multidimensional concept – it’s an idea, a policy priority, an organizational and professional practice, and a personal commitment.