#But No There's No Whiteness Problem probably it's just that BAME people like to uhhh Stick To Their Own Kind

[thedreadvampy]

having said this the fucking senior manager from this meeting has just sent around an email like "further to our conversation at the last meeting where we discussed outreach to BAME communities..." NO WE DIDN'T!!!! THAT'S NOT WHAT THE CONVERSATION WAS ABOUT!!!!!!! WE WERE SAYING WE AS A STAFF BODY HAVE A WHITENESS ISSUE!!!!!!

anyway instead of doing any work on my to do list I'm now scoping out consultancy and antiracist strategy development programmes so when I've typed up the minutes from the last meeting I can send them around with a list of resources and a couple of costed options for Doing The Work Of Tackling Our Whiteness Problem.

If that's on the agenda for the next meeting, with a clear focus on organisational change rather than outreach, and we've got options on the table and I know for a fact that the majority of people in the room do think that addressing our whiteness problem is a priority, then she'll have to actually deal with the conversation at hand and come up with a reason why she doesn't think it should be a priority.

this is also btw the senior manager who has repeatedly berated me for only putting up pictures of entirely white groups of staff and not creating Black History Month content, to which my answer has repeatedly been: if we had any not-white staff or any Black voices in the organisation I would love to. but frankly our 4 colleagues of colour are getting real sick of being photographed, and I don't think we have a single useful thing to say about blackness when we have 0 Black staff or volunteers interested in producing content.

hahaha sweet vindication I went to a fuckin. uh so we have an inclusion and diversity working group at work and a subgroup of that which meets separately for LGBT+ inclusion. which is the fun one. the party group.

anyway got onto the teams call and both the other people in the room were already talking about how fucked up the last Inclusion and Diversity meeting was. you know the one where I suggested we might be a bit overwhelmingly white at 98% White People On Staff and maybe we should do something about it and the senior director pitched a defensive fit and started talking about how it's "never been a priority" in the fully white room of people driving the diversity agenda and how it's FINE because we sometimes work with BAME client groups and maybe people of colour just don't WANT to work here for NO PARTICULAR REASON? that meeting?

very nice to hear that everyone except the two people getting defensive left that meeting going WHAT THE FUCK and immediately went to talk to their colleagues about the whiteness problem in this workplace.

so the HR team are now talking among themselves about how to emphasise that it does need to be a priority, two Asian members of staff have sent emails to the I&D group diplomatically saying "hey here's why the overwhelming whiteness is a deeply affecting problem for me and makes me feel unsafe at work", and in the LGBT group we are discussing how to use the budget we already have allocated for improving LGBT+ inclusivity to Trojan horse in some data gathering that will demonstrate that no actually the problem is not "mysterious whiteness" there's an addressable systemic issue

so once again "being too angry to let it go" is playing out positively. my friends. start shit when people talk shit, is my policy 😘 saying 'hey that seems fucked up' in a meeting where nobody else is saying it has almost always, in my experience, had the effect of other people going YEAH ACTUALLY IT IS FUCKED UP I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY PERSON THINKING THAT WE SHOULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT

cause managers love to make you feel like you're being ridiculous and Just Don't Understand and if you speak up everyone will laugh at you. but you understand fine! and if you ask a polite question, either someone will have an obvious answer to give you and you can move on, or, more often, they won't have a good answer and other people will be like 'hey yeah that's a shit answer! why did we accept that as obvious?'

in my entire professional life this 'if you feel uncomfortable with something, question it out loud' approach has gone wrong like. a single figure number of times. and right almost every time. is all I'm saying. not cause I'm usually right but cause it requires people to think about what they're saying.