Hiring a Chief Diversity Officer Won’t Fix Your Racist Company Culture
Racial equity must be a top priority for everyone, incorporated into how a company hires, makes decisions, and approaches all of its objectives.
This is Exit Interviews, a column by Nadia Owusu on the experiences of women of color in the workplace.
claimed
Sandra told me that the foundation had hired her “to solve their racism problem.” I asked how that was going. “Not great,” she said.
white
The organization’s leaders can say that they tried, that they are still trying, as the gap between what they commit to on their websites and how employees actually experience the workplace continues to widen.
everyone’s everyone’sall
only
Nadia Owusu’s essay “The Wailing” is included in the anthology forthcoming from Catapult in February 2020.
Nadia Owusu’s first book, Aftershocks, will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2020. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her lyric essay chapbook, So Devilish a Fire, won the Atlas Review chapbook series. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Washington Post’s The Lily, the Literary Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and others. Owusu grew up in Rome, Addis Ababa, Kampala, Dar es Salaam, Kumasi, and London. She is an Associate Director at Living Cities, an economic racial justice organization, and lives in Brooklyn.
Enter your email address to receive notifications for author Nadia Owusu
Success!
You have been added to the notification list for author Nadia Owusu
More by this author
“Just a Waitress”: On Abuse Faced by Women of Color in the Restaurant Industry
Abuse and harassment within the restaurant industry is very much intertwined with other forms of racial and economic oppression and violence.
More in this series
Cripple Perks: The Unreasonable Luxury of Living While Disabled
“Accommodations are things that we need, and deserve, in order to lead our lives. But they’re treated—we are treated—like we’re trying to pull one over on the rest of society.”
What Happens to Our Numbers When We Die?
When I search for my father, I feel his numbers. Here’s a house number on my friend’s street that mimics the first few digits of my father’s phone. Here, at the 7/11, my receipt totals the amount of the last four digits of his SSN.
Mountains, Monasteries, and Myths: What I Discovered While Living in My Darjeeling Family Home
After a youth spent trying to ignore my Asian heritage, I came looking for it. My journey turned out to be the beginning of an excavation that continues to this day.


