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 is a Ghanaian and Armenian-American writer and urbanist. Her first book, Aftershocks, topped many best book of the year lists, including Vulture, TIME, Esquire, and the BBC. It was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.
Nadia is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, and others.
She is Director of Storytelling at Frontline Solutions, a Black-owned consulting firm working with social change organizations. She lives in Brooklyn.
Enter your email address to receive notifications for author Nadia Owusu
Success!
Confirmation link sent to your email to add you to notification list for author Nadia Owusu
More by this author
No One Should Have to Ignore Their Grief, Yet It’s Long Been Expected of People of Color
For our communities, those missing and murdered, caged and dying, are not distant examples, invisible, or forgotten. They are our family and friends.
Women of Color in Academia Often Work Harder for Less Respect
The racist assumption that women of color are hired as faculty because of our identities rather than our credentials can have a serious impact on our careers.
“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
How Trees Complicate Our Understanding of Gender
A few years ago, the UK’s oldest tree, a Yew that had spent thousands of years in the appearance of maleness, began to grow female berries.
Did I Want Tony Stark Or Want to Be Him?
‘Iron Man’ is far from the origin story of my sexuality, but it’s an inescapable part of the multiverse that is my queerness.
“The Queerest of the Queer”: Listening to Garbage in the Nineties
I listened to the lead singer, Shirley Manson, play what I understood as masculine and feminine in the same hand.