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, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2021. 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!
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
Are We Ever Disabled ‘Enough’ When You Don’t See Our Disabilities?
It is not so much that these things are invisible as it is that people are trained to hide them, and society is conditioned to look away from them.
The Headache Diaries
The diary was how I organized a life suddenly thrown into chaos. This is what the human mind does; it looks for a narrative, for meaning.
May This Pandemic Help Us Abandon Ableist Language
Disability justices can be, and are, plural.