Why diversity, equity, and inclusion doesn’t work.

(BELOW IS A WRITTEN DIALOGUE BETWEEN DANIELLE CASTILLEJO AND JENNY MCGRATH)

It’s been a long while - close to a year and 6 months. Is anything changing? Signing off Zoom with the faces of my most recent group engagement, in the same office where it started, I am unsure. There are precious few glimpses of hope in the long-term conversations I engage with select white folks. Mostly it’s been a bust professionally, personally – systemically. I read relentlessly, theorize based on my own limited experiences, and applied for an IRB research project. Perhaps things are changing, but very little. The sheer enormity of the problem I and others are trying to address is suffocating, so I usually refuse to think about it. Yet, here I am. Again.

These last two years have been a time of great racial awakening and division.  Among the frenzy of information, books, news reports, and protests- many white Americans have awoken to the cries of people of Color that have existed far longer than 2020.  The murder of George Floyd sparked a necessary and overdue examination of our nations tapestry.  This has produced unfortunate division as certain ideologies have sought to stamp out critical race theory and exploration of systemic injustices in our world.  The other side of the spectrum; it has seemed, are the liberal white organizations seeking to rectify their wrongs and grasp for ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) training.  On the surface this seems to be a great step forward. Unfortunately, It doesn’t work. 

At least not in the way those hiring DEI trainers want it to.

In the beginning, the zoom waiting room lights up, one participant at a time. My body tingles. I’m anticipating mostly white faces, with a couple of folks of color. George Floyd’s death, me finally graduating, and the urgency to address white supremacy inspired this group: “Race and Story.” 

Palms, sweaty. Mind, sharp. Wit, intact.

Are my instincts right? Should I have asked a colleague to join me? I barely know anything. I doubt myself, which is familiar.

I’m not the first therapist of color to work in the realm of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” Many renowned interdisciplinary researchers, healers, therapists, and trainers are interested in the internal structural components of white folks, impact of their racism on bodies of color, best practices and interventions to address “white supremacy” or “racism.” 

The term “white fragility” is commonly used to refer to white folks’ internal structure and outward expression of their recognition of their racial social position in relation to bodies of color. It’s a term referring to their common collapse, becoming undone in these difficult conversations; therefore, labelled “fragile” or I think “breakable”. This phenomenon is salient and observable to bodies of color whether it is at a distance or in face-to-face encounters with white culture folks. (I’m not sure it should be called fragility. I know our group will be up against a screen full of something, whatever it is.) 

Many seeking DEI training are wanting to learn about “the other ''. They are admitting, bravely, that they have not listened to the voices of people of Color, LBGTQ+ people, disabled people, and other marginalized communities. So, it seems, they believe the way forward is to learn from “the other''. Unfortunately, this in itself is another form of colonialism, a colonialism of the psyche. It requires those seeking the training to remain unmoved by their own identity work.  This seeks to make the problem worth solving “out there.” While the intentions behind these types of explorations can be good-natured, they often come with an immaturity, an unwillingness to do the difficult work of identifying the problem as an internal one.  

White bodies, straight bodies, able bodies, skinny bodies- and other bodies who have access and privilege from these systems are also dehumanized by these systems. This is where we must begin.  

What makes you so certain this group will help? I interrogate myself.

I have no idea if our group will make any difference. I’m skeptical of my own ideas, theories. I doubt my right to identify as a Mexican – Indigenous – German woman.

Before letting them into the meeting room, my colleague and I touch base questioning one another; 

“Do we have a schedule? Who will keep time? Who is defining ‘whiteness’? Do we even know what we are doing?”

This is our attempt at something different than the DEI training we both attended at graduate school. The screen lights up with squares. As everyone pops onto the screen, in the midst of pandemic and country-wide protests, we introduce ourselves, group norms, and jump into short teaching. We both share a story to engage our own complex racial identities.

I feel each participants’ silence, smirk, black screen F-you,  or tears through the inter-webs. The faces are first and foremost, so their presence onscreen is essential. It’s a pressure cooker inside my gut. My colleague’s face constrains, as different folks engage either aggressively or tearfully. 

A  pressure cooker DEI training traumatized me. Floundering about like a salmon who’s escaped the fishnet aboard a trawler, trying to get back into the water to live, my body jumped between the white faces of that room and the faces of color. I never got back into the water, not really.

>How have we, in ourselves, become dehumanized? 

>Where can we trace our steps back to reclaim our messy, beautiful, ugly, hard, meaningful humanity? 

It is a grueling journey, and one that cannot be solved through more knowledge about history or “the other”.  It is a journey that requires a total shift in consciousness.  It requires an ability to hold the “both,and.”

BOTH- I have significantly privileged from this system of oppression so as to think I am in a place to seek out DEI training. 

AND- I have also been dehumanized by this system.  

Resmaa Menakem highlights the different collective realities for bodies of color and for white identifying bodies. In the field of psychology, the norm for diagnosis, mental health and interventions are based on an assumed common and shared reality. When we encounter the social construction of race, there is a marked difference in both experience – perceived and lived – of reality for bodies of color and white bodies. The difficulty in understanding the psychology and interventions for “white supremacy” individually and collectively lies in the shared reality that the field of psychology is a predominantly white space, presided over in its institutions, publications, and professionals which are also predominantly white. 

And, this leads to the majority of DEI – interdisciplinary interventions born from this same system. DEI work is typically in workshop form, in a concentrated period of time, with countless hours of information. We are in a system that relies on evidence – based interventions (the evidence itself being judged and studied by these same disembodied, colonized white experts) which are combinations of fill-in-the-blank forms, history lessons, and cognitive reflections on the same information. It ends up as a sort of “exposure-shock therapy meets information overload mixed with shame and guilt”. 

Anything short of acknowledging the “both/and” is saviorism.  Professor Firoze Manji so aptly reminds us that “saviors need victims”.  This is why organizations can pay thousands of dollars to receive training and remain unchanged. If they can remain in the savior mentality, if they can continue to be “one of the good ones” then they can continue to feed off of the commodity of others suffering. 

If; however, they enter into the fullness of their humanity. If they seek first the life that is theirs to live, then they will be less distracted by the tasks of saviorism that are perpetuated by the system. 

How does that heal? 

Will that stop the next white police officer from shooting an unarmed Black or Brown child? 
Will these trainings prevent the next Tamir Rice or Adam Toledo?

 Therefore, how can my colleagues and I form – even the beginning of an engagement with white folks when the common reality is one of normalized oppression built on disembodied DEI work? 

Phew. I don’t want to do that. We don’t know how to do something we haven’t done, but I trust my body. My colleagues trust their instincts. We’ve been trained to attune, connect, and embody witness to stories of perpetrators and the trauma that results. 

Why would DEI interventions be any different? Healing comes through an integrated experience of multiple emotions, body sensations, combined with imagination ignited on a cellular level – including our hearts, arms, fingers, thighs, spirits, guts, and yes, the prefrontal cortex thinking/processing brain. 

I am not saying we should not do good. I am not saying we should not learn about racism and systems of harm and not try to change them. But that is it- it is the system we need to be focused on.  Professor Manji says elsewhere, “You cannot fight poverty. What you can fight is those who make people poor.”  DEI, though well intentioned, is often misdirected.  It illuminates the other as the one who needs saving (or inclusion), rather than the system as one that needs subverting.  All the saviorism in the world is not enough to motivate us to subvert the system; however, our own humanity may be just the thing we need. If we really wake up to what we’ve been denied, what we’ve been told doesn’t exist- that is a fight worth fighting.  For ourselves.  This will ultimately include the other, as emancipation is a collective process. But we need to be fighting for emancipation, not simply reformation. We are too far down the path of white supremacy and patriarchy to simply try to reform- we need to emancipate.  And emancipation is a process that begins from the inside out.   

It begins with coming home to our body.  It is a slower, more tedious and gruesome process.  It requires us to get in touch with our own pains, pleasures, failures, desires.  It requires us to be more fully human.  We need our humanity in order to create sustainable change in our collective bodies.  This will not be possible through whiteness. This will require emancipation from the idea of being white. Again- this is holding the both and. We need to emancipate ourselves from whiteness, AND continue to acknowledge the privilege that we have from being white.  

Therefore, when we slow our story-teller down, it’s to be curious about movement of eyes, warmth or cold of their body limbs, the pace of their heartbeat. Sure, we want to know what they are “thinking” about their racial identity, but we want to know if their body is with them as we process what it looks like to disentangle from white supremacy. 

As you read this you may be dizzy, angry, unsettled. You may feel confused or frustrated.  That means you’re in the right place.  True DEI work is done through disorienting the right to comfort that privileged bodies feel entitled to. But the other side of that spectrum is white fragility that demands we “be aware of” how bad we are for being white while being unmoved. This self flagellation helps no one.  Part of the disorientation is that, for perhaps the first time, we must admit how magical and brilliant we are simply for existing as sentient beings.  We must embrace a place of existence and stay there. We cannot depart from existence or humanity if we are to see true equity. Anything short is a perpetuation of saviorism that will continue to commodify the suffering of others.