Discussing Institutional Racism
Finding it difficult to navigate effective conversations around institutional racism in your workplace?
Our founder Madelaine Jones talks with Dr Kul Verma, founder and CEO of Deep Insight about his experiences discussing institutional racism, its terminology and how to make constructive steps towards tackling racism in workplaces.
Transcript
Hi, I'm Maddie, the founder and CEO of Jackafal. We're a small learning design company which focuses on inclusive learning. Some of that takes the form of DEI training specifically, and some of that integrating more inclusive approaches to learning for more general or technical training. We do a mix of live delivery and eLearning modules as well, some of which are available on our website and some of which we do directly for clients.
Hello, my name's Kul Verma, I'm the CEO of Deep Insight Limited. We're a micro-business: like microbreweries we're full of taste and lots of exciting content. We specialise in inclusive leadership development. We're thought disruptors, so we want to get people to think differently so that they can behave differently, and we specialise in emotional intelligence. Our motto is 'brave organisations have courageous conversations'.
We're here today because each of us has a blog for our respective companies and we wanted to take the chance to have a conversation about a really important and really big topic, so I have to say, I think we're only going to touch the edges today of that in the conversation we're having. But we're going to be talking today about the topic of institutional racism.
Kul, I'm actually going to pass over to you first because it'd be good to hear about your experiences of having discussions around institutional racism, given I know the backgrounds you work in, but perhaps our viewers won't.
My first recollection of institutional racism is looking at processes and the way that organisations work. I was a former police officer, I did 30 years in policing and sometimes there were things that weren't really connecting with the community or connecting internally. And sometimes you've got to ask yourself, 'why are these things not happening?' Such as how we view different people, how I was viewed when I was in the police service. The revelation came after the Scarman Review, which talked about institutional racism. And it sort of set me on this path of 'what is it, how does it affect people and what are the outcomes?'
So, to top it all, what I did was to try and coalesce some of my thinking. And I did six years and I did a doctorate in institutional racism, looking at the progression of Black and Asian senior officers in the police service. So when we talk about institutions or institutional racism, it is a structural and procedural way that we think about the world and it is not something that is laid down. Again, it's a human construct, a human construct of who has value, and who doesn't.
We chat on a regular basis about lots of topics around DEI and we have talked about institutional racism, but I don't think I'd ever found out that that's what you did your PhD in. So that was a bit of a surprise for me, so that's great to know!
I think one of the challenges about having discussions around institutional racism and tackling it is that you have, as you said, this overarching structural issue of how things are built. But there's also that implicit layer that I think people often aren't aware of until, as you said, either they spend the time to have it brought to their attention by their own volition or it's something that they find out for, you know, less education based reasons, and maybe they have personal experiences with it. When it comes to broaching the subject and having those discussions, do you find that people are willing to come round to that idea quickly or is it a struggle?
I think it's all about approach. So I do a lot of work, like yourself, Madelaine, in getting people to talk about things that they don't really want to talk about because it's uncomfortable. And one of the things that people don't want to talk about is protective characteristics, particularly race, women, gender, LGBTQ. It sort of gets people a bit prickly and if you know policing, I mean, since 1999, since the MacPherson report, there's been thousands and thousands of training programmes. Now, the ones that have crashed and burned are people that are trying to deliver it from a textbook. You can't deliver it from a textbook.
“So what we say to people is, ditch the fear. Let’s have a brave conversation. And when people can ditch the fear, and it’s not about blame, it’s really about exploring a new way of thinking. ”
First of all, you need to have real knowledge, knowledge about the subject, you really know about the psychology of it, what the history is and what you're trying to achieve. And the second thing is, I think you need some personal experience, a lived experience, so you can give examples. The examples or storytelling is so important. What I do through my own company, Deep Insight, what we ask people to do is ditch the fear. And unfortunately, on a higher level, since the 80s and the 90s, the British government institutions, particularly in public service, have used the Judith Katz approach. Now, great pioneer in terms of race training, but the Katz approach, and I'm sure it wasn't her intention, but the Katz approach is, 'look at me, I'm a victim, look at all the hurt that I've got.' And that makes you feel sad, that makes you feel, 'oh, my gosh, what am I doing?'
So what we say to people is, ditch the fear. Let's have a brave conversation. And when people can ditch the fear, and it's not about blame, it's really about exploring a new way of thinking. My gosh, you know, I've been in rooms with people that are steadfast. 'What are you going to teach me? You're never going to change me.' But you change them through the storytelling, and the storytelling has to have a relevance to their life, their professional life. 'Why? Why do I need to care? Why do I need to know?' And when you build in that professional operational imperative, then people take note: 'oh, my gosh, it's got something to do with my role.' And the usual thing is about, 'we need to be nice to Black people', or 'we need to be representative of the community'. I'm going, that's just fluff. That's just something you've read off the website.
So why, for your business, do you need to know? If you can't root it in the why, the why then gives you a purpose within an organisation. And when you approach it in that way, I always find people, well, they give us really good feedback about our programmes, but our programmes are not about stuffing something down their neck, our programmes are about getting them curious and getting them to think differently.
One thing that I've noticed tends to evoke a lot of defensiveness when conversations are had around this actually is terminology. And to bring it back to policing, when you look at things like the Casey Report and how a lot of the findings, people were quite happy to accept. But as soon as that label 'institutionally racist' is used, people become very defensive and cautious and unable to have those conversations.
Is that something that you find in environments is counterproductive sometimes to use that language? Or do you think it's actually important for people to power through that and get to a point where they're comfortable with it?
“...we don’t put that term into a context and leaders don’t know how to articulate it.”
I think it's how it's framed. So if we talk about institutional racism, we've had the Casey Review with the Metropolitan Police and the current Metropolitan Police Commissioner is not accepting that term, saying that it is not a useful term. My guess is that it's not a useful term because there will be… there's a white backlash. So the majority of his officers are white. And if you use that term, they'll be saying, 'am I racist?' And it's because we don't put that term into a context and leaders don't know how to articulate it.
That's why we're in a bind, because we're either one end of the spectrum saying it exists, which is me, through evidence, and we're on the other side where we're saying we don't want to upset a lot of our colleagues, how do we include them? Well, I have to go out and work within, you know, whatever teams we have throughout whichever business. And I think until we get leaders to actually understand why it's important to be inclusive, why it's important for people to have a voice, why it's important for people to feel psychologically safe to say, this is who I am, truly, instead of trying to model themselves on something else, then we'll always be in that area.
The terminology is really important, but the terminology in all protective characteristics is contested, even by Black and Asian people. I was asked 3 years ago to go and do a workshop on the term BAME: Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic. We had a Black audience and, you know, it took us a whole day and we got to no finalisation at all. And my workshop was 'To BAME or not to BAME'. Now, when we look, when we look at that terminology and you go backwards, the genesis of all terminology has been given by government. Government gives you that terminology.
You touched there on that idea of one of the difficulties being that actually what, what is mandated, what is systemic and what individuals are doing on a daily basis can often be quite disconnected. Something that can be really difficult when approaching conversations around institutional racism is reaching a point where both of those things are considered, because ultimately, anybody who is working within a system, even if they're not expressly doing something that's actively racist, you're complicit by being in that system.
I would like to hear more about how you tackle having those conversations, because, as you've said, blame is something that can be difficult for people to swallow. But there also has to come a discussion around accountability and taking steps individually as well as systemically. How would you approach those conversations in a way that's constructive?
Well, the first thing I would say at a more strategic level to executives, 'where is your organisation right now?' So I use a term called 'miasma', it's the greek word for 'fog'. When you've got fog around concepts and you don't understand it, you'll have impaired interactions, communication and performance; where you have clarity of individual and organisational acceptance, this is about inclusion. You'll have enhanced recognition, understanding and enhanced valuing of people.
When we're talking, let's start talking and having an evidence based conversation, rather than an opinion based conversation. Operationally and more tactically, what we've got to do is dispel some of the big myths that we have out there. So if we talk about positive action, positive action is allowed through the Equality Act 2010. But there are certain limits of positive action. You can't just give a job to a Black person or a female, but that is the mantra, that is the conversation that is happening. So when we get to approaching it at a tactical level, possibly interacting with the community or customers, I think you really need to educate people as to the why. Why are we doing this? Why now?
I'll give you another example. We worked with an organisation who was struggling with the why. It was a pensions group, I won't say who. Lovely people, and they just didn't get it. And then after lunch, I did ask them about pensions. Would an Asian, Muslim or Black person think about pensions in the same way? And I spoke to him about my father, you know, unfortunately, he passed away. But when you look at his pension provision after his life, it looks totally different to the way that they viewed how pensions would be. And the penny dropped. The penny dropped that there's a market out there and we're not actually looking at that market. So I think when we're approaching things, I think you have to approach them again from having an evidence base, not speaking from opinion, we're not speaking about VAR or has it gone over the line? We're talking about actual things that affect people.
Coming round to that topic of how you view and measure progress, I'm actually going to challenge something you said because I want to dig into it more, which is you talked about, obviously, the importance of evidence base over opinion. But one thing that can be difficult is that organisations will often pick and choose the evidence in order to show, for example, that they're making good progress in a particular area, but discounting the fact that it's maybe a surface level result. As you said, representation for example tends to be a real tick box for a lot of organisations where they go, ‘well, we have a visible element of Black people in higher leadership’ etc. but they haven't necessarily tackled the problems within the culture and dealt with that at a root level.
When it comes to guiding organisations to use evidence in a way that's not just a positive spin on the steps that they're taking, how do you lead that conversation? How do you get organisations to start seeing it as actually, this shows you where to improve, rather than just, this highlights where we're not doing a good job, let's sweep it under the rug.
Having done a Master's in training and evaluation, most people do evaluation really badly. They do evaluation quickly to get the result that they want to get. And the first premise on measurement is what are you measuring? And what we measure at the moment, what's the easy thing to measure, is numbers: the numbers of people that you've got, how many Black people have you got, how many white people have you got etc. So the numeric value gives you a bit of a contour on that map, but it doesn't tell you how people are feeling. And so that emotional data is absent.
There are emotions that need to be gathered, emotions like how do people relate to one another? How do they value each other? How do they sense privilege, how do they use power? And what is their culture? Do they know what the culture is? Now, all of those things people will say, 'oh, my gosh, Kul, you have just outlined all the things we can't measure.' You can't measure them because you're not making an effort to measure them. And there are ways of gathering that data. The best way of gathering the data is to get you or me into an organisation that has no institutional bond to anybody. So then you go in with fresh eyes and you start listening. So what we've got to do is gather your organisational intelligence, but on emotions, not on the easy stuff.
It really resonated with me when you were saying about fresh eyes in an organisation there. And I think particularly when you're working with public sector, charity, education, as we each respectively do, one of the problems is that the people who are part of that organisation are generally really passionate about it. It's a vocation, it's not just a job for them.
And so, as you said, there can be these rose tinted glasses. I mean, not for everything. Everybody will complain in every organisation ever, but there will often be these rose tinted glasses when it comes to the fundamental issues, such as institutional racism, where they can't take that step back. And actually, it's real opportunity to be able to bring in a set of fresh eyes, particularly a set of eyes that has experience seeing this in other environments, to be able to go, actually, what's here that we haven't dug into and uncovered?
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's really, really important. And I know that, you know, I might upset a lot of consultancies out there, but I think when we're talking about this, you've got to have heart within your consultancy. Why are you doing this? You're doing it because you're passionate about what you do. And I think that sets apart consultancies.
I often see sort of like the big consultancies, you know, in London, they're very white, but they're talking about race and I'm chuckling and I'm going, you're saying something really textbook, which is great, but it's not going to make a lot of change. And if we see large leadership programmes for public and private sector, you look at them every year, the lead consultancy changes every year. And why it changes because nothing changes, but they just think somebody else is going to bring something in.
And I think what comes through, especially after speaking with people like yourself especially, Maddie, is that you really care. When you care, it really comes through. And it comes through in our family life, with our kids, our partners, and it should shine through, you know, our businesses. And I think businesses also should be thinking about their social value.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you've just said, including I'm very aware that being white and having this discussion about institutional racism today, I'm not speaking from a position of lived experience at all. And I'm very aware that having your expertise and your own experiences in the room is invaluable. And so I want to thank you for taking the time for both of us to discuss this and to be able to share it.
Thank you so much for chatting. It's been an absolute pleasure, Kul.
It's been fantastic. Thank you.
If you are interested to find out more about Kul's work with Deep Insight, visit www.deep-insight.co.uk.
