Workplace should resemble community it serves

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/04/2022 (1273 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two months ago, two employees at The Brick in Thompson accused an Indigenous customer of being drunk, ordered him to leave, and called RCMP.

The customer was Edwin Beardy, a 70-year-old man from Tataskweyak Cree Nation, who suffers from Kennedy disease — a degenerative disorder causing progressive weakness in the face and legs as well as, in particular, impacts on speech and swallowing.

Leaders from Tataskweyak and the advocacy body for northern Manitoba First Nations, Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Inc. (MKO), called the Feb. 19 incident “racial profiling.”

I prefer to call it “Indigenous life.”

I don’t know one Indigenous person who has not been followed in a store, accused in a workplace of something suspicious, or been pulled over by police after “resembling a suspect” at some point in their life.

I can only imagine how many times this has happened in history, because it’s only recently we hear about these kinds of incidents. This is due to social media, diversity in newsrooms, and maybe, just maybe, more and more people standing up to racism.

Take the last five years. There isn’t a month that there isn’t some incident involving a banker, a business owner, a nurse, a police officer, or a teacher in a workplace stereotyping, harassing, or discriminating against a racialized person.

I started a list of Canadian businesses recently accused of racial profiling and quickly realized this column would have just been a list of company names.

Not all accusations are legitimate, of course, but the sheer number of allegations and straightforward cases like in Thompson show that workplaces in Canada have a serious problem with racism.

The typical response to an allegation of racism in a workplace is to provide employees with “diversity” or “cultural awareness” training or an “anti-racism” workshop. In the case of The Brick, all employees at the Thompson store are now taking this kind of training.

The problem is that research suggests “cultural awareness” training doesn’t work just by itself.

In an article entitled “Why Doesn’t Diversity Training Work?” by researchers Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in the scientific journal Anthropology Now, they studied the anti-racism training Starbucks put 175,000 employees through after an incident in a Philadelphia coffee shop.

“Nearly all Fortune 500 companies do training, and two-thirds of colleges and universities have [diversity] training for faculty,” Dobbin and Kalev write, “yet hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behaviour, or change the workplace.”

Dobbin and Kalev state that diversity training does not replace the impact of real-life diversity.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how many times The Brick employees in Thompson learn about medicine circles or spend time with elders, racism will barely be impacted. Only when Indigenous peoples are fully and completely a part of the workplace will change occur.

The offering of “cultural awareness” training is more a smoke screen to systemic racism in a workplace — a way to shield an organization from criticism — than a path to institutional change.

Mandating anti-racism training, if consistent over time, can change some attitudes but may also entrench some views or, worse, heighten division in a workplace.

This is not to say employees should not learn about land theft, the Indian Act, and residential schools — all factors that lead to anti-Indigenous racism — it’s just that those most impacted by this information are likely already friendly to the message.

This kind of training will likely not impact those holding the most racist views and performing actions garnering accusations of racism.

Change comes from hiring and altering the workplace itself, with Indigenous peoples at the lead.

Once recruitment is accomplished, a much bigger problem emerges — retention.

No Indigenous person hired at that furniture store in Thompson will be able to effectively work if racist views are tolerated. This means new workplace policies and practices must be written and existing ones enforced.

New Indigenous employees must be supported because they are facing off against all the reasons they were never there in the first place. This support is not something “extra” but moving a workplace into the modern day.

It is not enough to have all Indigenous employees in entry-level positions or that one “Indigenous” centred job, either. Diversity must exist at all levels of the organization.

A workplace must also resemble the community it serves. This means, if 20 per cent of Manitobans are Indigenous, one out of every five employees, policies, and practices must be Indigenous or focused on Indigenous peoples in Manitoba.

“Diversity,” “cultural awareness” or even “anti-racism” training is not a solution to addressing the bias in any workplace. It’s more a Band-Aid, and a temporary one at that.

Only the presence of the people being discriminated against alter policies and practices of discrimination.

That, and a good dose of humanity.

niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca