Toybox: The first edition
Why systems thinking is so important for supporting your Black friends & coworkers
"It’s not White vs Black. It’s everyone vs racism.”
Hello and welcome to ToyBox - where we unpack systemic racism in the workplace. Or for short: “systemic racism for dummies.”
Our goal is to make systemic racism easy to understand, digest, and eradicate.
About the Author
My name is Yaw Owusu-Boahen. If you're looking for the professional story, check out my LinkedIn. For the real story, read below:
I was born in Ghana and moved to the US when I was 6 years old to live in NJ. Growing up, I attended predominantly white public schools where I faced a fair amount of discrimination including being held at gunpoint by a police officer for "speeding." I went on to attend Princeton University where I helped organize protests against the university's systemic racism, facing death threats from the community and expulsion threats from the university just for asking to to hire more diverse faculty and rename the Woodrow Wilson School after...well…just about anyone else who didn't host KKK members in the white house.
I'm saying all of this to say - I'm human. I'm not a social justice superman. I studied critical race theory and public policy in college, but really I'm just a man trying to live an adult life who knows that any traffic stop could be his last. I love engaging with this type of discourse, but I do it in large part because I have to. Systemic racism is an "issue" for many, but for me it's life and death. I'm working to educate people because I know it goes some small way to helping make sure I don't get killed in the streets like others who look like me.
Today’s Topic: Being a good ally to Black people requires systems thinking
"You cannot dismantle a system that you do not understand."
Systems govern our lives
It feels abnormal to think about life as a tangled web of systems designed for humans to flourish, but that's what it is. Stay with me here - I promise we’ll get to systemic racism soon.
One of my favorite video games is Red Dead Redemption II - and not just because during quarantine it was the only way I could experience life outside of my apartment. It's because it puts a critical eye on what it's looked like to build American society from the ground up. Our country has bountiful natural resources, so we designed systems to discover, harness, and distribute energy that we could use to power our homes. We have millions of citizens, so we built an education system that would ideally equip those people with the knowledge to contribute to society. We have a serious poverty problem, so we created social safety net systems to make sure that we keep people alive long enough to stand up on their own two feet. Making all of these services happen costs money, so we have a tax system that collects a percentage of our income and spending to keep the government running.
These systems have varying degrees of success in enabling Americans to thrive and we will address that in future discussions, but for now the important takeaway is that systems are everywhere and control every aspect of our lives.
Systems are always designed with an output in mind
Any coders out there? Remember when you learned how to make a computer program say "Hello World"? You went into the assignment with a specific output in mind - "I want to make this program say to me 'Hello World'". So you used the tools at your disposal (whatever coding language you did this in) and your time and intelligence to design the program specifically to produce that output. When the program spits out an error message, you know that it's not necessarily the program's fault. The program does exactly what you tell it to do. So you keep iterating on your code until it finally says "Hello World" and you can sit back and reflect on how great of a coding wizard you are.
Life systems are very similar. Your company is theoretically a system designed to generate profits for its owners. If your company is not generating profit, you don't blame the office building or the receptionist, you blame the organization as a whole. Unless you're selling icepicks in Alaska, there's probably some organizational reason you’re not succeeding if others in the space are. Maybe you have the wrong leadership team in place. Maybe the cultural norms within the company discourage collaboration necessary to succeed. Whatever the problem is, it’s a systemic problem with a systemic solution.
Many American systems are white supremacist systems
Let’s talk life systems output.
Black Americans represent 13% of the US population yet:
Represent 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs
Account for 40% of US prisoners
Maintain 10% of the wealth of an equivalent White family
Is this a natural outcome? Are Black Americans genetically worse at running companies? Are Black Americans more predisposed to commit crime? Are Black Americans inherently worse at accumulating wealth? Of course not. These statistics are the outputs of life systems designed with White supremacy in mind.
Side note: if you want a quick way to tell if a system is systemically racist, check the Black representation (%) of its output. If it’s too low or too high and skin color is not supposed to be a deciding factor, chances are there’s some systemic racism within the institution.
White supremacy isn’t just skinheads marching on UVA to declare that “Jews will not replace us.” White supremacy is also the myriad of systems that govern American life that are designed for the specific output of White flourishing at the expense of Black people. White supremacy is embedded in our country’s history. The founding fathers knew what they were doing when they wrote “all men are created equal” while maintaining their slaves.
When that police officer held a 16-year-old Yaw at gunpoint, it wasn’t just one bad cop having a particularly racist day. It was the deliberate result of an American police system built to funnel Black men into prisons.
Black suffering in America is deliberate. That’s a hard reality to sit with, but in the same way that decreasing national testing doesn’t make COVID-19 less severe, choosing to ignore White supremacy doesn’t make it go away. If you decide to tune it out, I might still get killed in broad daylight.
Together we’ll learn how to spot and dismantle white supremacist systems
My goal is to help you learn to spot the White supremacist systems in your life and figure out how to change them within the workplace. This is actually a journey that I had to go on myself. Despite my tall dark and handsome demeanor, I didn’t identify as a Black man until college. I was raised to believe that I was Ghanaian, not Black American. If I just worked hard enough, got a 99th percentile SAT score, and secured a nice job, I could have everything that my White peers have. But Mike Brown’s death made me see that none of that matters if I can be killed just for existing. So I read books, took classes, and built a wealth of knowledge on systemic racism.
And now I’m passing that knowledge on to you.
Because this isn’t a battle between White America and Black America. Or Democrats and Republicans. It’s a battle between everyone and racism. And we can’t let racism win.
You ask, we answer
A Toy Box community member asked:
“How can mixed raced/racially ambiguous/afro-descendant/non-visibly Black POC navigate their racial identity?”
I wish I had a one sentence answer for you, but this is such a nuanced and complex issue and I can’t directly relate to it. So I reached out to a biracial person who could. Here’s what they said:
“For me, it was about learning how to love yourself and embrace both sides of who you are as equal and valid. Growing up, I never felt Black enough. But at the same time, I never thought I was Japanese either. I didn’t identify as Japanese until after college because no one outside of my family ever acknowledged that identity. But just because someone looks at me and sees a Black person doesn’t mean I’m not qualified to be a Japanese person.
I also think it helps a lot to learn about the struggles of both sides of your history, because you begin to feel like part of a larger story. I talked to my grandparents about the Japanese internment camps, where they lost everything and were forced to start over. I talked to my other grandparents about being sharecroppers and how hard it was to break that cycle of servitude. I am equally descendent from both experiences and I embody both struggles. All of it makes me who I am.
Coming soon: The Toy Box model
Next week, we will talk through a mental model you can use to spot systemically racist systems, especially those at work.
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