The Great White Workplace Bake-Off
Why "people of color" might not pick up what "we" put down
At my last job, I remember our administration played a video urging us to avoid sexual harassment. “If you’re still struggling with consent,” the British narrator intoned, “just imagine that instead of initiating sex, you’re making them a cup of tea.”
Someone may say they want a cup of tea, but then, after the water’s boiling and the teapot’s whistling, the person shakes their head. An ethic of consent means, that even in that moment, you shouldn’t make them drink the tea.
I think we need a video like this for white people at work.
Not about consent exactly, but about attentive respect for the actual needs and wants of Black and Brown coworkers. But in my proposed high-quality HR video, let’s change the metaphor from brewing tea to baking dinner rolls.
The HR video white people actually need
You can very nearly taste them right now. Oh geez, the sweetly baked offerings your Grandma Elizabeth used to make for holiday dinners! You can close your eyes right now, and they’re there, steaming and ready for butter and honey. For that moment, the kitchen is a tabernacle, your grandma’s a priestess, and the aroma fills the house with glory.
But the truth of the matter is that dinner rolls aren’t always desirable. There are scenarios where those rolls would be completely amazing and entirely unwanted:
The pizza has just arrived from Quarantino’s. Your friends have filled their plates with thin-crust slices topped with basil, tomatoes and extra mozzarella. And there you are, circling the group offering each person a dinner roll. Your friends are—puzzled.
Your partner’s making his way slowly through a slice of double-chocolate cake from a local bakery. But as his eyes close in buttercream bliss, you clear your throat. His eyes flip open as you say enticingly, “I have something you’ll really like.” As his eyes widen, you pull from your lap a plate of dinner rolls.
A runner has just reached the finish line of a half marathon, gasping, hands on knees, utterly spent, but she’s smiling with the happiness of survival and victory. Someone hands her a small cup of water. Someone else gives her a towel. And you, not to be outdone, hand her a buttered roll.
You get the point of my proposed DEI video. There are times when nothing, absolutely nothing, could be better than a soft, golden, newly baked dinner roll—except literally any other thing.
A story about my own baking mistake
My organizational research over the past few years has engaged Black and Brown people’s stories about living and working in predominantly white spaces. It’d be fun to posture myself now as a sort of equity guru: “Based on my research, here are three things that white people should never do at work.”
Instead, I should tell you a story about my baking what people weren’t taking.
Recently, on a cold February morning in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I was helping to lead a focus group about institutional racism. After a lot of practice, I have learned—or I think I have learned—how to comport myself as a tactful and watchful and attentive researcher.
But in this particular focus group session, things went briefly sideways when I asked something about the experience of “communities of color.” To me, it was an innocuous phrase, one often used by academics to be racially inclusive.
But at this table, the phrase landed wrong.
A woman spoke up to say, no offense, but she hated the term people of color. I stiffened slightly, as small noises of agreement spread around the table. She added that she’d rather be called the n-word than be labeled a person of color.
I tried to keep nodding, but I felt stunned.
My co-researcher DeAmon (himself a Black man) said calmly and easily, “We’ll change the wording of that question.” And I bobbed my head quickly, trying very hard to be the right kind of person for the people in the room. But I felt like someone had tossed my carefully prepared bread into a trash bin.
Two things can be simultaneously true in situations like that. It’s possible to be a well-intentioned person, and it’s possible that those good intentions can be so very extra.
Making the switch from mere politeness to attentive respect
Let’s say you’re a manager with a few Black team members.
Let’s say your director is Asian or Native American.
Let’s say you’re a strategist for a predominantly white company designing marketing for a predominantly Brown community.
You work hard to keep your intentions pure and your words appropriate. You work hard (a little ironically) to be relaxed and comfortable. You work hard simply to not be racist. But despite doing your best to bake up something warm and considerate, it turns out to be exactly wrong.
How does this happen? Let me suggest three misconceptions—and then, you tell me what you think, okay?
Every people group needs just one thing, and it’s your job to figure it out. But ethnic minorities (another problematic phrase) are not fill-in-the-blank quizzes. A few moments of reflection should make clear how kooky it is to think that there’s only one right answer for what Black and Brown folk want.
A friend of mine recently said she doesn’t like the trope that “white people just need to do their work.” The problem is, she wasn’t sure (as a Black woman herself) that she trusted white people to do the work right. And, she added, is it really loving on my part not to tell them how to love me and instead make them guess? Her words make me think that the best policy is the most obvious one: simply ask your coworkers what they actually need and want in any given situation. (Hint: it might not be those dinner rolls.)
Everybody just needs to feel included, and it’s your job to make sure no one’s left out. I recently attended a workshop at the Selma Center for Nonviolence, where the Black woman leading the session told our group (half of us being Black, half being white) that she wanted to say something she’d never said in public. Sometimes, she confessed, I just need to be in Black-only spaces. She attends a multiethnic church, for example, but it can be exhausting to be around white people all the time. Sometimes, she just needs to be in her own house with family and friends who all look like her and just—and here, she shifted her posture from Uptight to Relaxed.
Her story made me think that sometimes, white people like me are tempted to offer Black and Brown coworkers a dubious gift of our amazing presence. (And here’s some butter for the fresh bread we just baked you!)
Everybody just needs allies, so it’s your job, in every situation, to be the nice person. Just what the DEI workshop ordered, right? But I can put my BLM bumper sticker on my car and wear my James Baldwin tee-shirt and never really do anything that’s genuinely helpful, much less needful, for BIPOC coworkers. The workplace changes needed are more than theatrical. There are materially consequential actions that will make workplaces more equitable. Sometimes, for me, that might mean caucusing with white people to say the dumb things I’m thinking about Black people. At other times, it means calling out white theft, nominating Brown colleagues for leadership, urging diverse candidate pools.
I wonder what you’re thinking after reading this. I would appreciate your hitting “reply” to this email or commenting below.
But here’s the mode/switch I’m mulling as I wrap this up. The freshly baked dinner rolls metaphor I started with reminds me of the basically philanthropic mindset I too often hold towards coworkers with a different skin color and a different history. I have something to offer you that is going to be so good for you! But I shouldn’t let the the good, hard work of caring for humans distract me from the fact that diversely beautiful coworkers already bring their own goods and gifts to the workplace community.
What others bring is easy to overlook, especially if it doesn’t look like what you’re bringing. But let’s keep eyes and hearts and hands open. There’s abundance to share.
