Diversity is the Wrong Word

July 13, 2010  |  Diversity, Leaders of Color, Race

This morning, I moderated a panel called “Rising Through the Ranks: Race & Gender in Nonprofit Leadership.” The discussion was a joint event between the Nonprofit Roundtable and YNPNdc geared toward emerging leaders in philanthropy and nonprofits.

The conversation opened with Kelly Reid from the National MultiCultural Institute sharing some of the statistics in the Urban Institute’s recent report,  Measuring Racial-Ethnic Diversity in the Baltimore-Washington Region’s Nonprofit Sector. We were joined by a racially and gender diverse panel, including:

Each panelist shared a story about how their leadership experiences in the nonprofit sector have been affected by race and/or gender. It was an amazing discussion and I wish you had been there.

One Really Important Thing that stuck out for me during the conversation was this:

Diversity is very often the wrong word to use when we’re talking about efforts to bring in more people of color or LGBT or men or women into our organizations. We have to get increasingly more specific about what we mean when we say diversity, because we all think something different in our minds when the term is used.

In my case, what I’m usually talking about on my blog is racial justice.

The Applied Research Center defines racial justice this way:

We define racial justice as the proactive reinforcement of policies, practices, attitudes and actions that produce equitable power, opportunities, treatment, impacts and outcomes for all.

I’m talking about inclusion and equality and I’m talking about power. Which is far more complex and involved than diversity. It goes beyond “diversity workshops” and “sensitivity training” and reaches into sector reform, advocacy and policy change.

What many of us do goes way beyond diversity as a blanket concept. But in nonprofit circles, diversity seems to be a much more accessible word for the conversation.

Or is it?



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  • Great post and fantastic comments.

    Our work at the Inclusiveness Project at The Denver Foundation is to support nonprofits in moving beyond diversity into (what we call) inclusiveness. Organizations have found success in advancing racial justice by taking an organizational development tact--looking beyond boards to marketing, programs, evaluation, and fundraising. Examining these components can help channel anti-oppression theory and work in the nonprofit setting. It's not easy, and we don't have all the answers. But many Denver nonprofits (and all the incredible individuals in community) are committed to examination, learning, and change.
    www.nonprofitinclusiveness.org

    Thanks for elevating the conversation.
  • Great to hear about the work you all are doing in Denver and I love the name of the project - I think it says what we're really trying to do and indicates that's it's more than just filling slots for people of color in our organizations. I'd be happy to feature a guest post from your organization about lessons you've learned so far!
  • Deborah
    Hi Rosetta,

    Thanks for bringing up this important issue. In our work (at the Leadership Learning Community) we believe that focusing on diversity is important, but not enough. We use racial justice language and think that we need to talk more about structural racism because it helps us to understand the ways in which policies, culture, media, institutions and individual behaviors work together to affect one’s access (or lack of access) to important life opportunities. To deal with the issues your panelists shared in their stories, it won’t be enough to focus on individual behaviors and solutions – we need to understand the systems behind those issues. Its more than language, it’s what we believe about change and how to tackle racism in this country. E.g. research indicates that while intrapersonal racism is declining, structural racism is on the rise.

    We recently launched a collaborative research initiative that explores the implications of structural racism on leadership development – Leadership for a New Era (www.leadershipforanewera.org). We will launch a publication on this topic later this summer. Once again, thanks for sharing this insightful post - language and framing play a critical role in helping us understand the scope of our work.

    Deborah Meehan
  • Love what y'all are doing at the LLC! One of the questions that comes up often in my own leadership development circles is whether - even if we help people of color build the capacity needed for social change - will they even have access to leadership positions given issues like structural racism? Thanks for the update & for linking us to your work.
  • This is a discussion that every nonprofit organization needs to have. Many have language in their policies/procedures stating that diversity is supported and encouraged, but doesn't say HOW that will be accomplished.
  • Well, a lot of organizations are just paying lip service to diversity in the first place. And even for the groups that do really want to change the way they work, the policy is the first focus, then they never make it to the second step. Your comment makes me think that the policy should actually come second. Because without stating how they define diversity, it's hard to tell when/if they've been successful in their efforts.
  • bsaunders
    Great post.

    I agree with you about racial (and gender) justice. I also think this misuse of the term diversity creates another problem as well. Issues of other kinds of diversity - political approach, theories of change, for instance - can get overlooked when "diversity" efforts address only on race and gender.
  • Well, "diversity" as a code word for something else will always be skewed toward whatever that "something else" is. If we take the time to even just clarify what we mean by the word "diversity," it would be a great first step.
  • Reid Kelly
    Thanks for teasing out this critical and often over-looked distinction, Rosetta.

    In my work, I think about diversity as presence. It's only about whether or not we’ve got the people in the room. Diversity doesn’t tell us whether there is equitable power, opportunity, treatment, impacts or outcomes within that room. However, the absence of diversity can be an indicator (one of many) of underlying injustice, just as greater diversity can be the product of greater equity.

    Diversity is easy to measure, it is easy to talk about and it is easy to use as a distraction from the hard work of tackling injustice head on.

    As I mentioned this morning, most of us in the nonprofit sector are doing the hard work of addressing symptoms, results or root causes of social injustice in our communities. The lack of diversity (presence) of certain groups within the nonprofit workforce is evidence that those same structural inequities are at play in our sector.

    If we are talking about HOW to make the sector more inclusive of currently underrepresented groups, then we are not talking about diversity; we are talking about doing the hard work of looking at our selves and the sector to breakdown all of those ways that we hold up structures that reproduce inequity and injustice.

    Can we successfully promote justice and equity in any community without doing it first in our own organizations/sector?
  • Right. The way we currently talk about diversity is in terms of numbers, i.e. how many people of color do we have at the table. The problem for the nonprofit sector though, is that since we don't yet have the numbers, we still need to focus on getting different types of folks into our organizations. And THEN we can talk about justice and equity and power. But I think what we're both saying is that we need to go beyond that. We need to figure out how to do both at the same time.
  • Kelly Reid
    It's so true: we have to do both at the same time. Really, organizational diversity/inclusion and the cultural competency of the services we provide are two sides of the same coin. Nonprofits that are aware of how they may reproduce structural inequities and learn to address these issues, have greater diversity among their staff and can apply these lessons to serving their constituents.

    IMPACT is a fantastic example of an organization that does this work internally and is seeing the benefit in their work/partnership with the community. We will all always be learning - and we can learn so much from each other. Thanks to you and your colleagues at IMPACT, Anh!
  • Kelly, I had a moment to reflect on your question tonight. I just got home from Tuesdays Together, a mutual support circle held at Catholic Charities in the Wheaton neighborhood with IMPACT Silver Spring. One one hand, there is the use of shared space, one way to share power. On the other hand, there is the issue of positional power, air time, real diversity. Everyone in the room had the chance to bid for 1-2 minutes to share a gift, need, or announcement. In 1 hour, we identified resources from each other, and found multiple moments that crossed lines of race, culture, language, and class. We're still figuring it out: http://neighborscampaign.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/crossing-class-lines-in-the-neighborhood/
  • I love what IMPACT is doing. I wonder if it could be useful to have a similar type of "support circle" for nonprofit leaders of color?
  • Great post, Rosetta. I think the words we use are so very important. I do think that we are all thinking very different things when we talk about diversity.

    The variation in meaning is reflected in another panel conversation (in addition to the one you participated in). Back in 2007, the Council on Foundations, The Foundation Center, and ARNOVA gathered a group of researchers together to discuss the current state of research about nonprofit diversity issues.

    One of the primary questions the participants discussed was how we define diversity. You can read the summary of the conversation in a pdf, accessed here: http://foundationcenter.org/gainknowledge/research/pdf/diversity.pdf

    Keep up the great work!
  • Thanks for linking to this great report, Jessica! There's so much good stuff here, and the definitions piece is especially useful. I think organizations should first define the term for themselves before embarking on any "diversity initiative." Outcomes will be vastly different depending on what the initial premise is, and unfortunately, most nonprofits stop when they've successfully recruited and hired "enough" people of color/LGBT/women/men.
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