If you had 30 minutes to align and cohere a 200-person team around a racial equity goal, how would you do it? Would you fear pushback and blowback? Would you worry about how much you can say and if you'd lose your job? Would you feel too overwhelmed to find the words to say what you need to say?

I've been there. In 2018, I’d been asked to be a keynote speaker at my last DEI team's start of the year retreat. The agenda slated my address right after the Chief Diversity Officer and the director I reported to at the time. I used the opportunity to facilitate a discovery learning process. 

My discovery learning process began with examples of the racial hierarchy that occurs globally across industries and society. A racial hierarchy refers to the way society organizes and ranks us - whereby some racial/ethnic groups get arranged at the top of the racial hierarchy with more access to resources, while others get arranged at the bottom of the hierarchy with less access.

I invited the team to stand with a partner. For the next set of slides, they viewed a range of images. Their job was to observe, analyze, and then discuss in pairs, what they noticed in relation to the racial hierarchy that distributes access to resources previously discussed.

The slides consisted of line graphs by race of in-industry and non-industry outcome metrics for hiring, representation of the executive bench, promotion rates, and retention rates. Additionally, I shared product ads and reviews. 

Here's an example the type of data shared (not the one I facilitated above).

As each slide shifted to the next, the observer got an opportunity to notice similarities and differences between the hierarchy of access to resources by race on a societal level and in the more localized images.

Light bulb moments rippled across the room. You could see the barriers to seeing race fall like dominoes. The team's collective purpose unfolded in a constellation-like manner - dots connecting across silo'ed teams. If anyone questioned our why they didn’t any longer. 

What I facilitated here is an example of evoking race analysis from a group.

It's an exquisite example of why your DEI strategy can be high-caliber with race analysis as a racial equity tool.

Shortly after, I was authorized to lead en masse and had, in effect, set the global company-wide strategy for racial equity at Google. Soon after, I founded the Center for Racial Equity and Systemic Transformation (CREST). 

I share this story to illuminate the power of race analysis skills to inform and inspire a collective to cohere to action. To facilitate this kind of awakening requires expertise in race analysis.

<<Related: Don't forget to click  to download my free guide on how race moves through the operations of organizations. >>

By the end of this post, you’ll learn:

• what race analysis is
• the benefits of being able to do race analysis
• what happens when racial equity and DE&I work is done without race analysis

What is race analysis?

Race analysis involves 5 ways of seeing race in the workplace.

When a racial event happens, some people recognize that something has happened. They get it. Those who do not, can’t “see.” There’s one difference between people who “get it” and people who do not get it - race analysis. The ability to see race.

I’ll show you what I mean by “seeing race.” It’s a sociological perspective, one where you attune your sight to notice what’s implicit, what Dubois (1991) called "atmospheric," and "elusive to the grasp."

To see race is to:

1. Recognize that some organizational practices implicitly sift and sort who gets advantaged and who gets gridlocked out of opportunities to be hired, promoted, or assigned a high-visibility project.

2. See the ways of doing business that arranges people of different racial/ethnic groups into the organization’s hierarchy. Who is in the c-suite vs the cleaning staff?

3. Discern how race operates in interactions.

4. Decode what makes a process racial.

5. Observe how spaces get raced, engaging in a spatial analysis connected to the health of the racial climate of the organization. What’s the vibe of the organizational culture and are there patterned descriptions of the vibe by race/ethnicity and its intersections?

Race analysis skills are necessary for naming, identifying, and qualifying the social dynamics we observe. It’s one of the initial steps in intervening to prevent, stop, or repair racial harm. And, it’s one critical step toward creating strategies robust enough to compel a racially unequal system to move.

<<Related post: Unconscious bias training hasn't achieved your DEI goals? Build race analysis skills instead>>

The Benefits of Race Analysis

Benefit #1: Race analysis provides the capacity to notice race in the workplace, to discern the racial anatomy of organizations and its kinesiology.

1. How do the organizational processes arrange people of different racial/ethnic groups into the organization’s hierarchy? Who gets organized in the highest positions of authority, power, pay, and exemptions? And who does not?

Benefit #2: Race analysis skills are necessary for naming, identifying, and qualifying the social dynamics we observe.

Noticing and naming social dynamics are most useful in the following type of moments:

1. How does a hiring manager know when denial for hire based on a ‘culture-fit’ logic is problematic?
2. How does a DEI practitioner influence an executive who doesn’t seem to notice that BIPOC attrition is connected to the culture of the organization they lead?
3. How does a CDO influence laterally to other executives to distribute the load and burden of curating a healthy racial climate?
4. How does a DEI team influence an entire HR organization to buy into an antiracism HR strategy?

<<Related post:  How to use race analysis to tackle equity in the workplace>>

Benefit #3: Race analysis skills are one of the initial steps in intervening to prevent, stop, or repair racial harm and racism at work.

They help you answer:

1. How does one develop the capacity to anticipate and prevent racialized harm from happening?
2. How does one develop the capacity to intervene to stop racialized harm in progress, limiting the adverse impact?
3. How does one begin to repair racialized harm once they’ve made a mistake?

What happens when racial equity and DE&I work is done without race analysis?

Without race analysis skills, you won’t be able to expand your capacity to:

• Assess why, in one organization, fewer progress in one racial group and many in other racial groups advance.

• Read the texts, contexts, and subtexts of seemingly neutral organizational processes and decipher in what ways is race acknowledged, ignored, articulated, and interrogated? Overlooking and not noticing doesn’t mean it isn’t there

• Detect what makes a process racial? 

• And to learn what do employees’ experiences, BIPOC, NBPOC, and white, teach us about how race may function in the organization?

<<Related post: DEI falls short without race analysis. Why your DEI strategy needs it to be effective>>

Without race analysis skills, you won’t be able to create strategies robust enough to compel a racially unequal system to move.

Race analysis skills help you:

• astutely read data disaggregated by race and gender. 
• humanize racialized data in an effort to compel other members of a system, esp those with more authoritarian power, 
• shift the disengaged to engaged, the indifferent to caring, and the unaware to behavioral change.

Race analysis is one of many racial equity tools.

It cultivates the capacity to notice subtle racial dynamics surrounding seemingly race-neutral work tasks and business operations. 

So remember…race analysis is the road to a higher-caliber DE&I strategy. You equip yourself and others to perceive the racial anatomy of the organization and its kinesiology.

You can learn to use strong race analysis as a critical part of your racial strategy in The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership. Let robust strategy carry the load that’s too much to do alone.

If you liked this post, please share it with a friend. And, download these free guides and workbooks as gifts from me to you. 

Now you know exactly how race analysis benefits a high-caliber DEI strategy, but what about specific interactions in which you’d use it? I’ve got you. Don't forget to check out this related post: Race in the workplace: The 10 most useful interactions at work to use race analysis, next, to help you with that. 

I help trailblazing leaders like you, who are stuck between mainstream minutiae and resistance from status quo keepers, pivot organizational systems from unfair to equitable.

When you join The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership, you shift from:

• Risk aversion to fortified, unshakable leadership
• Mainstream generic approaches to unprecedented models for more racially equitable outcomes
• DEI burnout to tenacious healing and growth
• Martyrdom , reactivity, or inaction to honorable gamesmanship
• Misaligned and unclear to found providence
• Being an isolated load bearer to cooperative command

Work with me to expand your leadership capacity in care-curated leadership crucibles, sustained coaching, community, and battle-tested curriculum. If you want help applying these concepts, join The Equitecture®️ Academy for Decolonizing Leadership.