Diversity in the New World Part I - Understanding Race as a System.

In the Fall of 2022, Collaborate hosted Human Learning Systems Week, with over 30 free online events showcasing all things HLS. I led the organisation and programme management of the Week, culminating in hosting my own event, ‘Diversity in the New World,’ based on my Charityworks Impact Research looking at racial diversity in the Charity Sector. If you want to learn more about HLS, check out the HLS Website or this previous post. 

Joining Collaborate what interested me the most was our work on HLS, in which I could finally begin to see and understand the reasons for my personal hardships towards trying to create social change, by recognising and understanding the systems we all live in and why they are designed the way they are. I wanted to push this further to see if I could use HLS to tackle how I see ‘race’ as a system itself, to improve diversity, to ensure good practice and a system that works for us all. 

My research led me to the conclusion that understanding that racism, equity and diversity are in themselves complex systems, explains why the old way of thinking about these issues has never worked, and more importantly why a new way of thinking is needed, why a ‘new world’ is needed. A change in the way we think about how effective social change happens, and what it takes to enable this. Race isn’t a biological reality, it doesn’t exist in nature, it’s a socially engineered concept invented with very specific intentions, and that was racism. 

Historically, Emma Dabiri, one of the inspirations for this work tells us, we’ve never distinguished one another through our colour, it simply didn’t exist before 1661. Racial difference came from the English colonies during the slave trade, to distinguish and dehumanise ‘black’ people from ‘white,’ to essentially allow the effective exploitation of one ‘race’ for the benefit of the other. 

And that became enshrined in law, codifying race into our legal system, where it grew and evolved to shape the power structures that still determine ‘race’ today. And to dismantle this structure, this system, we must see ‘race’ for what it represents, who benefits from it, who is disproportionately affected by it, and who retains power and privilege because of it. Recognising this is fundamental if we ever want to change the system, because until we understand its beginning, we will not see its end. 

And how we see racism now in society is through racist language or acts and legally it’s based on our protected characteristics.’ But by defining it like that it becomes easy to measure and straightforward, and fails to understand the complexity of the system as a whole. What we don’t give enough recognition to is the systemic, structural and institutional forms of racism, because they cannot be measured. 

Because recognising an individual’s ‘race’ as the forefront of their identity takes away from their individuality, their humanity, where they are seen by their colour and what that represents and not for who they are. So if I accept ‘race’ as a social construct and complex system, what does that mean for the practice of seeing myself and others as human?  Because it’s impossible in today’s society not to see the colour of our skin, our own experiences, our own class and gender, but we can, or at least I hope we can, change the narrative of what that represents. 

Because my ‘race’ isn’t my soul identity, but merely a factor that has shaped who I am, my perceptions, my experiences, my weaknesses and my strengths. There is something in us all that cannot be easily defined in data, language or representation, and there is also something within us that remains unfinished and open to the world. We can never be reduced entirely to sociological explanation, we ourselves are complex systems, the most complex of all. 

So if HLS is about making services more human, adaptative and collaborative, how do we do that in a system that divides us by our characteristics, those very same things that make us the humans we truly are? 

• What does it mean to be human in our practice?
• How do we have the conversations and experiment to address race inequalities in the world? 
• What does it mean to be human - in a system which divides people by race, class, gender , ability etc? 

Read Part II, Learning to Talk about Race here