Kerrien Suarez is executive director of Equity in the Center, a foundation-supported effort to promote equity in philanthropy and the social sector. The group provides training and webinars for foundation and nonprofit leaders and offers tools and resources to help leaders build a race equity culture within their organizations.
Suarez spoke to the Chronicle about how philanthropy approached racial diversity, equity, and inclusion — often referred to as DEI — at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic and how that may shift in response to the recent killings of George Floyd and other unarmed black people and the resulting protests against police violence and racism.
When the pandemic began, did demand for your racial-equity training change?
A lot of organizations had trainings on their schedule, and most stuck with it. In talking to my colleagues who do this kind of work, the overwhelming majority who had things scheduled remain scheduled but have gone remote. Some people canceled their in-person trainings and picked a later date.
The big question that people were asking was less about this quarter and more about how can we possibly continue to invest in trainings and external support and center equity when 90 to 100 percent of our revenue has disappeared.
As a rule — and not just within the nonprofit sector — people see “diversity” as something that you do in addition to your regular work. So there was a instinctual urge to say that we could no longer invest in DEI moving through and coming out of Covid because there wouldn’t be any money. That was a fairly average response that I heard from your average nonprofit, both large and small, that is in the early stages of work on diversity.
Back in March, did you feel you had to make the connection for people that Covid-19 is a racial-equity issue?
The overwhelming majority of people came to the conversation in March thinking that there were two separate issues: Covid and “DEI work.”
Most organizations are so early in their journey, and are working on issues of diversity, meaning a variation of individuals by race in their organization. Most people are just trying to find people to work for them who are not white and using the word equity to talk about that work, which is actually diversity.
In some cases, whatever equity work they were doing in this three-month period has continued and become more urgent and explicit — if they were raising a Covid fund, or their programing or advocacy work was around health equity, or they were responding to the immediate needs that communities have had as a result of Covid, for example.
Covid is just the latest incarnation of how structural racism manifests. And in some cases, the conversations have shifted to use Covid as an illustration of how structural racism unfolds.
What organizations and society should have been doing is focusing on mitigating race-based inequities. So applying a race-equity lens to your Covid response and not to your overall work is illogical when you think about it that way.
The disproportionate impact of Covid on communities of color, the disproportionate rate at which black men and black people are killed by the police, and the resulting unrest are the result of the same thing, which is structural racism.
What have you seen as you’ve tracked organizations’ responses to the killing of George Floyd and the protests?
There hasn’t been enough time for organizations to really do anything more than make a statement and have some internal conversations about what is happening. Most organizations are struggling to just acknowledge race, but the statements are an indicator of something that is changing.
There have been literally thousands of statements. That’s much more than in the past when these killings of unarmed black men have happened.
They’re naming Black Lives Matter even if they’re not using the words Black Lives Matter. Statements explicitly say that black life needs to be valued equally to white life and that it is not currently valued as equal in this country. That is a huge shift in language.
Statements are external. They’re performative indicators. People are releasing those statements to say something to the world but also to be perceived as saying something to the world.
The question going forward from here is, what will they do in the days ahead to live into those values? Because as of today, the overwhelming majority of organizations that released statements with those words in it do not have a culture where the black people who work there feel that they are valued as equal to white people.
We’ll see what happens going forward in terms of whether or not organizations actually change their culture because that’s what they need to do. Folks have dropped these very “woke” statements. Will they now live into the anti-racist values that they professed? That work takes years.
Do you think we’ll start to see groups move beyond making statements and take concrete action?
I do think that this is a different moment where people will actually begin to do the work. If they continue to have conversations with the support of consultants who know how to lead these change efforts, they’ll make progress toward a race-equity culture inside of the organization and in that process become anti-racist.
I have some colleagues who have been completely overwhelmed with requests for support over the past week. So something is different. But we’re going to have to wait and see if people live into the values that they professed.
The best statements that have come out in this past week acknowledge the author organization’s failings in centering black lives in their own work. That was a minority of statements. Most organizations’ statements didn’t hold themselves accountable for how they have not valued black lives equally in their own work and in their own organization. But that’s where you’ll see the change going forward. Who is going to use this as an opportunity to look internally to change their culture?
In your experience, what’s the most effective way to make the case to someone in a position of power at a philanthropic institution to center race in their work?
The short answer is it depends on the person and the organization. When I look at what moves institutions along, it’s trainings and learning opportunities that put the participants in the emotional space that the whole country is in this week.
In our work with Equity in the Center, when people ask that question, generally what they’re asking is, “What intervention can I do with my people who are skeptical and don’t believe that racism or discrimination or structural oppression are real?” We generally recommend that they participate in Racial Equity Institute’s trainings. They have a half-day session called Groundwater, which is a good fit for board members, for example, who don’t believe that this is a thing and would never devote an entire day to a training on structural racism.
Generally, the most skeptical people are board-member types — people of wealth and privilege whose proximity to inequity is galaxies away and they don’t believe that these things are real. What those people usually need is data because they don’t believe what they see or hear from folks of color.
Racial Equity Institutehttps
has one of the most effective learning interventions because its data-based and has multiple case studies from American history to illustrate structural racism. The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond has another training that we found to be particularly effective, and so do Race Forward and CrossRoads Anti-Racism Organizing & Training, which focuses on pulling the thread from structural racism to institutional racism. Those are particularly effective at making the case to people who are skeptical.
What they have in common is that they are intense, strategic, and very well-designed learning opportunities for people to finally make the connection between their lived experience and the experience of people of color who live within a system of structural oppression.
I’d also recommend a paper published by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in 2018 which makes the business case for race equity by quantifying the cost of racial inequity in housing, education, criminal justice, and several other social-sector causes.https://www.wkkf.org/resource-directory/resource/2018/07/business-case-for-racial-equity
These trainings and that paper can help wake people up and make the case. But to move the organization along, you still need an intentional equity process that would guide an organization to move through the transformation.
How are people agitating for change from within social-sector organizations?
I think people are pushing and they want to do the work. But there’s going to be a learning curve for organizations to reckon with what’s happening in society and draw the connection between their internal organizational culture and broader structural racism.
I think there is unrest and discontent in almost all organizations. White people seem to be asking, “What’s going on? How could this be?” It’s similar to what happened when Trump was elected. It’s been here all along, but people have the privilege of believing that structural racism is some extra thing or unrelated to whatever the current crisis or manifestation is. No black person is surprised by what has happened with the death of George Floyd and the civil unrest that has resulted. What’s different is that white folks are aware in a different way than they have been before of the reality that black life in America is not valued equally with white life.
I do think some folks are asking, “What is our organization going to do?” But I don’t know that the majority of them inside of their organizations are talking explicitly about the value of black life because that hierarchy of human value is the foundation of racism inside of organizations and in society. Until you reckon with that, you’re not going to transform into an anti-racist organization.
What advice do you have for younger staff at these institutions or people who don’t feel like they have decision-making power?
I was part of a conversation last week about how younger staff, like millennial staff, across organizations, are pushing for an organizational response to what’s happening in the world. To be clear, they’re pushing for something, which isn’t the same as explicitly naming what they need to become an anti-racist organization.
They should keep beating on the drum, continuing to do what they’re doing. The unrelenting naming of race issues and structural oppression as something that the organization has to address is helpful.
But then also ensuring that people in power are made aware of or connected to people and resources that can move them from awareness to action. Once people wake up to the “business case,” they’re going to need some external support — resources, learning opportunities, and individuals and organizations that can help them take action versus just write statements. If people don’t know what to do, there is no action.
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
