Diversity without the Enemy
The old saying that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is true. The study of countless societies that have been colonized, thrown off the colonizer, and then sought to be independent nations shows us that the best way for a group of people to work together and become as a unit is for them to identify a common enemy. Even well before today’s world, Europe’s nations formed into the shapes we now know by making common enemies out of others—sometimes Jewish people, sometimes Muslims, sometimes Christians of a different sort. For a people to see themselves as one people, they usually require an other people to set themselves off against.
This dynamic is so common and so central that it feels natural to many of us. Since it feels natural, it creeps into many of our group dynamics. Not just how we build countries, but also how we build work environments.
In DEI, the dynamic often manifests as blame, leading community members into a constant search for perpetrators. Always looking for who did what is exhausting. It’s also fear-inducing and self-perpetuating. When coworkers regularly worry that they might do something wrong, their fear supports a culture of blame. In that culture, people either give up or fight harder. Since few people have envisioned a world without blame, the idea of building community without it rarely occurs to us.
Many will find it hard to fathom how such a community could work. Wouldn’t everyone do whatever they wanted with no regard for others? How could we ensure members’ safety?
When we start to envision a blameless version of diversity work, it makes people nervous. It’s as if not searching for perpetrators is to admit zero repercussions and all consequences simultaneously. Yet the approach is actually quite simple. The work of diversity is the work of healing. And healing doesn’t mean consequences don’t exist. It just means our capacity to heal does not depend on the punishment of another.
In inclusive communities, the goal is for all members to feel welcomed and calm. Yet, community members bring with them varying experiences of feeling unwelcome, threatened, and devalued. They have experienced discrimination in multiple situations and from perpetrators separated from them by all sorts of identity factors: race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, culture, geography, just to name a few. Then they are expected to stroll into the workplace and be in effective, productive community with folks who share identities with the very people who have hurt them.
What’s more, inclusion requires healing from centuries of discrimination and the resulting pain, some of it passed down in our genes. And there’s no way to punish the dead.
We have to figure out how to move forward differently.
This is the moment when many people give up. Acknowledging eons of pain and working through it seems impossible. But the trick is in healing ourselves. It creates the conditions for healing in our organizations.
Consider the story of Anna, a client with whom we worked a few years ago. She led the public education arm of an arts and culture institution that developed a new curriculum on Black History. Rolling it out was to be the centerpiece of her institution’s Black History Month celebration. The curriculum was put together by several bright, excited, and well regarded members of her staff who were mostly people of color. Busy running the whole public education division, she did not have a direct hand in the work, but she did look in on it and heard a lot of excited praise from managers in her division who reviewed parts of the new curriculum. So, when a local arts and culture council, known for their own work in publicizing the histories of BIPOC, offered to review the work before its rollout, Anna was excited. She would present them the curriculum and incorporate their feedback to make it even stronger.
Anna had sent them a written version of the curriculum before her presentation as a matter of course. They would only have two hours together, and the curriculum was 150 pages long. Yet, as she presented, she began to feel a chill in the room. Her jokes weren’t drawing laughs. Her smiles were going unreturned.
Finally, it was time for the council to offer their feedback. The first few comments were mildly positive, but by the time the fourth member spoke, remarks were increasingly negative. There wasn’t enough on Black educational history. Black political self-determination was ignored. The discussion of Black arts was too celebratory and didn’t give enough attention to the exploitation of Black artists. The sixth member pronounced the entire curriculum a damnable failure and everyone seemed to agree. While pronouncing the failure, the council member looked squarely at Anna as if to say “How could you?” Anna squirmed in her seat.
All Anna could think was: How could she deliver this news to the excited cohort of younger POC staff who had built the curriculum? Had she been blind to its faults because she is White? All she knew was the buck stopped with her. So this was all her fault. She was both determined and devastated.
Anna continued to reel from this experience for months after the event. When she came to speak with us in 2021, she felt called to protect colleagues of color—from what threat she wasn’t sure, but it felt a lot like she needed to protect them from herself. She was also determined not to get in their way. The challenging event, in which everyone who took part had thought they were helping, had actually made it harder for her to do her work. For the most part, this meant she had avoided working with matters pertaining to race at all. At any diversity-related meetings she usually said something like: “I know my place is to listen and learn.” She felt strong emotions and even righteous anger when discussing historical injustices, but kept silent in conversations about how to respond.
Then the president of her current institution asked her to lead a task force assessing several divisions’ progress toward the organization’s diversity goals. She didn’t feel she could say no, but as she approached the work, she started to experience sleeplessness and digestive issues. Then she came to us.
In working with her, we began by helping Anna realize she had become so uncomfortable, frightened, and timid about the antiracist efforts she once championed because she had taken all the blame on herself. She feared doing anything lest it go wrong. We knew we had to help her move toward fearlessness or her antiracist allyship would remain inert and the diversity efforts she was now in charge of would go nowhere. This kind of healing isn’t an overnight process, but it is possible by helping people feel seen, heard, valued, and settled.
Our work together helped her begin to experience the failure not as her fault but as a manifestation of the pain—the collective pain—caused by racism and prejudice that splits human communities and tears asunder individuals’ psychological wholeness. None of us can sit unaffected in the presence of such pain, but we can learn ways to engage with it productively.
The processes we use to help an individual move away from experiencing themself as the enemy of diversity helped Anna to forgive herself. This is not easy labor, but most people we work with are willing to do it. Not because they want to be heroes, but because they believe in the value of human community. And fostering diverse community requires that they resolve fear and the expectation of an us-versus-them dynamic for themselves first. Anna now tells us she has a much higher capacity to be with the pain she may encounter in her organization’s current efforts. She doesn’t absorb it or try to solve it alone. She serves as a source of connection and doesn’t burn herself out in the process.
A community built on togetherness requires exorcising the ghosts of the nation-building, colonizing, and racist practices that left us with so much pain to manage in the first place. As DEI facilitators, we model something humans have rarely had a chance to practice: being with someone in their pain in a way that focuses not on blame but on collective healing. Once we do that, we can envision and realize whole new ways of being—together.
Photo by GR Stocks.