Reforming institutions can be risky for leaders of colour

This article is written by Meg Juarez, Suk Rhee, and Dianne Riley who recently served on the leadership team in the Office of Community & Civic Life at the City of Portland, Oregon, as community safety supervisor, bureau director, and community & neighborhood involvement center supervisor, respectively.

Confronting racism requires deep institutional change, as well as for individuals to educate themselves and commit to supporting change. So when people of colour take leadership positions in the public service, they experience backlash from within the systems they work in as well as from the communities benefiting from what the current systems deliver.

What will it take to truly reconcile with the United States’ racist past? Perhaps much more than any of us realise. As public servants, we have rarely seen or experienced local, state or federal governments pursue policy that actively confronts racism: even when these governments are pursuing equality and equity.

The City of Portland adopted anti-racism and equity as values in 2020. It has taken 170 years for the City of Portland to have a bureau — the Office of Community & Civic Life — with a multicultural leadership team: 89% identify as Black, Indigenous or from communities of colour, and many have LGBTQIA, immigrant or refugee identities.

White supremacy consists of many mutually-reinforcing cultural, political and socio-economic systems. When people of colour and women step into leadership roles in public service, they again confront the reality that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” They are often asked to reform institutions based on white supremacy with tools and processes that helped to create and sustain it.

As former leaders at the Office of Community & Civic Life, we transformed programmes away from implicitly and explicitly racist models of crime prevention to community safety. We changed inequitable complaint-based systems into ones that deliver equitable services to communities. We dared to rewrite City codes and laws to reflect all members of the community and further racial, disability and social justice.

The systems we took on are those that ensure those in power maintain that power. Policies that help to perpetuate these systems have their own mechanisms to keep them in place.

Our reform efforts have challenged the structures of white supremacy by exposing the unexamined assumptions that underpin signature programmes and investments. Originally founded as the Office of Neighborhood Associations in 1974, our City has codified ‘recognition,’ privileges, exemptions, waivers and benefits in City Code only for geographic neighborhood associations and no other types of groups. At first glance, this may seem accessible to every Portland resident...everyone lives in a neighborhood, right? But it’s critical to remember that neighborhood boundaries themselves were originally drawn to exclude Blacks, Chinese, Mexicans and many others. These origins continue to shape outcomes today. The wealthiest and most politically powerful neighborhoods remain the least diverse in the 4th least-diverse City in the United States. Communities of colour who live across many neighborhoods but comprise only a small portion of any one neighborhood have been made invisible through this system. City reports document that communities of colour increasingly cannot afford to rent or own in the City; for example, the average Black household, with a median annual income of $31,538, could not afford the typical rent in any Portland neighborhood in 2020.

This geography-based system of civic privileges also does not reflect the rights of citizens of Native Nations to their usual and accustomed places on the ceded and unceded land upon which Portland is built. These individuals do not live in or identify as part of any neighborhood, and this way of organising civic participation erases their presence. Our unhoused communities are also not always respected as members of the neighborhood, and/or are pushed out.

While it is important that the City of Portland has declared anti-racism as a value, it has never been the case that simply declaring it made it so.

Our reform efforts have also challenged the culture of whiteness, including the soft bigotry of low expectations that exist alongside impossibly high double standards for ‘non-White’ employees. Low expectations often translate into tokenism, whereby employees of colour are not trained, supported or held accountable for the basic knowledge, skills and abilities needed to do their jobs. The inverse of this--impossibly high double standards--exploits the contributions of workers. When supervisors of colour who do not seek to benefit from or perpetuate the existing system enter the workplace, their expectations for greater accountability and actions for more just outcomes are seen as aberrations from the norm. They become the ‘problem’ in the culture. Employment practices also tend to favour precedent, and so addressing previously upheld standards is made even harder for these supervisors.

Leading reforms is challenging enough for any leader. But leaders of colour face particular obstacles. In an in-depth six-year study of leaders in three companies, a group of emeritus professors at Harvard Business School found that “people of colour had to manage their careers more strategically than their white peers did and to prove greater competence before winning promotions.” Other research shows that black leaders who do rise to the top are disproportionately handed “glass cliff” assignments. These offer substantial rewards but carry a greater risk of failure.

For reformers in Portland, the backlash has included disproportionate scrutiny and false allegations against supervisors of colour. An age-old tactic to resist change is to undermine the credibility and reputation of those advancing it. Many have mastered doing so and have weaponised the City’s complaint-based system, instinctively capitalising on racial, gender and negativity bias. Those experiencing this feel demoralised and undermined, and often leave City employment as a result.

Most would agree that leadership is essential if we want to change organisations. But what happens when the culture of white supremacy neutralises and undermines reform efforts led by people of colour?

While it is important that the City of Portland has declared anti-racism as a value, it has never been the case that simply declaring it made it so.

Making anti-racism real requires deep institutional change. Institutions and programmes must acknowledge the harms perpetrated by harmful policies. These mustn’t be treated as a personal attack on individuals. Instead, individuals need to do the hard work of educating themselves, and be willing to take part in reform for the common good.

But the rules of the institution itself, and those of wider society, also compound the challenges of reform. Take human resources and employment law. These rules are steeped in a history of white supremacy. They emphasise a view of racism as an interpersonal question, paying less attention to institutional racism, implicit bias and organisational outcomes.

Meanwhile, what remains outside the reach of reform? Our institutions default to a pattern of settlements and non-disclosure. These ways of ‘righting’ wrongs often focus on individual harms and not systemic change. They don’t establish new legal precedents that can support further change.

These questions are some that our experiences have revealed and that research has documented. We invite readers to share their experiences with us and offer your insights about what else is needed to reform organisations and examine the biases that undermine the leadership of people of colour.

Picture credit: Cameron Willer (Unsplash)