Urgency and White Supremacy Culture

If you’re a U.S. leader feeling a sense of urgency, take a breath. Urgency isn’t an antidote to complacency. In fact, it reinforces white supremacy culture because it intensifies disconnection and increases implicit bias in decision-making.

Under racial capitalism, the pressure to speed up pushes individuals and organizations to move faster and faster, exacerbating racial and economic disparities, which many Americans barely notice as we strive to keep up with the frantic pace of competition, consumption, and change.

Rushing into the DEIB space will almost always:

🔥 Undermine meaningful change
🔥 Create unrealistic expectations
🔥 Increase bias in decision-making
🔥 Decrease democracy in decision-making
🔥 Decenter those most impacted by existing inequities, thereby reinforcing existing hierarchies.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself and your team is to stop and ask yourself what is driving your feeling of urgency. Why do you want to offer an all-staff DEIB training, start a DEIB committee, or increase board diversity?

For inclusion efforts to be sustainable, it's crucial to step back and assess before launching into frantic fixes. Do you have a clear picture of where you are on your DEIB journey and where you want to go? Are you being transparent about the challenges you face as an organization and the work that's needed in order to meaningfully address them?

As Tema Okun has famously argued in her work on white supremacy culture, we must interrogate "our cultural habit of applying a sense of urgency to our every-day lives in ways that perpetuate power imbalance while disconnecting us from our need to breathe and pause and reflect. The irony is that this imposed sense of urgency serves to erase the actual urgency of tackling racial and social injustice."

👉 👉 Social acceleration is not social justice.