Who says you can’t learn anything during a dreaded work presentation? Several Tuesday afternoons ago, when I logged on for a two-hour video seminar on diversity and inclusion, my expectations were low. I figured I was in for more lip service about the benefits of a diverse workplace delivered to an audience that had heard it all before. The audience was also just as predominantly White as any other I’d previously been a part of while listening to the same message.
I turned off my camera and prepared to tune out mentally. (One of the many benefits of working from home is that no-one can necessarily see how engrossed you are — or aren’t.) Then the speaker, who was a Black woman, suggested something that made my ears perk up. My takeaway: We’ve all been mangling the word “diversity” for years because we lack a firm grasp of what it actually means. The diversity problem we’ve been talking about in “progressive” workplaces with increasing frequency since the murder of George Floyd kicked off a new era of racial reckoning isn’t actually a diversity problem at all.
I scanned my screen, looking at the faces of my colleagues who had their cameras turned on. Sure the senior staff members tuning in may have been overwhelmingly white, but they were just as diverse as they would have been if half of them had been employees of color.
You see, a group that is 100 percent white can be just as diverse as one that is 50 percent Black or brown. Even within the most seemingly homogenous white ranks, the diversity factor might be high. As long as you have people of different genders, different sexual orientations, different religions, different socio-economic backgrounds, different geographical backgrounds, different hair colors, different eye colors, different anything except race, you have diversity. Any random group of people, regardless of the racial breakdown, is diverse.
So is all this talk about diversity just talk? Well, for some it is. It’s a way of appearing to be progressive and racially aware without actually doing anything to create a workplace where diversity is also skin deep. When most of us use the word “diversity,” we are talking not about diversity in general, but about racial diversity.
Unfortunately, racial diversity is often merely cosmetic. It tends to be about optics rather than actual practice. The word most of us should be using when we talk about workplaces that aren’t just White, male, and straight is “inclusive.” It not only means something; it does something, too. “Diverse” is a passive adjective, while “inclusive” is an active one.
“Inclusive” suggests not only a broader scope of personnel but the active involvement of said personnel in productivity and decision making. I might be just a face in a diverse crowd, but in an inclusive crowd, my presence is both seen and felt. Even when its concerns are racial, diversity refers mostly to our faces. Inclusion gives us a voice.
Unlike diversity, inclusion works both ways. It doesn’t end when white decision-makers give us a seat at the table. Once we are included, it’s up to us to do more than just sit there. Inclusion empowers us to engage and take action, which can begin with fighting for the kind of racial equality we are actually talking about when we talk about diversity.
I recently had a sobering conversation with my husband, who is white, about my frustration over the paucity of Black male journalists in mainstream print media. In recent years, the white people who run both the print and digital publishing industry have been making a noticeable effort to install women of color at the top of the mastheads of publications like Allure, Bon Appétit, The Cut, Entertainment Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, HuffPost, and Teen Vogue. Meanwhile, Black male editors-in-chief still seem to thrive mostly at specialty publications that cater to very specific (i.e., Black) readers.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot since my Black colleagues at People magazine, where I started my career as an intern in the ’90s and returned to in June as Executive Editor, set up a video meeting to welcome me back into the fold. As I looked at the faces on my screen, I was thrilled to see that I had so many Black colleagues, all of whom were excited to have me among them. But it didn’t take me long to notice that not one of the dozen or so people at the virtual meet-and-greet was male.
As I pointed this out to my husband that evening, he said, “Well, now you are in a position to do something about it.” I had been so preoccupied with doing a good job that I hadn’t stopped to think about what I could and should be doing beyond my job description. I never felt more empowered than I did in that moment when I realized that for the first time in my professional career, I had the power to make the change I wanted to see. It’s time to turn my own inclusion into action.
My workplace, like any workplace not populated by robots created on an assembly line, is already diverse and was diverse long before my return, or even before my initial arrival decades ago. Now I’m dedicated to making it more inclusive, too. The hallowed state of diverse can still be static and monochromatic, a perpetual stalemate, but inclusive can change the game forever.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeremy Heligar's work on Medium.