Race Reflections AT WORK Race Reflections

In today's episode Guilaine reflects on her recent trip to the Congo. This topic was asked for when she polled people on twitter/x to find out what they wanted her to speak on for this episode.
She begins with some context, first for her and then for the country and region in general. Covering how she was born in Bastille and grew up in inner city Paris and is of Congolese descent, specifically descending from Congo-Brazzaville. She then gives a brief overview of the history of colonialism, slavery, war and genocide experienced by Congo-Brazzaville and The Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Then she talks about her experience there, being confronted by this paradox of death and life, beauty and horror, poverty and people thriving, learning more about the colonial atrocities that were committed but also at the same time being exposed to the pure beauty of the landscapes. She explores the complexity of these powerful dualities and contradictions, the paradox of life and death almost intertwined and dancing, the invitation to ask how do we hold these dualities at the same time, remembering the pain of the past but imagining alternative futures, the abundance and wealth of nature contrasted with the poverty of neocolonialism. It invites you to be deeply reflective about the possibility of life.

She finishes by thinking about her writing and research around trauma and transference and how when talking to people on her travels and looking into cosmologies and autologies of the region she realised that a lot of what she had been writing corresponded with the thinking and cosmologies of this land. And so brings her back to her question of “what we know without knowing?” And to issues of ancestral communication and memory and how echoes form between generations, particularly within the African diaspora, particularly when it comes to issues of thinking about African consciousness in the context of Black suffering, and thinking about all of this within the Kikongo frame, Kikongo being the language, people and culture of the Congo.

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In this re-released episode first published  on 15th March 2021, Guilaine reflects on why institutions often turn on those who allege racism. She considers some of the group processes at play using as illustration the treatment of Meghan Markle and responses from that interview. Location of disturbance and scapegoating are presented as frames to formulate victimisation and retaliation within institutions.  
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To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

Transcript: https://racereflections.co.uk/at-work-the-podcast/

In today's episode Guilaine reflects on consent, in relation to her research on whiteness, her lived experience, and the implications of this issue within the workplace


She begins with a basic definition of consent, then she details some experiences related to going out dancing that she recently experienced, and links them to the wider issues that her research explores. Part of the theme that has come up again and again in her data is patients talking about experience of whiteness in the clinic where therapists appear to be breaching boundaries, oversharing, dismissing experiences of racism, using gaslighting tactics, and engaging in the politics of denialism. She links all this to her concept of epistemic homeless and names these behaviours as acts of occupying the epistemic space of the other.


She considers how trauma is generally centered on some kind breach of boundary and how whiteness can be seen as colonial violence performed through spacial embodiment, that breaches of consent are the colonial enactment of whiteness, and that white supremacy is founded on breaching the boundaries, borders, and sovereignty of the other - bodily, territorial, psychic - and so in the everyday quotidian enactment of white violence we are going to see some repetition and reproduction of those wider politics 


She then concludes by thinking about the workplace and how the coloniality of interpersonal relationships, especially cross racial interpersonal relationships, is enacted in relation to the consent of employees of colour.


Some links:


Epistemic homelessness:


https://mediadiversified.org/2017/11/24/epistemic-homelessness-feeling-like-a-stranger-in-a-familiar-land/


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoKBLPbkB5I


Envy: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/8728416


Location of disturbance: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/8127268


White Minds: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/white-minds


Living While Black: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442992/living-while-black-by-kinouani-guilaine/9781529109436


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To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine reflects around a listeners query asking "how do we get mangers to understand how biased they are when it comes to the feedback that they give to employees of colour." 
After briefly questioning the terminology of bias and unconscious bias, she looks at the evidence from organisational psychology, considering how empirical evidence shows that marginalised employees tend to receive poorer quality feedback. Even though the research isn’t always intersectional what exists demonstrates the intersectional effect that takes place when axis of oppression and identity collide. This feedback tends to be lower quality: less precise, more global, less frequent, and there tends to be a lot of anxiety around the exercise of providing feedback
She consider aversive racism where employers withhold negative feedback to avoid accusations of racism, but in act of withholding feedback deprive the employee of the opportunity to correct and to improve, and so sometimes to not be able to pass their probation periods or acquire skills and experience that would offer the opportunity for progression within their work. Basically in this dynamic employees of colour and other marginalised groups  are set to fail.
She reflects on how a high percentage of disputes that end up in employment tribunals are related to evaluation or discipline, and that the provision of effective feedback is central and essential to fair and just treatment in the workplace.
She spends some time talking about what employers racialised as white need to work on in regards to their anxiety and phobia around Blackness, considering what Fanon has said on these issues and the wider context of racist violence and exclusion, reflecting on how these conflicts are a liability for institutions when they are found lacking, and more frequently for black and brown individuals when they are not.
She then gives some thought to what can be done to correct these issues.
That whilst it’s worth making sure to avoiding it becoming self-fulfilling situation, most of the time people's instincts based on their  lived experience are astute and accurate/ We need to correct the misconception that people are misinterpreting the situations, marginalised people in general interpret things on balance correctly. So instead we need to take seriously these feelings and instincts and come up with strategies to mitigate and navigate these situations. Ultimately though it is really for employers and people racialised as white to address their issues around giving feedback because it isn’t something employees of colour can change alone.
Further listening:
Aversive Racism: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/8346383
Thinking about feeling, feeling about thinking: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1623760/14041582
Further reading:
White Minds: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/white-minds
Living While Black: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442992/living-while-black-by-kinouani-guilaine/9781529109436
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To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine reflects on the phenomenon and social dynamic of what has been called whitelash, a combination of white/whiteness and backlash. 
The term was coined by African-American journalist Van Jones to describe the backlash of White America coming together to reject what had been seen as a liberalisation of the USA under Obama. And in a more general sense it describes the sense of grievance, the sense of anger, the sense of frustration that originates from people racialised as White that comes from an often misconstrued and misconceived sense of displacement and social change which is a reaction to a perception that social advancements are being made in terms of equality. This is a concept and area that is expanded on in Guilaine’s second book White Minds.
After defining and exploring the concept she then considers it within the terms of group analytic thinking, theory and practice, and looks the relationship between the socio-political and the ways that institutions, organisations and individuals relate and interact, focusing on the workplace.
She considers the whitelash that we are currently experiencing almost 4 years after the murder of George Floyd galvanised institutions to make commitments and how those words and sometimes actions are now being pushed back against very strongly. And how this whitelash is also being felt across many intersections and identities.
She then shares some observations from her experience of delivering work related DEI training and looks at the affect of whitelash on Race Reflections as both an organisation and as a business.
White Minds is available to buy here: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/white-minds
Van Jones on whitelash: https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/11/9/13572182/van-jones-cnn-trump-election-2016
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To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk

In today's episode Guilaine continues to look forwards towards Race Reflections path in 2024 and beyond. She announces a future book that will be coming from Race Reflections, our first book as an organisation.
That book is Surviving Whiteness at Work: reflections on defiance, resistance and transformation

It will aim to describe the working of Whiteness in the workplace through the lived experience of our team and community members, and what ways they have found helpful to grow, to survive, to thrive despite working in an environment that might have been hostile, toxic, marginalising and discriminatory. It will look at theory and autoethnographic experience and will be solution focused.

In this episode she discusses and reflects on that book and gives a flavour of the thinking and topics it may cover.

For more on this exciting new project see here: https://racereflections.co.uk/title-surviving-whiteness-at-work-reflections-on-defiance-resistance-and-transformation/

If you are a member of the Race Reflections community we are looking for contributions: https://racereflections.co.uk/call-for-contributions-whiteness-at-work/


Subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.


To send us your queries, questions and dilemmas please email atwork@racereflections.co.uk