By Cyndi Suarez, President of Big Soul
In a time of backlash to powerful social change, the question many are asking is what’s next for racial equity? The leaders of Equity In The Center—a leading racial equity organization, coining the term Race Equity Culture™—have clarity about what needs to happen.
At the top of the list is the need for both a public and underground game plan. Second, the field is ready for more intentional, coordinated work. Third, there is much internal work to be done within organizations. Finally, some are looking forward to what the next uprising on the side of the people might look like.
Public and Underground Game
One of the main learnings of Equity In The Center over the last five years is that the work of racial equity is cyclical. There are moments of breakthrough and then predictable backlash. This needs to be taken into account when doing the work. We are in a time of backlash now.
Sean Thomas-Breitfeld—program officer on Ford’s Civic Engagement and Government team, former Co-Executive Director of the Building Movement Project, and EIC board member—says, “There’s been a very clear pulling back. We must adapt to the way that the landscape has changed and prepare for the next moment.”
Carly Hare, CEO of Headwaters Foundation and EIC board member, explains
We’re going to need some people playing the ground game and others playing the underground game. Those of us with positional power, access, and proximity to resource and power should step into that more frequently and be the cover and the shield for the organizations that are doing the deep work, but collapse more easily from a lawsuit. How do we create a radical approach to the public facing work and the organizing work it’s going to take to not lose traction in this moment? Equity In The Center is one of those organizations that can provide shade and cover. We can be overt.
Andrew Plumley—senior consultant at Global Health Visions, the second employee hired by EIC as Senior Program Manager (later becoming Managing Director)—says, “I think there’s some real blocking and tackling we still have to do. We have to figure out how to navigate the legal backlash, the language piece of it, and continue to do this work and sustain it. I see it getting much more contextual state by state.”
Niki Jagpal, EIC’s former executive vice president, says,
Centering equity in this environment may prove challenging until we figure out how to literally talk about the work in a different way. That will help folks who are farther out from equity focused work along. It will be important to us not to dilute our message. For example, our framework predates the term “woke” being weaponized. Language is absolutely something that I think is important.
Dr Raquel Gutierrez—founder and CEO of Blue Agave Partners, an EIC advisor, and a member of EIC’s team of seasoned racial equity practitioners—has already begun to change her language:
I don’t tell people,“I do race equity work,” like I did four years ago. I ask things like, “What do you want to see in the world? Who do you want to see that for?” It’s a very results-driven framework that I think a lot of people who do equity work roll their eyes at as if it’s some corporate model. It’s not. It’s actually just another entry into the conversation. For me, it’s not so much about meeting people where they’re at, it’s about learning and understanding and being in relationship with people. It’s just common sense to me, old school organizing that didn’t get capitalized.
So I think what’s next for race equity work is an expansion of how we think and talk about the work. We’re going to need to be very careful. I’m not one of those people who says, “I’m gonna fucking say it all the time and fuck you if you don’t feel comfortable with that,” and if a person doesn’t talk about it all the time they’re a sellout. That’s not my liberation. I want to be connected. And if that requires me to be more in my soul with them, even if I find repulsivity in that, then that says something about me. So, let me learn from that and figure out what I’m going to do.
That’s been our contribution to the space we are in now. We have used divisive language. We have used divisive tactics. We have created characteristics and conditions that bring some people in and keep some people out. If we can’t admit that to ourselves, then we’re not going anywhere.
Marcus Walton, President and CEO of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), EIC’s first major partner, goes further, to the work of actually embodying the change we want. He says,
If we are emphasizing frameworks and language—say it like this and say it like that—we’re missing it. That is what I refer to as a racial equity orthodoxy. It doesn’t serve. It becomes increasingly rigid and valuable in increasingly smaller specific context. What’s next for racial equity is moving beyond the language, moving it beyond an attachment to frameworks and toolkits, and into the deeper practice and embodiment of it. It’s relational at its core. Anyone I know that has completed multiple cycles of this work talks about how important it is to be relational. You develop trust inside of relationships, and trust really does define how much change is able to happen in terms of our intentional facilitation of it. Change happens at the speed of trust. It is more than just a very catchy saying. As we embody the principles and practices, we become adept at noticing when to bring certain analyses to bear, how to interpret what is being experienced in ways that help at varying levels.
Intentional, Coordinated Field Work
While many flowers bloomed over the last few years of racial justice movements, there is a growing articulation of the need for more intentional and coordinated work across organizations.
Amanda Andere, CEO of Funders Together to End Homelessness and EIC board member, says, “On a good day, I believe the reason why there’s so much resistance is because we are actually making progress, and people are afraid that we’re gaining power. So I think what’s next is figuring out how we collectively harness that power to make more than incremental narrative change—less case making, less convincing— more really disrupting power structures.”
EIC leaders highlighted a few key areas for strengthening.
There are key infrastructure needs, and we don’t have a way to figure out what those are. Maggie Potapchuk, lead of MP Associates Consulting and EIC board member, says, “We don’t have a space or a circle to be able to connect the dots and figure out what’s the infrastructure that’s needed.”
There is a desire for coordination at the level of long-term field strategy. Hare says, “When the fire has gotten hot enough or the targets have gotten more intense on you, we swap out. Right now it just happens because people get exhausted, or burnout or fall off the desk, get pushed off the desk. But imagine if we could be more intentional about it, providing relief, revitalization, and recovery among each other better.”
There is a need for philanthropy to be better organized. Potapchuk adds, “Philanthropy is not organizing philanthropy. What is their responsibility and accountability? This is the time for them to be showing up differently.”
Internal Work
The internal work of building strong movements, organizations, and institutions is ongoing. However, two key areas are identified for the next phase of the work: increasing our ability to have difficult conversations and clarity on where people stand.
Increasing Skills for Difficult Conversations
Social change work often requires addressing deep conflict, and racial equity work is no exception. In fact, many see race as the core conflict in multiracial democracies like the US and South Africa. So it is not surprising that increasing our ability to have difficult conversations is coming up as a core internal need. It is not just difficult to have public, society-level conversations about race, it’s difficult to have internal ones as well—both across organizations and within.
Hare calls for actively building a function for this in the field. She says, “We have to build a network within this racial justice construct movement that is ready to have those uncomfortable conversations more comfortably.”
Thomas-Breitfeld points to the organizational challenges between leadership and staff:
The reputational calculus of the organization is different between leadership and staff. For a lot of younger staff, the reputational risk is that organizations are not being authentic, or sufficiently down for the struggle. Organizational leaders and boards see more reputational risk with being too down for the struggle.
Potapchuk explains how destructive the internal challenges can be and the opportunity available now to address them with careful and intentional design:
In terms of staffing, when any organization gets burnt by several staff members in different ways, how do you bring someone in? How to trust? How to create the structures? I think a lot was learned, but there’s still a container to be created so that the work can really grow and thrive in a new way.
Increasing Clarity About Where People Stand
Related to the internal work of building capacity for difficult conversations is a desire for more transparency about where people really stand on issues.
Hare explains, “We need the space to understand where people are falling into the spectrum of solidarity in this work and where, in the moment with the power that they have either as an individual or institution, they can push.”
Andere further explains, “The pushback will not only come from what we assume are the usual suspects, but also from people who we might think are our allies and our partners.”
Currently, many of these conversations happen informally between people: who you can trust, who you have to be careful with. Of course, dynamics between leaders and funders, even justice funders, often curtail this kind of transparency.
The Next Uprising
Looking forward to the next uprising, some EIC leaders predict it will be more integrated across oppressions and globally.
Andere says,
I wonder if we’ll have another reckoning and uprising that’s beyond what George Floyd represented in 2020, that will be more multiracial, multi-oppression. People will finally start to realize that our liberation is actually connected. We are going to go through iterations of this attention and inattention cycle until there’s a reckoning that actually disrupts the system that is maintaining power.
Plumley agrees,
What I’m interested in, which is what I hope we move towards, is how we finally—and many people are doing this work and doing a great job of it—globalize this conversation to begin to talk much more internationally about how these systems of oppression are actually working across the globe.
Cyndi Suarez is president of Big Soul, a creative knowledge firm. She is the author of The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics, in which she outlines a new theory and practice of liberatory power. She is a former president and editor-in chief at Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ). Suarez has over 30 years of experience in the nonprofit sector and has worked as a strategy and innovation consultant with a focus on networks and platforms for social movements. She is currently writing a book that offers a new framework for social change. Learn more at cyndisuarez.com.
