Victims, Persecutors & Rescuers in D&I
This is Part One of a talk I gave in September 2022 to the Counterweight Conference on Liberal Approaches to Diversity and Inclusion
My name is Amiel Handelsman. I will start with a few short stories.
The MBA program I attended in the mid 90s had twice the percentage of self-identified African Americans as the national average. The school was proud of this, as was I. “It’s good,” I thought, “to give a leg up to people who’ve been excluded.” One day the head of the career office said something that shifted this interpretation: “Are you aware,” he said, “that if it weren’t for our strong Black Business Student Association, a number of our top corporate recruiters wouldn’t be here? And are you aware that once they come, they interview all of you?”
Lesson: Diversity can benefit everyone.
Now, I didn’t go the corporate route. Instead, I started a small consulting business. One of my first engagements was with the community foundation in Detroit. Our question was: how can we create the conditions for more minority entrepreneurs in the inner city? During that project, I came across a study by a Wayne State University professor that surprised me. Black-owned firms in the suburbs hire more minorities than white-owned businesses in the inner city. The reason? Not racism, but social networks. Businesses, especially smaller ones, hire people they know. It’s not wrong but instead human.
Lesson: Inclusion is about more than bias, conscious or unconscious.
Not long after that project, I unexpectedly received an offer to direct field operations for a candidate for Governor, someone I knew personally and admired. A couple months in, I was sitting in the office when I got a call telling me that the candidate wouldn’t be able to make an event I had planned for that evening. This gathering was for a special group of lawyers, half from the opposing party, who I saw as a great way to expand the base for our campaign. So this news disappointed me. But my emotions paled in comparison to what I heard that evening when I met with the lawyers who had stuck out their necks to organize the event. Both were frustrated and angry. One was moved to tears. These were very smart, up-and-coming superstars–both light-skinned. Why were they so upset? Exclusion. They had put their names on the line and had had the embarrassing task of informing their colleagues at the last minute that the event was off.
Lesson: Inclusion and exclusion affect everyone
One final anecdote. After leaving that political campaign, tired and burned out, I returned to my original line of work before business school: developing leaders and teams. One day I drove down to Cincinnati to get trained in the Myers Briggs personality system. A participant asked how MBTI can help with diversity. The instructor’s response was that nothing works better. Why? Because once you see how differently people are wired by personality type, it’s hard to stereotype a gender or ethnic group. Plus, meeting people who share your personality type can unite you across gender and ethnic groups.
Two Lessons:
- There are many forms of diversity
- Appreciating them doesn’t reduce our skill in cultural diversity. It increases it.
My talk today for this Counterweight conference is about what we can accomplish together in organizations and for the world through Diversity & Inclusion. This starts by taking the words Diversity and Inclusion seriously and expansively. That’s why I’m calling it Think Big, Include More.
Think Big is about our aspirations. We all know the horror stories about diversity and inclusion gone awry. They are painful, sometimes epically so, and I’ll give you my quick take on what’s behind them. Yet what if we were to direct our attention to the deepest purposes and highest potential of D&I? What if D&I were about improving the performance of organizations where we dedicate so much of our time–and therefore about raising the odds that these organizations can contribute to a better world? What, too, if D&I were about helping everyone improve their professional skills and grow as human beings? That’s what thinking big is all about.
Include More means three things.
- One: including more people in our aims. This means supporting and challenging everyone to bring out their best
- Two: including more varieties of diversity — way more than ethnicity, gender, and so on–so we can fully leverage diversity toward better conversations, decisions, and results.
- Three: include more perspectives about what causes people to feel included or excluded in their organization
I’ll be talking about each of these in turn. But before I do that, I’d like to offer some context to get present and grounded with what’s true today — in particular, some of the unpleasant and even ugly realities connected with D&I. We can’t bypass those.
The Bad News about D&I
I’m going to split this bad news into three categories: unhealthy D&I, healthy but suboptimal D&I, and unhealthy opposition to D&I. What they all have in common is they are not thinking big enough or including enough.
Unhealthy D&I
Most of you are probably familiar with this. Here we see blaming and shaming, forcing so-called black and white people to meet separately, ridiculous stereotypes about so-called white culture and so-called black culture that are demeaning to everyone, competent and caring people getting pushed out of organizations for lousy reasons, and the silencing of anyone who even modestly dissents from all of this. Not cool. Not fun. People get hurt. And it discredits the whole D&I enterprise. I don’t think we have any data on the percentage of people in the workforce who have experienced this unhealthy D&I. Obviously, it’s hard to measure, and I’m not sure anyone has tried. But what’s clear is that when these unhealthy dynamics are present, not much good comes from them.
Now here’s my take on what’s behind unhealthy D&I. It’s complex, and I’d like to offer a lens for thinking about this. It is a psychological concept known as the drama triangle. In the drama triangle, which Steven Karpman introduced in the late 60s, there are three roles that people play: the victim, the persecutor, and the rescuer. Some of you may be familiar with the victim/oppressor theory of power common in deconstructive postmodernism. The drama triangle uses some similar words, but the goal is to break free of these dynamics rather than reinforce them, we use the word persecutor instead of oppressor, and we add the crucial role of rescuer into the mix. Unlike the postmodern power theory, the deal here isn’t to show how bad victims have been treated or how much guilt oppressors/ persecutors bear. Instead the idea is that people occupying all three roles are creating an unhealthy and rather immature dynamic that is extraordinarily common. And by becoming aware of this dynamic, we have a shot at breaking free of it. I’m now realizing that breaking free of the drama triangle probably qualifies as an example of Thinking Big. Anyhow, it goes a bit like this. The victim claims they have been harmed and lashes out at their persecutor. The persecutor of course does everything they can to defend themself. So there’s an escalation of conflict right off the bat. People identify with their roles and dig in. But let’s not forget about the rescuer. As I said, we don’t hear much about this in criticisms of D&I, yet the role is crucial. The rescuer sees their job as saving the victim and perhaps joining the attack on the persecutor, a double-teaming, if you will.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, a lot of white identified Americans took on the rescuer role. Behind this in my view was a lot of unconscious and unprocessed shame and guilt. I felt some of it myself and still do from time to time. So after George Floyd’s murder, people in the victim role clamored for something to be done, rescuers felt morally responsible to act — to do something, anything to help–which also meant doing anything to deal with the feelings of shame and guilt. Unfortunately, many rescuers, especially in organizational leadership roles, weren’t particularly discerning about who to hire to help or what books to recommend. So they turned to folks like Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, whose work reinforces binary understandings of who has done what harm to whom.
The sad irony, which I think many of us have seen, is that people in the rescuer role often ended up as victims themselves. They found themselves getting attacked for not doing enough, not believing the right thing, for being fake in their aspirations. One way to think about Robin D’Angelo‘s last two books, White Fragility and Nice Racism, is that they are uncompassionate attacks on persecutors and rescuers. White Fragility is uncompromising in its stance that so-called white people own up to their the racism, and if they don’t, that itself is a sign of the racism. I wrote an extended two-part essay on this that remains the most widely read piece I’ve ever written. Her book after that, Nice Racism, which is much less well known, aims its attack at rescuers, progressives trying to do good. There are partial truths in both of her books, but in my view they are vastly overshadowed by her simplistic thinking and lack of compassion.
A quick word about the ideology that Kendi and DiAngelo bring. The problem with ideology like this is that it isn’t logical, isn’t rational, isn’t reasonable. Now, we are meeting here at a conference about liberal approaches to D&I. Their ideology isn’t liberal either. If it were, it would not be an ideology. So the error of ideologies is that they are wired to not be reasonable. The error that the rest of us sometimes make is to expect that they will be reasonable, hence our grave surprise when they are not.
The fact that so many of these ideologies won the day in many organizations tells us something about the culture in those organizations. Their commitment to liberal values like free speech and due process was less than we might have imagined. This is rather disillusioning, isn’t it? Not just that the ideologues were present and scheming but that the culture of the organizations did not have enough liberalism to resist them.
A better approach is the drama triangle. Here we name the dynamics and roles that people get caught in without shaming them for doing so, and then we offer them a more mature adult-to-adult way of interacting.
Healthy but Suboptimal D&I
So that’s unhealthy D&I. Then there is healthy but suboptimal D&I. When I say “suboptimal,” I don’t mean it’s worthless, just that it’s far short of potential — the Think Big standards I’ll be discussing shortly. There are thousands of smart, competent people with good intentions leading D&I efforts who are not out to blame or shame anyone and don’t kick white women out of the room for crying. Some are focused on the makeup of leadership teams or the workforce as a whole. Others are involved in helping people learn how to respect differences for the sake of better teamwork. I have friends and colleagues like this who are doing good work they are rightly proud of–yet they will be the first to admit they and their organization could be accomplishing a lot more. If thinking big and including more is going to come from anyone, it’s likely going to come from these folks.
The reason I use the word “suboptimal” is that too often, these D&I efforts are divorced from organizational outcomes and managerial chains of accountability. They’re off to the side, special workshops and programs. Sometimes they’re framed in business outcomes, sometimes not. But most of the time what’s missing are direct connections to how people coordinate action, key business conversations, and organizational results. These connections often aren’t present, and that’s because D&I isn’t designed to make them. And when they are present, it’s not often visible to anyone outside of the D&I department. And we know what happens to anything in an organization that isn’t clearly tied to organizational results. When budgets are tight or top leadership changes, they get downsized or cancelled. So you have a lot of energy, then time passes, things dissipate, people get cynical about the whole thing…and the process repeats itself. This isn’t unique to D&I. It’s common across the board in organizational development and leadership development. One impact is that creates stories that are useful to people opposed to the entire D&I project — and they are not afraid of telling these stories.
Unhealthy Opposition to D&I
This brings me to unhealthy opposition to D&I. I’m not talking about people who are frustrated by the excesses and unhealthy expressions. I’m talking about folks who are opposed to D&I at its best and healthiest. Some view it as a complete waste of time. For others, the very notion of diversity is anathema to their worldview and sense of how things ought to be. And then there are the really toxic forms of opposition. I recently spoke with someone who is a very seasoned executive coach who has given many talks in companies about D&I. She has been threatened verbally and online and even been doxxed. She is a healthy and mature person doing good work. I’m also reminded of a client of mine, a senior woman executive in a big company, who was the target of sexual harassment multiple times from the same man. Whatever he did, he always seemed to get away with it. And I should tell you, this all happened after the Me Too movement took off. And finally, there is a political and social movement of people, largely what we might call right-wing, who use the excesses of diversity and inclusion to caricature and discredit the entire line of work.
So, there’s our context: three unpleasant realities around D&I today. Now, let’s talk about thinking big and including more.
