Dear white leaders, have you explored your own experience of race, as a white person?
It may seem counter-intuitive as a helpful practice to do in supporting your BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) friends, family or team members at work. Yet we have found at Tōsha Coaching & Consulting that it is the best place to begin for us white people. Without understanding your own identity, your power and privilege, any efforts towards building a racially inclusive team will likely be performative at best.
Before doing this work myself, I absolutely had internalised the idea that being white and the life I lived as a white person was ‘normal’ and everything else was ‘different’, ‘diverse’, ’exotic’, ‘cultural’ or ‘ethnic’. I would say all the ‘right things' and I believed I was ‘woke’ but like a horse with blinkers on, I did not know that my normal represented a position of privilege and power.
This is despite the unusual life experience I was gifted as a teenager when my family moved from our small white affluent beachside home town in Australia to Brunei Darussalam, a tiny country in South East Asia that I’d never heard of prior. Brunei is located in the heart of the Borneo jungle, with a predominantly Malay, Muslim population. At the time, Brunei didn’t experience much tourism or immigration and many people there had little to no daily contact with white people. It was so different from the world I knew as an Australian teenager.
While living there my focus was all on the realisation that I was now living in a country where white was a minority and women had less rights. As a young white woman with long blonde hair and blue eyes, I stood out like a sore thumb, no matter how much I tried to minimise attention and cover myself up. People would stop what they were doing to glare at me with a look of distaste. Mothers would point me out to their children like you might a special exhibit at a zoo. Men would make the most disturbing ‘tsk tsk tsk’ noises as I walked past. It made my tummy turn and my nervous system go on alert anytime I left the house. It gave me some insight into what it is like to be considered ‘racially’ different, as a woman, but that is where it stopped.
What I realised much later in life, when reflecting on my experience of race, was the societal privilege I had living in Brunei because of my skin color. My family were referred to as ‘expats’ and not ‘immigrants’ despite my parents spending 10 years living there. I can recall how the religious police who walked the streets each day turned a blind eye to me and my white (or white adjacent) ‘expat’ friends who didn’t cover our hair in a hijab. Although drinking alcohol was strictly banned in the country, my parents and their ‘expat’ friends were permitted to buy alcohol across the border and drink discreetly. The rest of the country had Friday off work in respect of the Islamic holy day, yet we were able to maintain our Sat-Sun weekend structure. We were never expected to ‘assimilate’, our customs and practices were respected. As ‘expats’ we had proximity to the vast wealth of the royal family who had eye popping amounts of money from oil. I’m pretty sure my white skin also got me an invite to a Bruneian Princess’s birthday, despite never having met her. There I saw Janet Jackson do a private concert of her Music Box Tour. It was out of this world stuff. I can also clearly remember looking out my bedroom window beyond our apartment block’s outdoor pool, to the local family house over the fence that looked like it was made from scrap metal. I would see that family of around twelve people and their chickens most mornings, going about their day, existing in very basic conditions and the starkness of the inequality felt sickening, until it became normal.
Reflecting back I can see that whilst as a white woman I received a lot of unwanted attention, my white skin also afforded me privileges that I didn’t appreciate much at the time. That newer awareness serves me, its helps me understand and continue to deepen my understanding of race and just how pervasive white privilege can be. Even when we as white people are a tiny minority, living in another country as immigrants who don’t speak the language or practice the dominant religion - we had access, we were afforded automatic privileges and our white culture was protected.
I can also see, beyond these more overt examples in Brunei, how my white privilege has showed up when living in the UK, USA, Spain and Australia. Just recently, when temporality living in another country, I was correctly told, by a police officer, not to worry about staying over on my 90 day holiday visa because “You’ll be fine, you are Australian - not Colombian”. In fact I have lived and worked and travelled a huge amount - all over the world and not once have I been pulled out of line for ‘randomly selected extra questioning’. There are so many examples to point to and likely many more I still do not notice. My work has been in building an awareness and acceptance of my white privilege and rather than feeling shame, I feel empowered with this knowledge, to help others and to practice better Allyship.
If you haven’t taken the time to explore your own lived experiences as a white person, I highly recommend doing this. To know your power and privilege and the ways in which all aspects of your identity have shaped your perspective is the key to inclusive leadership. Likely it will be learning that continues to empower you through the rest of your life, it will shape you and provide space for more.
Having experienced this myself, I knew we needed to make this foundational within all that we do at Tōsha. Today, our Immersive Learning Labs and our Executive Coaching programs provide a compassionate and courageous space to uncover the parts we often ignore or haven’t yet seen.
Image description: 2 girls in school uniform, walk along a path in Kampong Ayer in the city of Seri Begawan, Negara Brunei Darussalam.