Real Corporate Anti-Racist Training Starts at the Top

July 24, 2020·27 min·2 clips

A white man cried in Kim Crowder's anti-racist training and said 'I can't unsee it — I have no excuse not to act.'

The conversation begins with avoidance. The host names workplace racism as difficult and messy, while making clear that denial does real damage inside companies. Against the protests that began in Minneapolis after George Floyd's death, the episode asks what serious anti-racist work takes inside an organization. Kim Crowder comes in as the practitioner. Her consulting work covers diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racist training, and inclusive marketing and communications. Her first question is blunt: how invested are the leaders before training even starts? That keeps the episode grounded. This is not a discussion about saying the right thing. It is about whether leaders and staff will actually change how they work. Crowder shares a story from a self-selected virtual group that included people from major organizations such as Adobe, SmugMug, and Flickr. The shift in the room stayed with her. By the end, people felt close enough that one white man cried and said he understood as much as he could. Crowder treats that response as meaningful because white men benefit most from systemic racism. His choice to keep learning and bring the training to his organization mattered. The host sits with that moment. She hears Crowder making room for people to see their own role instead of hiding behind easy labels. The real snag is binary thinking. Crowder and the host push against the idea that racism is a good-person or bad-person test. The work is getting people past the need for a clean identity and into changed behavior.

As heard by us

A clear leadership-focused conversation on anti-racist training, inclusive marketing, and turning awareness into workplace responsibility.

Workplace anti-racism comes through as a leadership problem before it is a training problem. Megan Keeney Anderson opens with companies reassessing racism and bias after George Floyd's death, then gives Kim Crowder room to explain why her work begins with one question: how…

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Why you'd press play

A practical conversation about what anti-racist leadership actually asks of you.

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