At 28 I did what any idealistic, hope and change, millennial would do, I ran for public office. There was an open School Board seat in my hometown of Richmond, VA, and I wanted to give back to my community. I turned down a highly coveted fellowship in Baltimore to complete my campaign. Although, I lost the election, and decided to return to my profession within the Victim Services field, I knew that I had reached a growing dissatisfaction with the status of my career, and I was ready for something that allowed me to use the skills I had developed as a capacity builder, trainer, and victim services advocate.

Following the campaign, I encountered a job opportunity that I hesitated to pursue — although it was theoretically the perfect position for what I envisioned to be the next stage of my career. I was intrigued by the fact the position was in the same city as the fellowship—Baltimore. I read the description with a childlike glee, as I had developed an intense yearning to further enhance previously acquired skills, and I was beyond eager for the opportunity to finally transition into a management role, something I had spent years working toward.

On March 15, 2018, Aaryn M. Lang, former Movement Building and Campaign Manager with GetEQUAL, chronicled her experience of racial animus, oppression, and the professional neglect she experienced, in a detailed, yet timely Facebook post following her termination from the organization.

In 2017, Cyndi Suarez highlighted the racial divide that exist in non-profit leadership in her article The Non-Profit Racial Leadership Gap: Flipping the Lens. In analyzing much of the unsurprising data from Building Movement Project’s leadership report. Ms. Suarez notes the disparity between the growing cultural diversity within our society and the lack of representation from those diverse groups serving in executive capacities: “As the U.S. becomes increasingly diverse, the percentage of people of color in executive director/CEO roles has remained under 20 percent for the last 15 years.

A study respondent said, “One of the big problems in the nonprofit sector is that the leadership of nonprofit organizations doesn’t represent the racial/ethnic diversity of the country.” This revelation is critical, given that when we examine gaps in employment representation, research focuses on the private sector; however, people of color are overwhelmingly employed in Human and Social Services capacities, areas of which are the primary focus of many non-profit agencies.

As people of color that work within these organizations, we are professionally neglected, our suggestions for improvement are dismissed or only validated when supported by non-people of color, we routinely experience greater wage disparity — especially given that most of us have never been taught the skillful art of salary negotiation, and the environments are so toxic that we are forced into a perpetual subconscious state of survival or eventually leave the agencies altogether.

The role of the Training Institute Manager, for the largest comprehensive services agency in Maryland, outlined many of the roles and responsibilities that simply did not exist in my current position, but were critical components necessary for my professional advancement. Along with being responsible for orchestrating various training and education initiatives, the Training Institute Manager also served as a Program Manager for the agency’s male-engagement initiative and supervised a staff of four. Until this point in my career I had zero experience with managing people. In fact, the personnel management requirement is what fueled my initial hesitation in applying for the position; however, I felt that with the right guidance, mentorship, and support from the agency’s leadership, I had the potential to be successful in the role. A year later, I found myself unceremoniously terminated from the agency, living off public assistance, and wishing I had not drank the kool-aid of idealism that is surreptitiously served to my generation — especially as a person of color.

There was an urgency to elevate the program to a national level, but I assumed the role in a department where grant projects were nearly five months behind schedule, the male-engagement initiative was at a virtual standstill, and the Director, who had promised her mentorship and that she was open to listening to and incorporating new ideas, would later devise a plan that aided in my dismissal only a week after being placed on “corrective” action plan.

The department lacked much of the structure that was needed to successfully operate its programs, specifically basic tools needed to assist in the collection and processing of training fees, and general departmental policies and procedures. I had a brand-new and virtually inexperienced staff that was hired prior to my arrival (with the exception the Program Assistant); there was a growing dissatisfaction among employees with internal and external operations of the agency — primarily related to a lack of diverse representation in management and executive leadership, a lack of a formal community engagement strategy, an absence of structured professional development and supervisors trainings, and an unclear indication of how to implement the massive grant related projects designed in a vacuum. These observations all motivated my disregarded requests to restructure departmental operations and reconsider the way we devised and implemented new programs.

Just three years ago, the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s premier LGBTQ advocacy organization was mired in controversy following the public release of an internal report that framed the organization as a: “white men’s club.” In response to the report, the agency’s Executive Director, Chad Griffin, stated that HRC Leadership was aware of the issues and were actively working to rectify them: "As we fully anticipated, the report flagged problem areas that the organization has already begun to tackle aggressively.”

You may be thinking, that was three years ago! But, I am beginning to believe that this tone-deaf response is the standard line for white-led agencies that perpetually fail to intentionally invest in their employees and communities of color. Unsurprisingly, and much to my annoyance, I received a similar response when I finally amassed the courage and brought my personal concerns, and those of my peers, to my former director who positioned herself as the lone white liberal ally championing the case for diversity and inclusion within the agency. However, amid searching for program documents on a public drive, I happened to encounter a series of internal surveys, conducted five years prior to my arrival, that noted among other things, the employees’ dissatisfaction with the agency culture.

As one of two Senior Managers of color within the agency, I had a closer seat at the proverbial table of power than my peers of color. I was now commissioned to bring fourth their frustrations, work to breathe life into and gain buy-in for their ideas and serve as a sounding board when faced with the adversity of having to navigate a workplace culture that was perpetually complicit in maintaining the very structures non-profits express they are fighting against. I did not voice the most critical of my concerns until after I completed probation. As people of color, we know that when we challenge institutions and systems of power, or their representatives to address issues of race, cultural insensitivity, or internal operations, we quickly find ourselves isolated from ongoing conversations, marked as radicals with a secret agenda, or labeled as angry, arrogant, condescending, difficult to work with and rebellious.

For those individuals that ascend beyond program support and sub-management roles, their acquired seat at the table comes at the expense of having to navigate the unrelenting presence that cognitive dissonance plays in our lives. Leaders within these organizations, especially those who recruit us and promote themselves as being the most woke, manufacture a calculated game of psychological warfare utilizing the one form of kryptonite that always forces us into a precarious state of survival — other people of color.

As the gatekeepers of institutional power, white leaders intentionally serve as puppeteers that orchestrate the movements and performance of other employees of color who are not always consciously aware of their role as an antagonistic force against their peers. These individuals, at the behest of white leadership, operate in one of two ways: They become the safety patrol officer for office respectability politics, and hound their peers of color for expressing both innate or culturally influenced behaviors and personality traits, or they serve as agents of resistance that are instructed to challenge the competence, qualifications, and performance of their peers of color. These individuals eventually succumb to unsettling guilt of their actions or come to the realization that they were merely a pawn in game they were unequipped to or had no intention of playing. And like sand in a dial, their presence at these agencies too disappears.

White led nonprofits should no longer be allowed to live under the veil of progressive activism, without committing to first doing the necessary work within. Before recruiting people of color, the leadership at these organizations must be intentional about first acknowledging the implicit bias that exist within their institutions, irrespective of the work individuals have done. It is no longer sufficient to say that “we are aware of the matter,” without collectively coming to the table to listen to their employees and communities of color, to comprehensively overhaul and implement wide-spread agency changes that rectify the neglect, toxicity and exclusion felt by those who are marginalized by their institutional practices.

When their employees of color actively and persistently voice concerns, or fail to operate under the microcosm of respectability, that cannot be used as justification to excommunicate them from future discussions or their positions altogether. If these organizations are unwilling to emphatically cultivate the people of color they recruit, then call them what they are — plantations. We selflessly give our lives to social justice movements and the agencies that employee us, so it is time they consider the harm and impact it has upon us when we are forced to navigate, especially within our workplaces, the very structures we were hired to fight against.

Sean M. Smith

Writing since May 2018 · 1 story contributed