The peace was never peaceful for everyone.

I think one of the reasons racism survives so well at work is because we have become very good at talking around it.

We talk about culture.

We talk about belonging.

We talk about respect.

We talk about inclusive leadership, which is usually where my eyes start glazing over.

What we do not always do is say the word racism and then leave enough room for people to actually ask what that means.

That is the problem.

Because if someone does not understand why a comment was racist, or why something that looked tiny to them landed as a microaggression for somebody else, where exactly are they supposed to ask?

Usually not in the room where the person who was harmed is sitting.

And that distinction matters.

I am not interested in another racial sensitivity class.

Sensitivity is not the issue.

What we need is racial literacy, advocacy and somewhere people can ask the clumsy, uncomfortable questions without turning Black and brown colleagues into unpaid instructors.

That may be the part workplaces are still getting wrong.

We keep asking the people being harmed to explain the harm

Think about how this usually works.

Something happens.

A comment.

A joke.

A name repeatedly mispronounced after correction.

A Black employee is described as aggressive for using a tone that would be called confident in somebody else.

A brown colleague is asked where they are “really” from.

Somebody touches somebody’s hair.

A person gets mistaken for the only other Black person in the company.

None of these examples require a hood and a burning cross to have an impact.

Research on Black employees has found that workplace racial microaggressions can drain cognitive and emotional resources, increase vigilance, contribute to burnout and reduce job satisfaction.

And then, after the thing happens, we often ask the person affected to explain why it was a problem.

That is another job.

One they did not apply for.

“But why is that racist?” should be a question you can ask

This is where I think workplaces need to be much braver.

People are afraid to ask questions about race because they are terrified of getting something wrong.

So they stay quiet.

Or worse, they wait until the person affected is in front of them and ask them to explain it.

I would rather build a place where people can say:

Why is that racist?

Why is that a microaggression?

I genuinely do not understand why that phrase is offensive.

What should I have said instead?

What do I do if I realise I have done something like this before?

Those are useful questions.

They are also potentially exhausting questions if the person receiving them has heard them 200 times before.

Both things can be true.

A good workplace should make room for curiosity without making the harmed person absorb the cost of everybody else’s learning.

I am going to say something that sounds controversial: separate the learning sometimes

I do not mean segregation in the legal or historical sense.

I mean professionally facilitated, race-conscious learning spaces.

There are moments when everybody should be in the same room.

There are also moments when they probably should not be.

If a group of white employees needs to work through basic questions about race, privilege, bias, language and defensiveness, I do not necessarily think Black and brown colleagues should have to sit there and absorb the whole learning curve.

Especially if the questions are going to include things that could be painful, ignorant or simply exhausting to hear.

That is not exclusion for exclusion’s sake.

It is about who carries the psychological cost of the conversation.

I had anti-racism training early in my career that used experiential scenarios. People were placed into structured situations designed to make power, exclusion and unequal treatment more visible.

It was professionally facilitated, and the learning environment was controlled very deliberately.

That mattered.

Because this work should not be improvised by whoever happens to be the most senior person in HR.

A professional facilitator knows when to stop a conversation, when to push it, when somebody is becoming defensive and when somebody else is taking on too much emotional weight.

I think we have forgotten how important that is.

Black and brown employees do not owe you the Q&A

There is something else that organisations need to understand.

Sometimes somebody experiences a racist incident or microaggression at work and says:

No, I’m fine.

It didn’t really bother me.

It’s okay.

Do not assume that means it was okay.

Sometimes people are assessing the room.

Is this going to become a whole thing?

Will I be believed?

Will I be seen as difficult?

Will I suddenly become the person who “always brings up race”?

Will this affect my career?

Would it be easier to simply leave?

Recent research has linked workplace microaggressions and racism with mental-health strain, poorer work outcomes and intent to leave.

That does not mean every uncomfortable workplace interaction leads to resignation.

It does mean silence is not necessarily evidence that everything is fine.

Sometimes silence is strategy.

Microaggressions are not “minor” because the word starts with micro

I think the word itself confuses people.

Micro sounds tiny.

Insignificant.

Something you should brush off.

But microaggressions describe the form, not necessarily the cumulative effect.

Research on Black professionals and healthcare workers has linked anti-Black racism and microaggressions with mental-health strain, career impact and decisions to leave workplaces early.

This is why I get irritated when organisations reduce the whole conversation to “be kind.”

Of course be kind.

But racism is not fixed by everybody agreeing to be nicer.

You need people who can recognise what is happening.

You need managers who know how to respond.

You need reporting systems employees trust.

You need consequences when something is serious.

And you need education that continues beyond one awkward afternoon with a PowerPoint deck.

Maybe stop calling it sensitivity training

I would genuinely retire the phrase.

It makes the problem sound like some people are simply too sensitive.

They are not.

I would rather see something called:

Racial Advocacy at Work

or

Race, Power and Advocacy in the Workplace

Something that shifts the responsibility.

Advocacy asks:

What do you do when you witness something?

How do you interrupt a microaggression without making the affected person manage the aftermath?

How do you support a colleague privately?

How do you recognise when your own interpretation of an incident may be incomplete?

How do you ask questions without demanding emotional labour from somebody else?

How does a manager respond when an employee says something happened, without immediately turning the conversation into cross-examination?

That is much more useful than teaching everyone the correct vocabulary and sending them back to their desks.

And the research is actually fairly sobering here.

A 2025 meta-review of organisational diversity and inclusion interventions found that diversity training can improve knowledge and awareness, but evidence that training alone changes retention, progression or other organisational outcomes is much weaker.

A 2024 systematic review of experimental workplace interventions found more promising evidence for structural approaches that change procedures, communication and interactions, rather than relying only on awareness.

And yes, there is a business case, if that is the only language somebody understands

I wish we did not always have to justify human dignity with a spreadsheet.

But fine.

Let’s talk business.

If people are spending energy anticipating racism, recovering from racism, deciding whether to report racism, managing how they react to racism and wondering whether they should leave because of racism, that is energy they are not putting into their work.

That is not ideology.

That is capacity.

Gallup’s 2024 meta-analysis of more than 183,000 business units found strong relationships between employee engagement and outcomes including productivity, profitability, turnover and wellbeing.

That research is about engagement broadly, not race specifically, so I am not going to pretend it proves an anti-racism programme will increase your profit by 23%.

It does support something much more basic.

Healthy workplaces tend to perform better than unhealthy ones.

And workplace racism is not a healthy workplace condition.

If talented people do not trust the environment, you lose something.

Sometimes you lose their voice first.

Then their ideas.

Then eventually the person.

We have lost ground

This is the part that worries me most.

There was a period when it felt as though we were at least becoming more comfortable talking about racism directly.

Not necessarily solving it.

But naming it.

Listening.

Trying.

Now the conversation often feels angrier, more defensive and more exhausted.

Black and brown people are tired of explaining.

White people are afraid of saying the wrong thing.

Everyone retreats to their corner.

Nothing useful happens there.

I understand the exhaustion.

I also do not think silence is an option.

If we cannot talk about racism openly, then the smallest incidents become harder to challenge and the bigger incidents become easier to normalise.

That is how culture changes in the wrong direction.

Not usually through one enormous event.

Through what everyone slowly agrees not to mention.

So yes, can we finally talk about racism in the workplace?

But I want to change how we do it.

Do not drag Black and brown employees into a room and ask them to explain racism to everybody else.

Do not turn the session into a confession booth.

Do not make somebody relive an incident so their colleagues can learn something.

Do not assume the loudest person in the room is the person most affected.

Bring in somebody who knows what they are doing.

Create learning spaces where people can ask uncomfortable questions.

Use separate caucus spaces when that protects employees from unnecessary emotional harm.

Bring people back together when there is meaningful work to do collectively.

Teach people how to advocate, not just how to avoid saying the wrong sentence.

Then look at the actual workplace.

Promotions.

Pay.

Complaints.

Turnover.

Who gets heard.

Who gets interrupted.

Who gets described as difficult.

Who quietly leaves.

Because if your organisation wants smart, capable people, you cannot keep creating conditions where some of those people have to spend part of every workday deciding how much racism they are willing to tolerate.

DEI label or no DEI label.

Call it whatever you want.

Just do the work.

Sources and Further Reading

A 2023 Journal of Applied Psychology study examined racial microaggressions among Black employees and found associations with resource depletion, vigilance, burnout and lower job satisfaction.

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis examined workplace microaggressions and racial discrimination across seven studies and nearly 3,000 participants, finding that both were prevalent across the included research.

Recent studies of Black professionals and healthcare workers have linked workplace racism and microaggressions with mental-health strain, poorer work outcomes and intent to leave.

A 2025 meta-review of organisational diversity and inclusion interventions found diversity training was more consistently associated with awareness and learning than with downstream organisational outcomes, while broader structural interventions remain important.

Gallup’s 2024 employee-engagement meta-analysis examined more than 183,000 business units across 53 industries and found consistent relationships between engagement and productivity, profitability, turnover and wellbeing.

Francesca Alexander is the founder of The Intelligent Marketing Studio at Social Global Grind and the Hustle and Glow Network, a business community for founders building with intention across Auckland, New Zealand and Los Angeles, California. She hosts the Hustle and Glow Podcast, a long-form conversation series on marketing, identity, community and what it actually takes to build something real. Find her work at socialglobalgrind.com and connect with Francesca at socialglobalgrind.com/socialglobalgrind-com/francesca.