Ep16 Putting Race on the Agenda

In this special episode for Black History Month, we invite our guest Maurice Mcleod (pronounced as 'Morris' by his friends), the CEO of ROTA (Race on the Agenda), to give his views on how racism has changed over his lifetime, and how we as individuals and organisations can learn from and support Black, Asian and other ethnic minority colleagues. We discuss the impact on personal judgement and decision-making and what we can each personally do to be more inclusive and become true allies.

 For further information about ROTA please go to: https://www.rota.org.uk/

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Timestamps

Race on the Agenda

·       00:00 – Introduction to Race on the Agenda

·       01:24 – Maurice Mcleod Career History

·       01:45 – ROTA Explained

·       03:02 – Structurally speaking…

·       04:17 – Who does ROTA partner with?

·       05:28 – Trust & Safety panel

Breaking barriers

·       07:14 – Our allies

·       08:30 – Curiosity doesn’t kill the cat

·       09:07 – Psychological Safety revisited

·       10:36 – Watch our language

·       11:31 – Race is non-existent?

·       12:49 – Intentions are what we need to look for!

·       13:35 – Transcontinental barriers

·       14:58 – Context

Born in the USA

·       16:26 – Growing up in the Deep South…

·       17:00 – Code-switching

·       17:18 – “White Voice”

·       18:32 – Conversations with friends

·       20:39 – Watch how you speak!

·       21:28 – Accentuation

·       22:17 – The Eton choristers

·       22:45 – Interaction from a couple’s perspective

In the workplace

·       23:46 – Equity vs. Equality

·       25:00 – Being authentic

·       26:14 – The work perspective

·       27:07 – Impact of COVID and Home-working

·       29:12 – The Statistics (US based)

Hardwired

·       29:53 – Steven Bartlett vs. Malcolm Gladwell

·       30:48 – Not everybody’s existence is like this…

·       32:07 – Personal experiences of racism in the workplace

·       34:32 – Micro-aggressions

·       35:45 – Overt or Covert?

·       37:39 – Are things changing?

·       38:36 – The end.

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Transcript

Angela Malik: 0:05

Welcome to this episode of the Chief Psychology Officer with Dr. Amanda Potter, chartered psychologist and CEO of Zircon. I'm Angela Malik, the client relationship manager at Zircon. Our guest today is Maurice Mcleod, the Chief Executive of Race on the Agenda, a journalist and a consultant specializing in engaging ethnic minority communities, as well as the local counselor for Wandsworth. Welcome, Maurice.

Maurice Mcleod: 0:30

Hello there. How are you doing?

Angela Malik: 0:32

Today we'll be talking about Black History Month, the lived experiences of Black and ethnic minority professionals, the neuroscience behind what happens when people are exposed to discrimination and racism, and what organizations can do to be more effective allies. Amanda, this is our 16th podcast episode. Isn't that amazing?

Dr Amanda Potter: 0:50

It is. Thank you, Angela. And I'm so excited about the fact that we are attracting such fantastic guests. And I'm very proud and pleased that Maurice is here to talk about a topic that's so critical for our clients and so critical for us to understand, to make sure that we get our language right and to make sure that we're asking the right questions of our clients so that we're helping them prepare for the future and be as inclusive and diverse as they can possibly be.

Angela Malik: 1:20

Absolutely. Maurice, why don't you introduce yourself?

Maurice Mcleod: 1:24

Hello there. So I'm uh Maurice Mcleod. I am, as you say, the chief exec of Race on the Agenda. I've been a journalist for sort of 30 odd years, and I also do some consultancy around engagement and diversity and all those sorts of challenges, as you say. And I'm a local councillor for my sins.

Angela Malik: 1:42

And Maurice, why don't you explain a little bit more about Rota Race on the Agenda and its mission?

Maurice Mcleod: 1:48

Race on the Agenda has been around for nearly 40 years. We were set up sort of in the 80s. Originally in London, I think we were called Glare, so that was the Greater London Association on Race Equality. Later changed that to Rota. And the basic idea of the charity is that we're here to fight structural racism. So specifically when laws and practices are being designed, we think it's really important that race isn't forgotten and that people of colour, so black people, Asian people, minority ethnic backgrounds, are involved in planning policy that's going to affect their lives. We don't want policy just to happen to people. We want people to be involved in it. And hopefully that'll unpick some of the ingrained structural issues that we sadly still have in this country.

Dr Amanda Potter: 2:32

And so, Maurice, just to help me understand, what's the real difference then you make for people in society or in organizations?

Maurice Mcleod: 2:40

As I say, we're here to to fight structural racism. It's very specific that it's structural racism because I think that that very often people can get confused and think, oh, okay, so someone was nasty to me on the bus. Yeah, that's awful. That's that's interpersonal racism, and that that needs to be challenged. But that's not what we look at. We look at sort of institutions, structures, businesses, the the way the health service works, the housing market, and really try to unpick why those uh organizations or institutions seem to have negative outcomes or more negative outcomes for black and Asian people. So we really try and work out what's causing that, and we do that with by working with the community. As I say, we have a real nothing about us without us uh philosophy of how we do our work, which means we sort of don't believe in just sort of sitting in a room going, hmm, we think this is the problem and this is how you should solve it. You only really I think you only really get proper answers by talking to the people that are going through the problem that you're trying to sort out. So people with real lived experience, and that's what we, you know, over our years, we're a membership organization, so we have nearly 3,000 members who are small organizations who hopefully give us that real on the ground uh um way of talking to communities. It's difficult because it's not a very uh simple thing to understand, and most people go, okay, so what even is structural racism? And it sounds really complicated, especially before BLM, before the BLM uprising, it was very hard for us to explain even what we were trying to do uh in simple terms.

Dr Amanda Potter: 4:15

So, Maurice, who do you generally partner with? Is it with the community or is it with organizations? You say you've got all these members, these small organizations who are members of your organization, but would you partner with a large global corporate and look at structural racism within that organization, or is it generally you do it within the community?

Maurice Mcleod: 4:34

Yeah, to be honest, a bit of both. Well, who do we partner with? Anyone that wants to do the work, basically, anyone that wants to make that change. We absolutely partner with very small community groups. I guess that's our daily bread, they're our members. That's that's why we're here. So we absolutely partner with them and build coalitions with them. Sometimes, you know, there might be someone doing some brilliant work in South London, and there's some someone doing some brilliant work in Manchester, and we help join them up and make sure that they're being as efficient as possible and as effective as possible. But then we also work with local authorities, schools, government departments, large private corporations that want to make a change in in how they do things and see the value, hopefully, of being inclusive. That's what I mean. That's more and more our work seems to be drifting into looking at that sort of stuff. How do we help organisations get better?

Dr Amanda Potter: 5:27

You were telling me about a trust and safety panel, which is something you work with clients on to help them understand how they can be more diverse and how they can create greater trust and safety within an organization. Would you mind just telling us a little bit about that, please?

Maurice Mcleod: 5:44

Yeah, I mean, this this is a particular way that we're working with one client. I mean, they're involved in a sort of hospitality business and have a large number of hosts who are welcoming people into their homes. And what what they wanted to do, or what that what we're doing with them, is they have a whole panel that looks at all the sort of different issues that can happen in people's homes, like you know, fire safety and accident prevention and carbon monoxide. But as well as that, and I I think this is a good progressive move, they've also said we we want our hosts to be as welcoming and inclusive as possible. So, you know, they've included us on there on the panel of experts that they help put together guides and help talk to their, you know, put webinars on, talk to their hosts about issues that might come up, but also help plan the organization itself as it rolls forward and some of the challenges it's looking at in the future. I think it's a really good way of working with an organization. We get lots of requests to work with organizations. We're a very small charity, we get lots of requests, but it's great that to have that kind of real partnership rather than just sort of feeling like we've been drafted in, we've given a course, and then we disappear and they they go, Great, we've done that, tick the box. So it doesn't feel like that. It feels very involved and long-lasting.

Dr Amanda Potter: 6:58

One of the things that you helped me understand was the concept of having an ally. So someone in the organisation who truly understands the importance of overcoming this structural racism. Could you help us understand a little bit about that, Maurice?

Maurice Mcleod: 7:13

Yeah, I mean, I think I think that um again the BLM uprising, I think there was a a big groundswell. I I would say of people that maybe hadn't been very involved in in sort of the anti-racism work before, but because uh everyone was talking about it, I think a lot of people came into space who who maybe hadn't before and uh wanted to make things better but didn't know how. I think it's really important that what doesn't happen is people go, oh gosh, I've discovered racism's a thing. I'm gonna help these poor black people. Uh, you know, it shouldn't come from a savior point of view. That that I ideally what you do is go, gosh, let me go and talk to the people that are going through this, really understand and work out what they want me to do to help them. So one of the challenges when we're trying to help a situation that isn't it isn't directly impacting us is to sometimes be able to switch off going, okay, it's not just about me. There is there are people that have been involved in this challenge and struggle for quite a bit longer. So how do I help them? That that's what gonna be a good ally is, I think.

Dr Amanda Potter: 8:13

So what I'm hearing then, Maurice, is that if I wanted to be an ally, it's not that I would be coming to the party with the answers, most definitely wouldn't, but that I should be curious, I should have a look at what's happening around me, I should ask questions, see what's happening thus far, and see how I can help.

Maurice Mcleod: 8:31

Exactly that. No one's expecting anyone to turn up with with answers or whatever. As you say, be curious, be to speak to the people that are going through it and and be genuinely listening to what they're saying. That's a massive first step because I say people have been doing this work for a long time, or you know, whether whether they've been doing it officially or not. And so, yeah, just just being curious, just sort of really trying to get your head around what it feels like to be going through this and what some of the solutions might be.

Angela Malik: 8:58

From an organizational point of view, it sounds to me like one way an organization could be a good ally, then, would be to really focus on cultivating a psychologically safe environment so that black and ethnic minority colleagues feel safe enough to talk about their experiences and explain their point.

Maurice Mcleod: 9:17

Absolutely. I think a number of organizations, I'm still working with some now, but a number of organizations, if they were large enough, would have staff groups of people of colour or whatever. And that that I think is a really helpful space in that what's often came from them was then conversations with the larger staff body and those groups that really got into, I think, some quite tricky issues that people have been sort of suffering through and not really knowing how to talk about or what to say about them. But a lot of that stuff came out, and and hopefully, I I think in a positive way it's done genuinely. People don't feel patronized or okay, yeah, you get you get two days to tell me about your thing and then we'll move on to something else. No, if it's genuinely part of how an organization is trying to improve itself, talking to staff, you know, black and Asian staff about what their experience is and really talking honestly and setting the framework before that conversation, as you say, that this is a safe space that no one's gonna be um and on both sides to be honest, that that no one's gonna be hauled over the coals for making a mistake or using the wrong term, or uh, but also, you know, no one's gonna have the trauma, if it is trauma, that they've experienced or minimized, uh, you know, it's it's making sure that on both sides people know that they're safe to have those conversations.

Dr Amanda Potter: 10:34

That's a really lovely segue. I'm going to move on to language because I think this is a really lovely link between safety, psychological safety, and language. I'm sometimes cautious in communicating around racism or diversity because of language. And I had a question about language, Maurice, because I noticed on your website that you have the term BAME. And I understand that that is now a catch-all that's really regarded to be unacceptable. And I find it hard to keep up with what is and what is not acceptable in terms of language, and I really worry I'm going to say the wrong thing and I'm going to offend.

Maurice Mcleod: 11:14

I I I think that that worry is really common. This is still a live area because it's the live discussion. You know, how do we define people? How do we describe people? I mean, the bottom line with describing race is that it is complicated and nuanced, and it's not it's not simple. Race is invented, race doesn't actually exist. You know, our culture, I mean, you might look at me and go, oh, yeah, there's a black guy, yeah. But or I could say I'm mixed race because my dad is African and my mum's Jamaican, or I could say there's all sorts of different ways of defining race. So I think that unfortunately people do get worried about terminology and weren't worried about phrases. But I think if you say my father-in-law, actually, when we when we very first met, and he's a lovely guy, I really do get on with him real very well, and he's he's white. So and he came into London, he said, Oh, there were um there was this little black girl on the train, um, and I called her a a pickininny. And I was like, Wow, you said I mean that's a really pretty offensive term from segregation and slavery terms, it's really not a nice term. Um, and and there is a Jamaican phrase picney, which means little kids, and my mum might call me a picnic, obviously comes from that derivation. Anyway, so he said this term, and I think the whole room, because we were quite new, sort of looked at me and went, Oh my gosh, he just said something really awful. And it's like, oh, okay, no, that means this, and that's fine. I think if someone makes a mistake in an honest way, but have the conversation. I mean, the difference is when you go, Well, I don't see why I can't say that, and then you keep saying it if someone says something's offensive, that's that's a different sort of interaction. But I think we need to be less worried about what we say and more concerned about what our intention is. And if our intention is to interact and be honest and open, then no one should be sort of pilloried or attacked for for making a mistake. Language does evolve. Um, and when it comes to BAME, yeah, we that that shows because we meant to take them all off of our website, just because that's how it's moved on. I don't have a massive problem with the term, other than it is, it is a catch-all, it has lump everyone together. That's why there's been the pushback. And, you know, BAME, BME, uh, global majority, racialized communities, there are so many different ways of of describing that. It all means something slightly different. So I think we should this is funny for a journalist, but we should be less hung up on the words and more hung up on what we're what we're actually trying to communicate, I think.

Dr Amanda Potter: 13:34

I was once told by a client that I was racist. I got a very strongly worded email from a client from the Netherlands saying that I was a racist because of the drop downs that we use on our B Talent psychometrics. Now we use the gov UK ethnic groups that they request that we use when we gather data for diversity screening, and there are 21 options in terms of ethnic groups from the UK's perspective. If you do it from a US perspective, there's 15 options, and in the EU there's a number of others. Now, language that we use in the UK apparently is racist in the Netherlands because we have, I think the articulation was non-white, and he was so offended. We were in our minds following a policy, a process required by the British Psychological Society. There doesn't appear to be a catch-all ethnic grouping that applies to every country, of course, because every country's perspective is different. We can't please everybody, but that was quite upsetting from my side because I worry that as an organization we do the right thing for everybody and we're hugely inclusive. So I wondered if you had any examples of whether you've seen that happen in your experience?

Maurice Mcleod: 14:56

Yeah, um, so yeah, language is always about context, isn't it? It's not surprising that what's perfectly acceptable in one country isn't in another. Um, when I first went to South Africa, um, my father was from Swaziland and heard people talking about coloured, which used to be how people describe black people in Britain because they didn't want to say black. They thought that was a bit, ooh, that's a bit awkward. So we say coloured because it sort of feels a bit polite, and and that's a very old-fashioned way in Britain of talking about black people to say, oh, oh, oh, he's coloured. But in in South Africa, it's very much a defined ethnic group. The the people from Cape Malay, people of Indian and mixed heritages are described as coloured. There's the black community, which is you know the vast majority, there's the minority white community, and there's the coloured community, which is a very specific thing. So, you know, language means what it means in the context that it means. And to my ears, when I first heard, oh yeah, I'm a coloured guy, it's like, oh gosh, why is he calling himself that? That's uh a perfectly understandable term. I mean, years ago, me if me saying black would have, you know, if I'd said that you know, a hundred years ago, I'm a black man, it'd be like, oh gosh, well, don't put yourself down. But no, I'm a proud black person. That's that's you know, that's how I like to describe myself. So, you know, language moves, and like I say, I think it's intention. And you know, if someone's offended, you say, Oh gosh, sorry, that's not what I meant. I meant this, and you move on and don't say that term again to them if that's really what upset them. That's how I see it.

Dr Amanda Potter: 16:24

Angela, did you have any reflections from your move from the US to the UK?

Angela Malik: 16:30

Oh, I mean, there's plenty of linguistic differences. I grew up in the in the deep south, so of course there was um exposure to black communities of all kinds. I'm from Louisiana, so we have Haitian backgrounds, we have Creole, we have, of course, African Americans of all shapes and sizes and different communities, different backgrounds, everything. I would say where I'm from, you get a lot of exposure to things like code switching, where you have almost everyone will have black colleagues, for example, and it's very easy to see how they speak with each other or knowing how they interact outside of the workplace, and then to see them switch when they have to pick up the phone and speak to a client, for example, and suddenly put on a sort of quote, white voice, because now they have to change the way they communicate. I guess they feel they need to change that way to fit in, to be accepted, to not have stereotypes thrown at them. Morris, I don't know if this is as prevalent of an issue in the UK, but I imagine it must be quite exhausting to feel that you have to mask who you are in certain situations at the workplace and not show up as completely 100% yourself.

Maurice Mcleod: 17:45

Absolutely. And sadly, it's very much a case I would I would actually think, and I don't know, obviously not lived and worked in the US, but the different demographics in in the States, there is a much larger minority community in in some parts of the US, certainly, but but there's much larger minority community because of its history in the US than there is in the UK. I'd be fairly certain that code switching is a bigger thing here than even in the US, in that unless I was doing something that's specifically black, I'm almost always the only black person in the room. I I absolutely had have had to learn how to to speak and communicate differently. My partner, who who is, who is white, we met a group of my friends, went to a barbecue and this group with my old school friends who were black and white and whatever, but might be a people I grew up with. And she sort of said, Oh my god, that's so funny. Why are you doing that funny voice? You're trying to be down with the kids or whatever. I went, This is how I speak. How how I interact with you is how I learnt to speak at university. I went, I went to university to learn to be white. That's how I describe it. And and it is quite tiring. I I've noticed in um in workspaces that I'm in, you know, if there's a small black pool of black uh employees, there'll often be some sort of get-together that that the black people have where the whole accent changes and it's like, ah, or we can relax in this space now, and we're not going to be judged for speaking in a Jamaican accent or an African accent or whatever, speaking how we want to speak. So I think it probably happens more here, even than the States. I think in the States there's that, you know, because there's such a large community, you'd like to think people go, okay, so that's a perfectly reasonable way of communicating. If I sat here and spoke in my sort of very South London, I think it's called MLE, bits of Jamaican, bits of everything chucked in accent that I probably grew up with. I believe, maybe I'm wrong, but I believe my authority would be undermined and you'd go, oh gosh, does this guy really know what he's speaking about? He's doesn't seem that that eloquent. That's sadly what gets associated with, you know, the no the way that I would normally talk. Hopefully it'd be less and less. Maybe bit by bit. You know, I noticed the news are doing it, you know, the it always seems to happen there. We've moved away from the sort of received pronunciation, we've moved to a more, you know, there are regional accents and they're all that sort of thing coming in. Hopefully that will include more people speaking in the way that they actually speak, which would be great when people talk about diversity. And I say, imagine having to. So you're you're there, you're being yourself, you're doing your job, you're being who you want to be in your job, and the person next to you is having to change big parts of how they exist, how they communicate, just to be on the starting line, they're having to change all of that. So when you think, oh, we're all here and we're all equal, you're playing in your home kit. The person next to you is playing away, they're playing with a crowd that they don't know, they're playing on a ground that they're not familiar with. That stuff does matter.

Angela Malik: 20:38

And it can have massive impact, can't it? Because if we look back at the Trayvon Martin case in Florida and the US some years ago, one of the witnesses there, her authority was completely undermined because of how she spoke. I think the jury and the news media and everybody just had such a hard time connecting with her because of her language and her way of speaking. And she was just being herself and being authentic. It undermined the entire testimony and actually may well have affected the outcome of that case.

Maurice Mcleod: 21:14

That's that's appalling. We certainly do that. We certainly judge people and dismiss them or not by by how we think they come across. And when I say we, actually, it's I think it's an important thing because it's often these accents or these voices, like a a real a really thick London accent. There's loads of people in London that speak like that and who would absolutely understand me. And I think actually, probably most people would understand me. But the default is defined, I I think the default's defined by the established, by the media, by you know, what are the voices, you know, what's an acceptable way of speaking? If I was going on the radio, what's an acceptable way of me speaking and what's not? That's not defined democratically, that's defined by a few people who all happen to speak in a particular way. So, you know, the people that went to private school that do speak in in that particular way get to define what the rest of us should sound like. So I guess that's the bit that I'm hoping for a pushback against. I'm hoping for us to go, well, why should everyone sound like that, like that? And we do we do associate authority with, you know, there's a thing in Britain about why so many prime ministers went to one or two private schools and have a very similar accent and whatever is because we hear that accent and say we the people hear that accent and go, oh, they're important. They they sound like they know what they're talking about. And they chucked a Latin phrase in as well. They seem really educated. We're very susceptible to that.

Angela Malik: 22:33

What I thought was really interesting is my husband and I went to St. Lucia on our honeymoon. What I found incredibly interesting, and kind of sad for me, there was a very big difference from how the local people were interacting with my husband, who is Pakistani, versus how they were interacting with me. And I got the distinct impression that there was a little bit of a, I don't know, there was a barrier there, a little bit of a concern that if they say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing, I'm gonna be the person who's asking for the manager. Whereas they didn't necessarily behave like that when my husband was joking with them, they would joke back.

Maurice Mcleod: 23:12

I think that's really common. We we've I've been with my partner for 23 years, so we've been together quite a lot, and we've traveled quite a lot. Yeah, there were so many things like that that, you know, traveling abroad that we noticed. I had to point out to her that that waiters always talk to her, that everything's directed at her. They ask her for the wine, they she tastes like it all, they bring her the bill. It's really like, hello, I'm I'm I'm here, you know, I'm I'm a guy, I'm not I'm not sort of playing the gender role, but it's really interesting that it all goes through her. The assumption is that you know I'm I'm her pet or her guest or something.

Angela Malik: 23:46

So, Morris, earlier when you were talking about Rhoda's mission, one of the things I heard was that you were looking to achieve equity as opposed to equality. And I was wondering if you could explain the difference between those two things.

Maurice Mcleod: 24:00

Yeah, the equality-equity thing, I I try to um actually avoid terms and phrases that I know people don't genuinely understand. And I think the equality and equity thing, the simple answer is equity is what we're after. Equality just means that let me let me think of an example. If you say, right, everyone can um can catch that bus over there, it comes at 10 o'clock, we've all got equality, we can all go there and get that. If you don't acknowledge where we're all starting in that race, then then you can't ever get to equity. You can't ever get to the place where I have as much chance of catching the bus as someone else down the line. But I think that can be a bit nuanced. It's one of those circumstances where I think the actual terms that we use are more confusing than than people understand. So I kind of where I can, I try and I try and sidestep that.

Angela Malik: 24:48

And how do you talk around it then? What language do you use to explain that concept?

Maurice Mcleod: 24:52

We talk about outcomes, we talk about what actually happens. So if we're talking about um, I don't know, the criminal justice system, for instance, we can you can talk, you can have all sorts of conversations, but if you as an individual are more likely to have this, this, this, and this happening, then we talk, we talk about what the outcomes are, how many people end up convicted on you know for the same issue as other people. What what's the actual stats? What's the actual outcome of the issue we're talking about? How do we fix that outcome? So if we start, if we start from the end rather than the beginning, people often start from the, oh, well, if we make it easier for this and we fix that, yeah, all of that's important, but the thing you're trying to get to is everyone being their best self, you know, everyone reaching their potential and and being able to bring their authentic, proper self to the job and you know, do well at the at whatever it is they're trying to achieve. I try to be ends focused, outcomes focused, because that's the bit that matters, to be honest. We can you can do whatever interventions, we can make whatever changes seem well-meaning and and and what have you. But if the end result is still that one group of people have a much worse set of outcomes than someone else, than another group, that's that's that's still a problem. That's still the thing that we're looking to fix.

Dr Amanda Potter: 26:06

And Angela, did you have any examples of the difference between equality and equity from a work perspective?

Angela Malik: 26:13

Um, I can think of one that is more about recognizing the differences in neurodiversity, for example. If you have a policy for hybrid working where colleagues come into the office and everyone is allocated a desk, but they hot desk, so they move around. But policy is when you're working in the office, you have a desk that is your assigned desk for the day. If you are neurodiverse, and perhaps for you, you need to have a specific desk. You can't be moving around. You need that structure, you need that routine. Equality would be you get a desk. And equity would be when this person comes into the office, the policy is they get that desk. They are never assigned a different desk, and everyone else adjusts to accommodate that need that they have in order to perform at their best.

Dr Amanda Potter: 27:01

I think that's a brilliant example. So, Maurice, I wondered what has been the impact of COVID and remote working for black and ethnic minority professionals from your side.

Maurice Mcleod: 27:12

We're a research, a policy research body. So most of the stuff we do involves trying to find answers that we can then use those answers to push for change. During the pandemic, I mean there's there's some really interesting and worrying trends that are coming up. The pandemic showed what we kind of knew that was that black and Asian people, people from minority communities, are often in a more challenging financial situation, often have less money, you know, have smaller homes or more likely to be overcrowded, all those sorts of things. And and when we suddenly said to everyone, right, go home and work from there, the results of that wasn't the same on everyone. Some people are like, oh, brilliant, I've got a lovely garden and a beautiful setup, and this works really well for me. Other people know they're overcrowded, and granny lives in the room next doors, and there's the kids crying, and there's mould on the walls, and and and they they live in that circumstance. What I found fascinating in that is that despite arguably being in worse homes or worse homes that are less set up for working from home from, the evidence we're seeing is that people of colour, black and Asian people, are less keen to go back to the office. They're less keen to return to sort of previous working uh conditions, which really does suggest that there's something sadly quite toxic about the working or about many work environments that means people would rather stay there than come back into the office. That's something that I think really does need looking into. But it's not a sort of thing you can just have an answer to, just you know, you you need to talk to people, you need to actually find out where is the reticence in returning to work, what's happening there, and and what can we do to fix it? What is it that people have seen during COVID and they're working from home that they've gone, oh wow, isn't it nice not to have to deal with that microaggression or deal with whatever whatever it is, you know, I'm not putting words into people's mouths, but there is a there's clearly a reason that people are less keen. We don't fancy traveling. I don't just think it's that. I think that there is sadly something which should give us concern.

Dr Amanda Potter: 29:10

So, from a statistics perspective, to support what you're saying, 20% of working professionals want to return to the office full-time in the US. So this is US data. Interestingly, only 3% of black professionals in the US want to go back to the office full-time. So a significantly lower number.

Maurice Mcleod: 29:31

If only 3% of people actually want to come into the office, there's something that needs to be fixed. And if it were fixed, I'm sure would have better results for everyone, for the companies I'm talking about, not just for the people who are reticent to come in again.

Dr Amanda Potter: 29:45

There is a quite a contentious debate happening on LinkedIn over the last couple of weeks as a result of a Stephen Bartlett podcast with Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers. Malcolm Gladwell said on the diary of the CEO. Podcast that he believes that working from home is causing a disconnection between people and society. He was talking about the fact that it's not in your best interest to work at home. He said, I know it's a hassle to come into the office, but if you're sitting at home in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live? Now there was quite an outpouring of outrage, at least on the professional LinkedIn circuit, about it, because it didn't account for societal differences and the situation people have been in, and actually the the great degree of flexibility it's giving us in work-life balance and the positive impact it's had on creating healthy habits that we're now embedding so well in our lives.

Maurice Mcleod: 30:46

I think we all have a habit of assuming our existence is everyone's existence, you know, what we're going through is what everyone's going through. And probably from his point of view, he was thinking, oh gosh, if I didn't get into the office and no, and you know, it's I can imagine him thinking that and and sort of expanding it to think that's how it is for everybody. And you know, sometimes it is it is good for people, just a little reminder that not everybody has that, just a little reminder that some people's existence is like this. Uh, I think I think that does it well for all of us, to be honest, though. I think the working from home thing, one of the things that we've found uh at Rota, um, we have a staff member who's who's in a wheelchair. Um, and so the ability for that staff member to you know to be on Zoom and to be able to um interact as easily as other people can has been has been really important to us. It's been a real bit of learning that we've gone, ah, okay, so we inadvertently um were excluding this person from some of the things we were doing because we always wanted to meet in person because you look someone in the eye, and that's what matters great if you're if you're able to travel, if there aren't any challenges. So I think it's always important to be called out and sort of and and reminded that your experience isn't universal, that we all have different, we're all coming from different places and have different challenges.

Angela Malik: 32:05

So, Morris, what has been your personal experience of racism in the workplace?

Maurice Mcleod: 32:11

Yeah, I I sadly I think I've seen all sorts of micro and fairly macro aggression. I'd been working on a black newspaper and I went, I went to have an interview on a mainstream paper, and the editor was like, Oh, this is brilliant the work you've been doing, but you do know that you know you'll be doing more than black stuff if you come here. I'm like, of course, yeah, but that's because I was working on a black newspaper. So if I was working on a South London newspaper, all my stuff would have been South London. I have the ability to shift and move. I started on The Voice, which is a black newspaper, and so a lot of my friends, I had lots of friends who were also going through the media journey, but doing it while being black. And um, and so we meet up and go, Oh gosh, this is what happened to me. And they asked me to report on this asylum seeker, or they asked that there's the stories and things that we were being asked to do, and the impact of not doing those. Um, so so I've been asked to do things that I think are really beyond the pale and dodgy and would actually be of of harm to my community, and told that if I don't do them like what? Um uh once I was I was asked to uh go to Brixton Market. There was the a paper decided that there was a propensity of of what's called bushmeat, which is wild endangered animals. It's sort of I don't know if that's a thing or not. Um, it's certainly not a massively prevalent thing, but uh but a paper got into its head that that's what was going on. They wanted me to go down to Brixton Market and buy some of this meat. And I sort of said, Well, one, I don't know if that's true, and two, I think this is a really dodgy story. You know, in my bones, this feels like a really racist, dodgy story. You're trying to paint a picture that I don't think's there. I'm concerned about your motives for wanting to paint it. And the response was, are you expecting to work on this paper ever? Because if you are, you'll go down and do that story. I didn't do it, and I've never worked for that paper again. It's like now it's sort of 20 odd years later. Um and then these and people might say, Oh, well, these aren't massive racism things, but they are ways that being my race had a massively negative impact on how I could progress in my career. They wouldn't have asked the white journalists to go and do that. And if they'd said, Oh, I'm I'm not sure this sounds a bit dodgy, they might have gone, gosh, yeah, maybe it does. But for me, they were like, How dare you sort of argue with us? We've told you what to go and do. Don't tell us we're being dodgy. We think black people are eating monkeys and we want you to go and report on it. Not accepting any even quite polite, I would say, pushback. I know that I've experienced lots of minor things like that. And I can, you know, I can I can look at plots of my career. I went to sort of the the the one of the best journalism schools in Britain, but then you look around at your cohort, your colleagues, the people that studied with you, some good, some bad, whatever, and you can go, oh gosh, look, look at where all of the black students ended up. Look at their careers, which haven't been terrible. I mean, I'm not sitting here crying saying, Oh, I've had an awful career, but compared to the stellar careers of some of our colleagues, I mean, really stellar, sort of you think, okay, there's something that's more than just me not being very good at interviews or something. There's something else happening. But those things are super hard to pin down. You know, you can drive yourself mad looking for the structural stuff when you're talking about your own individual case, because it's impossible to pick out what's you and what's society.

Dr Amanda Potter: 35:19

So that's a good summary of what you might think the impact might have been for you personally. I know from our preparation interview that we had, you were talking about the fact that you felt that you might have been overlooked in certain organizations, that you may not have been given as equal opportunities as some of your colleagues. Doesn't seem like a microaggression to me. It seems quite overt, sadly. More broadly, what happens when people are trying to build their careers? What might be some of the things that people do in order to progress and be seen as equal, if you like? What tactics do you see people using?

Maurice Mcleod: 35:59

Sadly, people do all sorts of things to to get ahead, to get by, to thrive in what can be a challenging world. Um, I I absolutely know about people that will go through their CV. I mean, I've like I say, I've worked at black newspapers, I've worked on campaigns that are particularly anti-racist, I've done that sort of thing. If I put that in my CV prominently, it'll be very obvious that I might be a black person. If I take that out and just talk about the Daily Express and the BBC and all sorts of nice things like that, I paint a very different picture of myself. My name, Maurice McLeod, isn't particularly black. It could be French, it could be Scottish, who knows? I understand that some people feel that the weight of being black and applying for those jobs is so much that if they can take that away, if they can deratialize their CV and that we talked earlier about code switching, um, learn to speak in the way that the employer wants you to speak, then there's more chance, I guess, of you getting ahead. It's sad, and it's not, it's certainly not what we want, as we were saying. We want people to bring their whole selves. You we really are missing out as a society, we're missing out as employers when we have people who are bringing a half or a quarter of themselves to work, painting this very what they think they need to do, picture themselves, because they think all this other stuff will be rejected. We're losing out on the potential of those people, I would argue.

Dr Amanda Potter: 37:22

Those two terms, CV whitening and racial code switching, are the ones I think we've been referring to in this podcast. And quite sad from my perspective that people feel that they have to even do that in order to be to be given an equal chance.

Maurice Mcleod: 37:36

I know there are a number of organizations now that don't use CVs at all, that sort of go a different direction. These are the skills we want to examine and go for a much more, I guess, uh anonymous way of employing people, just because despite unconscious bias training and all the stuff that organizations do do, there is still a almost a built-in desire for us to work with. We you know, you know, we as employers want to be comfortable. We as employers want to feel like, oh, okay, this person in front of me, I get them, they get me. And so we go for people that are like us. And so, you know, whether it's a name being foreign or someone having a thick accent or something like those things, it's really hard for us, I think. You have to actively not let those things uh impact on your decisions. And most of us aren't very good at that. If we can be more active in breaking maybe unhelpful cycles and practices that we're in, I think that would be a good thing too.

Dr Amanda Potter: 38:35

Thank you so much for being our guest. And just in case anyone's slightly confused, Maurice is known as Maurice or Morris. His friends call him Maurice. So Angela and I, having met Maurice a number of times, have decided to call him Maurice rather than Maurice. But hopefully we're friends. Thank you so much for being our guest, and thank you for your insight and for helping to educate us.

Angela Malik: 39:02

We'd also like to thank Monica Mark for her support in preparing for this podcast and to Jane Lenton for her support in introducing us to Morris.

Dr Amanda Potter: 39:13

It's been a great conversation, so I really hope our listeners get a great deal of value from today.

Maurice Mcleod: 39:19

Thank you so much. Been wonderful speaking to you both.

Angela Malik: 39:22

And if you're an individual or organization wanting to support Rhoda's mission or interested in learning more about how Rhoda can help your diversity agenda, visit the website www.rotarota.org.uk.

Dr Amanda Potter: 39:38

And if you like our podcasts, please click the follow button on your podcast platform so you know when it is available. Thank you everyone for listening. Take care, everybody.