Carolyn Hibbs: I really appreciate your willingness to discuss these concepts with me. I really admire both of your work in this area, and I’ve learned a lot from both of you through conversations like this one.

CH: What led you to become dedicated to diversity, equity & inclusion?

Vivia Kay Kieswetter: My own experiences as both a worker and manager led me to this field. As a person raised in poverty, I quickly keyed into how class played a role in how people were treated in the workplace and then promoted—or skipped over for promotions. This flowed quickly into noticing that class wasn’t the only factor that impacted this—leading to research and reading into anti-racism practices and in general anti-oppressive practices.

Emily Rosser: I’ve always been interested in justice, since I was very young. I think it had to do with a few things—most directly, being raised in a single parent family and also observing how violence played out across a number of families I knew growing up. I also grew up at a time when the world was starting to come to terms with the atrocities of the recent past—including the first round of publicity about the abuses that had happened in residential schools. In university, I volunteered on a sexual assault crisis line.

CH: What has contributed the most to your development in this area?

VK: A hunger to make things better. As a person keenly aware of what structural violence and oppression can feel like when it is directed at you, I have sought ways in which I can learn how not to do these things to others. It’s something that requires constant vigilance—privilege is a shifting web and as I move through different spaces and roles I either receive or am robbed of varying degrees of power. Always trying to be aware of those relationships—who has power or who might be abusing it—is central in my work and my values.

ER: First, working in collaboration with others to challenge injustice and to provide direct support to survivors of violence. A lot of things you only learn through frontline and activist experience, or through being at the receiving end of violence.

Second, I did have an excellent formal education and I don’t want to discount that here. I was in the first generation of PhDs in women’s and gender studies. I learned how to value and highlight experience as a source of knowledge. I benefited from an incredible range of anti-racist feminists as my teachers and mentors, and particularly as my colleagues. 

Third, a lot of my work has been across different languages, and I think the experience of constant translation and interpretation is a very good metaphor for how DEI work can and should go. You are never sure how someone else has experienced the world, you are always asking for clarification and confirmation that the other person has understood, always searching for common ground, common vocabulary, never assuming.

CH: What does leadership in diversity, equity & inclusion look like?

ER: Leadership would look different depending on who is leading. If you were a person or group that embodies a lot of privilege—like white people or cisgender men, for example: leadership from that type of group could look like making things more consultative, more horizontal, less hierarchical; accompanying and taking direction. Leading by example for this type of privileged group is very important. It doesn’t mean deferring to others at all times. It does mean using the power you have in an imperfect society to actually change the way things are. 

VK: Being a leader in an anti-oppressive space means that you need to be willing to sit with uncomfortable feedback and make those who you work with feel safe to let you know when you have messed up. No one is going to go to training and then never make a mistake again, so part of the training needs to be breaking down the “top down” mentality.

CH: How do you ensure that people from equity-deserving groups play leadership roles in diversity, equity & inclusion initiatives? 

ER: I have had more doors open to me by virtue of my whiteness, my education, speaking English as a first language, being relatively able-bodied. I try to use the platforms I do have to do what activists call “pass the mic.” I can invite people on panels, or write articles with them, or defer my time somewhere so someone else can keep talking. I read and support intellectuals and activists. 

In terms of more formal DEI work, you should hire people to help your organization do DEI work well. Those people are out there and they are good at it. But again, nothing really matters if you are only doing it for show. Your goals have to go beyond the superficial.

VK: I would want to be very careful that marginalized people weren’t the ones who became responsible for educating people who have been instrumental in marginalizing them.

ER: Organizations may have implemented superficial measures recognizing gender and racial equality, and maybe also sexual diversity. But organizational cultures often remain deeply ableist, which means they idealize a culture of constant work, a grind that never stops, and putting work over all other needs. My dream is to normalize health.

CH: What would you say to someone who is skeptical of these initiatives?

ER: To someone who is skeptical because they think things are fine the way they are, or they fear losing some of their privileges, I would say, part of living together is caring for others, caring about others. Our society does not do a great job of this yet. 

VK: Do not discount the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion training. If this training makes you deeply uncomfortable, that is a sign that you need it. 

ER: I would also say that, actually, we all benefit when we do things more equitably. Oppressive systems harm those in positions of power as well as those in positions of marginality—participating in them harms their humanity, as anti-racist feminist bell hooks would say. Just taking conventional ideas of masculinity as one example: I have worked with so many men who have been deeply damaged by the narrow expectations placed on them. This is not to equate all suffering or to flatten out the effects of power, it’s more to say that there can be entry points for everyone, and engaging across differences in power and experience doesn't have to look like arguments or defensiveness.

VK: A corporation is a body—that’s literally the root of the word. Think about your body as a thing you need to care for. You wouldn’t expect your body to be healthy if you were constantly smashing your left hand with a hammer. This might seem like an exaggeration, but if you have an environment where people are experiencing daily micro-aggressions or worse then you are never going to be firing on all cylinders.

ER: The other reason people might be skeptical is because people in equity-deserving groups have seen these types of initiatives fail. It’s common to come into an organization that says the right-sounding things about DEI, only to find that they have done very little to put those values into practice. DEI has become a sort of trend recently in corporate and academic settings. The worst examples are when leaders pay lip service to diversity and take a bunch of diverse looking photos for their pamphlets and websites, but the structures of power and decision-making remain decidedly not diverse. It makes people who experience harassment or violence feel like tokens rather than valuable members of an organization, a team.

Another common experience is to enter an institution and find you are tasked with “fixing” it because you belong to a particular marginalized group. It’s not fair to place that responsibility on the shoulders of those who experience the harshest effects of discrimination—or on any one individual. For all those reasons, I would say that I absolutely share those forms of skepticism about DEI initiatives. I still want organizations to try. I think they should be held accountable to the standards that already exist in our society. But they have to try hard.

CH: What is a common mistake people make when they are pursuing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives?

ER: They think it’s something you can accomplish by updating policy and maybe hiring a couple of new people. There are no shortcuts and that there’s no way to improve the situation without acknowledging imbalances of power. Policy is important but it’s the bare minimum. Lots of organizations have excellent policies that they don’t enforce properly. 

VK: Exactly. Having policy but continuing to enforce privilege. It’s why I’m skeptical about training within a workplace—I’ve worked in places where they say things like “we have a zero tolerance policy for X” but when X gets reported it turns out there is tolerance for it, depending on who is accused of it—even if there are multiple accounts coming from multiple victims.

ER: This is often because they don't recognize the relationship between policy and culture. Cultural change makes it possible to report or say no to discrimination or violence and to be supported. If you don’t commit to significant cultural change, your initiatives won’t be as effective as you hope. Don’t be ashamed of not knowing everything already. Life is about learning. This stuff is not really possible to learn in one workshop, or by doing an online training module and reading an article. It's heart learning. 

At the same time, you have to have space for those who survived violence or experienced some form of oppression. Something that is not always acknowledged in this field is that when you lump everyone together in a group for training, you tend to privilege the needs and questions of those least familiar with the topic. I don't think it's productive to do this work as though people of colour or poor people or mad people or Queer people should just hang around and wait until other people catch up.

CH: What should people remember after a significant incident of harassment or violence?

ER: Leaders need to take seriously that their staff or volunteers or members are going to need debriefing. Do something immediately to acknowledge the incident and reiterate that it is not acceptable, that you know it was upsetting. I am a big fan of trauma-informed practice. What that means is basically seeing a trauma response as a normal and healthy way to respond to a traumatic event, or to a society that consistently oppresses and traumatizes specific groups of people. This means treating people’s needs and responses as normal. It means acknowledging and believing their realities.

Then follow up with people on an individual level. People may need some support, whether that comes from inside or outside of the organization. Listen to them! Their experience is important knowledge you may lack. Communicate that you value their health and that they are important to the organization through policies about time off, insurance that includes coverage for counselling, and temporarily easing up on a person’s responsibilities. People need to see that you won’t let this type of incident happen again, whether that is through disciplining those responsible for causing harm, implementing new policies and programs, or creating new structures of governance. Knowing that your organization has your back is very powerful, and can help people feel empowered to push for further changes that move the organization forward.

VK: Ultimately, it’s on management to straighten that back towards justice. The Human Rights Code is a thing. Ministry of Labour regulations are a thing. Be sure that your workplace knows them—these are the bare minimum that employees should experience. It shouldn’t be on the worker to self-advocate, or navigate a way to avoid re-experiencing the behaviour or encountering the individual responsible.

ER: Also, remember that you will make mistakes. You don't have to be perfect.

CH: What do you do when you make a mistake?

VK: I take accountability. I apologize. If a conversation is possible and does not cause further harm to the person I have wronged, ask for ways I could do better.

ER: I apologize right away and then take my cue from the person or people involved. Humility and empathy are going to get you a long way, and listening to and then taking direction from others is going to get you even further. But I don’t make it their responsibility to forgive me or absolve me. My actions are my responsibility. Admit that you are still learning, and commit to doing better in the future. But then you actually have to follow through on that. 

CH: How do you incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion in your day-to-day life and work?

ER: Create a culture of support and care, rather than competition and isolation. In the research project I'm currently working on, we are gathering and analyzing data on sexual violence in post-secondary settings. It can be intense, and we are working slowly and steadily to make sure we don't burn ourselves out, or absorb unmanageable amounts of trauma vicariously. This way of working has been welcomed so much more readily by my younger collaborators than by anyone else I've worked with. I learn so much from them.

VK: This ties in a bit to what I said earlier: recognize that everyone is carrying something, and do your best to be kind in any situation that you can. Going back to the idea of corporation as body—constantly reminding myself that we are all inter-connected is literally part of my religious world-view.

ER: Live by example. Always believe in the possibility of change—encourage everyone to think beyond the status quo. Support people when they speak out against unjust situations. We all need to know our allies! 

Bystander education is really productive because it takes the pressure off the people experiencing the discrimination and violence to call it out or prevent it. You spread the responsibility out to more individuals. Getting more people to feel accountable and empowered to help, or to step in when needed, is a good start. 

CH: What does success look like? How do we get there?

VK: Nothing short of cultural change—and this is really, really hard.

ER: Also, actual consequences for those who violate human rights, and this looks like tangible shifts in power. Success looks like a constant ongoing effort, particularly on the part of those who benefit from privileges that protect them from daily indignities in all areas of life. 

VK: Real shift involves people who may not want to surrender their power laying a lot of it down. 

ER: Success is not a destination. I believe in what anarchist feminists call prefigurative politics—practical action, always learning, always trying new things, never getting there, creating the reality you want through your relationships and practices in the everyday.

CH: What is one thing you wish people knew about diversity, equity & inclusion?

VK: That the harm caused by discrimination and oppression is real violence. That it’s the equivalent of wearing a heavy backpack every single day while other people have springs on their feet. That barriers are incredibly tangible for a lot of people.

ER: Yes, this concept of heaviness is important. I wish people knew what a heavy burden oppression is for people who experience it daily. I wish people would think more seriously about intersectional approaches. In particular, I have seen disability get left off the list of concerns and initiatives.

CH: Thank you for your thoughts! These concepts have seen significant development and change in my lifetime, and we can really never stop learning. I sincerely appreciate how you’ve presented diversity, equity and inclusion as an evolving field, while still clearly identifying important steps that we can take right now.

This article was previously published in two parts in the August and September 2021 issues of the CSAE Trillium Network FORUM e-magazine: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: In Conversation Part 1 and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: In Conversation Part 2.