Work-From-Home Policies May Increase Racism
Businesses should rethink how office rules impact society, not just their bottom line.
On a recent plane ride back from Houston, the person next to me was talking about how her large company in downtown Denver was moving to an entirely remote work platform.
Over 2,000 employees, and now they would be working from home.
We can chat another day about the horrific impact this has on surrounding restaurants, coffee shops, small businesses, parking lot owners and downtowns in general.
But there’s another unintended consequence that companies are ignoring.
The racial impact
Prior to the pandemic, we already knew the United States was overwhelmingly segregated.
Over 80% of large metropolitan areas in this country were more segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990, according to a research analysis of residential segregation by the University of California-Berkeley. While America technically has become more diverse, that so-called advancement is a bit misleading since we’ve been separating more and more these past 30 years.
Adding insult to our segregated neighborhood problem are our dinner tables and after-5:00 p.m. spaces — they aren’t diverse, either. Very few of us work to create any remote semblance of ethnic or racial diversity in our homes.
Work is another place we’ve done a bad job of integrating, although it’s way better than our record in housing. Black-white segregation in the workplace declined significantly from the late 1960s through the late 1970s and improved again modestly from 1990 to 2000.
Many of us at least spend some time commingling with people of different races and ethnicities from 9 to 5. Coffee meetings. Lunches. In-person business meetings at the office. Diversity in factories. It’s the one space in society where some of us interact with and get to know people who are racially different from ourselves.
Dare I say that Black-white friendships sometimes even develop out of those interactions.
While workplace diversity is no replacement for the more serious relationships that endure outside of work hours, we still shouldn’t take away that small piece of society where people of different races and backgrounds are actually getting to know each other a little.
Why does this matter?
Because we’ve all been fed so many images and taught such inadequate history when it comes to race that we’re left to our implicit biases to control our thoughts and actions.
One way to start unraveling those biases is to spend time getting to know others who are different from ourselves. Every interaction is an opportunity to chip away at our biases.
Dear Corporate America,
Pease don’t take away one of the last remaining places for Black-white relationships to form.
