December is a short month for us at TOB HQ as we’re closing our doors for the festive period for three whole week so that we can rest and recoup from the year that has been 2020. But that doesn’t mean we’ve taken it easy with the Diversity Dictionary offerings! This month, we covered words and concepts that negatively impact the work of social justice and equity.
October marks Black History Month in the UK. This year more than ever, organisations and individuals had the responsibility to truly educate themselves not only on Black British history but how Black British history is British history. With that in mind, October’s Diversity Dictionary offerings are words and concepts that shed some light on global experiences of Black people and people of colour.
As some of us made the slow return to the office or workplace, we spent September’s #DiversityDictionary looking at words that critique certain attempts at diversity, equity and inclusion. It can be very easy for organisations to take superficial action without creating meaningful change that truly challenges the systems and structures that create inequity in the first place.
For August’s Diversity Dictionary we partnered with Sulaiman Khan of @ThisAbilityLtd to share definitions that centre the voices and experiences of disabled people. In the process of creating these posts for August and partnering with This Ability, we at TOB HQ learned so much about our own non-disabled privilege.
July 2020 saw the continuation in the global upsurge in Black Lives Matter protests and action. It was an opportunity for many people to reflect on how they might be covertly or overtly reproducing systemic inequality and oppression through the more subtle language and behaviours we take part in day-to-day.
The start of June saw the uprising of global Black Lives Matter protests in response to the public murdering of George Floyd in the US. June’s Diversity Dictionary words have sought to interrogate the ways in which we can all be allies to Black people but also the many ways in which we have all internalised messages of white dominance.
Business leaders are facing some of the toughest people-related decisions of their careers. One for which there is no blueprint, no guidelines. It is a great unknown. Whether having to furlough staff, give out redundancies or simply lay them off, there is something those decision-makers need to be aware of more than ever: unconscious bias.
Welcome to our February round-up of the Diversity Dictionary™ Word of the Week. You might have noticed we’ve been exploring a Word of the Week every Monday on our social profiles over the past month. February marks the annual month-long observance of LGBT+ history in the UK, so that was our theme for our inaugural month.
