Trigger warning: mention of child sexual abuse
Like a lot of millennials, I feel fed up with the workplace. I often find myself comparing my achievements to my counterparts, worrying about my lack of progress, and hoping one day I can find work that pays well and is fulfilling. I feel tired beyond the point of exhaustion, and a large reason for this is my experience within the charity sector as a working-class Black woman.
As of 2019, there were 168,000 charities in England and Wales, according to the Charity Commission (Charity Commission for England and Wales, 2019:3). Charities, in theory, are organizations set up to provide support or address a social problem. Still, there is an argument to be made that the charity sector maintains rather than disrupts the status quo. It only takes a quick Google search to find several stories of employees sharing first-hand experiences of bullying, discrimination, and other inappropriate behavior in the charity sector.
In the summer of 2019, Oxfam GB which describes itself as an organization “focusing on the alleviation of global poverty,” was found by a Charity Commission inquiry to have failed to act on reports of aid workers working for Oxfam sexually abusing children in Haiti in 2011 (Wikipedia, 2019, para 1)(Bulman, 2019, para 1-2). An article published by ViceUK in 2021 explores the issue of racism within the charity sector in the context of several organizations, including Quakers, Barnardo’s, and Solace Woman’s Aid, to name a few (Akram, 2021, para 1-30).
“…the charity sector maintains rather than disrupts the status quo”
In my early twenties, one of my first jobs was working for a charity in the City of London. One day, I was supporting a weekend event run by the local community, and one of our volunteers, a White woman, used the n-word in a “joke” towards me. In shock, I later brought this situation to my manager, a well-known figure in a local political party. Despite being a Black woman herself, my manager did nothing. She acted like it was any other day and left early to attend her political party meeting. My manager did not attempt to remove the volunteer from the organization.
Being young, I was vulnerable, and my confidence was severely impacted due to my time working at this charity. I felt terrible for years. Even to this day, a part of me feels like my inability to tolerate bad treatment meant I am a weak person. It did not help that my leaving this position to protect myself coincided with the start of a global pandemic where I had no income and felt even more lost.
Nobody stepped in or intervened when bullying and inappropriate behavior continued. I was even taunted by a White senior manager who thought it was entertaining that I pointed out how mean my manager was. I will always be disturbed by her whispering, “How do you feel that X will never acknowledge how hard you work?” in my ears. It was the snarky grin on her face that I will never forget.
Another experience took place after the horrific murder of 46-year-old African American man, George Floyd, in May 2020. As a result, a lot of organizations have since started to ramble on about their commitment to diversity and inclusion despite how hard it is for Black people to thrive in them. Lip service is not an example of concrete change; my next story will explain why.
One day, I was in a Microsoft Teams meeting set up to encourage open and honest conversations around race. My White colleagues at the time were asked to deliver an educational presentation on racial inequality. Before they started, they decided to proudly share that they were afraid of being canceled for saying the wrong thing. Throughout the presentation, they then continued to center their Whiteness, with one even proudly exclaiming they were shocked that our colleagues knew who Rosa Parks was. During their presentation, all I could think about was how diversity and inclusion strategies are like applying plaster to a bath full of water with a crack in it. Diversity and inclusion are temporary solutions to deeply embedded issues. Eventually, the plaster will fall off, and the water will spill.
Despite what platforms like GB News report, White people, especially White men, have and continue to benefit from preferential social treatment (Rees-Mogg, 2023, para 1-5). However, as my experiences in the charity sector demonstrate, White women need to address their own complex relationship to power.
Podcaster and journalist Nadine Batchelor-Hunt highlighted that “charity leadership teams in England and Wales were less ethnically diverse than FTSE100 firms and the House of Commons” (Batchelor-Hunt, 2020, para 3). In my experience, charities have a clear separation between White middle-class women in senior management roles and Black women in more junior and entry-level positions. What is considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior is then shaped by social class and the dominant ethnic makeup of the sector.
“Diversity and inclusion are temporary solutions to deeply embedded issues”
This is, however, not to suggest that replacing White faces with non-White faces is a solution to systematic issues that plague British society, but to highlight what people like me have and continue to experience in the workplace. Through sharing my stories, I aim to illustrate how being non-White and not middle-class puts you at a higher risk of experiencing discrimination and bullying in the charity sector. The lack of union representation for employees within this sector is also an issue that must be investigated further.
The charity field as an industry ignores how their working conditions, processes, and procedures help maintain social division. I have witnessed so many people on the frontline, many of whom are working-class, Black women and/or Women of Color, dealing with complex issues yet facing little career growth and extremely low pay. This starkly contrasts with those with the “right qualifications” and connections, who are cold and often complicit yet continue to reach career milestones.
Charities are a perfect case study for how corporations frame themselves as innocent bystanders. However, just like any other business, the charity sector benefits from social stratification, therefore profiting from being able to pay some of us less than others due to our perceived lack of social value. For Black women, capitalism cannot be separated from patriarchy and White supremacy. How these systems interconnect illustrates why the workplace is and continues to be a site of tension for Black women. To fully address these issues, charities would have to cease to exist.