SPEAKER 1: Despite me having a master’s degree and lots of relevant work experience, it took me almost a year to get a job in international development. And even then, it was only for a few weeks’ work on a short-term contract. Through Facebook and conversations with my former post-graduate classmates, I learnt that all my peers who were white and middle class had gotten really good jobs and internships much quicker than my non-white peers, who were finding it harder to secure employment. My manager regularly told me, “You take up too much space.” He’d make offensive comments, saying none of his friends would ever date a Black woman. My new manager was even worse.

He started treating me like a glorified secretary and described me as “hostile” and “abrupt” whenever I raised issues with him. He started lecturing me about my religion. I raised a grievance against him. Within days, he issued a counter grievance, in which he accused me of discriminating against white men and described me as not being ‘a culture fit’. Managers and HR failed to effectively deal with the issues I’d raised. They hired an external investigator, who was actually very friendly with several members of the senior management team. This external investigator recommended that we should not discuss issues relating to race in the workplace. This was ridiculous.

How can we work in countries where the majority populations are people of colour and not discuss race? Following the grievance, I was expected to go back into being line managed by my manager and resume my one-to-ones with him. I did not feel safe sitting alone with him in a room.

SPEAKER 2: I work in development communications. It’s an incredibly white space. Every interview I’ve ever been to has been an all-white panel. I go into every one of those interviews fearing that I’m not going to get the job because I look so different to the panel. There’s so much about working in communications that I find really uncomfortable. The lack of diversity in communications teams has an impact on the quality of our work. I’ve had difficulties getting stories signed off where I wasn’t framing people as ‘the other’, or where I wasn’t emphasising the conditions of poverty in which they lived or came from. Sometimes it results in just really silly ideas.

Once I was brainstorming ideas with my team for a campaign against a specific conflict in the Middle East. We were trying to think of strong campaign hooks. One man said, “I know, I’ve got it. Why don’t we all just wear tea towels on our heads?”

SPEAKER 3: I have often faced prejudice, rather than overt racism at work. I think this could be linked to the fact that I know how to speak the coded language, and I conform to the white social norms I need to in order to get by – so much so that another very senior leader once told me over dinner, “You know, you don’t behave like a typical African.” I asked him what a typical African behaved like. He said, “You’re confident, and you speak your mind.” It was clear he expected all Africans to be submissive and behave in the same way. It’s so interesting that since COVID-19 started, INGOs have evacuated many expat staff from their country programmes.

And yet in my experience, national staff are managing the programmes very well without expatriate expertise. My colleague, who is also from Africa, told me, “It’s as if the experts have their knees on our necks the whole time.”

SPEAKER 4: I organised a big event on women’s leadership and wanted to include strong BAME representation on the invite list, but I faced resistance from my manager on this. She was keen to include strong female representation, but when I asked for equal number of invites for the organisation’s BAME network, I was overruled. This points to a broader issue of how the issues of race were seen as being in opposition to issues of women’s rights in this organisation. I would take part in various women’s platforms in this NGO, but there was limited BAME representation in the groups. And whenever I raised an issue, I was viewed as problematic.

I was even accused of being aggressive – something women of colour are often told when they disagree with white women. Even when you work on women’s rights with people who are self-proclaimed feminists, there is a lack of solidarity, support, and allyship.