How can capitalism be anti-racist?

Written by Technically Media CEO Chris Wink, Technical.ly’s Culture Builder newsletter features tips on growing powerful teams and dynamic workplaces. Below is the latest edition we published. Sign up to get the next one.

Her outspoken criticism of the tech industry’s slow progress on diversifying its workforce doesn’t come from a desire to be known for it. Her leading seminars on antiracism aren’t what she intends for her life’s mission.

“I’m a business strategist but I need these systems changed if we can ever move past them,” Crayton said.

Crayton has a new book called “Profit Without Oppression: A Blueprint for Building an Antiracist Organization Now.” Her title caught my attention not for the word “oppression” but for the word “profit.”

Progressive critiques of the many shortcomings of the American economy — such as wealth inequality, racial disparities and paralyzed climate change investments — can often result in a revolutionary turn: Burn down the entire capitalist system. That’s not the argument from Crayton, a self-described “provocateur.”

“Capitalism is just a theory of private ownership and goods and services. It’s been problematic because it rooted oppression in our economic system — people were owned by the system,” Crayton said. “But look at any other system. Socialism, Marxism, communism and fascism are all rooted in white supremacy. I don’t care how you switch it out, you’ll have the same problems.”

Revolutions tend to leave vulnerable people more vulnerable, she added.

“You swap one entrenched power to another,” she said. Crayton, then, argues for a radical restructuring of capitalism, rather than an entirely new system. We have to work with the cards we’ve been dealt.

“But not tech economies as they have operated so far,” Crayton clarified.

How to get there? Crayton’s book is billed as a blueprint for entrepreneurs and business leaders to make their contribution. Crayton is a proponent of swapping a company’s priority on shareholder value for stakeholder value — one of the biggest debates in modern economic theory. She says the work comes in three big steps: Know thyself; know thy organization; know thy community.

Professionals must start with their own personal discovery of their place and role and goals as it relates to racial injustice. As Crayton has put it: “What kind of ancestor do you want to be?”

From there, comes a focus on “organizational hospitality,” to use Crayton’s phrase. Business leaders must take a comprehensive view of the experience of past, current and future employees “from invitation to the salutation”: What are the gaps in how they’d feel welcome?

Can we have an economic system that is supremacy, coercion, discrimination and exploitation free?

“We all know the difference between a host that centers themselves or those who focus on making everyone else feel comfortable and welcomed,” she said.

Crayton’s book includes a checklist and scoring mechanism she has developed for companies to self-assess their progress in contributing to anti-racism. Anti-racism is a heavy phrase often credited to the philosopher-academic Angela Davis, who is attributed with writing, “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”

It argues that it’s not enough for a hiring manager or a company to feel they don’t actively contribute to racial inequality — to be “not racist.” To combat the systems, policies and institutions with racist origins, one must actively work against them. That leads to another classic economic debate between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Is it enough for company leaders to say they are an equal opportunity employer if the outcome of their job search doesn’t result in a workforce that resembles the communities that company serves?

Crayton says no. She turns to a biblical reference: “We have to stop putting new wine in old wine skins.”

To do that, Crayton adds a nuance to the anti-racism concept. Rather than being defined in opposition to white supremacy and anti-blackness, her anti-racism creates something new.

“I no longer want to deal with systems, institutions and policies that are designed to prioritize and privilege the few at the expense of the many,” Crayton said. “Can we have an economic system that is supremacy, coercion, discrimination and exploitation free?”

I turned her rhetorical question back to her: Can we? Crayton believes we can. If the focus remains on change.

As she put it: “Let’s try to create a world that was never supposed to exist.”