Mana Tahaie from YWCA Tulsa Oklahoma

One of the biggest problems faced by diversity professionals is that of isolation. There are few pre-existing spaces for them to gather and meet each other, especially across different industries. To help combat this, every month I will profile a different diversity professional. In the course of the interview, you’ll not only get to hear about the kind of work this person is doing, you’ll also be able to benefit from the resources, strategies, and tips they share with you.

By Carmen Van Kerckhove

Name:
Mana Tahaie

Title:
Director of Racial Justice.

Organization:
YWCA Tulsa Oklahoma

1. Can you give us a broad overview of your organization and what it does?

YWCA Tulsa is part of the Young Women’s Christian Association, USA. Its mission is eliminating racism and empowering women. Depending on the association and community, doing this can look very different at different YWCA’s. A lot of YWCA’s provide domestic violence intervention and have shelters for at-risk women. Tulsa already has another organization providing domestic violence and sheltering services, so at the YWCA here, we work to meet the social services needs of the community.

The YWCA has always been a women’s organization. It has advocated for equal rights for women starting with suffrage. Over 60 years ago, they adopted an Interracial Charter, stating “Wherever there is injustice on the basis of race, whether in the community, the nation, or the world, our protest must be clear and our labor for its removal vigorous and steady.” In 1970, they added to their mission the One Imperative: “To thrust our collective power towards the elimination of racism wherever it exists and by any means necessary”. In recent years, from national and regional levels, there has been a strong push to renew our emphasis on racial justice.

The YWCA Tulsa has always provided social service work for at-risk communities, but it hadn’t focused on advocacy and social change issues in the area of racial justice until more recently. And, again, each effort looks different depending on where it is and the community it’s in.

2. What’s your role at your organization and in what ways does it involve diversity?

At the YWCA, we try to avoid the word “diversity,” although I do view part of my work as being kind of a diversity coordinator such as what you’d find in a larger corporate atmosphere.

I’m the first person to hold this position at this association. I was hired in June 2007. Historically, there has been a racial justice committee on the board, but there have been limitations on the committee because up until now we’ve had only volunteers. So I’m impressed that they have decided it’s important to develop resources to address these issues, even though this department doesn’t generate revenue in any significant way.

My role is being crafted as we go along. Internally, what we are trying to do is thoroughly evaluate how well we are meeting our racial justice mission, which involves a huge variety of things. It involves basic training — small group discussions and workshops to familiarize people with what achieving racial justice will look like, and then empowering them to achieve these goals. That’s the first step.

Our hope is that we are going to start with conversations and then perhaps have focus groups, because I think you can tease out people’s experiences through personal conversations much better than you can by just giving them a static survey. Doing it this way helps the staff understand what our mission is, and what my role within the organization is, as far as our internal work goes. They are over 160 people on staff, so my role in keeping this going is a big one.

I also work quite a bit in the Tulsa community, doing workshops, working with other social justice organizations, and serving as a voice for racial justice.

3. What do you think is the single biggest diversity challenge to tackle this year?

Within the organization we have the classic non-profit challenge: a lot of folks still believe that providing social services alone meets our mission. But what I’m trying to do is figure out and reveal why the inequities exist in the first place, and address those. So a significant paradigm shift will be getting our stake holders onboard for the additional obligation. Making the shift from social services to social change is obviously not a 100% shift, because we still need to provide social services for communities who are experiencing inequity and need. What we are already doing counts; it’s just not the final answer.

Another big problem is the current mindset, “Oh, hey, we elected Obama! That means the work is done, we solved the problem, racism doesn’t exist any more. Let’s all stop complaining and move on”. What this points to is a very dated understanding of what racism is. If we’re speaking about racism in terms of people getting lynched and burning crosses and slavery, it’s true that we’re not there anymore. But we need a more nuanced understanding, a contemporary understanding, of how racism shows itself today. I think many people don’t have this more complex understanding of the institutionalized racism that we still need to address.

4. Which professional development resources would you recommend to other professionals involved in diversity work?

I spend a lot of time on the Internet keeping up with what’s going on. Just to be able to answer questions brought up by people who have a lot of common assumptions and misconceptions is a full-time job. It helps to find language online to help someone look at things in a new way.

I read a ton of blogs, too, including yours, which are enormously helpful. I created Google news alerts on various keywords and I try to get through those daily. I have my blog readers set up to gather and aggregate all of the different things that are constantly happening on new websites. So I use technology to keep up.

If there’s an issue of the day, I log on and read both sides of the story, which is vital because inevitably someone is going to pose the argument to me, so it’s helpful to hear a question or an argument and fashion thoughtful answers before any of it catches me off guard.

Immigration is a huge deal in Oklahoma and a quarter of our association’s programming is devoted to providing immigration and refuge services, so racial justice related to immigration is constantly on my mind. I get the Intelligence Report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which includes a yearly report on hate groups. This year the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League both have done a lot of work connecting the dots between hate groups and the anti-immigration lobby. So knowing about other organizations that do related work is important. I get their letters and magazines to use as references and resources.

I also try to learn more about other organizations doing this kind of work, to learn about where the movement is and avoid reinventing the wheel. The YWCA worked with Crossroads (crossroadsantiracism.org) a couple years ago, and they are a great institutional resource if you want to engage a lot of people within your company or organization in a long-term evaluation and transformation process. They and others do a lot of really good work.

5. What advice do you wish someone had given you before you entered this field?

The biggest surprise I had were the challenges of working with other groups who share a common mission or a common vision for social justice. Just getting everyone to feel they are equally a part of something is very difficult. I really thought I just needed to partner with the right people, get on the right committees and we’d do some great work seamlessly. That was naïve, as it turns out.

Collaborations can be challenging. I think a lot of it is because collaborations bring up the same kind of institutional dynamics and power structures that we try so hard to work against. There will always be a hierarchy when decisions have to be made. This sort of challenge can cause unintended and unwanted alienation, which all of us have felt and which is why we are doing the work we’re doing now! So that’s something that I hadn’t really thought about very much: how challenging it can be to work with folks who should be easy to work with because they believe the same thing you do!

6. What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job?

I love digging into ideas and having conversations with people. So any time I get the opportunity to talk to a new group of people or to a co-worker about these somewhat philosophical ideas and how they relate to our work, I often get the sense that this is the first time they have heard this, and it’s interesting to them. So I’m able to effectively get past any initial resistance as people walk with me a little bit down this philosophical and ethical road.

Just getting them to see things a little bit differently than how they have been trained to see things, and seeing the flicker of recognition or the occasional “Oh, you know, I never thought about that!” is immensely rewarding because that’s one of the hardest things to accomplish: to just get people to see that their perspective is just one perspective and that there might be another way of seeing and being in the world.

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