Why Call It Racial Harm

Written By Shereen Daniels

When most people hear the word racism, they think of the obvious.

A slur shouted in the street.

Graffiti painted on lamp posts.

An act of violence caught on camera.

A shocking headline.

These images dominate our imagination of systemic racism. What rarely comes to mind is the workplace.

Offices, boardrooms, universities, charities and corridors of power are assumed to be neutral. Professional. Even meritocratic. A place where people can thrive if they work hard enough.

But workplaces are one of the most enduring sites of racial harm. Not always the kind of harm that trends on social media, of course, but the type of harm that derails careers, corrodes dignity and destroys lives.

Why harm persists

One reason racial harm persists despite our collective depth of action over the past few years is how senior leaders respond when the topic is raised.

Those least impacted often hold the greatest authority to intervene. Yet instead of turning the mirror on themselves, leaders locate the problem elsewhere - in the blatant slur, the violent act, the “bad apple” or even the unfortunate individual who put their head about the parapet to flag that “something isn’t right.”

This framing is comforting. It allows leaders to say, “That isn’t us, that isn’t me,” without asking the harder questions about how their own decisions, policies and cultures sustain the very outcomes they condemn.

The result? Everyday harms - being overlooked for promotion, scrutinised more closely in reviews, having grievances dismissed - do not “count.” Leaders can believe themselves committed to fairness while presiding over systems that consistently disadvantage Black colleagues.

A second corrosive dynamic is how organisations treat experiences of racism when raised. Invariably, they are framed as matters of perception. “That’s how they experienced it,” leaders say, as if interpretation, not the event itself, is the issue. The burden falls back on the individual to prove, justify and re-explain, often to audiences already primed to doubt them.

This is not neutrality. It is gaslighting dressed as balance. Leaders may believe they are being fair, but what they call objectivity functions as denial. It corrodes trust and signals that no matter how often racial harm is named, the organisation reserves the right not to believe it. Belief, in this framing, is not a right, it is a favour. It is extended selectively, as an act of benevolence or charity, rather than as a recognition of truth.

Racial harm is not a single event. It is a pattern.

  • It is not unusual for Black colleagues to have to spell out their expertise again and again, while others are trusted without question.

  • Being passed over for projects that lead to promotion

  • Being promoted into roles that are deemed “poison chalices”

  • Being told you are “difficult” or “not a fit” when you raise concerns

  • Being reprimanded for being too aggressive when instead you’re just being direct

  • Seeing grievances minimised, reframed or closed without resolution

  • Silently calculating whether speaking up is worth the risk to your career

I could continue, but you get the point.

Individually, these incidents may be dismissed as minor. Collectively, they are devastating. Careers stall. Health deteriorates. Trust drains away. And many Black professionals leave, carrying the conviction that no matter how much they achieve, they will never be seen the same way as others.

That is harm. And it is racial.

Why the term racial harm?

You might ask: is this just another phrase? Another something we are expected to learn under the endless banner of all of this “inclusion” talk? I’ve already got to get my head around microaggressions and the like – surely this is enough now?

I contend that racial harm is not a stylistic update to your “anti-racism” glossary of terms.

It is a necessary correction.

Systemic racism describes the “what”, the structures, policies, behaviours and practices that produce unequal experiences, opportunities and ultimately outcomes. But racial harm names the consequence and centres the impact.

It also shifts responsibility and makes accountability clearer.

If the issue is bias, then the fix is training.

If the issue is microaggressions, the fix is a quiet word to elicit the reassurance that it will never happen again.

But if the issue is racial harm, the responsibility sits with leaders who hold the ultimate power, influence and control. Leaders must ask: what systems are producing this harm, why does it persist, and what are we refusing to confront that makes this such a stubborn reality? Who are we protecting? To what extent have we quietly accepted a culture that works only for those who fit a narrow definition of “normal”?

Taken from The Anti-Racist Organization: Dismantling Systemic Racism in the Workplace (Wiley, 2022)

And naming racial harm accurately is not about branding or adding a new term to the corporate lexicon. People, even with good intentions, will seize on new language as proof of progress, as if using the phrase itself is the work.

Earlier in the summer, I completed a commissioned review of the London Metropolitan Police Service to assess the extent to which their London Race Action Plan is moving them towards their stated mission of becoming an anti-racist organisation. What struck me was how often systemic racism is still framed as a matter of “bad apples” or “unfortunate incidents.”

This framing narrows the problem and, in turn, limits the depth of interventions designed to address it. And the Met are not an outlier here. The same dynamic plays out across many organisations and institutions, where language shifts and commitments to doing better are made, but the structures that sustain harm remain largely untouched.

This is why the language of racial harm matters. It forces us to look beyond isolated incidents and recognise the patterned injuries that are built into organisational life. Without that recognition, we risk mistaking words for progress and performance for change.

The point of the term is not to signal awareness but to force accountability.

Addressing systemic racism is not just about confronting behaviours; it is about owning the systemic patterns of racial harm that colleagues experience every single day. These patterns are not incidental. They are reproduced through decisions leaders make about what harm is and isn’t acted upon, who is promoted, who is told to wait their turn, whose grievances are believed, whose potential is invested in, whose competence is quietly questioned, whose presence is attributed to tokenism and whose mediocrity is excused.

To acknowledge systemic racism (the what) and racial harm (the impact) is to accept that these are not random outcomes, but predictable consequences of how organisations are designed and sustained.

Until, that is, we become brave enough to do something about it.

Naming racial harm is not the end of the work; it should be the continuation of an obligation - to act, to repair, to dig into structures and redesign systems so that harm is no longer passively accepted and deliberately ignored.

Dr Shereen Daniels


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