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OPINION: DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION – YOU DON’T KNOW HOW IT FEELS

by | Apr 27, 2025 | Articles, Black Lives Matter, Opinion, Racism

OPINION: DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION – YOU DON’T KNOW HOW IT FEELS

This new column explores issues relating to diversity and inclusion in coaching.

This issue: White skin: White coaches – how our embodied discourses of Whiteness can impact our practice with Black and Brown clients

By Matt Jacobs

 

On an August weekend in the summer of 2024, racially motivated riots broke out across Britain. Black and Brown British people were verbally and physically attacked in the streets, their cars, their homes. 

Mosques were surrounded. Immigration centres and hostels were attacked. Cars were burned and vitriolic racist chants rang out in the streets over the length and breadth of the country. Marches were held in 50 locations from Newcastle to Plymouth and from Belfast to London. More than 30 of these descended into mass violence and rioting. At the same time, counter-protests took place, with those attending often outnumbering the racists (2024 United Kingdom Riots, 2025). While this outpouring of opposition to racism appeared to send a clear message, there’s a deeper legacy of that weekend that White coaches must consider in our work. 

A racist rioter, a White counter-protestor, and a White coach walk into a room. None are carrying placards. All are wearing nondescript clothing. None of them speak. How do you know which one is which and what their views are? 

You can’t know. 

To all intents and purposes, they all look the same and we’re uncertain of their views. Now, for White people, this uncertainty is, perhaps, more of an intellectual one as we ponder what these people might be thinking. What is it, though, for Black and Brown people? How might this uncertainty feel for Black and Brown people going about their lives surrounded by White people whose views they don’t know? 

If you’re a White coach working with Black and Brown clients, try to imagine how they might feel walking into their first session with you, given that in that moment, you look the same as the rioter. How might your Whiteness impact on their sense of safety in that space? How might any uncertainty and fear affect their engagement with the questions you ask them? How might these feelings impact on how they engage with developing their answers?

 

The lived experience

To be honest, you can’t answer any of these questions, nor truly know how Black and Brown people feel because you don’t have the lived experience nor the generational trauma to do so. Neither do I. However, Black and Brown people have spoken about an initial spike of fear, a trepidation, a tensing of the flight muscles each time they meet a White person they don’t know, just in case… I cannot imagine what it’s like living in a state of perpetual fear even when, for example, simply going to the shop. 

This is an uncertainty, an anxiety and fear that’s derived from the fact that all White people, through our appearance, in our Whiteness, carry and communicate the discourses of the rioters. These discourses said, “You’re not English anymore” (Spereall, 2024), “We want our country back” (Riddell, 2024), “No surrender!” and “English till I die!” (Badshah, Lowe, Vinter, & Makay, 2024). Yes, our bodies also communicate the chants of the counter-protestors, but if a person has been subject to racist abuse and discrimination all their life, it’s the words of the racists that will echo more loudly from our bodies. 

I appreciate that at the time of reading this piece, these racist riots happened some nine months ago. For most White people reading this, they’ll have faded into the background, superseded by subsequent news stories. Our lives will have gone back to ‘normal’. However, we should be mindful that for many Black and Brown people this is unlikely to be the case. 

The events of that weekend built on events, large and small, that have occurred and reoccurred for hundreds of years such that for Black and Brown people, ‘normal’, while familiar, is more of a living with re-traumatisation than an easy state of being. Equally, and crucially for our coaching practice, the racist discourses our White bodies carry from those riots build on and add to the historic discourses of Whiteness our bodies already carry. 

 

Racial discourses

Over the centuries, discourses of Whiteness have marked people as White or Black or Brown, etc, and communicated racialised stereotypes about people as ‘truths’ (Foucault, 1979), whether these be negative stereotypes about, for example, Black men, or positive stereotypes about White men. In doing so, they inscribe differing degrees of value onto the bodies, lives and cultural norms of those people so marked. These generations-old discourses define a racialised hierarchy of value that has been used to justify racist horrors from enslavement through colonialism to immigration policies of today. 

White people’s bodies are marked by these discourses. We carry them on us and in performing our identities, we ‘cite’, or re-express them through our bodies and our acts, gestures and how we dress (Butler, 1990, 1993). These citational practices are the ongoing, everyday practices of ‘race making’ that enact a hierarchical relationship with the ‘other’ (Knowles, 2003) and re-articulate discourses of Whiteness inscribed into us even before we speak.

 

Education is key

From our perspective as coaches, our embodied selves, our identities, and the meaning we project to a client simply by being in the same space with them is a crucial consideration. We all attend to our body language and remain mindful of what our posture, position, gestures and facial expressions might communicate. Understanding that our bodies also re-articulate discourses have been used to justify generational trauma adds a further aspect we must be mindful of when coaching Black and Brown clients.

We cannot, of course, change how we’ve been racialised. 

We can, though, educate ourselves on the history of Whiteness, racism and how they work – there are a multitude of books out there. Just Google it and make a start.

We can make clear declarations of our position on race equity well in advance of our first session – let people know our views. 

We can be explicit in communicating our understanding of how we represent racist histories and structures during contracting – communicate that, as best we can, we get it. 

We can remain mindful of the oppression we represent and regularly check in with our clients on how they are with us – foreground our client’s feelings, rather than any discomfort we might feel. 

We can train ourselves to be continually, critically conscious of how we construct questions to prevent our words magnifying the discourses that mark our bodies.

Crucially, and, perhaps more importantly for our practice, we must remember that we’re racialised too and that this communicates significant meaning to the people we work with. 

 

About the author

  • Dr Matt Jacobs is a coach, facilitator, speaker and consultant with 25 years’ experience in equity, diversity, and inclusion. Over this time, as a White, middle-class, heterosexual man he’s been on something of an uncomfortable journey learning about how these aspects of his identity intersect to provide him with advantages and opportunities denied to others. These experiences alongside researching the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion underpins his belief that inclusion is an ‘All of Us’ issue, and that we must work collectively towards achieving it for everyone.
  • Matt’s doctoral research focused on how White, middle-class, heterosexual men performed their identities in response to the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter campaigns. In his professional life, Matt’s experience ranges from working directly with those experiencing marginalisation to leading multi-million-pound programmes delivering impact at a city level. He now works with organisations and leaders from start-ups to multinational corporations who aspire to be inclusive for everyone.
  • Matt is a certified Senior Practitioner Leadership Coach (ILM Level 7), a member of the International Coaching Federation (ICF), and a member of the Institute of Leadership. He holds a First Class Honours degree in Business Administration, an MSc in Ethnicity and Multiculturalism and a PhD in Sociology exploring everyday power and privilege at the intersection of race, gender, and class.

 

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