Have you talked about Charlottesville at work yet?

No? That’s understandable. Maybe you aren’t sure how. Maybe you don’t feel like it’s your place. Maybe you were going to, but now you think the moment might have passed. Maybe you hope that the moment has passed, that soonCharlottesville will recede from the headlines, and then things will kind of go back to ‘normal.’

It’s true, Charlottesville will eventually recede from the headlines.

But then something new and awful will come along to take its place.

Will you talk about that at work when it happens?

No, talking about these things at work is not easy, and no, technically, Charlottesville wasn’t about the workplace, at least not as blatantly and obviously as the Google manifesto that dominated the headlines just a couple weeks ago — until Charlottesville happened.

But to not talk about these things — about race, about racism, about anti-Semitism, about the shameful treatment of other human beings that is inextricably interwoven into American history — is to ensure that they will continue to haunt us.

We have to talk about them.

“We haven’t engaged in the narrative conversation that we need to have,” said Bryan Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative. On The Daily Show this week, he told Trevor Noah, “The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. This idea that white supremacy — racial apartheid — was unacceptable, was not something we ever embraced. That’s why we have this era of terror, and that’s why we have this era of segregation….

“In this country, we don’t talk about slavery. We don’t talk about lynching, we don’t talk about segregation … we’re preoccupied with the 19th century in [the South], hundreds of confederate memorials and statues, but nothing about slavery or lynching. I don’t think we’re going to get free, we will not overcome these problems, until we confront this history.

“We want truth and reconciliation, we want unity, but we don’t realize, those … things are not simultaneous. You’ve got to have truth before reconciliation — they’re sequential — and we haven’t done truth-telling in this country, and we won’t get where we’re trying to go until we do.”

You may not be in the position to lead a national dialogue about these issues — but you can start a dialogue within your sphere of influence.

So … how do you talk about it at work?

You could start with a simple question: In response to Charlottesville, what can we do to make our workplace more inclusive?

You could make the question a little more personal, and ask:  I’m still thinking about what happened in Charlottesville, and I know we have haven’t talked about it as an organization. In light of what happened there, what can we do to make our workplace more inclusive?

If you are in a leadership role, you could pose the question to your fellow leaders at a meeting of team or organizational leadership, and encourage them to expand the conversation across the organization.

You could pose the question as an open invitation to an informal lunchtime discussion to talk about it.

If you’re not in a leadership position, you could ask the question one-on-one to your manager, to someone in Human Resources, or simply someone you respect on the leadership team. You could ask it to one of your co-workers who you think might be thinking about these issues, too.

Is there risk in bringing it up? Of course there is.

Is the conversation you start going to stop systemic racism? Of course it’s not.

But talking about it can interrupt the ways racism operates to maintain the status quo. And not talking about it, not taking that risk, is missing an opportunity to make your workplace more inclusive.

This originally appeared in The Mouse and the Elephant Weekly. Read the full email, explore other resources, and subscribe at https://tinyletter.com/mouseandelephant/.

It’s been quite a week at Google. “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” a 10-page manifesto criticizing Google’s pro-diversity efforts, went viral inside the company last Friday. It was leaked to the public on Saturday. Its author, software engineer James Damore, was fired on Monday. After resulting online harassment of Google employees throughout the week, a planned all-hands town hall meeting inside Google was canceled on Thursday because, as CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a letter to employees, “Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall.”

Google was already under scrutiny on diversity issues, specifically its treatment of women. In April, as part of a wage-discrimination investigation by the Department of Labor, Regional Director Janette Wipper testified that “we found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce.” And The Guardian reported on Tuesday that, “More than 60 current and former Google employees are considering bringing a class-action lawsuit alleging sexism and pay disparities against women.”

So even when the furor over this particular memo dies down, that scrutiny won’t go away.

Nor should it.

Setting questions of damage control aside, “The most important question we should be asking of leaders at Google and that they should be asking of themselves is this: why is the environment at Google such that racists and sexists feel supported and safe in sharing these views in the company? What about the company culture sends the message that sharing sexism and racism will be accepted?” writes former Google engineer Erica Baker. “What has shaped the culture thus far, to get to this point? In short, Google leadership should do a post-mortem, a real one, on how the company got to this place where they’ve experienced such a catastrophic failure in their culture, assuming it is indeed viewed as such.”

The larger frame for these questions is the culture of U.S. society. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is pushing many to face these same questions about our country. How did we get here? What about our country’s culture sends the message that sharing hatred will be accepted? We each have individual questions to ask of ourselves and the spaces we occupy.

That’s why these questions need to be asked well beyond Google.

As Stanford computer science professor Cynthia Lee writes, “To be a woman in tech is to know the thrill of participating in one of the most transformative revolutions humankind has known, to experience the crystalline satisfaction of finding an elegant solution to an algorithmic challenge, to want to throw the monitor out the window in frustration with a bug and, later, to do a happy dance in a chair while finally fixing it. To be a woman in tech is also to always and forever be faced with skepticism that I do and feel all those things authentically enough to truly belong.”

Lee goes on to dismantle the “biological differences” argument Damore asserted in his memo:

In other words, this is a culture issue. And until Google, its Silicon Valley peers, and indeed, workplaces worldwide address it as a culture issue — not a recruiting issue, not a pipeline issue, not a performance review issue, but a culture issue — and in so doing create diverse, welcoming, equitable, and truly inclusive cultures, incidents like this memo and lawsuits like the ones Google faces will continue to arise.

Because incidents and lawsuits are never the problems.

They are always the symptoms.

This originally appeared in The Mouse and the Elephant Weekly. Read the full email, explore other resources, and subscribe at https://tinyletter.com/mouseandelephant/.