“First, the colours of beautiful bodies must not be dusky or muddy, but clean and fair. Secondly, they must not be of the strongest kind. Those which seem most appropriated to beauty, are the milder of every sort….”

– Edmund Burke

How does your business impact diversity and inclusion? Is your business afraid of the dark? The purpose of this resource is to help business and community stakeholders design imagery that supports Black bodies as visible, sentient, and human in a shared human experience.

In this guide:

• Why Implicit Bias Is Not Enough
• Why Diversity Is Not Enough
• What Is Anti-Blackness?
• What Is ADF?
• ADF, Anti-Blackness, And Your Business
• Worksheet: How Does Your Messaging Impact Diversity And Inclusion?

Why Implicit Bias Is Not Enough

An implicit bias test will track the speed of ones ability to accept and activate an idea.

A recent implicit bias test taken online^1.for “Black” and “White” racial categories asked me to consider values such as “African Americans are good,” and “European Americans are bad” —and the reverse— followed by a touch screen selection of a White or Black face.

The test then asked for my honest racial preferences, in general, but how I answered this was, perhaps, not so important. The confirmation screen indicated that I was actually being tested for how quickly I was able to make the cognitive connection between one value and another: “African American=Good” and “European American=Bad,” for example. The test concluded that I had a slight bias toward African-American, which surprised me given that I had felt during the test that I was perhaps too quick to click the White faces when prompted to select them as good and was too slow to click the good faces when they were Black.

In the end, I decided that to be slightly inclined towards African American is progress, given I have spent my previous decade of life training myself to see Black people as human.

1. Implicit Associations Test, Black and White races @implicit.harvard.edu

Why Diversity Is Not Enough

Diverse and inclusive imagery alone does not end anti-Blackness without diverse and inclusive substance.

I grew up with the ability to see and challenge anti-Blackness while at the same time imagining that my own child would be a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy named “Giancarlo.”

I had apparently equally peculiar contradictions around my own self-image and when I finally confronted these conflicting ideas, realized that “at best,” my children would be “biracial”—and that I did not want Black children.

My vision had been formed by images taken from mandatory education, the books I read, the television I watched, and the politics I saw playing out around me. These feelings went well beyond simply defying expectations of Blackness—I was literally disgusted by my being Black.

Implicit bias may be a genetic inclination to more easily see “as human” those who more closely resemble ones image of family, but cultural bias can outweigh or even overwhelm implicit bias and create an entirely new set of unusual, and unreal, expectations.

The self-contradictions that arose from cultural determinants meant that I not only had to confront the targeted violence against Blackness in our cultural imagination, I had to heal the self-deleterious effects it had on how I imagined myself and my possibilities.

Many years ago some AOL click-bait asked users to vote whether James Brown or Nick Nolte’s mugshot looked the worse. To my surprise, those on board overwhelmingly found James Brown to be the “uglier. To be fair, I found both to be equally bad off but began to wonder whether I was using the correct determinants to weigh ugliness.

What is anti-Blackness?

Anti-Blackness is deliberate or indirect opposition to the institutions and ideas that, to one, symbolize Black political, economic, and social power. In short, it’s an irrational opposition to Black humanity as “humanity” and Black justice as fair. At the core of anti-Blackness is Manichean Motif, a term coined by dramatist Dr. Arthur Graham to describe a 19th-century literary device developed by practitioners of the time to fundamentally seat White supremacist ideology and imagery against Black inferiority in American cultural imagination.

The week following the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castille, this pool safety billboard was vandalized with buckshot in Buckeye, AZ. The public information officer advised that the concern here was property damage. There were two of these billboards. Both were damaged in the same way and, eventually, removed. Photo Credit: Nefertiti Van der Riese

What Is ADF?

African dramatic form is a tool for story development that re-emphasizes story as a figure of community. ADF helps storytellers and image-makers create empathy, meaning, and movement for the audiences they wish to serve.

ADF, Anti-Blackness, And Your Business

Language is metaphorical. Our cultural imagination is essentially anti-Black, anti-woman, and demonizes “undesirables” with this imagery along a spectrum of “white” humanity and “black” inhumanity; and though we do have some guidance for how to construct language and imagery without gender bias, there is little to no guidance on how to construct language and imagery without anti-Blackness.

The cultural and implicit biases that resoundingly inform anti-Blackness create disproportionately undesirable outcomes for Black people in policing, judicial punishment, education, healthcare, politics, and banking ultimately resulting in a continued legacy of wealth exclusion, disenfranchisement, and adversely impacted quality of life.

It is not enough, simply, to increase Black presence in the workforce. Given that so much of our language is imagined around the idea that African humanity is not “humanity,” substance and presence will be essential to affecting outcomes that extirpate anti-Blackness and create diverse, inclusive, and safer communities for all.

ADF helps business storytellers and image-makers reclaim the figure of story to create empathy, meaning, and movement for the communities they wish to serve.

Can I change how you talk about the dark? Learn the three primary figures of anti-Blackness >>