(Photo by iStock/gremlin)
Some of Aida Davis’s earliest memories are of encounters with anti-Blackness and dehumanization. The daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, she describes Apple Valley, her small Southern California hometown, as a hostile environment that welcomed neo-Nazis on the city council and where neighbors touted white supremacist values. As painful and frightening as those experiences were, they helped propel Davis on her path to launching Decolonize Design, a global consulting firm that aims to provide organizations with a meaningful alternative to traditional diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) approaches.
“I started Decolonize Design out of a frustration with traditional design and organizing approaches,” Davis says. “I believe that design is a tool. It’s a problem-solving approach to create innovation, which is indigenous to systemically oppressed peoples. To survive in really harsh conditions is innovation, and we need to reclaim that.”
Davis was the sole employee when she founded her organization at the end of 2018. She says it was “unsurprising” that, as a Black woman, she wasn’t initially able to get investor funding. Instead, her consulting firm continues to rely on the fees it charges clients. Ultimately, Davis says, she and her team—which has grown to eight members—are trying to build a movement of stakeholders, not shareholders.
“At this point we are doing well, and I’m not excited at the prospect of investors,” she says. Davis is committed to maintaining her integrity and her vision for her business, which likely wouldn’t be possible if she had to answer to investors.
Aida Davis founded Decolonize Design, a global consulting firm, to revolutionize the diversity, equity, and inclusion conversation.(Photo courtesy of Shellee Fisher)
Davis believes that what she refers to as the “DEI industrial complex” is superficial and harmful, and Decolonize Design seeks to disrupt that model through community-centered alternatives. Davis explains that this 30-year-old industry, which spends about $8 billion on diversity trainings alone, isn’t providing any tangible results or change.
Many organizations using a traditional DEI model focus on a lack of diversity, or a need to create a more diverse workforce. Davis questions what people really mean when they say they want more diversity. “It’s typically discussed in relation to white, heteronormative, dominant culture, and that type of thinking has to be abandoned,” Davis explains. “DEI asks people of color to participate more deeply in a system not created for them and one that does not see their complete culture and humanity,” she adds. “DEI in its current form cannot address the intergenerational legacies of white supremacy, nor is it a mechanism for organizational change and innovation.”
Decolonize Design offers an alternative framework that is grounded in belonging, dignity, and justice (BDJ). Belonging means that all people are welcomed in a space as they are. No person is expected to change anything about who they are in order to fit into an environment. Dignity means that everyone is respected and valued in a company, from the CEO to the janitor. Justice is “about making people whole and repairing harm and being reparative and restorative,” Davis says. The BDJ framework seeks to abolish assimilation and promotes taking responsibility to challenge and confront racism and anti-Blackness head-on.
“While organizations are increasingly acknowledging DEI, the framework has been critiqued for good reason,” observes political economist and participatory designer Nicole Anand. “The Decolonize Design BDJ framework boldly and powerfully drives organizations toward values that can only be assessed through the understanding of lived experiences.”
Through workshops, focus groups, and training sessions, Davis and her team create sustainable transformation for companies by centering Black and Indigenous methods. “We believe in Sankofa, which means we have to look back to move forward,” says Davis about the concept, which originates from Ghana’s Akan tribe. “We can reclaim design to create new experiences and new services, so that everybody can reach their potential.”
The companies that seek help from Decolonize Design have usually suffered a failed DEI experience. Her team selects clients based on their desire to exercise courage and to take a stand in language and action.
“As a music company, failing to have the talents of marginalized people equitably represented at our company and in our work was a foundational failure,” says Lauren McGuire, president of Man Made Music. “Decolonize Design’s Belonging, Dignity, and Justice approach is both a breath of fresh air and a welcome punch to the gut. We sought radical change, and Decolonize Design’s ‘anti-DEI’ approach is the disruption to the status quo we both wanted and needed.”
Anyone who has benefitted from white supremacy has a responsibility to make moves to be restorative and reparative. According to Davis, while there is no clear formula for what this looks like, the principles necessary to guide the design of effective strategies “include rigorous and disciplined inquiry, limitless reimagining of systems, a culture of learning and leadership, and abandoning assimilation.”
Read more stories by Shani Saxon.