182. Profit Without Oppression: Getting into Nuance with Kim Crayton
Creating Alternative Systems
There has been a lot of conversation about dismantling systems of oppression over the last few years. But too often, this conversation stalls before turning into action.
It’s not enough to have language to explain concepts and systems of supremacy, disrimination, and exploitation or to simply take in information. Change happens when we take action.
Kim Crayton joins Erica for a wide-ranging conversation about why she’s done with call outs, why dismantling systems isn’t enough, and how she’s envisioning and creating alternative systems through Profit Without Oppression.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
Why Kim is no longer interested in calling out harm
How academic theories like white guilt and fragility inhibit action
Why Kim doesn’t use the term ally
How Kim is envisioning a future that is supremacy free, coercion free, discrimination free, and exploitation free
A Hopeful, Authentic, and Strategic Future
As the Antiracist Economist, Kim Crayton is dedicated to building a future that Is Supremacy, Coercion, Discrimination, and Exploitation FREE. Formerly known for #causeascene, she used her platform to call out harm and the facade of inclusion, often consulting with tech companies that were experiencing “challenges” when it came to ensuring the welcoming and psychological safety of their work environment.
After years of the status quo Kim has shifted. She is no longer putting out fires and instead is ready to focus her time and efforts on moving forward. Having worked many years as an educator she decided to become the mentor she wished she’d had. Using her own lived experience to guide her, Kim has been actively working to build businesses that model Profit Without Oppression by sharing knowledge and helping others develop skills in ways that accommodate the masses. In doing so Kim is laying the foundation for a Future that is Hopeful, Authentic and Strategic in Action…are you in?
The Beginning of #causeascene
On the Pause on the Play® podcast Erica Courdae (she/her) and Kim Crayton (she/her) begin by reflecting on the last three years, starting with the onset of the pandemic.
While Erica says she was totally burned out after 2020 and 2021 and she is actively working to recreate the normal she wants, Kim says, “I was made for a freaking pandemic.”
She says she understands why so many people hit a wall in 2020, but that her experience spearheading #causeascene starting in 2018 prepared her in many respects.
She says #causeascene arose out of her frustration with being called on as a diversity and inclusion expert, when her expertise was as a business strategist, and how DEI was focused more on optics than action.
“But the reason I have to keep talking about D&I…is because no one has it. I don’t wanna be dealing with this. I wanna be helping you build your business, but I can’t do that in an information economy where diversity is not a nice-to-have, it is a must-have when your products and services are impacting a global community.”
She says she was being invited to speak by companies and at conferences, but was frequently expected to rack up expenses for travel and accommodations on her own credit card.
“They wanted to bring me in to make white folks uncomfortable, but you weren’t doing anything to benefit me. I was not getting anything out of it. So at that point, I was like, screw it, I have nothing to lose…So I just started calling people out…If I was gonna be the trope of the Angry Black Woman, I was gonna live up to it. I was gonna be strategic about being the Angry Black Woman.”
2020 and the Inadequacy of White Guilt
Because of that experience, by the time 2020 came around, she was ready to move on from call outs and telling white people that they needed to be uncomfortable.
“I realized, oh, white people can take a lot of discomfort.”
She says prior to 2020, “I saw us moving into what people considered…forced diversity, inclusion, and equity, instead of understanding that it is necessary. And because…they perceived that it was being forced upon them, they were fighting hard against it.”
When the pandemic started, Kim recognized that it would highlight many of the systemic issues and inequities that she had already been discussing.
“White folks need to see that there’s no solidarity in whiteness. There’s no loyalty in whiteness. There’s no community in whiteness. It’s all about individuality. And the people with the most power are always putting the people who are the most vulnerable in positions where they can be harmed.”
She gives essential workers as an example. Early in the pandemic, people were cheering for them, and “two years later, we’re treating ‘em like shit again.”
When George Floyd was murdered, Kim knew there would be an outpouting of white guilt, but predicted that it wouldn’t last. She says in July of 2020, she began a three-part course on an introduction to being anti-racist. The first session had 1200 people in it. Two months later, the second session had less than 300 people, and the final session had 200.
“I wasn’t upset. I knew it was happening because this is how whiteness works.”
She says this kind of behavior pattern is also what put a book like White Fragility by Robin Diangelo on the bestseller list. The book is not about anti-racism, but is an academic theory that gave white people language for their behavior, but no call to action to change the behavior.
White people then weaponized that language to excuse their continued racist behavior.
“I don’t give a fuck about your white fragility. You need to manage your feelings. Now you understand this shit, that doesn’t absolve you from the harm…There was never a, what do I need to do to make amends and make the people whole who my white fragility harmed.”
Kim also pushes back against the term microaggression because “there’s nothing micro about it. It is professional violence.”
Those behaviors distract from the actual event, recenter a white person’s feelings, and put the person whose boundaries were violated on the defensive.
“Whiteness can only be cast in two roles–hero or victim–and never the villain. So if it can never be the villain, then that means we are the villain. And so that’s why whiteness created blackness.”
Building Alternative Systems
Kim says that the pandemic highlighted that the systems of whiteness and capitalism can’t be dismantled or redefined.
“It is not broken. It is performing exactly how it was designed.”
In 2020, “I thought about Audre Lord, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’...It became a very clear understanding for me that any more effort put into dismantling, tearing down, quote, unquote repairing, is not only a waste, but is designed for me to burn out. It is designed for me as a Black woman to have high blood pressure and diabetes and get all that stuff, because we are the moral compass of this world, and our collective liberation is through us.”
She says Black women have always been put in positions of caring for others ahead of themselves. “When the shit hits the fan, it is Black women who have been trained to come in and clean that up.”
Kim realized that she could not be a martyr to antiracism work and that she couldn’t continue teaching people the basics. “I’m moving on to the PhD level. I cannot continue to be teaching ABCs.”
She stopped recording her podcast and began envisioning building something else.
“I don’t want my work in the future to be rooted in being against white supremacy and anti-Blackness. My work is rooted in something positive. I wanna be moving towards instead of against.”
She developed the Profit Without Oppression economic theory.
“Everybody keeps talking about, oh, capitalism is bad. That’s bullshit. Capitalism is a theory. That’s all it is. It’s how it’s been implemented [that] is problematic.”
She says in the United States, the capitalist system was built on the annihilation of Indigenous People and enslavement of Africans, and that is the system that we’ve exported. But she says Adam Smith, considered by many to be the grandfather of economics, was an abolitionist.
Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, the same year as the Declaration of Independence. The framers of the Declaration, and later the U.S. constitution, particularly Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton were familiar with Smith’s work, but needed to justify their continued enslavement of Africans even as they adopted a capitalist structure.
“What I’m saying is, if these people got to decide what capitalism looks like, then I get to decide what capitalism looks like…What Profit Without Oppression theory seeks to discover, is can we have an economic environment, an ecosystem, that is supremacy free, coercion free, discrimination free, and exploitation free?”
The goal is to present an alternative to our existing system, so that we no longer engage in the distraction of evaluating and hedging our ethics and morals to continue engaging with the system as it is now.
“What I’m intending to build are systems, institutions, and policies that are rooted in supremacy, coercion, discrimination, and exploitation free. And I’m helping people to do the same so that we can have an entirely different ecosystem.”
Allies and Co-Conspirators
Erica says she also witnessed the way that interest in DEI fell off as 2020 progressed.
“We had to figure out, what are we doing to make people solution-oriented? If we’re just talking, talking does nothing.”
Kim adds that white people get into cycles of shame and guilt, where they are both helpless and harmful. “As an educator, your shame and your guilt does nothing for me. It provides nothing. It’s all about you.”
Erica says that’s where Imperfect Allyship® comes in, because people have to learn to be okay with messing up. “The problem is not to fuck it up, the problem is what you do after you fuck it up.”
Kim frames it as, “We are trying to create something that was never meant to exist…We are all messing it up…How I get around that is, I’m always focused on the most vulnerable. And when I do fuck up, what did I learn? How do I make amends? How do I make these individuals whole again?”
Kim says this is why she uses the term co-conspirator rather than ally. “An ally waits on the sidelines waiting for me to tell them to do something…I need you to, if they’re about to arrest both of us or about to arrest me, you say, no, that was me. And you take that damn paddy wagon ride. That’s what the hell I need.”
Erica says she agrees, but uses the term ally because there’s an existing understanding of what that means.
Kim responds, “Who got to define that term?”
She says she witnessed too many white people declaring themselves allies in one space, then trying to transfer that “like it was a badge and they would wear on their jacket every damn where they went,” regardless of whether they may be causing harm in those spaces.
She continues, “And allyship can be retracted. A co-conspirator can’t retract because you’re a part of this.”
She says allyship has been stripped of its meaning by white people because they treat it like a badge they can claim. “Allyship is something that someone tells you you’re doing for them in their community, not something that you take on for yourself.”
She asks, “Are you a co-conspirator? Are you willing to take these blows for me? If you not, then I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t need you.”
Erica says ultimately it doesn’t matter what word is used if there is no action to back it up.
Kim agrees, but adds that people do need a language for describing their positions. For that reason, she says she does always open her talks by defining terms so that everyone has a shared understanding of the words she’s using.
The same issues around needing shared language also come up when she is consulting on the development of a company’s code of conduct. “If I define it, and we agree on the terms, then when you violate those terms, those boundaries, then I have something to hold you accountable for.”
Towards Shared Understanding
While having a shared understanding of terms is necessary for accountability, Kim also cautions that we still need to hold space for nuance and that strict binaries are themselves tools of white supremacy.
Though Kim says she has let go of managing white people’s feelings. “When I stopped managing other people’s feelings and understanding that that was no longer my role as a Black woman, oh my god, I had so much freedom, so much space to think and to explore.”
As an example of a space where both shared expectations and nuance existed, she describes her style of classroom management. Students were expected to greet the class when they entered and to treat it like a community.
But there was space for nuance in classroom conversations and in allowing students to come to the answers by whatever method worked for them.
She says the same holds true for businesses. “You need to operationalize your core values in processes, procedures, and policies. Because once you put those things that can be documented, which is explicit knowledge, somewhere, then you have the space to deal with tacit knowledge, or the crisis, or the risk things that come up. Then you’re not starting from scratch every time.”
Erica agrees that having shared baseline expectations while allowing for nuance is key.
Kim says that lack of a shared baseline is part of why she refuses to engage in debate with people, especially online.
And it’s why she doesn’t want to be against white supremacy or against anti-Blackness, but to be for supremacy-free, coercion-free, discrimination-free, and exploitation-free systems.
“I can have any conversation with anybody if that is our basic shared understanding.”
She continues, “So the binary is, is this something you want to develop or believe in? Yes or no? If you say no, then you go about your business. If you say yes, now we can get into the nuance.”
Erica says that’s where there is a difference between having space for real nuance, and having space where people can hide and claim they didn’t know.
Kim has rules of engagement that operate at the community level for that reason.
In her communities, there is no debating anyone’s humanity or right to exist. People are expected to listen to and respect others’ lived experiences. And with that as a baseline, they can come together and create something together collaboratively rather than with compromise.
The Expectation of 110%
Kim’s framework for engagement has been expanded into her forthcoming book Profit Without Oppression: A Blueprint for Building an Antiracist Organization.
She says she’s already certain that white people will try to steal from her and repackage her ideas, but she knows people in her community will recognize her voice.
She calls out the quiet quitting conversation and says, “Black women quiet quit a long time ago,” because they were taught and given the expectation that they should work harder, and then witnessed their white peers slacking by comparison.
Kim gives an example of her time working for a nonprofit that had offices in multiple cities. When she was given an assignment on Friday and turned it in Tuesday morning. Then she got a call telling her not to turn things in ahead of deadlines.
“That is what whiteness is used to. If we tried that, it wouldn’t work for us.”
She continues, “That is what y’all just don’t understand, what it means to be told your whole life that you have to give 110%. Whiteness is mediocre and unremarkable and I stand by it. White dudes are not my equal at all. What you are, is able to leverage systems, institutions, and policies of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, in ways that I’m not.”
Who Benefits from Whiteness
Erica says that when she connected with Kim. “I didn’t meet many people that were in tech that was a Black woman…[Let alone] somebody that was in that space that was in a place that they were like, I’m not okay with this being like it is, and I’m willing to rage against the machine in this particular space.”
Kim says everyone has their own internalized white supremacy and anti-Blackness to grapple with, because we’ve all been indoctrinated into those systems.
Erica adds that there is a difference between being willing to engage in dismantling those influences in your life and behavior, and “being willing to just go along with your regularly scheduled programming because it benefits you.”
Kim says that there are a lot of C-Suite level Black professionals, particularly Gen-X and Baby Boomers, that find her threatening or unlikable at first.
“Because what my work points out to Black women is, baby, you may be here but because of the systems, institutions, and policies of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, you could be much further. And no one wants to hear that…It goes back to the whiteness of individuality. ‘I did this.’ No you didn’t; they allowed you.”
Kim acknowledges that this dynamic of being allowed a voice or a role played a significant part of the visibility of #causeascene.
“When Trump finally started wilding out, the more he wilded out, the more I was able to speak my truth, understand my truth, see other people, and connect the dots.”
And that symbiotic relationship continues to play out with the latest crop of far-right extremist politicians. “If it wasn’t for them fulfilling their contract, my contract would never be fulfilled.”
But she says, “I think more white people are realizing that they’re not only complicit in my harm, but they’re being destroyed as well…White supremacy is only designed for chaos and destruction. There is no bottom. So once we’re all gone, who do you think it’s gonna come for?”
And she says she extends grace to people who have used whiteness to their benefit. “I can’t blame them for that because what was the alternative?”
She gives Candace Owens as an example and says that there have always been Black people in the community who have benefited from whiteness. “What is different [now], is white people have gravitated to that shit and amplified it.”
The challenge then becomes, for someone like Owens, that when she consistently acts in service of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, “when she steps into doing anything that is pro-Black, she gets her hand slapped.”
That dynamic is why Kim says Black people can’t be racist. “We can hate white folks. We cannot be racist because we cannot leverage systems, institutions, and policies of white supremacy and anti-Blackness on our own behalf.”
AND Not OR
Erica says that when she met Kim, not only was Kim 150% herself, but she had a very clear and concrete understanding of what she was doing, why she was doing it, what she was working toward and understood what needed to change.
And Kim says that has come with a cost. There are people who will never work with her or listen to her and opportunities that she will never have access to because of how vocal she has been.
She has gotten feedback from people who initially resisted her messaging and ideas, but later told her they just weren’t ready for it at the time.
Erica says even she wasn’t sure she was on board with Kim’s advice to her at first about creating her own intellectual property and her own platform. But she realized that Kim was right.
“The creating of your own means that you have a part in trying to create something that is better than what exists, because your lived experience ended up being a part of creating this, even with the things that we all have within us, that we have to dismantle…this is still leaps and bounds ahead in the understanding of how equity needs to show up.”
Kim says that’s why it’s important to remember that we can do two things at once, that it’s an “and” not an “or,” and whiteness thrives on “or.”
Democratizing Entrepreneurial Education
Kim says she wrote her book to act as the mentor she wishes she’d had.
She says she has always been an entrepreneur at heart, but hasn’t been able to make it work. And while she’s had great mentors, they have all been white, and therefore have different assumptions about Kim’s ability to leverage systems, institutions, and policies.
As she’s pursued education in business and technology–she’s currently finishing a doctoral program in business administration with a focus on technology entrepreneurship–she will be well over $300,000 in debt.
“No one should have to do that to get this information that is passed down to whiteness. So my goal is to democratize business school education. I’m trying to get it to any hands of people, particularly those who are marginalized and underrepresented, who would not have access to this information.”
Kim notes that not only has she had to take on debt, but that the school environment itself isn’t supportive or accessible to everybody and institutional white supremacy has taken a toll on her as she’s pursued her degrees.
But the experience has allowed her to realize that the failings of the system aren’t personal to her, but are the result of the impacts of white supremacist systems, institutions, and policies. And those experiences allowed her to write Profit Without Oppression: A Blueprint for Building an Antiracist Organization.
The book is in three parts. The first delves into personal reflection and holding yourself accountable.
The second expands into Kim’s six-step process for building a business that is rooted in core values that are based on beingsupremacy-free, coercion-free, discrimination-free, and exploitation-free. It also outlines how to bring those core values into your operations, processes, procedures, and policies.
The final section of the book digs into building community within your organization without harmful and manipulative structures and norms.
“If you can understand and embody supremacy, coercion, discrimination, and exploitation free at work, you’ll be doing that in your home as well…This is my solution to how we all start building a consistent, demonstrated anti-racist practice.”
Create Your Own Strategy
Kim says that one key thing for people to understand about our current systems, is that we are here by design.
She recommends that people read the Powell Memo, published in 1971 for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memo is a direct reaction to the liberal movements of the 60s.
“Industry realized that liberal thinking, inclusive thinking, true diversity of thought, was a problem for them.”
The memo outlined an explicit strategy for getting conservatives into academia to publish conservative research to influence policy that continues to impact us today.
“I need you to stop looking at everything as if it just happened. Because once you start seeing that it’s happening as designed, then you can step back and it’s not so personal.”
Kim says that realization emboldened her. “If they could create a strategy, I can.”
She says that when you read the Powell Memo, “use that to create the strategy that for you aligns with supremacy-free, coercion-free, discrimination-free, and exploitation-free. If you do that, you are on your way.”
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