148. Is Urgency Using You As An Agent Of White Supremacy?
A Culture of Urgency
Where are you playing a role in giving or receiving urgency and its harmful side effects?
Urgency isn’t about whether or not something is time-sensitive. Urgency is about demanding something before it’s actually due, creating unreasonable expectations and unhealthy environments in its wake.
We’ve come to accept many things being labeled “urgent”in the business world, but is your urgency creating a culture that reinforces stigmas and health challenges, along with other undesired outcomes?
And if urgency is about saving your time and resources, who’s paying the price for the reclamation?
Erica breaks down what urgency is and isn’t, how it intersects with white supremacy, and how it impacts our stated commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:
How urgency skews priorities and reinforces power imbalances
Why your benchmarks need context, and why some things may not need them at all
How urgency circumvents clear expectations and communication
How urgency impacts relationships and environments
Swift Action
On the Pause on the Play® Podcast, Erica Courdae says that Oxford Languages defines urgency as importance requiring swift action.
When she thinks about situations that truly require swift action, she says “I think about dismantling racism, I think about a car accident, I think about a health crisis.”
The problem we face is that true urgency has been conflated with “I need that TPS report back.”
She says that some things are time-sensitive, but faux urgency means asking for them before they’re due, or setting unreasonable delivery dates that create environments of mental, physical, and emotional stress.
She asks, what is prompting your feeling of urgency? Where is it coming from? And who pays the price for your ability to reclaim time or resources with your urgency?
The power dynamics of urgency intersect with white supremacy in a number of ways and undermine your efforts at Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
The Intersections of Faux Urgency and White Supremacy
Faux urgency intersects with white supremacy when it deprioritizes equity.
Urgency doesn’t care about your health, your time off, needing to be with family, just needing a break from work.
This kind of urgency doesn’t consider anyone but the person making the demand.
Urgency intersects with white supremacy when it prioritizes timelines or deliverables that are assigned in unreasonable, unnecessary, and unhealthy ways.
Urgency insists on working outside of business hours, on vacation, delivering sooner than promised and ignoring boundaries.
Urgency intersects with white supremacy when it prioritizes output to mental, physical, and emotional health.
When productivity and output are valued above the mental, physical, and emotional health and wellness or betterment of individuals, that is a tool of white supremacy.
Urgency intersects with white supremacy when it bypasses opportunities for growth by speeding through undesirable, uncomfortable parts of the growth process.
When urgency utilizes a hierarchical advantage to pass discomfort on to another, it is a tool of white supremacy.
Urgency is a “standard that is deployed to make people feel as though they are either going to respond a certain way or they're going to feel lesser than. It is a tactic that is used against Black and Brown people time and time again.”
Urgency is a tool that upholds the status quo system of white supremacy and it is used against everyone.
What Urgency Is and Isn’t
There are, of course, things with actual due dates, Erica says, in life and in business.
Urgency doesn’t necessarily show up when we set priorities and benchmarks, or in the metrics we create to measure our progress.
Urgency arises, however, when “we prioritize those benchmarks arbitrarily, with zero context, and without addressing any consistent starting place or consistent access.”
As an example, benchmarks exist everywhere in education. But they generate problems when they don’t consider roadblocks to achievement experienced by some children or which children might have advantages that move their starting line.
The key is to consider where benchmarks and metrics are helpful, when they need additional context, and what situations don’t lend themselves to due dates at all.
Urgency also bypasses our clear communication.
When we set expectations for how and when we are in-office, answering emails, or otherwise reachable, we are not employing urgency.
We create urgency when we circumvent others’ clear expectations to assuage our own guilt, discomfort or personal designation of priorities.
Urgency is sending the “I know you’re off today, but…” email and other messages of the kind that show them we don’t care about their clearly stated needs, but only our own.
The Impacts of Urgency
That one “I know you’re out of office…” email you think you’re sending, is often part of a larger context in which people can feel and internalize anxiety, worry, pressure, feelings of not-enoughness, and lack of accountability from the person imparting the urgency.
Urgency shows up as “you have all the time in the world,” then dropping into their inbox three days before the project is due “just to check in.”
Those check-ins pass your anxiety on to the other person because you’re too uncomfortable to carry it.
“You’re basically like, I’m going to walk up to you, I’m going to put the suitcase down, and I’m gonna let you pick it up."
Erica gives several examples of having been on the receiving end of urgency, whether being pressed for details or guilted about needing to call out, or potential clients not accepting that she isn’t available.
When you’re pushing for someone to be available on your timeline, she asks, “If you put urgency on it because you need it right now, the question is why was it not urgent yesterday? Why did it not matter to you prior to now? And why is it that you are offloading this urgency on someone else?”
She says at some point all of us have felt these kinds of urgency and it’s important to pay attention to where and when it comes up.
“When it is trying to use you as an agent for white supremacy, pay attention to it. Notice it. Give yourself grace…And begin to notice where you can evolve it and do it differently.”
Ready to dive deeper?
Urgency loves to show up and dismantle the work you’re doing to reconsider your normal and figure out how things can be done better.
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