Ollie Folayan's Antiracist Toolkit

In October 2025, Ollie Folayan, one of the founders of the Association for Black and Minority Ethnic Engineers (AFBE), delivered a webinar to advise a toolkit which helps individual employees and stakeholders understand racism and develop the framework for conscious action. In the first of a 2-part series, Ollie explains why such a toolkit is essential and the background behind it.

"These are very much the times in which misinformation and hate can spread rapidly leaving devasting consequences in its wake.

An example of this is in August 2025 a family had their lives turned upside down after they became the subject of share campaign online. Natalie Ayeni, 52, and her husband Olajuwon, 35 a couple who live in Redcar were enjoying a day out at the park. Olajuwon who is black was playing with his white twin granddaughters. Natalie recorded a clip and posted it on TikTok with the caption “Grandad duties with the twins”. The video was lifted and reposted to a far-right campaigner’s 1.4 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) under the caption: “Wtf is even going on here? Where are the parents?!”. Misrepresentation then followed online with the same video being posted on other social media platforms with the caption, “African Invaders playing with little white girls at the local park”.

The clip’s misrepresentation triggered a wave of harassment, including false accusations that Mr Ayeni was a paedophile. Olajuwon, whose career was launched through a leading record label in Nigeria, said his management suspended all business dealings until the matter was resolved.

This is merely one instance that aligns with the deterioration of discussions on racial matters in recent years and the proliferation of hateful rhetoric. More troubling than this is the effort by self-proclaimed moderates to appease extremists by adopting some of their language. In his letter from a Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King expressed profound disappointment not with the KKK, but with “moderates” who, in his view, prioritized order over justice.

Luther was pointing out that when the mainstream tries too hard to placate extremists, what they do instead is move the centre of the Overton window in a hateful direction and cede ground overall. It was with this in mind that I was asked by our team at AFBE-UK last October to speak about the antiracist toolkit – a set of building blocks I started working on following the 2024 riots.

Why a Toolkit?

The antiracist toolkit is a resource that will help people understand racism and develop the framework for conscious action. Talks, lunch and learns and workshops became commonplace due to the heightened awareness that followed the tragic death of George Floyd in 2020, but these talks have yet to really transform the culture of our organisations. Even when there are specific initiatives or targets set, this can often be quite arbitrary not based on any real assessment of the status quo and not tied to the organisation’s vision as such. They are noble goals, which in and of themselves may be useful, but lack any real connection to the organisation’s key performance indicators and therefore are never embedded and are not sustainable.

I recently had a conversation with a senior leader who expressed a significant concern regarding the term "diversity." The leader rightly observed that many diversity-related initiatives are implemented without truly being embedded within the organisation's culture.

While I agreed with the leader’s concern about the lack of sustained impact, I also emphasised that embedding cultural change is a process. Think of the way in which change is managed on oil and gas platforms. We identify the change as part of a Management of Change process; it gets reviewed by key stakeholders and only when that change is deemed necessary does it progress to the design phase. Expecting to embed change without going through the process of raising awareness, involving the right stakeholders, framing policy, testing said policy etc would be like going straight from a request for modification to an As-Build. It's crucial to go through the stages before lasting change can take root. It is for this reason that a Toolkit is important.

The Toolkit:

It is important to note that the Toolkit does not prescribe what your company’s Framework should be specifically, rather it provides the reader with the building blocks required to make their own. The toolkit presented are based on 6 premises:

• Define: Racism is a set of Ideas, values and systems that result in the denial of equal opportunity to the affected group

• Understand: Racism cannot be understood through the lens of generic Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).

• Investigate: To address racism, you must Investigate where there is racial inequity in areas where you hold power.

• Involve: Meaningfully involve people of colour in the process

• Plan: Have a racial equity action plan

• Measure: Use Power to make measurable progress toward racial equity

In this blog, I touch on the first two points. I will discuss the remaining in part 2

Define

Modern racism is often reductively viewed only through the lens of overt, interpersonal acts of discrimination. However, this overlooks the fact that most contemporary racism is expressed through innuendo, tropes, stereotypes, misinformation, and micro-incivilities. Many of these have deep cultural and historical significance that may not be obvious to the perpetrator or even the victim.

In our presentation, The Ethics of Ethnic Diversity, we trace the evolution of modern racism:

1. Proto-Racial Ideas: From the concept of "purity of blood" articulated after the Reconquista in Spain in 1492 and in the Americas. This was the start of the religious era of racism.

2. Scientific Racism: Through the work of figures like Carl Linnaeus and Samuel George Morton (author of Crania Americana).

3. The way in which Scientific racism justified the industrialised scale of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

4. The Post-Holocaust Era: Following the 1950 UNESCO declaration that race is not a biological category.

5. Modern/Cultural Racism: Its eventual mutation into a form less about superior humans and more about superior cultures.

This historical context is vital to understanding why racism extends beyond interpersonal acts; it is fundamentally about systems and societal structures. These structures foster institutional inequalities, resulting in inequality of opportunity, and demonstrate how racist ideas can become so internalised that they are championed by anyone, regardless of background.

A powerful illustration of how systemic racism creates individual health disparities is the correction formerly embedded in US to measure kidney function.

A race-based adjustment was added to Black participants based on the unconfirmed hypothesis that they had higher average serum creatinine concentrations than white participants. The result of this correction was that until its removal in 2021, Black patients had fewer kidney problems diagnosed because the diagnostic thresholds were artificially higher. This led to missed diagnoses and highlights the serious consequences of systemic bias, including the potential for other countries to unknowingly adopt tools or judgments based on similar unconfirmed hypotheses.

Being clear on what racism is, how it mutates, and the various levels on which it operates is a fundamental building block for meaningful change.

Understanding

It follows if racism has a specific history that it cannot simply be addressed by the generic frameworks designed for equality, diversity and inclusion. Resources and time must be devoted to it and if it is to be effectively understood. In my experience most companies prioritise a focus area and rarely extend meaningfully beyond that aspect. In no other sphere of activity do we attempt to tackle a problem without understanding specifics. It leads to surface level interventions that do not lead to substantive change. I frequently meet business leaders who see themselves as diversity champions but never reach a proper understanding of racism because they never make time to understand racism outside of the EDI Prism. In her book the Antiracist organisation, the writer Shereen Daniels gave a personal account of being diagnosed with a form of cancer. Shereen’s treatment began with a visit to a general practitioner but once the cancer was diagnosed, she had to be referred to a cancer specialist. In the same way, racism must be understood through special knowledge and not just the general practice of an EDI professional. Understanding racism is also knowing the arena of struggle.

Many active antiracists of the past would point to the battle of Cable Street in 1936, the big campaigns against apartheid in 1980s, Stop Hate UK’s campaign of the 1990s and many others. While protest still has its place, the covert nature of racial hate and the fact that the arena in which most of the debate takes place is on social media means that the modern antiracist will find that the fight is against a different adversary. These adversaries are:

The Web of False Narratives

We live in the attention economy where so many things vie for our time. The speed at which information comes our way often means that we are receiving stories at a pace too fast to process and verify and this is where quite a lot of racist narratives are all communicated. The most important tool of the antiracist today is critical thinking and the ability to ask the question “how do you know that?”. Most of us expect racism to be articulated as angry and perhaps less formally educated voices, but in the current context the messenger and style of delivery is less important than the information being conveyed and whether there is any basis for what’s been asserted. Racist narratives can be delivered by people who sound reasonable, even affable. The effect however is often to invoke a sense of victimhood in listeners. These false narratives are often a revised version of old discredited ideas and so the modern antiracist must devote time to understanding these narratives and must sharpen their ability to discern truth from lies.

The Dog Whistle

The dog whistle is a high-pitched whistle invented in 1876 by Sir Francis Galton to train dogs. The dog whistle typically has a sound inaudible to humans, and it is also commonly used to describe subtly aimed messages intended for, and understood by, a particular demographic group and affording the user deniability. Many racist tropes are transmitted using a dog whistle. It is therefore important for the modern antiracist to recognise a dog whistle and be equipped to query it. Galton’s primary interest was developing a scientific study of human differences. In 1869, he published “Hereditary Genius,” a book arguing that human intelligence and other mental attributes were biologically inherited.

Galton disregarded “pretensions of natural equality” and concluded that high achievers tended to have children, brothers or cousins who were also well accomplished. Galton carried this “science” to an appallingly racist conclusion, asserting that high-achieving Black people could never rank higher than the average Anglo-Saxon, and that statistically the race was inferior. Galton’s whistle was a scientific instrument designed to test his hypothesis that differences among human races were the result of inheritance rather than environment. If race differences (based on his flawed method of measuring intelligence and accomplishment) were the result of an evolutionary process, then they wouldn’t disappear by providing equal opportunities and resources. Galton made his trips to the zoo to reinforce his idea that biological differences were both inherited and attributable to evolution. Animal tests were key to his scientific racism.

The Gaslight

Gaslighting is the psychological manipulation of a person into questioning their own sanity, memory, or powers of reasoning. While the term originated from a 1944 film, the practice is a frequent source of conflict, often leaving affected individuals feeling manipulated, especially in disputes where no overt racism has occurred. Denial almost instinctively follows any allegation of racism and unless there are mechanisms in place to verify the facts, victims of racism end up losing out every time.

The most effective way to address gaslighting in a company is through staff training designed to help employees understand and recognize the myriad of ways it can manifest. It is also important to recognise that most gaslighting occurs within the context of a power dynamic. This power dynamic is not strictly defined by the organisational structure, but is often determined by whether individuals are perceived as being part of the in-group or the out-group.

To the modern antiracist, are good intentions enough? Ask of yourself and your organisations:

1. What steps are you taking to understand the ways that modern racism occurs?

2. Has adequate resource been allocated to develop such work meaningfully and with more depth?

3. In an increasingly digitised world, what measures do you have in place to imbibe critical thinking in your staff? "