Racialized Organizations and the Interest Divergence Dilemma1

Abstract

This essay makes three points on the contemporary racial backlashes' impact on racialized organizations. First, Derrick Bell's notion of interest convergence—which argues that diversity policies did not spring from the goodness of white people's hearts but were a face-saving political necessity—helps to explain why the current assault on racially ameliorative policy has been so effective and why the retreat from diversity may worsen. Conservative activists are attempting to force interest divergence, as the historical conditions leading to affirmative action and diversity policy have disappeared. Second, Powell's decision in Regents of University of California versus Bakke, which made diversity orthodox, was facilitated by interest convergence. Diversity emerged as a deeply reformist organizational strategy designed to manage civil rights activists' revolutionary calls for a fully inclusive society. Third, interest divergence and the retreat from diversity have major implications for deepening racial inequality in organizations. By attempting to ensure interest divergence, contemporary right-wing movements hope to make the currently implicit white dominance of mainstream organizations (Ray 2019b) explicit again.