Understanding Racism in the Workplace

Abstract

When I was approached with the opportunity to serve as a guest editor for a special section on understanding racism in the workplace, our society and science were at a critical juncture. Very violent, public, and repeated instances of racial injustice gave the world a clear and sobering view of current manifestations of racial prejudice and hostility. Despite a predominant belief that racist attitudes had evolved from being antagonistic and blatant in nature to more ambivalent and nuanced (Brief et al., 2000), such events served to reconceptualize the idea of modern racism (see McConahay, 1986). At the same time, debates about the validity of defining race as a social construct and the acknowledgment of the embeddedness of bias in legal and organizational policies and systems intensified (Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.). Yet, as such events pushed racism to the forefront of societal consciousness and discourse, its phenomenology was not new or novel. Defined as an organized social system of privilege that establishes dominant and nondominant groups based on race and affords members of dominant racial groups access to resources, opportunities, and other advantageswhile limiting access to such outcomes for other groups (Avery et al., 2018; Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Dovidio et al., 1986), racism is a global phenomenon that has permeated workplaces throughout history (Colella et al., 2017; Nishii & Ozbilgin, 2007). Yet, empirical investigations of racism in organizational settings and as a component of employees’ experiences at work have been considerably less ubiquitous.