Racial Excavation: Racializing Organizations and Organizing Race

• In Event: 1470 - DuBoisian Sociology: Critical Insights for Theorizing Race and Ethnicity

Abstract

In 2015 student protests emerged across American college and university campuses. Motivated by heightened awareness of anti-Black racism in the United States, exemplified by the public killings of Black men and women by mostly white police officers, these protests drew attention to the failure of the respective institutions to respond to and remedy racism in their own localized campus community. By December, students from 80 colleges and universities independently outlined their demands. These demands largely consisted of an increase in the enrollment of students of color, particularly those from historically underrepresented groups the hiring of faculty of color, and a commitment and plan to combat the structural racism present on campuses. For student activists, a gradual change in the racial composition of the campus was not sufficient; a plan was needed to contend with the other racist elements of the institution. The protestors understood that race operates beyond any one person or set of people and an organization is more than the sum of its racialized individuals. Understanding race and, more importantly, racism requires a theoretical framework that conceives organizations, in addition to persons, as racialized units. Racism and racialization by the institution would not end by simply changing the number of non-white persons on campus; rather, more totalizing change to the organization itself was necessary to contend with the present racism. Limiting organizations as sites where racialized persons exist and operate discounts how the organization itself also participates in racially structuring its social context and reflects certain racial understandings and hierarchies. Bringing together critical race theory and organizational theory, this paper proposes a racial excavation framework, consisting of five analytical dimensions (audience, workforce, technologies, boundaries, and environment), to identify the racialized elements of an organization.

Authors

• Tina M. Park, Brown University

• Prabhdeep Singh Kehal, Brown University