Racial Triangulation in Racialized Organizations

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Organizational Politics (Table 8)

Abstract

Research on racialized organizations demonstrates how systemic inequality is reproduced through ostensibly colorblind narratives of meritocracy. Yet they tend to presume a bi-racial structure in which minorities are uniformly excluded from white-dominated institutions. Such models struggle to account for the dual positioning of Asian Americans—simultaneously portrayed as a “model minority” and marked as perpetually foreign. This paradox suggests that racial order does not operate primarily through categorical exclusion, but through conditional inclusion. Rethinking race in the United States, therefore, requires a tri-racial framework (Bonilla-Silva 2004) attentive to gradated inclusion and relational positioning. Racial triangulation theory (Kim 1999) specifies how dominant groups position minority groups along two independent dimensions: relative valorization and civic ostracism. Within triangulated stratification, the same positioning that grants advantage in one institutional context or career stage produces vulnerability and exclusion in another.

Operationalizing this framework within the U.S. Congress, I test six hypotheses using a longitudinal dataset of 29,760 staff members across 88,287 person–Congress observations from 1993 to 2024. Results demonstrate that colorblind meritocratic narratives do not simply mask uniform exclusion; instead, they enable differentiated access across racial groups. Relative valorization operates through credential-based gatekeeping in early career: Asian American staff have greater access to white members’ offices than other minoritized groups, face no advancement penalties once placed in those spaces, and receive amplified returns to insider credentials (i.e., law degrees). Yet civic ostracism emerges through late-career processes: Asian American staff exhibit elevated exit risk at later career stages and weaker reliance on co-ethnic sponsorship than other minoritized groups, not through categorical exclusion from senior rank but through reduced organizational durability. By tracing how racial triangulation unfolds across career stages, this study shows that meritocratic gatekeeping operates as a triangulated process: one that produces organizational inequality through conditional inclusion rather than categorical exclusion.

Author

• Yee Lok Wong, CUNY-Graduate Center