Beyond Demographics: White Organizations in Social Justice Work

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 10: Organizational Change and Survival

Abstract

Recent scholarship on racialized organizations has explored how race structures power, opportunity, and agency at the meso level. Yet in interviews with workers in social justice nonprofit organizations, participants frequently invoked a related but distinct term: “white organization.” This paper asks: How does a “white organization” differ from broader theories of racialized organizations? What do workers tangibly mean when they use this phrase? And what characteristics and processes inform how organizations come to be defined as white? Drawing on roughly 40 in-depth interviews with nonprofit workers, I build on racialized organizations and white space literatures by centering participants’ descriptions.

While existing scholarship often treats whiteness as a demographic descriptor tied to racial composition, participants consistently reject this reduction. Although demographics matter, respondents describe whiteness not as who occupies an organization but as how it operates. They conceptualize whiteness as a set of structural arrangements, institutional logics, and relational practices that organize authority, legitimacy, belonging, and dissent even in organizations led and staffed by people of color.

I argue that whiteness functions as an organizational formation: it shapes who holds decision-making power, how strategy is set, what counts as professionalism, how communities are represented, and how critique is received or disciplined. At the same time, respondents articulate efforts to interrupt these logics through what they describe as non-hegemonic or “fugitive” practices. This includes forms of organizing that prioritize relational accountability, shared voice, and alignment between values and internal governance. These practices are framed not as stable alternatives but as ongoing, imperfect struggles within the structural constraints of the nonprofit industrial complex. By shifting the analytic lens from who organizations are to how they operate, this paper reconceptualizes “white organizations” as dynamic and contested processes rather than fixed racial identities.

Author

• Marni Fritz, University of Illinois-Chicago