Black lives matter: Organization recommits to racial justice

Abstract

We at Organization are committed to “Black Lives Matter,” three simple words that represent a complex and powerful set of truths about the ongoing struggles of the Black community against the structural interests that beset them. We share many of the values that guide this global social movement. As a journal, we pledge to carry the ethical and political momentum generated by this mobilization for justice forward in the organization studies community and beyond. This brief note is both a reminder of what we have stood for as critical scholars since our early days, and an admission that we have not done nearly enough. Most importantly, it is a commitment to foregrounding and addressing anti-Black racism in our analyses, our actions, and our institutions.

The brutal murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis at the hands of the police ignited one of the largest and most wide-spread series of protests against anti-Black racism in the United States in recent history. Floyd and Breonna Taylor, another name in a far-too-long list of Black women and men unjustly killed by the police, became the symbols of the protests spurred by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which drew the world’s attention to the enduring and indeed, intensifying, nature of such racism and violence.

The BLM movement emerged in 2013 out of the Black community’s outrage at the acquittal of the vigilante murderer of 12-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida, a particularly egregious example of the way in which the legal system had been stacked up against the African American community. It picked up steam after the police killings of Michael Brown in Missouri in 2014 and Eric Garner in New York in 2015, and the suspicious death of Sandra Bland in police custody in Texas, also in 2015. Despite the many attempts to smear and undermine it (such as through the “All Lives Matter” counter-slogan), the BLM movement has only gained in strength and has forced a reckoning in many spaces, including academia.

Drawing upon the works of radical Black intellectuals such as Wells (1892) and DuBois (1903), the movement underscores the fact that anti-Black racism is built into the very structure of the capitalist system (what Robinson, 1983, and other Black intellectuals call “racial capitalism”), and points out that the wealth of the U.S., along with that of its trading partners in Europe, was built on the backs of enslaved Black Americans, and post-Emancipation, through their indentured labor. It insists on the specificity of anti-Black racism in the United States and elsewhere in the world and highlights the various forms of violence that have accompanied it. It further considers itself to be part of the long history of Black resistance to this violence from slave revolts to the various civil rights movements of the 20th century, ranging from the movements led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X down to the Black Panther Party and several others.

While police violence against Black bodies is endemic, it is only one manifestation – albeit an explicitly brutal one – of a system that is steeped in structural anti-black racism and white supremacy. Black lives are degraded and devalued at every turn and in every arena resulting in extreme forms of racial inequalities. African-Americans are systematically denied access to decent neighborhoods, affordable housing, good schools, healthy food, public services, and health care. They are disproportionately targeted by an overwhelmingly racist criminal justice system which profiles them in public spaces and attacks them in their own neighborhoods, schools, and homes. They face racial discrimination in every aspect of their lives from the workplace to the medical establishment. They are severely underrepresented in important institutions such as the media, the corporate world, and academia. The threat of arbitrary violence by the police and white vigilantes who operate under the assumption of immunity, superimposed on the daily micro-aggressions and -humiliations, produces a constant state of anxiety, which results in disproportionate rates of markers of chronic stress, such as high blood pressure and heart disease. Dubois’ (1903) “color line” continues to systematically deny African-Americans access to economic opportunity and has resulted in an immense racial wealth gap; white households today have over 11 times the wealth of Black households, a statistic that reveals there has been no progress in narrowing racial wealth inequality since the 1960s.

The matter-of-fact manner in which a policeman murdered George Floyd – impassively pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck while Floyd pleaded for his life and called for his mother – shocked people’s conscience, not just in the United States but across the world. “Black Lives Matter” protests have been held in dozens of countries, highlighting the interconnected global histories of slavery and colonialism, underscoring the continued marginalization and exploitation of Black bodies across the world, and bringing to mind Fanon’s (1967: 194) words from Black Skin White Masks: that Black people are “the scapegoat for white society – which is based on myths of progress, civilization, liberalism, education, enlightenment, refinement” because they are “the force that opposes the expansion and the triumph of these myths”.

We at Organization are committed to “Black Lives Matter,” three simple words that represent a complex and powerful set of truths about the ongoing struggles of the Black community against the structural interests that beset them. We share many of the values that guide this global social movement ¹ . As a journal, we pledge to carry the ethical and political momentum generated by this mobilization for justice forward in the organization studies community and beyond. This brief note is both a reminder of what we have stood for as critical scholars since our early days and an admission that we have not done nearly enough. Most importantly, it is a commitment to foregrounding and addressing anti-Black racism in our analyses, our actions, and our institutions.

The following is an illustrative rather than exhaustive list of the multiple ways in which Organization has engaged with issues of race and racism since its launch in 1994. In the journal’s inaugural issue, Kathy Ferguson elaborated on its mission to break open the “the set of hermeneutic spaces, linguistic practices and political agendas that are coded in decipherable ways by gender, race and class”, emphasizing how these “cannot be neatly separated from one another” (1994: 99). In the following year, Acker’s (1995) paper discussed the gender and race structures of market processes, while in a 1996 thematic editorial, Marta Calás and Linda Smircich pointed to the importance of key categories such as race, gender and class that “challenge the easy assumption of technical instrumentality and ethical neutrality that characterizes (organizational research)” (Calás and Smircich, 1996: 459). One of the contributions included in that issue dealt with unequal pay for African Americans (Saunders, 1996) while another reflected on the author’s racial and gendered perspective as a scholar (McGee Calvert and Ramsey, 1996). Litvin’s (1997) article examined the socio-biological assumptions underpinning the emergent literature on diversity, a significant contribution to race studies.

Over the last decade, a number of papers in the journal have helped advance the conversation on race in organizational studies. Swan’s (2010) article argued that diversity representations in organizational spaces “disable any political antagonism from minoritized groups, and placate the imagined white viewer, operating as a strategy of containment” (Swan, 2010: 77). Ulus’ (2015) paper explored the racial dimension of post-colonial workplaces. More recent articles in the journal have studied foreign workers through the lens of race (Andrijasevic et al., 2019), critiqued the ways in diversity professionals “sell diversity to white men,” both literally and metaphorically through regimes of economic rationality (Carrillo-Arciniega, 2020), and exposed manifestations of “benevolent” racism (Romani etal., 2018). A recent “Acting Up” piece seeks to draw attention to the process by which business schools de-value the knowledge and experiences of scholars of color (Dar et al., 2020), while another deploys Black feminist scholarship in order to call for intellectual activism that promotes social justice (Contu, 2017).

These contributions on race that have appeared in Organization over the years go hand in hand with a number of other discussions that have been taking place in the pages of the journal. Papers have analyzed indentured servitude (Dalton and Jung, 2019), caste oppression (Raman, 2020; Zulfiqar, 2019), intersectionality (Boogaard and Roggeband, 2010; Soni-Sinha, 2012), ethnicity (de Castro et al., 2020, Van Laer and Janssens, 2017; Zanoni et al., 2017), critical approaches to diversity (Holck, 2017; Zanoni et al., 2010), migration (Kalonaityte, 2010; Segarra and Prasad, 2019), non-western knowledge and epistemologies (Holvino, 1996; Mir and Mir, 2013), and colonialism (Cooke, 2004; Jack et al., 2011; Nkomo, 2011), among many others. We have also used the “editors’ pick” feature to critique diversity research that functions to de-emphasize race-centered concerns ² and to highlight the effacement of the Global South from organizational research. ³

This review of a sample of papers in Organization is indicative of the journal’s long-standing commitment to issues of racial and social justice. At the same time, it reveals the gaps in our work. While critical studies of diversity, inclusion and discrimination are numerous, analyses that specifically focus on anti-Black racism remain rare. Moreover, scholarly work that discusses issues of race and (post)colonialism are too often centered on whiteness. Our universities recruit internationally and brand themselves inclusive, yet our faculties have few Black academics and even fewer African-American ones, and we do not train many Black scholars in business-school PhD programs. Our own journal too has had a striking lack of Black scholars in our list of writers and our editorial boards.

We can be rightfully proud of the richness and complexity of the hermeneutic space we have opened up over two and a half decades in Organization, and of the many articles that we have published on the issues of race, racism, racialization and racial justice. This track record notwithstanding, we are well aware that we still have work to do. This is a unique moment in the history of racial justice, and we intend to step forward in response to the call of the BLM movement.

We want to use this statement to announce our solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement through a renewed commitment to racial justice. Specifically, we intend to do the following:

• We will actively solicit submissions of papers that deal explicitly with anti-Black racism;

• We will invite scholars and researchers to develop special issues of the journal that deal with anti-Black racism;

• We will recruit Black academics into our editorial board and associate editorial team; and

• We will support and nurture Black Ph.D. students and junior academics through the offices of this journal.

This is only a beginning. We will continue to listen to Black voices and will seek ways of standing in solidarity with this historic movement for racial justice, practicing our mission as a journal and a community. This editorial, which emerges from a conversation among the editorial board, is our commitment to hold ourselves accountable.