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Abstract

This article draws on an in-depth narrative of a Chinese woman, early career researcher based in a UK business school, to consider questions of subtle racism in academia. Specifically, engaging with our informant’s testimony, and reading it in the context of critical organizational debates on race, we offer episodic accounts of the subtle racism that she has encountered in academia to conceptualize experiences of in-betweenness of racial minorities excluded from dominant diversity discourses. In her case, subtle racism appears to emanate from a set of gendered and racialized tropes, culminating in the “model minority” myth. This article captures how racism is encountered differently by different populations; specifically, it illuminates how racism materializes in culturally-dependent, idiosyncratic forms, which should not be de-contextualized from the historical, political, and social dynamics that engender it. In so doing, it contributes to recent efforts to speak out against racism in the academy.

Keywords

Academia Asians business schools model minority racism speaking out

Introduction

When I started my PhD, I was the only woman of Asian origin in my department who successfully nailed the institution’s ‘competitive’ full-funding for doctoral studies in gender and organization subjects. Other peers funded by the same source were all ‘white’, local Brits. Looking back, this fact makes me reflect on whether there was implicit discrimination against minority candidates or simply a preference towards local (white) candidates in addition. . .to the ‘meritocracy’ assessment for filtering the pool.

Over the last decades, scholars have offered robust accounts of the myriad forms of racial discrimination that employees encounter in the workplace. This line of scholarly inquiry has been enriched by more recent debates on intersectionality. Intersectionality underscores the need to consider how social experiences are manifest of complex intersecting identities related to gender, race, class, and other bases of social differentiation (e.g. Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1991; Holvino, 2010; McCall, 2005; Meléndez and Özkazanç-Pan, 2021). Although race is often included in organizational discourses related to diversity—as one of the many sources of workplace discrimination—contextually situated questions about the subtle ways in which race and racialization materialize remain understudied in the discipline (Bell et al., 2021; Liu, 2020; Prasad and Qureshi, 2017)—and in business school scholarship more broadly (Annisette and Prasad, 2017). Not surprisingly, this has led some critical scholars to pursue studies on race as a systemic, intersectional phenomenon (Abdellatif, 2021; Bourabain, 2021; Kempf, 2020; Miller, 2021; Ramos and Yi, 2020; Yousfi, 2021) as well as to call for more research that represents voices from the margins; including from geographical locations of the Global South (Alcadipani et al., 2012; Jammulamadaka et al., 2021; Scobie et al., 2021; Ulus, 2015) and from conceptual spaces informed by Black feminism (Contu, 2018; Dorion, 2020). Accounting for racially disenfranchised voices would move toward understanding the discursive and the subtle ways in which racialized bodies become hyphenated, weakened, disabled, and silenced in contemporary organizational settings (Abdellatif, 2021; Christensen et al., 2020; Smith and Nkomo, 2003).

The academic workplace is certainly not immune to cases of discrimination against racial minorities (Bell et al., 2021; Bourabain, 2021; Dar et al., 2021; Einola et al., 2021; Kim, 2020; Ramos and Yi, 2020). Being predicated on the tenets of capitalism, which were only made operationally tenable by the free labor of black and brown bodies (Davis, 2016; DuBois, 2005), academia’s engagement with diversity is all too often structured around neoliberal approaches to inclusion (Boncori et al., 2020; Ivancheva et al., 2019). Such approaches advance politically correct ways of doing diversity (Ahmed, 2012) and often make a “business case” for it (Arciniega, 2021). Yet, in doing so, such diversity discourses: (1) serve profit-making objectives producing initiatives that only reinscribe the status quo and, thereby, the racial organization of society, and (2) remain blind to a critical questioning of how racial discrimination becomes normalized by a culture of white privilege (Liu, 2020; 2021a).

Ultimately, the experiences of racialized minorities remain not only underrepresented in scholarly texts, but when the phenomenon is studied it is often misrepresented because of “institutional polishing”—namely, the smiles and “shiny surfaces” that do not allow to see the “dirt” that lies beneath in academia (Ahmed, 2016: 102). This has been revealed in recent critical accounts drawing on actual experiences of academics (Abdellatif, 2021; Bourabain, 2021; Einola et al., 2021; Kim, 2020; Ramos and Yi, 2020). Ahmed (2016) has offered an incisive analysis on the presence of racialized bodies in academia. As she explains: “[S]ome [bodies] become ‘space invaders’ when they enter spaces that are not intended for them. We can be space invaders in the academy; we can be space invaders in theory too, just by referring to the wrong texts or by asking the wrong questions” (Ahmed, 2016: 9, emphasis in original). She further observes that different, racialized bodies can be perceived “as wrong for pointing out a wrong” (Ahmed, 2016: 73), for challenging the systemic patterns of normalized violence that are promoted by “white” institutions.

Recognizing the need to actively subvert the power structures of white supremacy—not validated biologically, of course, but one that normalizes and sustains white privilege—while perpetuating racial domination against people of color (Mills, 1997; Nkomo and Al Ariss, 2014), critical scholars have heeded calls to speak out against racism in the academy (Bell et al., 2021; Dar et al., 2021; Gao and Sai, 2020; Swan, 2017). This point has been highlighted by the Editors-in-Chief of this journal. Indeed, they used their editorial capacity, following the senseless death of George Floyd Jr., to underscore the importance of standing alongside Black academics and to establish academic space for them to express their voices (Mir and Zanoni, 2021; also see Barros and Alcadipani, 2022).

Responding to this call, in this article we seek to nuance the existing debates on race and racism in organization studies. Namely, by focusing on the business school setting, we move away from dichotomized ideas of white privilege and non-White marginalization to consider forms of racial discrimination that are often masked by veils of political correctness, acknowledging its structural and systemic bases (Yousfi, 2021). We examine various critical debates on diversity and inclusion (e.g. Fernando and Prasad, 2019; Iftikar and Museus, 2018; Poon et al., 2016) and draw on an in-depth narrative account of a woman academic of Chinese descent working in a UK business school. Our approach is inspired by recent studies in the field that have relied on a single narrative of a woman subject to unveil rich situated and embodied experiences (Kim, 2020; Liu, 2021b; Mandalaki, 2021; Segarra and Prasad, 2020).

Through this narrative, we argue that the idea of “model minority,” a label often cast upon Asian women academics (Fanon, 2008; Poon et al., 2016), functions to reduce their embodied experiences of othering through the use of simplistic stereotypical categories, ultimately perpetuating systems of racial discrimination. Relying on the narrative, we discuss how dominant academic discourses of “diversity” and “inclusion” risk leaving little space for voicing racial experiences between the black-white spectrum, leading colleagues that identify as neither black nor white to search for the “right tone of color” (Einola et al., 2021: 1614). In this way, we maintain that not only do the prevailing ways of embracing diversity in academia prevent meaningfully including the consciousness of black and brown bodies (Bell et al., 2021; Nkomo et al., 2019), but they often leave academics who fall somewhere between blackness and whiteness in a liminal space of uncertainty, in-betweenness and exclusion. We underscore the need to engage with critical race theory perspectives in order to nuance the way we think, speak out, write, position ourselves, and act up, as academics, vis-à-vis instances of explicit, implicit, and aversive racism.

Race and racial discrimination

We understand racism as the “the belief in the inherent superiority of one race [namely whiteness] over all others and therefore the right to dominance” (Lorde, 1981: 7). Racism materializes through unequal treatment of individuals based on their race in myriad facets of social and organizational life. Reading the experiences of racial discrimination described in the presented narrative through critical race theory and, specifically, the “Asian crit” perspective—the branch of critical race theory developed to make sense of racial inequities against Asian minorities, in particular (Chang, 2011; Iftikar and Museus, 2018; Kim, 2020)—we move beyond simplistic understandings of racism as stereotyping and bias that manifest at the individual and interpersonal level (Kempf, 2020). We rather recognize the structural and intersectional nature of racism (Crenshaw, 1991; Meléndez and Özkazanç-Pan, 2021); namely, the ways in which race intersects with other social categories of difference such as gender and class to yield systemic patterns of social, institutional, historical, and structural marginalization (Kempf, 2020; Yousfi, 2021; Zulfiqar and Prasad, 2021, 2022).

Informed by intersectional analysis, the narrative illuminates how implicit racism materializes in the academic setting, namely, here, through the model minority myth strongly associated with Asian women academics (Poon et al., 2016). This phenomenon animates the intersectional grounds of racism and, specifically, how “racism is nurtured when the circumstances for its indiscernibility are maintained” (Kempf, 2020: 191; Miller, 2021). Although often linked to unconscious and unintentional processes, we join other authors in contending that implicit racism is part of a broader racialization project that is formidable in maintaining the racial hierarchies and inequities that organize social relations (e.g. Bell, 1992; Crenshaw, 2017; Iftikar and Museus, 2018; Kempf, 2020). Adopting a view of “race” and “racism” from critical race theory is important insofar as we want to reframe how we interact with different others as ethically responsible subjects. Indeed, it is crucial to conceptualize the ways in which race and racism are enacted tacitly and discursively within contexts like academia, which disproportionately impact racial minorities, women, and other historically disenfranchised groups (Ivancheva et al., 2019).

Before proceeding, we will offer a caveat. We acknowledge that using labels such as “people of color,” “Blacks,” “Asians,” or “Chinese” to denote a racial category constitutes an oversimplification or an essentialism. Such labels disregard linguistic, cultural, and contextual differences as well as different bodies’ differential access to cultural, political, and social representation—the “politically contested social processes that construct meanings of race and ethnicity” (Poon et al., 2016: 3; also see Perez, 2002; Yeh, 2014).

Our intention in this article is neither to reduce complex realities to simplified labels nor to propose generalizable absolute truths. Instead, reading the embodied account presented in this article, and acknowledging its narrator’s positionality, we seek to engage with efforts to undo universalizing and essentializing tendencies that, at times, suggest that racism affects minorities in symmetrical ways (Yousfi, 2021). With this article, we hope to extend space for voicing contextualized, embodied experiences of othering, which often go unnoticed in neoliberal academic settings. In doing so, we join a collective effort to speak out and act up against the myriad forms of implicit and explicit racism found in academia and in the broader communities in which academia is located (e.g. Abdellatif, 2021; Bourabain, 2021; Calas and Smircich, 1996; Einola et al., 2021; Gao and Sai, 2020, 2021; Jammulamadaka et al., 2021; Mir and Zanoni, 2021; Prasad and Śliwa, 2022; Ramos and Yi, 2020; Scobie et al., 2021).

The model minority myth and experiences of in-betweenness

Shortly after beginning my PhD studies, I recall having been asked, during my first encounter with a British white male professor (also my supervisor at the time), where I am originally from—a ‘rural’ Chinese area or ‘a city’. This put me in an awkward situation. Is that a ‘detection’ of my finance or socio-economic situation? For what purposes or reasons? I didn’t have an answer and I quickly changed the topic. . . I assume that some colleagues in academia and the public hold the assumption that ‘Asians are generally rich’ and that most students come to the UK for higher education in a self-funded way. I fully understand that outsiders may hold a view on categorizing ‘tiers’ for some big cities in the mainland of China, that top-tiers include well-known big cities, like Beijing and Shanghai. I am ethnically Chinese, the only child of a dual-income family, with a family business, and originally come from an urban area, but I struggle to categorize myself under a single social class. I was raised in a city (not a top tier city like Beijing or Shanghai), where ethnic Koreans live in compact communities. So, I have had a ‘comfortable’ life, but definitely not rich.

Some scholars have observed how Asian academics’ higher representation in business schools—in relation to other racialized minorities—is used as an exemplar of the outcomes yielded by politically correct ways of embracing diversity (Võ, 2012). The same is often the case for Asian students who make up the majority of international business school students in the UK, thus participating in the profit-making objectives of neoliberal academia (Altbach, 2019; Fotaki and Prasad, 2015). Often, these students are perceived as rich, and therefore “good substitutes of white students” (Võ, 2012: 106) with potential to excel in their studies and reach high-salary positions (Benton and Gomez, 2008), as also reflected in the narrative. Constructions of Asians as good proxies based on dominant standards of whiteness serve to veil their actual racialized experiences of othering, vulnerability, and devaluation, while remaining consistent with a history of racial stratification (National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education [CARE], 2008; Chang, 2011; Võ, 2012). They work to undermine claims of systemic racism (Poon et al., 2016) often making them feel like “the elephant in the room,” as recent testimonies of Asian colleagues reveal (Einola et al., 2021: 1617; Kim, 2020). Further, these constructions provide a rather simplistic, a contextual view of Asian minorities, which disregards the precariat ontology that marks their intersectional identities as students under unstable working contracts in foreign countries (Abdellatif, 2021; Einola et al., 2021). These experiences can be even worse for female doctoral students of color, who become easier targets of intersectional racism, sexism, and other forms of bullying and marginalization by colleagues and academic supervisors (Bourabain, 2021; Ramos and Yi, 2020; Shavers and Moore, 2014).

Yet, profound efforts (with few exceptions) to deeply learn, understand, and address Asian colleagues’ needs and experiences of racialization remain limited in current organization debates (Einola et al., 2021; Gao and Sai, 2020). Such efforts also remain absent from dominant academic practices and discourses as reflected in, for instance, the lack of Asian colleagues’ representation (much like colleagues’ of other races and ethnicities)—and especially Asian women—in decision making, leading roles, and academic boards (Chan, 2005; Einola et al., 2021). Indeed, attesting to the failure of neoliberal academic institutions to promote racial equity, the extant literature has documented the significant embodied, emotional and interactional labor that academic minorities and namely women of color need to undertake to move toward leadership roles (Glass and Cook, 2020). Much like academic minorities of other racial backgrounds (Bell et al., 2021), Asian women are subjected to discrimination in recruitment processes and tenure-track career evaluations (Hune, 1998; Loo and Ho, 2006). Moreover, they are provided with fewer opportunities to produce scholarly impact, in contrast to (white) male colleagues, who steadily outperform minorities along conventional metrics (White et al., 2021). These points, taken together, critically capture the intersectional, namely gendered nature of racialized dynamics (Miller, 2021), which much of the extant literature has failed to consider (Iftikar and Museus, 2018; Kempf, 2020; Poon et al., 2016).

While growing up, I had access to good education in Hong Kong for a while and UK afterwards, where I conducted research in affiliation with the Euro-American/western world. Personally, from having been educated under a ‘diverse’ approach, including a few years of industrial professional experience in IT, I self-identify as an early career academic, adaptive professional who can work in any cross-cultural situation and as an academic holding a diverse mindset. I deliberately ‘polish’ my accent somehow, trying to be more English and I have been complimented by British white male colleagues and managers, who say: “your English is good, though we could sense you’re not a native speaker, but you did quite well.” Generally, I think the majority in western countries like the UK and the US does hold a view of ‘model minority’ assumption attached to us, including me; that I will work hard, perform well, obey rules and take whatever tasks leaders assign without challenging authority. But except for my appearance—an Asian woman of color—I do not adhere to or hold the widely assumed traditional Confucian gender role expectation and work/family articulation, such as being docile, having good housekeeping skills, or placing family as central in my life. It has happened that some experienced colleagues would expect me to have these attributes, in alignment with traditionally entrenched values, but they do not ‘know’ me personally.

I personally have a direct manner and am straightforward in most circumstances. But everyone hold their assumptions, and sometimes even biases, no matter to what extent you want to avoid being neutral and open-minded. In comparison, ‘blacks’ are sometimes perceived as potentially aggressive, easy to get angry. . . And most of them do not consider me a minority. Some of them hold the assumption of ‘China conquering the world’ and, of being powerful. One day, I was even described by another Asian (Malaysian) colleague saying that I am like a ‘banana’, which makes me uncomfortable, yet it may reveal some realities of my ambivalent and complex identities. Looking back, I think these impressions may explain, to some extent, why the other ‘minorities’ do not consider me as a minority, being perceived of Chinese descent.

Critical scholarship that has narrated experiences of racial discrimination of Chinese women academics (Gao and Sai, 2020, 2021; Võ, 2012) across different contexts, has explored how hegemonic discourses and inter-locking systems of oppression, shaped by “whiteness” and by relations of power between Asia and the West (Chang, 2011; Poon et al., 2016), yield paradoxical outcomes for Chinese immigrants. As reflected in the narrative, these paradoxical outcomes emerge as the informant, much like other Chinese women academics, is seen as being simultaneously subjected to and benefiting from the racial hierarchies in operation in Western contexts (Yeh, 2014). On one hand, these hierarchical structures construct Asian academics’ identities as others—namely, “foreign invaders” (Liu, 2017; see also Einola et al., 2021)—while, on the other, as “model minorities” they are believed to be insulated from racism (Song, 2003; Yeh, 2014).

Following a history of immigration of minority groups into the US, the “model minority” category has developed to depict a “middleman” minority that acts as a buffer in class power relationships between elites and peasants, eliciting hostility against its members without granting them access to social (and other) resources (Jain, 1990). Eventually, it is used in ways that offer acritical, over-simplified, ahistorical, and stereotypical assumptions of Asian minorities. These flawed narratives have been criticized by scholars engaging with critical race theory and, particularly, the Asian Crit (e.g. Iftikar and Museus, 2018; Kim, 2020), for upholding hegemonic thinking, while discrediting Asian minorities’ historical struggles within global systems of power (Chan, 2000; Poon et al., 2016). They eventually render their actual stories “untellable and unintelligible” (Chang, 2011), diverting resources from racial equality programs (Lee, 2006). The latter might also explain why colleagues from Asian descent often remain absent from non-white academic discourses, with the BAME (Black, Asian, and other Minority Ethnic) often being spelled as BMA (Einola et al., 2021).

Racial hierarchical structures expect Asians—and especially Asian women—to act in line with the interests of the neoliberal academy without disrupting how its very practices may be complicit in perpetuating inequalities (Einola et al., 2021; Võ, 2012). As Võ (2012: 104) puts it: “[R]acialized stereotypes about Asian Americans and other women of color can make us vulnerable targets. The converging perceptions of Asian American woman as exotic and docile ‘model minorities,’ who are less likely to file a complaint, increases the chances of us becoming victims of ‘racialized sexual harassment.’” This resonates with research findings that women of color are often tokenized, expected, and encouraged to engage with institutional processes that sustain the status-quo (Hassouneh-Phillips and Beckett, 2003). Crucially, it reveals the gendered, intersectional facets of race and racism, under neoliberal discourses, that exacerbate how labor is distributed upon racial, sexual, and colonial grounds (Yousfi, 2021; Zulfiqar and Prasad, 2021).

Once, during an internal research seminar, a male colleague from the Middle East reacted aggressively towards me because he thought that I was laughing at his presentation. I was caught out of the blue and responded by saying, ‘no offence, I was not.’ I did not want to cause a scene, so I repeated ‘no’ twice. Yet, he insisted on arguing, and honestly, I did not get what his point was. Afterwards, the convenor mitigated the tense atmosphere saying that it’s just me always keeping a polite ‘smile.’ This uncomfortable interaction made me reflect on whether I was performing inappropriately but, on the other hand, am I being perceived as too ‘soft’/’gentle’, and too easy to be targeted or challenged as a ‘model minority’? It seems that no matter how I position myself or try to be ‘inclusive,’ I feel I belong nowhere and always swinging in the middle across male-dominated white English institutions.

I’m not sure if I’m an insider or an outsider; perhaps it’s more accurate to ‘label’ myself as a familiar insider yet a distanced stranger, with a unique perspective infused with lived experience and critical reflexivity—a mix of familiarity and strangeness might describe better the nuances of everyday life at work. As a millennial woman, born after 1990, well-educated (doctorate-level), and financially independent, I haven’t been raised in a postcolonial cultural environment. But, when I was studying in Hong Kong, it was already run by China’s government, so I didn’t have that sense of identity. During my upbringing, I also did notice internal racism within ethnic communities in Asia. This manifests pretty passively and sometimes aggressively against people who attended international schools because of certain tropes, or vice versa, against people who attended local schools, or against people with darker skin tones because it connotes people from South Asia. I deliberately removed myself from that ‘circle,’ where I would potentially feel uncomfortable interacting. Overall, it is difficult to describe my positionality as a western-trained Chinese academic.

The above narrative illuminates how, as a “model minority,” as a Chinese woman academic, the informant is positioned as risk-averse and submissive, with the expectation to reply with “yes of course” to dominant hierarchical structures (Einola et al., 2021: 1616). Existing literature explicates how such assumptions perform as contemporary forms of silencing and racialization (Yeh, 2014), “an ideological discourse that operates to create and sustain racial marginality” (Kibria, 1998: 954) and white dominance (Poon and Hune, 2009). They present an overly reductionist and ahistorical idea of the Chinese population, which effectively denies subjects from this community a substantive sense of belonging. As reflected in the narrative, such assumptions lead Asian women academics to experience lack of support from the broader context, leaving them with feelings of isolation (Rabinowitz et al., 2009), revoking them full spectrum of agency, and “limiting possibilities of imagining the self as an embodied subject” (Yeh, 2014: 2).

In addition to majority-minority dynamics, what is also evident from the narrative are the forms of racialization that might be invoked between members of different minority groups (Abdellatif, 2021). These often materialize in microaggressions that subjugate different others (Sue, 2010), hindering cooperation among members of different minority groups, limiting possibilities for understanding the viewpoint of the other, and collectively unifying to fight racial injustices in neoliberal academia (Faria, 2013). Moreover, having to make choices between “authenticity” and “appropriateness” to fit dominant institutional assumptions (Gao and Sai, 2021: 187) reveals how Asian women academics must negotiate their ambiguous space in-between the boundaries of “whiteness” and broader dominant diversity discourses. As shown in the narrative, this phenomenon renders them vulnerable in ways that lead them to question their self-worth, wear academic masks to hide their real identities (Shavers and Moore, 2014), and develop defensive or controlled responses (Mellor, 2004).

With time, I became a bit ‘holding in’ or say I am not a person who would purposefully reveal my origin or ethnicity at work or other organizational settings, even hiding, and becoming more cautious in various situations. I think to some extent I would like others to view me professionally or in a more neutral/equal way. And, I also do not consider where I come from will affect my capabilities and how I perform at work in any way, despite being ‘recognizable’ from my appearance—a woman of color of Asian origin. Another reason I think may be attributed to these years of working abroad. I must admit that I am a western-made critical scholar and there’s also a ‘loss’ of many Asian traditions in my body, mind, and heart. So, it may not be very surprising that I may behave in a more ‘neutral’ way. But I also realize that practically I seem more inclined to keep a closer contact or relationship with other European colleagues at work (though definitely not deliberately) after these years of navigating several UK institutions. Maybe, just because we share more similar experiences of moving and working abroad, or maybe just because I feel more comfortable with people with a more ‘diverse’/’inclusive’ mindset irrespective of origin, race/ethnicity, or political/religious standing. I do not have a concrete answer. . . Overall, I think that those assumptions about different racial groups sometimes make us as academics more sensitive about the ‘difference’ that we need to be aware of at work.

And, although I’m not an over-sharer, especially on such ‘sensitive’ matters, if sharing this narrative could be of help in building further debates in race/racism studies, in which I am also personally invested, this would definitely be a value I would always like to feed into the field.

An invitation to collective action

The narrative at the crux in this article calls for critical reflection on the covert and the overt forms of racism directed against racialized minorities in the academy. Raising awareness about how vulnerabilities and privileges engendered by systemically entrenched racist behavior are unevenly distributed in academia is urgent, even if only to achieve the types of equity to which critical researchers routinely advocate. Heeding recent calls for unraveling racialization within academia (Abdellatif, 2021; Bell et al., 2021; Bourabain, 2021; Dar et al., 2021; Einola et al., 2021; Gao and Sai, 2020, 2021; Mir and Zanoni, 2021), in this article we focus on an understudied form of racism in the workplace, which impacts certain minority groups. In doing so, we point to the need to understand how racism is structurally and institutionally sustained and reproduced against different groups of people differently. Juxtaposing the narrative against certain arguments of critical race theory, we identify racialized experiences of in-betweenness. In the case of our informant, in-betweenness is systemically sustained by positioning her as a model minority. Using her experiences to illuminate the materialization of subtle forms of racism in academia, we argue that it is only in making sense of the nuances of how racism is enacted by different groups of people differently can there be a holistic engagement with how racism, in its intersectional and systemic dimensions, ought to be redressed.

Our article has sought to contribute to the project of subverting racism in three ways. First, we add to the small but growing body of critical organizational literature that focuses on the complex manifestation of race in academia (e.g. Abdellatif, 2021; Bell et al., 2021; Bourabain, 2021; Liu, 2020). Second, we use select excerpts from a narrative of a woman academic of Chinese descent to question the dominant and often simplistic ways in which racialized bodies are habitually constructed around the white/non-white dichotomy (Chan, 2005; Einola et al., 2021; Gao and Sai, 2020). Third, we call for making space for marginalized academic voices, which have been silenced behind discourses of political correctness, to claim their embodied truths both within university settings and in texts. Taking these points collectively, we contend that we might disrupt the colonizing, hegemonic practices, and writing traditions, which tend to reduce the complex other through academic rationality (Contu, 2018; Dussel and Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Mandalaki and Perezts, 2021; Prasad, 2016).

Echoing other recent critical accounts, our text invites academics of all races to raise a voice against the “continued intellectual and cultural imperialism” that sustains Western hegemony and knowledge structures (Mir and Zanoni, 2021; Ul-Haq and Westwood, 2012) with the intent to challenge how racialized experiences often “go unnoticed” in academia (Ulus, 2015). We speak out against colonializing patterns of knowledge production, including the ways in which we socialize, conduct, and write organizational research. We speak out to enable us, academics of all colors, to overturn the normalizing discourses that function to disenfranchise the experiences of racialized bodies in academia (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021; Scobie et al., 2021; Yousfi, 2021); to reflexively cross borders, meet foreignness, and recognize the value of different knowledge creation in this process (Cixous, 1993). We invite organization scholars—starting with ourselves—to embrace giving up the inclination to “reproduce” academically sound knowledge that abstractly speaks of and for others (Kaasila-Pakanen, 2021; Rhodes and Westwood, 2007). We should rather engage with embodied, reflexive, and decolonial methodologies and ways of writing so as to make space for underrepresented others to reclaim their identities and embodied truths (Mandalaki and Perezts, 2021; Scobie et al., 2021; Yousfi, 2021).

As academics of different races and genders, and as migrants working in foreign countries, we (the authors of this article) have been subjected to various forms of discrimination in our respective career paths. We cannot remain blind to institutional cases of implicit or explicit racism, which we sense daily in the academic spaces we occupy. Recognizing the intersections of race with gender—and various other identifiers of difference—we elected to write this article to actively engage as academics against forms of racism and discrimination that detrimentally affect our community (Bell et al., 2021; Contu, 2018; Mir and Zanoni, 2021). Our academic spaces provide us, we suggest, with a response-ability (Barad, 2014), which we should use to reframe our notions of responsibility relationally and, in so doing, to invigorate debates around dominant structures that scaffold experiences of otherness and difference in its myriad forms.

We often remain silent using the pretext of a lack of knowledge around issues of racial discrimination that do not affect us directly (hooks, 2002) wondering “what to do” (Swan, 2017). Reciting and extending the ideas of Bell et al. (2021), we suggest that we can all do something (Bell et al., 2021: 19) to overturn the very systemic racializing patterns that disqualify different bodies from full, substantive participation in our institutions. To the extent of the reach we possess within our institutions, we should all stand as academic allies with marginalized others in an effort to help empower them to regain their agency (Bell et al., 2021). We realize that the formation of alliances, especially when they are forged among marginalized groups, is often hindered by practical challenges, such as differential access to resources, conflicts of interest, power/status asymmetries, or inaccessibility to certain spaces. Yet, trying to establish such alliances to meaningfully resist colonizing practices in neoliberal academia is not just a personal matter: “it is about all of us and all of us now!” (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021: 719), and should be seriously pursued if we are to reinstate racial equity in academia.

Commencing the project of anti-racism involves carefully listening to the first-person testimonies of racialized others, as we have sought to do in this text. We suggest listening, which can be enabled through a variety of methodologies grounded on empathetic relationality, self/other-reflexivity, and a commitment to reveal the messiness of daily, embodied experience (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021; Mandalaki and Pérezts, 2020; Scobie et al., 2021), can be an important first step in advancing nuanced understandings of racism. As Ahmed (2016) reminds us, by listening to the stories of others, we learn to “be cautious about our capacity to bear witness” (p. 87) to the embodied experiences of different, racialized, and underrepresented bodies subjected to various forms of normalized violence. We train ourselves to embrace a plurality of perspectives in our ways of living, working, and relating so as to avoid falling victims to discourses of universality that reproduce oppressive hierarchies (Prasad et al., 2020). Presenting an interview-based narrative, whose embodiment and messiness we have not sought to conceal—but rather to reflexively and empathetically read in light of germane scholarly debates—we have sought to engage in such an attempt.

Our article is a call for change at this “critical juncture,” where we see a window of possibility for a “decisive transition” (Liu et al., 2014: 6) in our typical ways of thinking and behaving against racism in the academy. Echoing other critical scholars, we invite our academic communities to use research, pedagogy, and writing practices to reframe discourses around diversity and inclusion. Future researchers could engage with critical race theory and use their academic voices to offer locally situated perspectives of the experiences of racialized minorities in academia.

Specifically, future researchers may engage with critical, implicit race bias perspectives and embodied narratives—or other relevant forms of empirical resources—to access a more granular understanding of the social and the practical implications of racism. This promises to illuminate the forms of normalized violence performed against those others whose voices and bodies we ignore or “avoid”—physically or intellectually—in our daily academic and social lives; from the university corridors and our academic meetings to our texts, research seminars, and the classroom. Such an examination can advance awareness of how simple daily (often unconscious) behavioral patterns might be rooted in deeply engrained racialized attitudes sustained by historical and systemic patterns of colonialism and racism. It can push us to recognize the violence within ourselves and to problematize this violence, while envisioning ways forward for meaningfully redressing such systems of discrimination. Pedagogically, as hooks (1994) reminds us, “the classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility,” where we can “labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart” (p. 207). There, we can question “relationships between the micro and the macro, between the implicit and explicit life of race” and engage in critical examinations with our students to advance a humanistic understanding of how daily experiences of racism are deeply rooted in structural, institutional, and systemic patterns that organize much of social life (Kempf, 2020:123; Poon et al., 2016).

By using our academic spaces to speak of issues that affect our academic communities daily, we might mobilize the collective activism needed to meaningfully challenge and deconstruct dominant discourses and structures of privilege that perpetuate racial inequalities. In doing so, we can join forces to meaningfully transform the academy.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ghazal Zulfiqar and the two anonymous reviewers whose comments on earlier versions of this manuscript advanced our thinking on several ideas found in this article. Ajnesh Prasad would like to acknowledge research support from the Canada Research Chairs program.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ajnesh Prasad

Author biographies

Emmanouela Mandalaki is Associate Professor of Organizations at NEOMA Business School. Trained in arts and social sciences, in her research, Emmanouela engages with (auto)ethnographic and qualitative methodologies, heavily informed by her artistic practice. She combines these with feminist thinking and creative forms of writing to explore alternative ways of engaging with questions of embodiment, ethics, gender, diversity, inclusion, social inequalities, and affect in organizations. Emmanouela’s work appears in international book volumes and other academic outlets. Emmanoula holds editorial positions, both as editor and guest-editor, in different journals in the field.

Ajnesh Prasad is Professor and holds the Canada Research Chair in Critical Management Studies. His research focuses broadly on gender and diversity issues in organizations, interpretive methods and social inequality. He recently completed a five-year term as chair of the Critical Management Studies division at the Academy of Management. He currently serves on the senior editorial teams of several journals. Ajnesh earned his PhD in organization studies from York University’s Schulich School of Business. [ Email: ajnesh_prasad@yahoo.ca]

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Racialized experiences as in-betweenness in academia

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Race and racial discrimination

The model minority myth and experiences of in-betweenness

An invitation to collective action

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

ORCID iD

Author biographies

References