Anti-Blackness in Management and Organization Studies: Challenging Racial Capitalism in Organizing and Knowledge Production

Abstract

The papers in this special issue engage Black radical intellectual ideas to highlight the related concepts of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism. As such, these works challenge white supremacy in scholarship and beyond by providing case studies, interviews, essays, and theoretical explorations that center Black liberational thought and radical Black knowledge-making. Underpinning these efforts, is a commitment to challenge anti-Blackness in management and organization studies. Anti-Blackness is an organized and stubborn form of racism that targets Black communities by removing or denying their full humanity. In our introduction, we discuss the relationship between anti-Blackness and racial capitalism, and suggest that these are critical concepts for scholars of management and organization to meaningfully engage with. Racial capitalism has rapidly emerged over the last 10 years as a significant analytic of race and its materiality as a socioeconomic formation. We write this introduction to offer deeper insights into this concept and how its foundational ideas can be applied to current debates in the organization of scholarship, public policy, and corporate activity. Specifically, the special issue highlights the role of context and positionality in the formation of capitalism and urges scholars and activists to pay greater attention to how our analysis of race and capitalism must retain a focus on specific mechanisms and arrangements that shape these relations.

Introduction

The special issue’s focus on racial capitalism and anti-Black racism emerges from the political demand of Black communities and anti-racist allies in management and organization studies (MOS) who call for a reckoning with the severe under-representation/exclusion of Black scholars in our faculties, editorial boards, and academic journals (see Bell, 2020; Bell et al., 2021; Nkomo, 2019). As such, this special issue challenges the supremacist culture that centers whiteness in the theoretical and empirical justifications offered by conventional and critical scholarship (Abdallah, 2024). It has been over 30 years since Black decolonial feminist scholar, Nkomo (1992), wrote her incisive critique challenging the white, Eurocentric non-inclusive universalization shaping the contours and critical capacities of management knowledge. She finds this universalization produces deeply flawed scholarship within and about organization studies, from which claims are made to whiteness as the norm against which all other knowledges are valued. Her call for collective action to consider race as the central organizing principle in MOS knowledge and education has been cited over 1140 times. Yet to date, journals, publishers, business schools, and management scholarship remain firmly entrenched in the Western hemisphere and have built a body of literature that remains inherently white (see Dar et al., 2021). As a collective of Black and non-Black scholars of color, we have listened to these demands for broad and coalitional anti-racist action. This special issue is a collaborative response to take on the collective labor required to make transformational change a possibility and an enduring goal for such action. ¹

Born out of an urgent need for collective anti-racist action in the aftermath of the global protests instigated by the murder of George Floyd in 2020, this special issue is the outcome of discussions at the annual general meeting of the editorial board of Organization in June 2020. During this meeting we committed to address the persistent anti-Black racism in MOS scholarship and the need to center Black liberational thought and radical Black knowledge production. In response to the reawakening of a global anti-racist consciousness spurred by the Movement for Black Lives, we draw upon the concepts of racial capitalism (Robinson, 2000) and anti-Blackness theorized by Black Studies (Alkalimat, 2021; Hartman, 1997) to engage with contributions from management scholars and activists that address the systemic discrimination against Black people in organizations and academia. The goal of this special issue is to engage with radical Black thought underpinning liberational knowledges to transform the journal’s scholarship toward theoretical and empirical insights that take seriously the profound historical contempt, belittlement and violence against Black people by supremacist culture that is rooted in centuries of slavery, dispossession, and extraction underpinning capitalist economics and organizing logics. As such, this special issue pays close attention to the contextual arrangements of power that shape the relations between race and capitalism. By foregrounding anti-Black racism as a system of structural oppression within racial capitalism, we seek to draw attention to the widely prevalent and especially virulent kind of racism that is aimed at Black people worldwide, and to acknowledge that privileged non-Black people of color are often complicit in reproducing anti-Black racism. As an editorial collective that is constituted by Black people and non-Black people of color, we take seriously the need for self-accountability in all efforts that center Black peoples knowledge production in fields of scholarship.

Our engagement with a Black radical tradition of epistemological questioning that centers Black experiences in the production of knowledge stems from our frustration with the limited and narrow set of questions that emanate from within MOS when interrogating race. This frustration is echoed among diverse calls for racial justice that are outlined in recent articles and special issues, yet the demands for action that are set out in these efforts remain insufficiently addressed (Bell et al., 2021; Dar et al., 2021; Derry et al., 2024; Liu, 2024; McCluney and Rabelo, 2019). Following a recent paper by Muzanenhamo and Chowdhury (2023) that highlights the epistemic injustice of MOS and how this is structured by historical and material challenges that marginalize and invisibilize Black scholarship, little action has been taken at the level of structural change among editorial governance, journal policy, and community accountability (see also, Twumasi and Runswick, 2024).

Reckoning with the absence of anti-racist actions in MOS publishing and the field’s reluctance to take responsibility for its failings are among the objectives of this special issue (see Mir and Zanoni, 2021). At the same time, we note with much enthusiasm that our call for papers was positively received by the international critical MOS community. Our interactions over the last 2 years with colleagues working in diverse scholarly contexts have confirmed this special issue’s timeliness, as well as its political urgency in times of extreme racial violence. We write this introduction to encourage future generative interventions (intellectual, activist, scholarly, community-based) that build or recover the grounds for a consciously anti-racist agenda in MOS. This means the MOS community needs to take racial violence seriously, and to radically alter all conditions that fail oppressed peoples, when our scholarship bends toward the interests of supremacist, zionist, and anti-Black elites (Davis, 2016). Revolutionary voices in and among our movement for racial justice need to take center stage. This special issue foregrounds Black scholarship and Black thought that contributes a body of work committed to liberational practice.

In our introduction to the special issue we wish to address two critical concepts that provide an intellectual scaffolding to our articulation of structural racism in practices of knowledge production in MOS that we believe are under-researched and under-explored. Engaging meaningfully with anti-Blackness and racial capitalism can transform political debate in MOS to move us from a position of denial and inertia, toward an activated position that is radical and revolutionary. These two concepts are inevitably linked as they pertain to the same racialization process and hierarchical logic that underlie the historical development of capitalism. In Cedric Robinson’s famous assertion: “The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate” (Robinson, 2000: 26). For him, racialization processes predated capitalism but “capitalism amplified race by ‘disciplining’ the working class to such divisions, and capitalism enabled their ‘persistence and creation’” (Paret and Levenson, 2023: 1812). Anti-Blackness is a specific form of differentiation and racialization that emerges through that historical persistence of racial domination and places Black people at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. As the vilified and dehumanized “others,” Black people have been targets of a particularly vicious form of racial domination that is still at play today and its articulations are well described in critical Black scholarship (Wallace, 2022). In our special issue, we focus on both these concepts but do not consider them as fixed categories of thought or “singular perspectives” (Paret and Levenson, 2023) but as open relationalities whose intricacies and entanglements remain to be unpacked and questioned.

First, we discuss the concept of racial capitalism as developed by Black scholars (e.g. Cox, 1959; Robinson, 2000; Williams, 1944) to provide the socio-political and racialised context in which we work and publish as scholars. Racial capitalism offers an alternative analysis to the conventional (and critical) narrative of capitalism’s development and growth taught in business schools by focusing on its inherently racialized foundations. Second, we describe the concept of anti-Blackness as it has been theorized by radical Black scholars (e.g. Fanon, 1952, 1967; Hartman, 1997) and show how these works understand the systematic marginalization of Black knowledge formation in academia today, as well as the forms of resistant, creative, and revolutionary livingness that Black communities have created and sustained to constitute expansive notions of freedom. We conclude with a brief presentation of the collection of papers, essays, and interviews included in our special issue and outline their contributions that center Black liberational knowledge in our field.

Racial capitalism and the Black radical tradition

It is commonly understood that the history of anti-Blackness is intertwined with the history of chattel slavery and colonialism. However, what is far less recognized is that it is inextricably linked with the history of capitalism as well. This relationship was powerfully articulated during the 2020 protests led by the Movement for Black Lives, where a commonly seen slogan asserted: “There is no capitalism without racism.” This statement succinctly captures the essence of the concept of racial capitalism. The theory of racial capitalism has a long history in the tradition of Black radical thought, even if the term itself was ultimately popularized with the publication of Cedric Robinson’s book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983), which argues that racism is not incidental to capitalism, but constitutive of it (Kelley, 2000), and that race has played a crucial role in the extraction, expropriation, dispossession, exploitation, and wealth accumulation that has characterized capitalism from its very inception. In the words of Harris (2021): “Racial subjugation is not a special application of capitalist processes, but rather central to how capitalism operates.” Robinson developed the concept of racial capitalism ² —the idea that capitalism is inseparable from racial exploitation—by delving into the deep intellectual roots of the Black Radical Tradition within which scholars, activists, and revolutionaries, had long been laying the groundwork for understanding the intersections of race and class, colonialism, and capitalism.

W.E.B. Du Bois, perhaps the most prominent Black intellectual of the 20th century, offered one of the earliest critiques of capitalism’s reliance on racialized exploitation. In his powerful work, Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois and Edward (1935), argues that Black labor was central to the development of American capitalism and asserts that the enslavement and subsequent exploitation of African Americans provided the economic foundation for the growth of the U.S. economy, particularly in agriculture and industry. Slavery in Du Bois’ account was not merely a racial or social institution, but an economic system integral to the rise of global capitalism. For Du Bois, the plantations of the American South, the financial houses of Manhattan, and the mills of England were part of the same capitalist system, which relied on the engine of slavery. As Johnson (2018: np) points out, Du Bois demonstrates that “the history of capitalism makes no sense separate from the history of the slave trade and its aftermath. There was no such thing as capitalism without slavery: the history of Manchester never happened without the history of Mississippi.”

Du Bois’s work provided a foundational understanding of how racial exploitation and capitalism were intertwined long before the term “racial capitalism” was formalized, and a large number of Black scholars built upon this foundation. In Capitalism and Slavery, Williams (1944) offers a crucial early analysis that links the rise of capitalism to the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, arguing that the wealth generated from the exploitation of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and the Americas was essential to the development of European capitalism, particularly in financing the Industrial Revolution. His thesis challenged prevailing views by asserting that the abolition of slavery was driven by economic shifts rather than humanitarian ideals; as capitalism evolved, wage labor became more profitable than slavery. Williams’s analysis situates racialized exploitation, particularly through slavery, as a central driver of capitalist accumulation. Further, Williams (1944: 4) asserts that slavery itself was not a racist but an economic phenomenon: “[s]lavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.” Racialization was the tool through which slavery and exploitation was justified.

Oliver Cromwell Cox (1948) further articulated the relationship between race and capitalism in his landmark text, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, which critiques theories that treated race as an autonomous system, separate from economic structures, arguing that racism was not an ancient or universal phenomenon but a product of capitalism’s specific historical development and global expansion. According to Cox, the capitalist mode of production required the subjugation of certain groups to create and maintain unequal labor relations, and racism was the primary tool used to justify this subjugation.

In his most influential work, The Black Jacobins (first published in 1938 but significantly revised in 1963), the Trinidadian Marxist historian and revolutionary James (1963) advances the critique of capitalism’s reliance on racial exploitation through his study of colonialism and revolution. He points out the global significance of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and shows how the wealth generated by slave labor in the Caribbean had been essential to the development of European capitalism. The sugar, coffee, and tobacco produced by enslaved Africans in Haiti and elsewhere fueled industrial growth in Europe, just as cotton produced by slaves in the American South underpinned the Industrial Revolution. By focusing on the interconnectedness of race, class, and colonialism, James’s analysis provided a crucial lens for understanding how racial hierarchies were integral to the functioning of global capitalism. Importantly, James demonstrates that anti-colonial struggles were inherently anti-capitalist, for they sought to dismantle the racialized economic systems that upheld European dominance.

Cedric Robinson built upon these early analyses and developed the concept of racial capitalism to describe the inseparability of racial hierarchies and capitalist development. In Black Marxism, Robinson (2000) argues that capitalism was not a racially neutral economic system. Instead, he contends that racial oppression and exploitation have been embedded in the very fabric of capitalism from its inception, a point often overlooked by traditional Marxist analyses, which tended to prioritize class relations over race relations. One of Robinson’s key contributions to the debate was his assertion that capitalism did not create racial distinctions but rather emerged from a pre-existing racial order in Europe. As others before him, Robinson notes that European societies had long been stratified along ethnic, religious, and class lines, even before the rise of modern capitalism. These divisions, Robinson argues, formed the basis for the racial hierarchies that capitalism would later absorb and institutionalize. In many ways, Robinson’s argument is a direct extension of Cox’s critique of traditional sociological approaches that treated race as a separate, autonomous phenomenon from economic structures. While Robinson agrees with Cox that race was integral to the formation of the capitalist economy, unlike Cox who contends that racism was a product of capitalism, Robinson suggests that capitalism was racial from its very start. This crucial departure allows Robinson to frame racism not as a byproduct of capitalism but as its essential feature. By formalizing the term “racial capitalism,” Robinson unified these insights into a single framework that explained how capitalism, from its earliest moments, relied on the racialization of labor across the globe.

In addition to outlining how capitalism was inherently racialized, Robinson also sought to understand how racialized peoples resisted this system. This led to his development of the concept of the Black Radical Tradition, which he saw as a distinct mode of resistance to racial capitalism. Drawing on Du Bois’s analysis of Black labor and James’s work on revolutionary movements, Robinson argued that the Black Radical Tradition emerged in direct opposition to both capitalism and racism. Robinson’s formulation of racial capitalism marked a turning point in how scholars understood the relationship between race and capitalism, fundamentally challenging traditional Marxist frameworks that centered class struggle while treating race as secondary. After Robinson’s groundbreaking work, several scholars, especially those aligned with Black radical and feminist traditions, took up his ideas and expanded them into new areas of inquiry, including prison abolition, Black feminist thought, and the global dimensions of racial capitalism. Thinkers such as Davis (1981, 2016), Gilmore (2007), Kelley (2002), Hartman (1997, 2019), and Taylor (2019) have been instrumental in deploying and expanding upon the concept of racial capitalism, bringing it into the domains of carceral studies, urban policy, social movements, and historical reimaginings.

The relatively recent re-emergence of the term in US academic circles can be partly attributed to the republication of Robinson’s book in 2000 and the attention it received. But the global popularity of racial capitalism as a foundational analytical framing exploded after the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. While for the South African activists, racial capitalism is grounded in a particular history of struggle, Robinson deploys it in a more generalized fashion to offer a capacious understanding about how and why economic inequality goes hand in hand with racist violence. The concept of racial capitalism shows how this is no coincidence and asserts: all capitalism is racial capitalism. Or, to use Ruth Gilmore’s (Gilmore, 2007: 240) oft-quoted formulation: “Capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it.” Here we note the connective lines of political dialog between activist and scholarly communities that can have far reaching impacts on both anti-racist organizing and academic interests.

We note how business school scholars have deployed the concept of racial capitalism to analyze racial disparities and the role of management practices in materializing and entrenching anti-Blackness in organizations. For example, in a recent study, Mir and Toor (2024) use the framework of racial capitalism to show how the system of student debt in the U.S. is designed to funnel young Black students, especially Black women, into a form of debt servitude, and argue that the debt trap that ensnares a disproportionate number of Black students can be understood when read through the lens of racial capitalism. The paper also highlights the history of racist public policies in the US put in place over time with the active involvement of business corporations (see also, Mir and Toor, 2023). Another important contribution is by Prasad (2023) in which she analyzes the relevance of racial capitalism to Management and Organization Studies. In her paper, readers are introduced to the key tenets of racial capitalism, its intellectual grounding, and its potential to be read with Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic capital. Our special issue builds on these contributions and proposes a CMS agenda that is committed to advancing racial capitalism’s ideas and avenues for organizational analysis.

Theorizing anti-Blackness: From the “afterlives of slavery” to expansive visions of freedom

Our second key concept is anti-Blackness that emerged from discussions and debates in Black Studies - a field of interdisciplinary scholarship that engages with the histories, experiences, and changing cultural formations of Black life. Many Black Studies scholars acknowledge the field’s debt to the Black radical intellectual tradition as discussed above, drawing on its political philosophy to focus on the ways Black communities resist white supremacy through acts of creation and cultural invention. Black Studies offers ideas that challenges the moral superiority of Western liberalism, by pointing to the ongoing and ever-present legacies of slavery that inform entire global arrangements of power, but also the everyday governance of life through anti-Black laws, policies, policing, and financing regimes (Hartman, 1997). Importantly, the force of these ideas draw on, amongst other engagements, the radical politics of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies (e.g. Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, Paul Gilroy) that has transformed our understanding of race from a pernicious ideology to a materiality of the social. Racism structures the social and in this arrangement the production of social formation is co-determined by anti-Blackness.

When writing about anti-Blackness, it is impossible to propose a conceptual analysis without referring to Fanon’s (1952, 1967) canonic works that have shaped radical movements in intellectual spaces, such as decolonial theory, postcolonial studies, subaltern studies, Black studies, and critical race theory. Positing a conception of Black lives as fungible and systemically exposed to violence, a Fanonian perspective describes the experience of being Black as inseparable from a specific form of racism that takes root in the positioning of Black people as outside the realms of humanness. Drawing on his own experiences of French colonialism as a subject of Martinique and later as a political activist in the Algerian struggle for freedom from French colonialism, Fanon’s works identify how colonial violence is inherently racist and prevents Black people from becoming full political subjects. This in turn leads to the double nefarious effects on Black communities of being subordinated to historically oppressive material conditions such as slavery, and also to interiorize their degradation and to metabolize it through what Fanon calls self-alienation. His ideas remain foundational to contemporary engagements with liberational struggles, decolonization, and Black radical thought.

The term, anti-Black, was first coined by Canadian scholar Akua Benjamin, who used it in her doctoral thesis to describe the extreme brutality Black communities experience at the hands of Canadian state institutions, such as the courts and police forces (Benjamin, 2003). Later, anti-Blackness was mobilized by Black communities in North America and South Africa who sought to engage the state with abolitionist and anti-racist efforts that address the specific forms of racism that immobilize Black agency and perpetuate violence against them. However, starting with protests against the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and building on the consolidation of the movement for Black lives in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, the idea of a specific form of anti-Black racism proliferated among activist circles and popular media as a foundational analytic to make sense of the destruction of Black life under continuing white supremacy. In a widely read and shared op-ed for the New York Times following the murder of George Floyd, Kihana Ross, an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, describes anti-Blackness as the systemic and structural denial of the humanity of Black people. In her words, anti-Blackness is “the disdain, disregard, and disgust for our existence” (Ross, 2020: np). For French philosopher Norman Ajari anti-Blackness is historically articulated around three modalities of dehumanization: first, alienation or the systematic historical de-linking of Black people from their own culture, language and history making them “strangers to themselves” (Ajari, 2023: 22), second, expropriation which dispossesses Black communities from their resources, and ultimately from their bodies and from their sovereignty, and finally, historical genocide which leads to the ultimate eradication of Black existence from narratives and common accounts of history.

Today, the question of the exposure of Black communities to disproportionate and systemic violence such as police brutality, mass incarceration, police profiling, job discrimination and street shootings poses critical questions about the disposability of Black life and Black peoples structural position in social life. For Afropessimists, a community of scholars within Black Studies, Black people experience an ongoing social death (Patterson, 2018) characterized by a loss of social identity, social connectedness, and bodily disintegration—processes that were foundational to the organization and management of enslaved peoples. They maintain that this social death is an integral part of how liberal civil society is governed, its moral orders, judicial operations, and organization of private rights. Therefore, dismantling anti-Black racism requires a complete overhaul of liberal institutions, Western governance, and legal frameworks. Racial justice in MOS must therefore include and foreground efforts that grasp beyond piecemeal or reformative actions and must center revolutionary ideas that violently break from liberal notions of diversity and inclusion.

It is important here to note that the pessimism of Afropessimists does not pertain to how Black people see themselves and their future within this libidinal economy. Rather it points to non-Black people and their refusal to accept and enable the kind of structural change required for Black people to inhabit social life as fully human. Many Afropessimists do not consider a category such as “people of color” in their analysis as they believe the structural positioning of Black people is radically different from other communities among racially diverse societies. In this case Afropessimists do not deny that non-Black communities face structural racism, but rather that these communities do not embody the same structural position of social death as experienced by Black people and, as such, they do not experience the same form of gratuitous racial violence. This formulation has proved controversial among some communities of color, and Black scholars, for the problems this may pose for solidaristic politics among diverse communities. To be clear, Afropessimists question the knowledge that non-Black communities draw on to organize solidarity movements in anti-racist struggles. We take a position that, while tensions and contradictions are vital for revolutionary ideas to propagate and diffuse, Afropessimism brings a radical politics to how coalitional efforts can be organized for racial justice. The point for us, as a collective of Black and non-Black scholars of color, is to open and sustain multiple fronts of resistance to challenge white supremacy.

Following on from the above discussion, we wish to conclude this section with a brief summary of the significance of Saidiya Hartman’s work, which is perhaps one of the most transformative contributions to emerge from Black Studies in recent times. In her provocative re-telling of American history, Hartman (1997) explores the interrelation between slavery and freedom by questioning the nature of power and critically engaging with the assumptions of liberalism. Underpinning these explorations are the testimonies of the enslaved which enable her to construct and re-visit different “scenes” (e.g. auction block, minstrel show, plantation diaries). She uses these scenes to examine the performance of power including the terrifying domination of slaveholders alongside the forms of entertainment designed to pacify the enslaved. Connecting this formation to the present day, Hartman argues that Western liberalism materializes Black life in “the afterlives of slavery.” That is to say, that Western liberalism continues the structural maintenance of racial subjugation while it celebrates the formal abolition of slavery giving little political space to Black agency to determine the direction, capacities and demands of Black communities. Importantly however, Hartman pays equal attention to the possibility of resistance showing how domination is never complete or exhaustive - that Black life invents, creates, and rebels for ways of being human in a white supremacist culture. These ideas are further developed in her more recent work (Hartman, 2019) that explores the centrality of fugitivity to the conceptualization of Blackness. Caring deeply for and resurrecting stories of Black women who assert their freedom while escaping the force of white supremacist laws and the enclosure of the urban space of the ghetto, we read about the generative disorder that shapes Black livingness under conditions of anti-Black racism. Hartman’s project gives expression to the creativity and possibility of Black life, to the expansive visions of freedom. Importantly, Hartman shows us how liberational struggles arise in everyday spaces and in ordinary ways. These ideas upturn management logics that insist on the centrality of liberal democratic norms, patriarchal leadership, and quantifying logics in the organization of social “development.” For Hartman, everyday, disorganized, and minor maneuvers ensure Black life, its survival and inventiveness within modalities of anti-Black society. From this juncture of creation and care, we now outline the contributions of this special issue by introducing the papers, essays and interviews included in this volume.

Anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in MOS: Where we are today

The seven pieces of scholarship included in this special issue mobilize diverse knowledges and methods to connect racial capitalism and anti-Blackness to current debates in MOS and beyond. We begin with a dual-interview between Professor Stella Nkomo and PhD student Patricia T Naya. The interview is an original exchange between a long-established and an early career scholar—both committed to making race a central tenet of researching management and organizations. The discussion offers our readers several accessible points of engagement with current understandings about anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in MOS. Our call for papers invited contributions from scholars and activists that provide insights about Black peoples’ experiences of embodying difference in academic spaces and to highlight efforts that build local and trans-national solidarities against racism and white supremacy. This interview format supports a different kind of knowledge about the special issue themes by engaging in intergenerational, international, and transnational dimensions of anti-Black racism and how these have informed the politics of each scholar during the course of their academic lives. Traversing and crossing the North American and African regions, each interviewee reflects on the similarities and differences of racist conditions that perpetuate a stubbornly global form of anti-Black racism found in both contexts. The interview concludes with Nkomo and Naya outlining what they believe MOS scholars must do to work toward racial justice.

Our special issue’s second contribution is a paper by Darryl Rice, Oscar Jerome Stewart, Tsedale Melaku and Nicole C. J. Young that presents a critical examination of anti-Black performative allyship in MOS. Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT), Rice et al. present performative allyship as a form of epistemic injustice, where Black scholarship is systematically marginalized and devalued. The paper identifies three specific acts of anti-Black performative allyship within the peer-review process and illustrates, through personal narratives, how Black scholars’ knowledge production is often undermined but at the same time circulated within a highly racialized publishing community. This shows us how, despite being initially devalued, Black knowledge is later appropriated by mainstream voices for their own benefit. This appropriation is paradoxical, as the same ideas that are first dismissed, such as Critical Race Theory and “wokeness” (and soon racial capitalism) are subsequently co-opted and used to undermine Black perspectives further. The paper highlights how these contradictory practices reinforce white supremacy and obstruct the genuine advancement of Black scholarship in MOS.

Next, we introduce Sihela Jacobs and Kurt April’s work that centers Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness (BC) philosophy. This paper proposes a multi-level framework for confronting anti-Black racism in MOS and fostering solidarity in the pursuit of social and economic justice for Black people living under colonial conditions. While its focus is on South Africa, Jacobs and April emphasize that BC’s framework is applicable to other neo-colonial, apartheid, and settler-colonial contexts where anti-Blackness persists. The framework addresses anti-Black racism at the micro (individual), meso (organizational), and macro (societal) levels, with an emphasis on restorative and reparative justice. The paper critiques performative diversity initiatives, arguing that they are non-transformational and uphold oppressive white supremacist structures. Instead, the authors advocate for systemic and transformative changes that hold organizations accountable for their role in perpetuating historical and ongoing racial injustices. The paper urges MOS scholars and organizations to adopt BC thinking as a potential liberatory praxis to confront persistent anti-Black racism within organizations. Additionally, the paper reminds us of the broader disregard for African scholarship within the academy, particularly that which centers the material conditions of Black people, echoing Joelle Cruz’s contribution in this special issue. Both papers discuss how MOS, like many academic fields, often positions itself as incapable of learning anything substantive from African scholarship. However, as this paper illustrates, African scholarship offers critical insights into dismantling entrenched colonial and anti-black racial biases within MOS. These theorizations provide pathways for overcoming white supremacy that not only benefit Black people but advance the liberation and well-being of all humanity.

Our fourth contribution is by Sandiso Bazana and it is novel in many regards. Bazana applies a theoretical framework vastly under-mobilized in MOS to address the entrenched and mostly unquestioned anti-Blackness in management and organizing practices. It is the first to date in MOS to use an Afropessimist lens to address anti-Blackness in organizational structures and practices; the paper provides a rich description of a brutal labor-management conflict that illustrates the entrenched systemic anti-Black violence still at play in post-Apartheid South Africa. Using a narrative case study of the Marikana massacre that took place in South-Africa’s North West province in August 2012 and saw 34 miners killed by the South African Police Service, the paper shows the mechanisms through which a settler-colonial racist system sustained by corporate anti-Black violent anti-strike practices perpetuates enduring states of social death among always already dehumanized Black workers.

Our fifth contribution is Christopher Morris’s piece which focuses on HOPE VI, a federal public housing program in the U.S., and critiques the participatory methods used in housing redevelopment projects. Morris argues that HOPE VI’s participatory initiatives, though framed as community involvement, ultimately facilitated the marginalization and displacement of Black, low-income residents. The analysis presents two models of participatory engagement: the “deficit model,” which depicts residents as inferior and incapable, and the “governance model,” which uses token participation to control feedback and minimize resistance. Anti-Blackness in these models is evident in how Black residents were systematically disempowered and displaced through redevelopment policies that framed them as deficient, incapable of self-governance, and in need of state intervention. This racialized discourse served to legitimize the program’s harmful impacts, reinforcing stereotypes of Black inferiority and using token participation to mask deeper exclusion. The paper highlights how these participatory methods constructed Black residents as non-agentic subjects, where their inclusion was predicated on their exclusion, thus denying them genuine agency while simultaneously reinforcing state control. For MOS, this calls for a deeper exploration of how anti-Blackness is embedded in organizational structures, decisions, and discourses, especially in initiatives supposedly aimed at benefiting marginalized groups, like Black people.

Following these more traditional papers, we introduce Joelle Cruz’s provocative Speaking Out essay, in which she mobilizes embodied and reflexive prose to connect the materiality of anti-Blackness in MOS to lived experiences of African scholars who work under dehumanizing conditions of permanent non-existence. She describes this phenomenon using the framing of Africa as “No-Organization” to challenge the construct of Africa as an empty epistemological space. Setting out her essay in three movements, Cruz shifts the readers’ attention from the non-being of Black selfhood, to the existential promise of critical scholarship about Africans and Africa, to the “it” of anti-Blackness where the first two positions intersect. The essay powerfully articulates the everyday and virulent forms of gendered-racism that African women encounter in higher education and connect these to structural discourses and material conditions that entrench African scholarship within a zone of non-being. Cruz questions how critical scholars can make knowledge in dehumanizing social formations that disavow Africans’ contribution to scholarship. From this positionality of Black being as “non-being,” Cruz opens generative vistas to create knowledge that move us beyond racialized categories of human. The essay is a critical contribution to current understandings in MOS about Blackness, organizational scholarship, and the productive force of theorizing the “it” of organization studies to support the humanization of African research in MOS.

Our capstone contribution is a commissioned photo essay by artist, Anthony Francis, that we publish under the Acting Up section of this journal. Francis is an artist based in San Antonio, Texas. His photography practice is grounded in intellectual and poetic engagements with Blackness, Black feminist theory, and the politics of portraiture. The essay included here offers an artist’s reflection on photography as an expression to challenge anti-Blackness and its formation in a highly racialized market-driven art complex. The photo essay incorporates works of three other artists to comprise a collective dialogue on how photographic expression can be liberated from a historically colonial and racist medium to become a collective practice of love and community-building that rearranges power relations.

In conclusion, we outline some areas for further research and also make suggestions that can spark action among scholars and activists committed to anti-racism in critical management and organization studies. First, we are inspired by Paret and Levenson’s (2023: 1824) assertion that future scholarship must not flatten concepts, such as, anti-Blackness and racial capitalism and that “the relationship between racism and capitalism remains an open question.” This requires deeper engagement with the positionality and contextualizing factors that shape anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in organizations and management practices. As the works included in this special issue attest, paying close attention to diverse articulations of racial domination alongside forms of Black resistance can open the field to deeper engagements with these questions. Second, and related to the first point, our special issue urges for the centering of Black radical thought in the way we mobilize critical ideas. This means that rather than drawing a boundary around Black radical thought as pertaining only to issues of equality and diversity, these ideas must influence and shape our critical engagements more broadly. Finally, this brings us to the issue of pedagogy and our teaching environments. To develop our capacities for this work, it is imperative that our teaching contributes to both introducing these ideas and thinkers to students, as well as, building knowledge and understanding among faculty. While we recognize the importance of curricular transformations, we call for deeper structural changes as to how education is governed by centering Black students’ voices and lived experiences into the way we develop theory and teaching.

We hope that the readers of this special issue will find inspiration in its contents to collectively engage in an active anti-racist resistance to dismantle the anti-Blackness of the MOS field. We offer this introduction in solidarity with liberational efforts for a capacious intellectual project that enables racialized communities to inventively use their voice to make social worlds and ways of being outside the injunctions of racial capitalism.