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Racial stigma and racial criminalization have been centralizing pillars of the construction of Blackness in the United States. Taking such systemic injustice and racism as a given, then question then becomes how these macro-level arrangements are reflected in micro-level processes. This work uses radical interactionism and stigma theory to explore the potential implications for racialized identity construction and the development of “criminalized subjectivity” among Black undergraduate students at a predominately white university in the Midwest. I use semistructured interviews to explore the implications of racial stigma and criminalization on micro-level identity construction and how understandings of these issues can change across space and over the course of one's life. Findings demonstrate that Black university students are keenly aware of this particular stigma and its consequences in increasingly complex ways from the time they are school-aged children. They were aware of this stigma as a social fact but did not internalize it as a true reflection of themselves; said internalization was thwarted through strong self-concept and racial socialization. This increasingly complex awareness is also informed by an intersectional lens for some interviewees. I argue not only that the concept of stigma must be explicitly placed within these larger systems but also that understanding and identity-building are both rooted in ever-evolving processes of interaction and meaning-making. This research contributes to scholarship that applies a critical lens to Goffmanian stigma rooted in Black sociology and criminology and from the perspectives of the stigmatized themselves.

The gap between higher learning practices and business expectations in terms of preparing engineering, technology, and business students is significant. This paper offers an innovative approach toward narrowing that gap. The approach offered stresses an open system orientation and partnerships between business and education. This approach was utilized successfully, resulting in win‐win outcomes for both business and higher education. The results of a mini‐case study are presented and their implications are discussed.

The purpose of this article is to share reflections about the progress toward the inclusion of race as a core analytical concept in MOS since the article. The emperor has no clothes: Rewriting “race in organizations” was published in the Academy of Management Review twenty-nine years ago.

I critically reflect upon the past and future of race in management and organizations studies drawing upon my own subjective position in what has transpired over the past twenty-nine years. Specifically, I reflect upon the past and future of the study of race in organizations and also offer some recommendations for theories that may help advance it as a core theoretical concept in MOS drawing.

Dethroning the “emperor” remains a challenge. There has been a lack of significant progress toward positioning race as a core analytical concept in MOS. There is still much to do to elevate race to a significant analytical concept in MOS. Post-colonial theory, whiteness and the literature on the sociology of race may assist scholars in making progress.

I readily acknowledge that my subjective position as the author of an article declaring the significance of race in MOS and as a Black woman whose life and career has unfolded in a world of systemic racism shape my reflections. It may be time for to consider whether positioning race as a core analytical concept in MOS can be achieved under the diversity paradigm. Perhaps it is time for a new field of study – race in organizations.

Theorizing race in organizations is central to undoing the continuing effects of racism. Otherwise, it will be difficult to develop strategies that get to the roots of racial inequality in organizations.

The confluence of resurgent white supremacy, the stark global racial inequalities revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic and calls to end anti-Blackness and systemic racism by the Black Lives Matter Movement underscore the immense importance of race in every aspect of society including organizations.

This essay is my first reflections on what has transpired since the publication of the article. The essay reveals my insights and experiences of writing the article and why rewriting race into MOS is a much larger project than the one envisioned in 1992.

Critical race theory (CRT) seems to face a never-ending baptism by fire. When the Trump administration sought to ban CRT from American federal training courses in 2020, this may have come as a shock to few (Lang, 2020). Perhaps of greater surprise was that mutual sentiments resonated with the UK Minister for Equalities Kemi Badenoch, a black female, who appears to oppose the teaching of CRT in principle (Thrilling, 2020). The resurgence of such denunciations is problematic in a Western world which is primed for social activism, particularly for scholars in higher education institutions, where CRT has been gaining traction as a guiding framework for research into antiracism, fairness and affirmative action. This chapter suggests that the condemnation of CRT is neither unexpected nor is it altogether absurd. Nevertheless, it aims to provide a balanced metatheoretical ‘criticism’ of CRT and offer a view on the suitability of, and prospects for, its activist research agenda in higher education. Quite often, criticisms of CRT reflect issues with its origin as a troubled bricolage of conveniently assembled ‘tenets’, which do not lend themselves easily to the burden of evidentiary production required in higher education research and practice. In this review, I analyse CRT, through its bricolage-style characteristics, as primarily an explanatory theory, with respect to its application against racialised issues in higher education policy. It is hoped this chapter offers academic and activist researchers a way past the shadow of CRT's bricolage, by defusing some of the misgivings towards its inherent limitations.

This study examines the role of mentorship in black Greek letter fraternities (BGLFs) in resisting cultural and institutional oppression. Based on 20 interviews with black male college students, we build upon the works of others that have sought to examine the functions BGLFs play among black men in college. We suggest that BGLF participation offers collegiate black men mentorships with older members who motivate them to succeed personally and academically, support in integrating them into the black student community, and helps develop their professionalism and leadership. This mentorship allows young black men to contest the negative controlling images of black men culturally, and the lack of institutional support at predominantly white colleges and universities.

This paper explores organization-level racialized work strategies for maintaining racialized organizations (Ray, 2019). It focuses on intentional actions to maintain dominant racial norms, demonstrating how work strategies are informed by dominant racial structures that maintain racial inequities.

We compiled a chronological case study (Yin, 2012) based on 168 news media articles and various organizational documents to examine responses to athlete protests at the University of Texas at Austin following the death of George Floyd. Gioia et al.’s (2013) method uncovered how dominant racial norms inform organizational behaviors.

The paper challenges institutional theory neutrality and identifies several racialized work strategies that organizations employ to maintain racialized norms and practices. The findings provide a framework for organizations to interrogate their strategies and their role in reproducing dominant racial norms and inequities.

In 2020, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was reinvigorated within sporting and corporate domains. However, many organizations engaged in performativity, sparking criticism about meaningful change in organizational contexts. Our case study examines how one organization responded to athlete activists’ BLM-fueled demands, revealing specific racialized work strategies that maintain structures of racism. As organizations worldwide disrupt and discuss oppressive structures such as racism, we demonstrate how organizational leadership, while aware of policies and practices of racism, may choose not to act and actively maintain such structures.

Past research indicates that blacks are less trusting of physicians than are whites; yet, researchers have not examined within group differences in physician trust by religious denomination – an effort that is complicated by the high correlated nature of race and religion. To better understand black-white differences in physician trust, this chapter examines heterogeneity in trust levels among blacks associated with religious designations that distinguish Black Protestants from other ethnoreligious groups.

Using data from the 2002 and 2006 General Social Surveys, this study adopts an intersectional (i.e., race x religion) typology of religious denomination to understand the black-white gap in physician trust. Weighted multivariate linear regression is employed.

Black-white differences in physician trust are identified only when religious affiliation is considered but not when religious affiliation is omitted. Blacks who are affiliated with Black Protestant churches are more trusting than other religious groups, including Evangelical Protestants, Mainline Protestants, and blacks who are affiliated with other faiths.

This chapter indicates that there is more heterogeneity in trust levels among blacks than between blacks and whites. Moreover, the findings suggest that religion can play an important role in bridging the trust gap between blacks and the medical sciences.

This chapter connects colorblind ideology to organizational processes. Despite advances in our thinking about colorblindness as the current dominant racial ideology, scholars are reluctant to tie this ideology to organizational processes – creating the impression that colorblindness is an individual attribute rather than a structural phenomenon. Because the frames of colorblindness are usually interpreted through interviews – as opposed to organizational practices – focusing on the frames reinforces the sense that ideologies are free-floating prejudices unconnected to social structures. In this theoretical piece, we draw on the organizational literature, to tie Bonilla-Silva’s colorblind frames – abstract liberalism, cultural racism, the minimization of racism, and naturalization – to organizational processes, showing how mundane organizational procedures reinforce structural inequality. We argue that organizational policies and practices rely on normative Whiteness, devaluing the cultural norms of nonwhites, and passing those practices to successive administrations. Ostensibly nonracial procedures such as hiring, promotion, and performance reviews are rife with racialized meanings.

Racism occurs in many ways and varies across countries, evolving and adapting to sociocultural history, as well as contemporary economic, political and technological changes. This chapter discusses the multilevel dimensions of racism and its diverse manifestations across multiracial societies. It examines how different aspects of racism are mediated interpersonally, and embedded in institutions, social structures and processes, that produce and sustain racial inequities in power, resources and lived experiences. Furthermore, this chapter explores the direct and indirect ways racism is expressed in online and offline platforms and details its impacts on various groups based on their intersecting social and cultural identities. Targets of racism are those who primarily bear the adverse effects. However, racism also affects its perpetrators in many ways, including by limiting their social relations and attachments, and by imposing social and economic costs. This chapter thus analyses the many aspects of racism both from targets and perpetrators' perspectives.

There are racial differences in policing and treatment when people are stopped for the same crimes, and scholars have long documented and expressed concern regarding the police’s reactions to Black men. In this paper, we argue that racism is the root cause of police-involved killings of unarmed Black men. Utilizing several contemporary examples, we articulate the ways racism operates through cultural forces and institutional mechanisms to illustrate how this phenomenon lies at the intersection of public safety and public health. Thus, we begin by defining racism and describing how it is gendered to move the notion that the victims of police involved shootings overwhelmingly tend to be Black men from the margins of the explanation of the patterns to the center. Next, we discuss how the police have been used to promote public safety and public health throughout US history. We conclude by describing common explanations for contemporary police-involved shootings of unarmed Black males and why those arguments are flawed. Reframing the phenomena as gendered racism is critical for identifying points of intervention. Because neither intent nor purpose is a prerequisite of the ways that racism affects public safety and public health, the differential impact of policies and programs along racial lines is sufficient for racism to be a useful way to frame this pattern of outcomes. Incorporating gender into this framing of racism introduces that ways that Black men have been viewed, stereotyped, and treated implicitly in institutional practices and explicitly in institutional policies.