Journal article
Racialized Organizations and the Interest Divergence Dilemma
Sociological forum (Randolph, N.J.), Vol.38(4), pp.1375-1381
12/2023
DOI: 10.1111/socf.12950
Appears in UI Libraries Support Open Access
Abstract
This essay makes three points on the contemporary racial backlashes' impact on racialized organizations. First, Derrick Bell's notion of interest convergence—which argues that diversity policies did not spring from the goodness of white people's hearts but were a face‐saving political necessity—helps to explain why the current assault on racially ameliorative policy has been so effective and why the retreat from diversity may worsen. Conservative activists are attempting to force interest divergence, as the historical conditions leading to affirmative action and diversity policy have disappeared. Second, Powell's decision in Regents of University of California versus Bakke, which made diversity orthodox, was facilitated by interest convergence. Diversity emerged as a deeply reformist organizational strategy designed to manage civil rights activists' revolutionary calls for a fully inclusive society. Third, interest divergence and the retreat from diversity have major implications for deepening racial inequality in organizations. By attempting to ensure interest divergence, contemporary right‐wing movements hope to make the currently implicit white dominance of mainstream organizations (Ray 2019b) explicit again.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Racialized Organizations and the Interest Divergence Dilemma
- Creators
- Victor Ray - University of Iowa, African American Studies
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Sociological forum (Randolph, N.J.), Vol.38(4), pp.1375-1381
- DOI
- 10.1111/socf.12950
- ISSN
- 0884-8971
- eISSN
- 1573-7861
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Comment
- A prior version of this essay was presented at Columbia Business School's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Expertise in Racialized Organizations mini conference on March 17, 2023. I thank the organizers and participants for feedback and the space to be in conversation. Special thanks to the Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Fellowship for support.
- Language
- English
- Electronic publication date
- 11/02/2023
- Date published
- 12/2023
- Academic Unit
- African American Studies; Sociology and Criminology
- Record Identifier
- 9984517659502771
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