“Against a sharp white background”: How Black women experience the white gaze at work

Abstract

Whiteness is a pervasive context in (post)colonial organizations that maintains its enduring presence through everyday practices such as the white gaze: seeing people's bodies through the lens of whiteness. The white gaze distorts perceptions of people who deviate from whiteness, subjecting them to bodily scrutiny and control. Understanding how the white gaze manifests is therefore important for understanding the marginalization of particular bodies in organizations. We therefore center Black women's narratives to examine the following research question: How is the white gaze enacted and experienced at work? We conducted a critical discourse analysis of 1169 tweets containing the hashtag #BlackWomenAtWork and identified four mechanisms of the white gaze whereby whiteness is imposed, presumed, venerated, and forced on Black women's bodies. We conclude with a discussion of the white gaze as an apparatus to enforce gendered racialized hierarchies vis‐à‐vis the body and how foregrounding whiteness deepens our understanding of marginalization at work.

Majority members misperceive even “win-win” diversity policies as unbeneficial to them.

“…Other researchers have argued as much, for example highlighting that zero-sum thinking pervades gender dynamics in similar ways to racial dynamics (Kehn & Ruthig, 2013; Wilkins et al, 2015). That said, the present paper cannot definitively rule out that the effects are dependent on the specific history of race-focused diversity policies, Western settings, or Whiteness within American institutions (Rabelo et al, 2020; Ray, 2019). For example, the prominent ongoing public debate over the legality of affirmative action in the United States could have shaped our White American participants’ response to the policies they evaluated.…”

Hashtag Black Lives Matter’s Tweets as Education Media Messages

“…Educate viewers about hashtags respecting the sexual behaviour of black women (Rabelo et al, 2021;Saletti-cuesta et al, 2020).…”

Enslavement and the Foundations of Human Resource Development: Covert Learning, Consciousness Raising, and Resisting antiBlack Organizational Goals

“…The learning community to which Douglass contributed operated outside the organization's sponsorship and facilitated learning that resisted organizational goals (Moss, 2010). Situated beyond the white gaze (Rabelo et al, 2020), this learning community eschewed the surveillance of white leadership and strategically decoupled Black development initiatives from the wider organization.…”