Nonprofit Organizational Identification, Moral License, and Whiteness: An Experimental Study of the Effect of Nonprofit Work on the White Morality Myth

Abstract

Moral license researchers find that White people more readily agree with racial discrimination after interacting with nonprofits, but nonprofit organizations often support racial diversity. This study explores whether White nonprofit workers who are prompted to describe their work will identify with the equality espousals of their employers by indicating lower levels of discrimination or indicate higher levels of discrimination as the moral license literature predicts. An online experiment examines how describing nonprofit work influences race and gender opinions, finding that White nonprofit workers indicate lower agreement with a discrimination index after describing their work. These findings imply that racial institutional context is important for moral license and organizational identification. For nonprofits, the finding supports the use of strategic practices to manage diversity even when those practices do not have explicit linkages to race and gender equality.