Beyond Racial Division by George A. Yancey

Author:George A. Yancey [Yancey, George A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Race relations;racism;antiracism;collaborative conversations;mutual accountability;racial tension;colorblindness;colorblind;white fragility;mutual obligations;racial reconciliation;justice;racial justice;sociology;racial division;racial divide;public life;common good;race;ethnicity;black evangelicals;white evangelicals;race in the church;racial alienation;black Christian;diversity;unity;division;unity in the church;racial healing;division in the church;racial unity
ISBN: 9781514001844
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2021-12-16T05:38:21+00:00

Collaborative Communication and Structural Change

What about collaborative communication and healthy interracial communication when it comes to making institutional or structural changes? Are such attempts at communication merely ways to maintain the status quo? Can focusing on healthy interracial communication really result in alterations in how we run our organizations and formulate our laws? I believe that the win-win attitude we find in collaborative communication is important in finding solutions that will change our social structures and institutions. Not only will such an approach help us find solutions, it will help those solutions be sustainable as they gain support across racial and political dimensions. We know that collaborative styles of communication lead to less prejudice and more volitional compliance in the decisions that are made (Ellis & Fisher, 1994). Not only might we find better solutions by working together, we are also more likely to have solutions that are supported by a strong majority of those who participated in crafting those structural and institutional changes.

To look at how this happens let us go back to the research I noted in the last chapter (Dobbin & Kalev, 2016) about the failure of companies to hire more managers of color. We found that mandatory diversity training, implementing job tests as a requirement for new managers,1 and a grievance system for people of color correlated with fewer managers of color. That was the bad news. However, the researchers also examined companies that tried to increase the number of managers of color with voluntary diversity training and by using mostly white managers to recruit people of color out of college, to mentor people of color, and to head up diversity task forces. They found that five years later there were significantly more managers of color at these companies. What is the difference between the tools that work and those that do not? I suggest that the methods that do not work tend to be geared at forcing whites to “do the right thing.” We can see this in the compulsion to force white managers to attend diversity training and use job tests to screen out applicants. Grievance systems also can be seen as a way to place an institutional check on white managers. Such systems may be used as a threat to make certain whites conduct themselves in ways that are deemed sufficiently racially aware. The desire to make certain that the whites who potentially hire people of color have institutional checks that work to our advantage is understandable. Given our history of racial abuse and research indicating that there still is racial bias in hiring (Quillian et al., 2017), people of color and antiracists generally welcome such checks. The problem is that instead of obtaining the desired result of more managers of color, we end up with fewer managers of color.

But the measures that lead to more managers of color tend to be more focused on bringing whites into the conversation rather than compelling them to do right by people of color. If a

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