Reflections on race relations and organizations

Abstract

The publication of this Special Issue focuses the attention of readers on the subject of race relations and organizations. In deciding to devote an entire issue of the Journal to this topic, the editor, Cary L. Cooper, and the associate editor most closely connected to the project, Douglas T. Hall, took a major professional risk. They are white men. Ella Bell, the editor of this issue, is a black woman. The authors of the research papers in this edition are black men and black women. Cooper and Hall are highly respected researchers in organizational behavior, and the Journal of Organizational Behavior is very much what academics call a 'mainstream journal'. I am unaware of a mainstream journal in organizational behavior ever before devoting a special issue to the subject of race, authorizing a black scholar to be in charge of the issue, and publishing a complete set of papers by black authors. In the 1970s the Journal of Social Issues had several issues devoted to race relations, and sometimes (perhaps every time) the editor was black. But JSI is rooted in social psychology, a field that has contributed much to organizational behavior but is not identical with it. Social psychology has a much longer tradition of studying race relations than does organizational behaviour (Alderfer and Thomas, 1988). Possibly, the publication of this issue is an historic event. Why do I say that Cooper and Hall have taken a major professional risk in supporting this special issue? In part, I draw on my own experience as a white male with more than a decade of research and consulting experience with race relations in organizations. More important, I draw on knowledge about the history of race relations in the United States and South Africa. At the close of the American Civil War, for example, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a white male in part because of Lincoln's decision to free black slaves. During this century, Stanley Levison, a white man who was a close friend, advisor, and fundraiser for Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement, was harassed by the FBI (Oakes, 1982). King was advised by senior government officials to sever his relationship with Levison, because the white man was a risk to national security. Donald Woods, editor of the Daily Dispatch, friend of outspoken black leader Steve Biko and foe of apartheid, was banned from writing and publishing in his own country for five years (Woods, 1978). Many other examples could be cited. I make this point not to suggest that whites who work for progressive race relations face hazards comparable to blacks. Few do. Rather I wish to suggest why more whites do not take clear actions to change race relations and to explain why, for more than eight years, we in the United States have been experiencing a period of regression in race relations. Membership in the white group exerts strong pressures on individual