Academic Writing
Selling Diversity to White Men
Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic research, this paper finds that diversity professionals sell diversity to white men—literally to obtain new clients and, metaphorically, to gain supporters for their practices—by performing economic rationality. This article argues that economic rationality itself is a racial and gendered performance. It also unsettles pervasive scholarly and popular assumptions that capitalism is intrinsically amoral.
Published in Organization.
Creating Diversity Markets
Since the 1980s, diversity professionals have created value out of racial and gendered differences. In this paper, I show how diversity professionals circumvent debates in the morality of affirmative action, produce economic and cultural value in diverse talent, and design accountability structures to integrate diversity management into everyday business. Through these economization practices diversity professionals create markets for their work independent of the state, and reveal that the neoliberalization of organizations is an ongoing process.
Published in Economic Anthropology.
Graphing Race
Data visualization practices are effective for understanding the complex social, economic, and political phenomena that is racism, but we know little of why this is the case. Through semiotic and rhetorical strategies, I argue, social scientists and corporate bureaucrats give meanings to racial hierarchies in the workplace. These practices reveal that accountability is negotiated between these activists and the images they produce. This work helps illuminate how a Du Boisian antiracist legacy has extended to corporate America, as well as how data visualization itself can shape institutional efforts to dismantle systemic racism.
Published in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (open access journal)
Works in Progress
The Coherence of Race
Diversity professionals download photographs and biographical information, employ spreadsheets, mobilize equal employment opportunity documents, and confirm their impressions with their peers to make claims over the necessity of diversity programming. In attempting to classify individuals "true" racial identity, they classify some individuals as question marks, unable to ascertain their race, and exclude them from the tally of people of color. Extending insights that race is enacted beyond the “biological,” I argue that race is made coherent through the coordination of social and material action in relation to liberal racial projects, and advocate for more understandings of the relationship between antiracism and construction of race.
The Book Project
Diversity Politics: Liberal Antiracism, the Neoliberal Corporation, and Racial Capitalism examines how after the systemic dismantlement of affirmative action programs, management professionals of color and white women institutionalize diversity by integrating concerns with racism, sexism, and discrimination in the workplace and society with an organization’s economic and managerial business priorities. The book builds on the intersections of economic anthropology, science and technology studies, critical race studies, and feminist studies. It is based on a six-year ethnographic study of diversity management expert practices, which entailed observing and participating in consultant projects, attending over fifty diversity trainings, workshops, and events, and interviewing dozens of scholars and practitioners about their work.