The Color Bind: Talking (and Not Talking) About Race at Work

Charles W. Gossett (California State University, Sacramento, California, USA)

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

ISSN: 2040-7149

Article publication date: 18 May 2015

194

Citation

Charles W. Gossett (2015), "The Color Bind: Talking (and Not Talking) About Race at Work", Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Vol. 34 No. 4, pp. 348-350. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-02-2015-0010

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


This is a book of faith. A faith that is shared by this reviewer, but a book of faith, nonetheless. The faith is that somehow society will be much better off (however, that may be defined) if people are able to talk openly and honestly about race and its meanings and impacts on both individuals and society as a whole. At several points in the text the authors acknowledge that they are seeking ways to make everyone more “color cognizant” and less “color blind.”

The “color bind” of the book’s title refers to the situation most Americans find themselves in when it comes to talking about race, ethnicity, and culture. On the one hand, there is the desire to not see a person’s color or differences and to concentrate on them as an individual human being equal in every way to one’s self. On the other hand, however, is the need to recognize that the different historical experiences of people of different races and ethnicities shape opportunities, practices, and behaviors that are, in fact, closely tied to a person’s race. Also, this book addresses the needs of immigrant families which also raise the importance of racial and cultural factors in understanding needs and hopes of different people. The “color bind,” then is not unlike “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” bring race into consideration when dealing with other people. The authors deserve credit for talking about how this tension affected their own efforts in conducting and writing up the study since one author was white and the other African-American. Professor Foldy was the primary field researcher and Professor Buckley shared in the evaluation of the meaning of the findings (and many hours of recorded discussions) and the creation of the arguments in the text.

Most of the book focuses on a kind of “natural experiment” in the child welfare agency of a single state. The new child welfare commissioner called for the development of a more holistic team approach to managing child welfare cases and in various offices around the state, new teams were assembled to try out this more collaborative way of addressing the challenge of identifying situations needing intervention, providing necessary services, and closing cases at the appropriate time. Seven different sites were visited, but only three of the teams are featured in this book. The teams were labeled with geographically — focussed team names and, whether intentional or not, I found it unfortunate that the team that the authors clearly thought most highly of, Team North, which came closest to having a color cognizant approach was contrasted with Team South which, in the authors’ words, was “color hostile.” To me this seemed to perpetuate the stereotype that race relations are much worse in the southern part of the USA than in the north. Team East was the third of the teams.

The authors do an excellent job of analyzing how teams and groups approach race, ethnicity, and culture both in their individual practices and in group discussions. A combination of individual interviews, team interviews, and observation of periodic team meetings where they are doing their work lead to a very full picture of how different levels of willingness to openly engage these topics affects both relationships among team members and the kinds of solutions and approaches to cases that emerge from the discussions. The authors also pay close attention to the authority/supervisory structures and the general local office environment. That all of the case study sites are in the same agency helps to control for the “organizational culture” and “organizational leadership” elements. One element that was not included to any great extent, however, was the individual’s personal life outside the office. On several occasions, the authors note the importance of workers bringing their broad cultural backgrounds to bear on a particular case or, occasionally, references to the “way I was raised.” But little was said about the current personal situation of the employees. For example, I was often wondering whether or not any of the social workers was in an interracial marriage or relationship. Were any of them “invisible minorities” with respect to disabilities or sexual orientation? How integrated was the neighborhood in which they lived or the school their children attended. What kind of training did they have – did it matter which school awarded their degrees or when their degrees were awarded? The only real discussion of anyone’s current personal situation was related to a team leader who was unusually secretive about her personal life (which of course led to all of her co-workers speculating).

Using the information gained from these intensive case studies, the authors identify three distinct approaches to how race is talked about and the extent to which it influences choices and practices related to the work they do protecting children and strengthening families. Team North comes closest to the “color cognizant” ideal much more often (though not always, by any means) in that they were aware of how race or ethnicity may require different strategies to achieve the desired result. This was evidenced both in how individual social workers looked at their cases and how the team talked about possible ways of addressing client issues. Team East was labeled by the authors as “color evasive” because, although many of the team members indicated a color cognizant approach to their cases, as a group they rarely raised race or ethnicity in team meetings. The fact that this particular office had a history of racially hostile incidents and tension between the team leader and the members seems to have contributed to much of the reluctance to raise these issues in group settings. Finally, Team South was identified as “color hostile” in that the members tended to be quite insistent that the issues that they identified and the proposed actions could best be addressed by a color blind approach because, at base, people are all the same. Furthermore, members of the group were relatively open in their disparagement of the agency organization that was established to ensure that the agency adequately addressed issues of race and ethnicity not only in social work practice, but in organizational activities in general.

In the concluding chapters, the authors emphasize that it is the combination of individual attitudes and practices, the presence of at least one individual to bring up race as a possible explanatory variable in group discussions, the existence of trust so that employees feel that they are in a safe environment to have a discussion about race, and a supportive organizational culture and leadership that will ultimately make organizations and organizational policies and decisions more color cognizant. At one point, the authors caused me some angst when they recommended that organizations might discriminate among job applicants on the basis of their color cognizance. Given their earlier observations that color cognizance was more often difficult for white people to achieve than it was for people of color, this approach might lead to a situation of increasing resentment. More promising, I thought, was their discussion about using vignettes in training sessions that clearly illustrated how better organizational solutions could be reached with a color cognizant approach.

After reading this book, I walked away with a couple of thoughts that I’m not sure the authors intended, but I do give them credit for being very open and self-critical throughout the book. First, as a person interested in management, I wanted to know which approach was most effective in achieving results desired by the organization. On the penultimate page of the text, the authors admit that they did not address the question of “effectiveness” for any of the approaches in terms of organizational outcomes. Also, I was quite surprised when reading the chapter on Team South to learn that this “color hostile” team had a reputation within the agency for being one of the most effective teams in the agency. The case study indicated that the team leader was “data driven” and frequently used data in the team discussions, unlike the other teams studied. The authors’ rightly note that there is no independent analysis of how groups were performing, but in that case, reputation for success is pretty important. Also, I left with the impression that the less diversity there was on a team, the more likely it was to achieve a positive outcome whether that be Team North which was the most “color cognizant” or Team South, which had the best reputation for performance. The analysis of Team East, by far the most diverse of the three, left the reader with an image of a comparatively dysfunctional team.

This book would make an interesting text for generating discussions about the challenges of talking about race in the workplace in a wide variety of courses. It is written in an engaging manner and clearly recognizes that is doesn’t have all the answers so there is still much more work to do.

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