Workplace hate speech and rendering Black and Native lives as if they do not matter: A nightmarish autoethnography

Whiteness and anti-Black racism in organizational research

While there is a growing body of literature that addresses racism in organizational settings, “analysis that specifically focus on anti-Black racism remain rare” (Mir and Zanoni, 2021: 27) as do problematized conceptions of whiteness (Bohonos, 2019a). Several recent studies have pointed to the prevalence of white norms in organizational settings including talent management (Simon, 2019), customer service (Grandey et al., 2019) higher education (Bell et al., 2021; James-Gallaway and Turner, 2021), construction (Bohonos, 2020), public service (Bohonos and Johnson, in press) and high-level corporate leadership (Glass and Cook, 2020; Sisco, 2020), and on how racial minorities navigate white dominated working environments (Bohonos and Duff, 2020; Lewellen and Bohonos, 2020; Rabelo et al., 2020; Sisco, 2020; Small, 2020; Smith et al., 2019). Some studies have also focused on negative reactions of whites to growing levels of diversity (Bohonos, 2020; McDonald et al., 2018; Novicevic et al., 2019; Rabelo et al., 2020). This body of research highlights a variety of ways that white norms serve to marginalize Black employees and tends to foreground analysis of tacit, aversive, microaggressive, and colorblind forms of racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2014; Dovidio and Gaertner, 2004; Rawls and Duck, 2020). This work is complimented by research drawing primarily from sociology and linguistics which explores racist speech in the workplace.

Racist speech in organization settings

Racist speech has been documented by social scientists across a variety of American organizational types including restaurants, schools, large corporations, and nonprofits (Embrick and Henricks, 2013, 2015; Hughey, 2012; Myers, 2005; Rosette et al., 2013). These bodies of literature have shown that white men are more likely to engage with racist language either by expressing it themselves or by condoning it when initiated by their peers. The deployment of racists speech has been linked to white male identity formation, social dominance, the policing of gender boundaries, the protection of white privileges, the instantiation of white spaces, and the workplace exclusion of people of color. This literature demonstrates that white people accrue material and psychological advantages in the workplace (Du Bois, 1935) by using slurs and other racial insults in a variety of ways, including direct interpersonal aggression directed at minorities and banter among whites that use anti-Black slurs to reinforce ideologies of white supremacy. Much of this research (Embrick and Henricks, 2015; Hughey, 2012) also draws on Goffman’s (1956) distinction between frontstage and backstage discourse and show that white men often draw on the frames of colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2014) to perform political correctness while in public settings, while reserving color-conscious racist talk for backstage settings—usually those that are racially homogeneous. The majority of the research on organizational slurs and hate speech focuses on incidents when people of color are directly exposed to the language (Rosette et al., 2013). My research study contributes to this body of literature by interrogating the effects that hate speech in “whites only” settings can have in organizations.

Racist activity in the American Midwest: Mob violence, sundown towns and lynchings

The organizations explored in this paper were all located in the American Midwest, primarily in the state of Indiana. Like all regions in the United States, this area has a particular history of racist violence starting with colonial pushes into Native lands, which precipitated multiple forms of violence. These efforts were tied to genocidal practices germane to the larger project of European colonization, and the effects are clear to see in a state named “Indiana” (land of Indians), which is currently estimated to be less than half-a-percent Native American (Census Bureau, 2019). While Midwestern states were not Confederate slave-states, white violence against African Americans dates back to at least the antebellum era and was made famous by an Indiana mob attack against prominent African American abolitionist Fredrick Douglass and his supporters (Douglass, 1881). After the abolition of slavery, recorded incidents of anti-Black violence escalated as former slaves moved into the region. Efforts to stem such migration included the expulsion of many free Black people who had lived in the Midwest before the civil war (Loewen, 2005). Exclusions of Blacks from Midwestern communities was often violent in nature and could include tactics, including the destruction of personal property as well as threats, mob violence, and lynching.

Lynchings were not isolated events conducted in secret or the work of marginal outlaws, but rather they were community events that engaged men, women, and children. In one of Indiana’s most well-known Lynchings, a group of between 25 and 50 active white participants murdered two Black men while between 10,000 and 15,000 people enjoyed the carnival-like atmosphere surrounding the event. Eyewitnesses reported that the two Black men accused of raping a white woman were killed and mutilated even before the nooses were tied around their necks, and their corpses were hung. Many in the town sought souvenirs from the event, including strips of clothes ripped off the deceased men’s backs and short segments of rope cut from the nooses used in the hangings (Carr, 2006). No one was ever arrested or tried in connection with the crime, and researchers have indicated that up to 60 years later those who remembered the lynching continue to brag about it in circles where they feel safe to do so. While some argue that lynching has been relegated to the historical past others argue that various forms of violence, including, but not limited to, police shootings of unarmed Black people represent a refiguring of the lynch mob tradition (Brown, 2015; Nelson, 2016). Additionally, in this paper I will argue that contemporary noose tying’s create a symbolic connection the historical lynch mob tradition that transcends time in its ability to evoke horror and communicate threats of violence.

One man’s joke is another person’s nightmare

At several organizations where I have worked, radios frequently played in the background. In these cases, it was the norm to listen to broadcasts that specifically target white men (Crider, 2014; Soley, 2007). One such program was a morning radio show that has been shown to include racist material in over 25% of is comedic content (Bohonos, 2019b). The following passage presents a description of how I received and interpreted content from this show.

As we worked, the radio played in the background. I shake my head at a depiction of a monkey trying to put a Black man’s penis in his mouth (Bob & Tom Show, 2004). This is even worse than the jokes about Black men having incomprehensible speech patterns, corrupting white women, engaging in misogyny, abandoning their children, or becoming uncontrollably violent (Bob & Tom Show, 2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c). Or is it? It’s hard to tell anymore. A quarter of this shows jokes are racist, and they win awards from Billboard Magazine and the National Association of Broadcasters (Klemet, 2016). I’ve given up at trying to change the station. The guys I work with love this show, and if I want to work. I have to listen to it. Oh my, did they just equate the Native American genocide to a white man’s broken heart while playing a laugh track? Yes.

Critical race theorists argue that mass media influences public discourse by presenting a flood of subtly racist content that normalizes stereotypes (Crenshaw, 2018; Delgado and Stefancic, 2018). While this is undoubtedly true, in my experience, both subtle and blatant forms of racism can be normalized in organizational cultures through mass media consumed on the job. The racist jokes cracked on the airways were embraced and emulated in my workplace to the point that failing to participate in bigoted joke-telling could cast an individual as an outsider. As indicated in the previous passage, it was nearly impossible to change the dial on such radio content, making a captive audience of employees who objected to the material. These attempts were as futile as boycotts of racist talk shows that have tried to end the broadcast of such content (Schoettle, 2009). Both attempts to disrupt such speech fail because, judged by community standards, this content is acceptable—and therefore protected.

Some critical race theorists have suggested that, in interpersonal settings, advocates may be able to disrupt racist jokes (Matsuda, 2018). Research has demonstrated that such interventions generally fail (Myers, 2005) and often lead to increased circulation of slurs (Hill, 2008). In the following passages I explore how failed attempts to disrupt slurs and racist speech complicate Rosette’s et al. (2013) assertion that white men refrain from disrupting racist discourse because of allegiance to their dominant social positions. While Rosette’s assertion is probably true is some cases, in my experience choosing not to disrupt became a coping mechanism to avoid both discouragement and escalation of racists rhetoric. In the following passages, I explain various attempts I made to disrupt bigoted humor on a job, and the responses of coworkers which included recasting jokes in slightly more politically correct language and trying to “teach” me the stereotypes I needed to embrace to enjoy the joke, or regaling me with elaborate rationalizations intended to explain why one “nigger joke” or another was not racist.

One way I actively pushed back against racist jokes was to explain that racial slurs offended me. To oblige my sensibilities, my coworkers would sometimes substitute “Black” or “African American” for the customary “nigger” that was included in many punchlines. Where possible, in retelling these jokes, I elect to use the more politically correct slur substitutes my coworkers sometimes employed. When that strategy breaks down because the joke depends on a slur, I will explain why. The following are a few jokes I often heard at work.

“Hey, man, did you hear that the NFL was going to change the color of footballs from brown to green? You want to know why?”

“No. Why?”

“Well, have you ever seen an African American drop a watermelon?”

I met this punchline with a flat look of confusion. I was unaware of stereotypes involving Black people and watermelons; I learned a new stereotype that day. When I pushed back by arguing that everyone I had ever met loved watermelon, my coworkers said that I was missing the point. Some of my coworkers grew tired of explaining the jokes to me and of my flat responses, but others continued their attempts to use humor to ingrain stereotypes into me. At the time, I was the youngest employee in the company, and the older white men often felt a responsibility to educate me and prepare me for the world. This can be viewed as a form of racial training (Thandeka, 2000) that I was subjected to partially because I was young and seen as naive about race, and partially because my Canadian upbringing had not prepared me for American-style racism.

Humor was one mechanism they used to teach me, and through it, I learned countless racial and ethnic stereotypes. I was also exposed to permissive attitudes toward violence against Black people and to clear articulations of claims that Black lives do not matter. The following joke illustrates this point.

“What do you call 1,000 Blacks at the bottom of the ocean?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“A good start!”

When I heard this joke for the first time, I was angry. When I think about it today, I realize how much credence this joke lends to the Black Lives Matter movement’s contention that whites often fail to recognize the intrinsic worth of Black lives.

One of my more courteous workplace supervisors once agreed that when it was just the two of us working together, he would refrain from telling racist jokes. Immediately after making this commitment, he told the following joke.

“A trucker was driving through rural Texas with a load full of bowling balls. He saw two young Black men trying to hitch a ride. He stopped and asked them what the trouble was. They explained that they had both blown out their bike tires and were miles from town. The truck driver told them both to hop in his trailer and bring their bikes. And he promised to drop them off at the next town. He got back up to speed and cursed when the blue and red lights started flashing. He pulled over and the officer approached the window.

‘Howdy, partner. You realize that you forgot to use your turn signal when you merged back on to the interstate? That’s dangerous stuff,’ said the officer.

‘I’m sorry, sir, I was distracted. It was an honest mistake.’

‘Well, you mind if I take a look inside your trailer and see what you are hauling?’

‘No, sir. Go right ahead. It’s not locked,’ said the driver.

After taking a quick look in the trailer, the officer walked back up to the driver’s window. With fear in his eye and rage in his voice, he said, ‘Now you listen here, ya carpetbagger. You get back on this here interstate, and you drive. And you don’t stop driving until you hit the county line! Ya hear me? We don’t want no trouble round here!’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the truck driver as he started up his engine and drove off. When the officer returned to his car, his partner asked,

‘So, what was all that about? I never seen you look so scared.’

‘Well, Jimmie, that there trucker was hauling a load of nigger eggs and two of them already hatched and stole bicycles.’”

My supervisor laughed and gave me a sidelong glance. I pointed out that the joke sounded pretty racist to me. He explained that it wasn’t racist because it didn’t say anything bad about Black people. It only made fun of white ignorance and prejudice. He seemed to think I should enjoy that. Of course, this joke is thoroughly dehumanizing in that it plays up stereotypes of Black criminality while casting Black people as subhuman and even submammalian by suggesting that they “hatch.”

Rabelo et al. (2020) noted that Black women frequently use “animal metaphors” such as “mule” or “workhorse” (p. 12) to describe the way they are treated as beasts of burden by fellow employees. My data demonstrates that, as in the past (Novicevic et al., 2019), contemporary white men continue to equate Black people with animals in ways that reveal dehumanized conceptualizations of Blackness. This likely feeds into the dehumanized treatment Black women note when they describe being treated like beasts at work.

This supervisor, who typically avoided slurs around me, used “nigger” in this joke. Hill (2008) pointed out that slurs “are indispensable in certain kinds of joking and humorous talk.” My supervisor explained as much to me. He believed the slur was necessary for this joke because the usual substitutions do not work in the context. “African American eggs” has too many syllables and would take the punch out of the punch line. If he said, “Black eggs,” then the listener might have heard “black eggs” and assumed he was describing the color of the eggs rather than connecting them to African American reproduction. This conversation well exemplifies the extent to which racists joke tellers will go to defend hideously racist jokes as harmless and non-racial. Such rationalizations should be kept in mind when we encounter whites who claim that they are “just joking” or that Blacks are oversensitive regarding well-intentioned “banter” or “pranks” (Lawrence, 2018).

Nooses, crosses, genocide, jokes, and death

Dehumanizing and violent racist jokes normalize bigotry and can lead to physical engagement with racialized violence (Delgado and Stefancic, 2018). In several of my jobs, there was no shortage of violent imagery available to workers via the company radio, and it led to increasingly troublesome engagements with rituals steeped in racial violence.

Depictions of racial violence could start at the beginning of my shift on a morning show:

The radio played as usual; I wonder to myself. Did that DJ just crack a joke about putting “two hollow points” into the head of a Black man after attacking his professionalism, stereotyping him as violent, making fun of his hair, and calling him “retarded” (Bob & Tom Show, 2003). Of course, they did, the same guys broadcast bits about “getting some guns” and raising the Detroit murder rate by attacking Do Op singers (Bob & Tom Show, 2018) and called for airstrikes on Colin Kaepernick’s Afro (Baker, 2016). We listen to this show every morning.

And could continue throughout the day in the lyrics of country and classic rock songs.

Did that country singer just frame a verse around getting a long rope and hanging a man from a “tall oak tree” in a celebration of old school justice (Keith, 2003)? Of course, he did, in the last song this radio DJ selected a singer who boasted that his neck had been painted red “by the grace of God” and that his old truck was worth more than his “coondog” (Morgan, 2005), and before that, a singer screamed that people in America who don’t like his red neck, blue-collar, and white hair should “get the hell out” (Van Zant et al., 2003) so is pretty much what I’ve come to expect.

With so many racially violent words on the radio and shared interpersonally, perhaps I should not have been surprised when one co-worker invited me to a cross burning. But then, seeing my look of shock, laughed and said, “Oops sorry I meant couch burning. We like to go out into a big field and burn old couches.” Whether this was a real invitation or just another joke, I will never know, but the effect is the same. Either way, this coworker created a connection to racial terrorism in a similar way to the singer who boasted about his “coondog”—a reference to hunting dogs used by slave catchers to track runaway slaves. I was confronted by another such connection when a couple of senior coworkers—including one who worked part-time in law enforcement—invited me to join a vigilante group.

One day, Jack and one of my senior colleagues, a 55-year-old man who would regale me with story after story about driving around with the Good Ol’ Boys, began to talk about starting a vigilante group. They felt like crime was getting out of control and that the police were themselves handcuffed from taking decisive action. They expressed the need for real-life batmen to take control. They wanted to call this association of difference-makers, “The Team.” They asked me if I wanted to join. I told them that “The Team” sounded like a modern-day KKK. They laughed and played the conversation off like it was a joke.

Again, I found myself in a situation where I did not know if I was in a room with a few coworkers who were merely engaged in racially loaded speech and joking about organizing or if they had actually been attempting to recruit me into an active vigilante group. Again, the effect is the same. The speech ended up creating an environment that could easily be perceived as racially hostile, but the pretense of humor allowed this reality to be dismissed as “just a joke.”

One would imagine that it would be harder to present a literal noose tying as a joke, but when I witnessed such an event, it was executed with laughter.

One day I walked into work, the manager had all the guys circled up around him. He had decided that he was going to teach us all how to tie nooses. He demonstrated the technique and then showed us how to hang the noose. Rather than throw the end over a tree branch, he tossed the noose over our warehouse rafters. This took him a couple of attempts, he guffawed through the process. After he had it hung, he left it up for the rest of the day.

At the time, I connected nooses with Western films and was unaware of the long history of racial terror through lynching and its special place in Midwestern history. Thus, I was uncomfortable with an implement of execution being displayed in our warehouse. In hindsight, I am even more troubled because the noose signaled a threat of bigoted violence. Had any African Americans been present, those employees could have successfully argued that they were victims of workplace hate speech. At the time, the noose tying struck me as unusual, but not out of step with our daily workplace culture. Reflecting on this experience, I can now see how the hanging of the noose constituted one of many “rituals of terror” (Wilderson, 2020: 87) in our workplace and contributed to a culture that derived pleasure from the devaluation of Black lives while venerating racialized violence and seaking connections to the Midwest’s history of racial terror.

Rabelo et al. (2020) draw on testimonials of white workplace racism to describe a case in which a white supervisor sends a Black journalist to report on white nationalist political organizing because he found her discomfort amusing which demonstrates that, “the white gaze endangers Black women by disregarding their safety and dignity for others entertainment” (p. 12). The prevalence of jokes predicated on violence against Black people in my data suggests that the types of white endangerment of Black employees noted by Rabelo et al. is undergirded by a dehumanized view of Black people and rehearsals of violent speech and rituals in whites only spaces.

White spaces and words that wound in the absence of people of color

White spaces and words that wound literature have tended to focus on the experiences of People of Color who encounter hostility as they enter areas or organizations dominated by white people (Anderson, 2015; Delgado and Stefancic, 2018; Matsuda et al., 2018). The present research provides insights into how white spaces are maintained in the absence of non-white bodies. The findings indicate that a variety of speech forms, including music, jokes, symbols, and informal conversations foster attitudes of exclusion and normalize racist violence. Thus, the circulations of words that could wound prime white actors for engagement with violence when Black bodies present in the space. Put another way, backstage rehearsals of racist discourse reinforce white access to a retinue of violent images and words that can be drawn from in attacks on Black coworkers. In employment situations, the hostile environments developed in white spaces serve to protect the material interests of white workers (Du Bois, 1935; Harris, 1993; Roediger, 2006), who can draw on a wellspring of violent imageries to harass and intimidate people of color.

My findings also demonstrate that much evidence regarding hostile work environments can be collected by white allies who are better positioned to witness some forms of racists speech than people of color. This reality is hinted at by critical race theorists who indicate that utterances overheard by people of color can wound (Delgado, 2018), but my evidence pushes this concept further by demonstrating that hateful speech can do material harm to people of color even in their absence by circulating negative images that make workplaces hostile. If Black employees had not been present for the noose tying or any of the racist jokes, they likely would have picked up on pervasive microaggressions and tacit racism that encode antiblack hostility. In this case, they would have felt the hostility of their coworkers but would have been unable to point to the type of “smoking gun” incident that is often required to get the attention of organizational leaders, news media, or labor lawyers. To push a complaint, they would have needed to appeal to an authority who is sensitive to the impact that discrete forms of racism can have on a Black employee and would likely still have needed allies to substantiate their perspective in ways that would be recognized within the framework of formal disciplinary proceedings. In this way the violence of the lynch tradition continues in the symbolic realm of ritualized noose tying, and the effect of hate speech can be salient even when Black employees do not directly witness the hateful rhetoric or actions. This moves beyond previous words that wound configurations that have, rightly, pointed out that hate speech causes real harm when it is overheard by Black employees—even when such language is not used in reference to them (Matsuda, 2018).

While in most professional settings it is rare for white people to use slurs or to openly express distain or disgust towards Black colleagues, aversive forms of racism (Dovidio and Gaertner, 2004)—in which racist acts are committed despite actors purporting to non-racists or antiracist ideologies—abound. Bell et al. (2020) called on “White people to listen to and believe what Blacks say about their experiences” with organizational racism (emphasis in original) (p. 44). They also highlight the findings of Rasinski and Czopp (2010) which explain that white actors are viewed with more credibility that Blacks when raising issues of discrimination before calling for white allies to contribute to racial justice efforts (Bell et al., 2020). My data responds to this by demonstrating that the dehumanization Black people perceive when they confront various forms of subtle racism reflect the reality of some “whites only” discourse thus reinforcing that Black people should be believed when they feel something racist is going on—even if there is no “smoking gun.”

Racist language on the front stage

Two significant bodies of literature are growing that address white male race talk. The first focuses on the contrasts between white men’s politically correct frontstage performances of colorblindness and their backstage color-conscious racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2014; Embrick and Henricks, 2013, 2015; Hughey, 2012; Myers, 2005) while the second explores racism in the mass media (Archer, 2015; Crenshaw, 2018; Delgado and Stefancic, 2018; Hill, 2008; Jackson, 2015). My findings bring these literature streams together in a workplace setting by demonstrating that the frontstage racism broadcast on the radio mirrors the backstage race talk in white male workgroups. I also argue that the prevalence of racist discourse in mass media consumed at work normalized racist talk while perpetuating stereotypical images and encouraging the denigration of non-white lives. Demonstrating the connection between frontstage broadcast discourse and backstage race talk also furthers the argument that organizational leaders need to stop viewing users of racial slurs as “rogue actors” whose beliefs are out of step with a race-neutral workplace culture (Rosette et al., 2013), but rather need to understand racist talk to be a generally acceptable phenomenon across large swaths of their workforces that reinscribes the social dominance of privileged groups and in which many white men derive pleasure and enjoyment. In particular, when a virtual consensus is reached that a workplace radio will be tuned into programming, which regularly calls up racially stereotypical images, it demonstrates a commonly agreed upon acceptance of racists speech. Employee uses of similar language can then be seen as fitting into ideological frames routed in white supremacy (Feagin, 2013) which contributes to the maintenance of paradigms of antiblack violence (Wilderson, 2020).

Black lives are treated as if they do not matter in many white male discourse communities

In one of the most important recent studies exploring white workplaces and how Black people navigate them, Rabelo et al. (2020) drew on testimonials from Black Women and noted four ways in which whiteness manifests in organizations. These included:

My data provides complimentary data from white men that suggests that these four manifestations of whiteness are undergirded by ideologies of dehumanization and disregard for the value of Black lives.

This finding in suggested else ware in Rabelo et al.’s data when Black women note that they feel white coworkers treat them like beasts of burden (horses/mules) and amplified in my data when Black people are overtly compared to lizards and monkeys. In this way, putting my data in conversations with Rabelo et al.’s, further documents the pervasiveness with which Black employees encounter racism and the depth of the bigotry that can undergird anti Black acts which sometimes mascaraed as colorblind racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2014) and that some researchers label “tacit racism” (Rawls and Duck, 2020).