Intersections between Race and Class: A Postcolonial Analysis and Implications for Organizational Leaders.

Autorde Souza, Eloisio Moulin

Introduction

Considering that races are historical discursive productions with specific intelligibilities produced as a function of time and space (Hall, 2000), this article aims to analyze the intelligibility that undergraduate students of management have regarding race in the Brazilian context, focusing on the possible intersections between race and social class. Therefore, the main focus of this article is the study of racial identities and how they can be resignified by other forms of identity, specifically social class. The main assumption is that the meaning of race does not exist a priori and in isolation, rather being an interdependent construction with social class, referred to in this article as classification of race, a construction that resignifies race beyond phenotypic characteristics and produces structural inequalities that deconstruct the myth that Brazil is a racial democracy. For example, in terms of income equality between whites and blacks in Brazil, the report of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (OXFAM) asserts that whites earn on average per month (R$1,589.00) twice as much as blacks earn (R$898.00). The report also adds that in the last twenty years black incomes, which accounted for 45% of whites' income, rose to 57% (OXFAM, 2017).

Despite management and business schools being located within the social sciences, several authors argue that there is still a silence in organizational studies on race relations (Cox & Nkomo, 1990; Ely & Meyerson, 2000; Harding, Ford, & Fotaki, 2013; Holvino, 2010; Konrad, 2003; Zanoni, Janssens, Benschop, & Nkomo, 2010). Generally, such silence is justified by the fact that race is not considered as an organizational phenomenon and an organizing principle (P. Prasad, Pringle, & Konrad, 2006). Race is something evident and visible, but it is also a segregated, denied and avoided aspect in organizations (Acker, 2006). This paper seeks to understand how race identity is intersected by class, thus contributing to studies on intersectionality and adding to the few organizational works that analyze the intersectionality between race and class (Acker, 1999; Calas & Smircich, 1996; Harding et al., 2013; Holvino, 1994, 1996, 2010; Munro, 2001).

In this sense, this article aims to contribute to the debate within the scope of organizational studies as explained next. First, universities and management/business schools are organizations, and the study of postcolonial and racial aspects presented in these types of organizations by organizational researchers only recently began to be scrutinized at a global level (Manning, 2018; Marjo, Juusola, & Kivijarvi, 2019). About this, Marjo, Juusola and Kivijarvi (2019), when analyzing neocolonial relations in international business school campuses in United Arab Emirates, emphasize that the business schools have an important role in the education and formation of the identity of students, as well as in the development of the sense of community. Also, in a postcolonial approach, Manning (2018) asserts that business and management schools are often focused on developing knowledge and ignoring the empirical process through which knowledge is produced in everyday interactions, and that modernity, capitalism and coloniality are interconnected aspects which act to control knowledge and subjectivity. This paper then seeks to contribute to and advance the debate in two main aspects. First, by analyzing how management students' knowledge of race is shaped and signified by class, allowing the diagnosis of the political strategic intentionality of the classification of race in the formation of race identity, problematizing the knowledge produced in everyday interactions that are (re)produced in management school spaces, and considering that in most countries of the world the business courses discuss diversity. For example, in Brazil, the Ministry of Education has made mandatory to teach issues on race in administration courses. The diagnosis also highlights which misunderstandings and strategic political processes about race must be clarified and addressed during the training of business students and their formation as leaders. Then, studying the Brazilian reality permits at the same time to understand and analyze the political effects produced by colonialism in both colonizer and colonized countries. And second, the article contributes with intersectional and postcolonial identity approaches by establishing the connections between them related to the studies on identities, thus also enabling the deconstruction of knowledge produced in everyday interactions that race is not a racial marker (a concept that was established by the signification of racial identity inequalities as meaning merely social class inequalities). This breaks with the myth that there is no structural racism. Within the field of intersectionality in organizational studies, the postcolonial approach allows for the emergence of new theories, concepts and knowledge previously undervalued by colonizers, giving voice to organizational studies carried out outside the Anglo-Saxon axis. Postcolonialism has a very contentious meaning, there being diverse, different and even antagonistic definitions. In this article, a postcolonial approach of identity means that the study of cultural codes and shared historical experiences emerged in power relations that shape racial identities and knowledge, problematizing how race identity is represented in dominant colonial discourses that circulate in societies that were in their past European colonies (Hall, 1990, 1996). In this sense, intersectionality has been developed to signify and deconstruct the continuous and complex entanglement of processes of difference, exclusion and inclusion among identities (Acker, 2011), and several studies on intersectionality have been developed to explore the contingencies and complexities between identities in the production of multiple inequalities and markers of social differences (Harding et al., 2013). Because it does not reduce subjects exclusively to a single essential identity category and understands that social positions are relational, intersectionality has become a rich and complex approach to identity (Phoenix & Pattynama, 2006).

Intersectional theory has emerged in black feminist studies, which explains why most intersectional studies have studied the intersections between gender and race. In this sense, this article also intends to advance the field of intersectional studies by analyzing the intersections between race and social class, which is why the intersections related to gender will not be addressed in this article. Then, this paper seeks to understand the relational positioning between race and class identities and, in doing so, deconstruct the idea that Brazil is a racial democracy, mainly deconstructing the idea that race identity is reduced to merely class issues in an attempt to mask the existence of structural racism in Brazil. Although there are intersections between race and class, they are two different identities, and the meaning and importance of race identity is not subordinate to and determined by class. The classification of race is a power strategy that aims to hide the importance of racial identities as a social marker in an attempt to mask and perpetuate racial inequalities. Thus, the intersections between race and class highlight two dimensions of analysis: (a) how the intersection between race and class resignifies race beyond phenotypical characteristics, and (b) the political goal and strategy of this process of race resignification by class.

The article is organized as follows. The main concepts used to understand how identities are understood are presented, emphasizing the fluid, intersectional and non-essential character that surrounds the processes of identity construction. Later, the meaning of race is discussed from a postcolonial perspective, seeking to understand the concepts of race, racialization and racism. Next, the racial specificities in the Brazilian historical, cultural and social context are discussed, especially focusing on its particularities. In sequence, the methodology used in the empirical research is described, and analyses of the produced data are performed. Finally, the main conclusions of the article are presented.

Identities: Political Categories Discursively Constituted

Identities are social organizations (Baines, 2010) that produce the normal and the abnormal in society. Identity is a set of interactions materially and symbolically contingent on language and representation (Braidotti, 1997), constituting itself as a political category that establishes power relations (Jones & Stablein, 2006). Therefore, identities are processes of identification compelled by the desire to belong to categories (Moore, 1994), which makes them an affirmation of differences produced through discourse rather than a voluntary act of the subject (Bhabha, 1994; Braidotti, 1997; Butler, 1993, 1997; Foucault, 1970, 1982; Hall, 1996). The subject is constituted by multiple practices of categorization and regulation (Cohen, 1997) that consistently produce fluid, heterogeneous, political and antagonistic identities (Lovaas & Jenkins, 2007), where language acts normatively by framing boundaries and existential possibilities (Seidman, 1994). Therefore, although identities are at the personal level, identities are not individual, but cultural, historical, social and collective (Ainsworth & Hardy, 2004).

The term intersectionality was coined by Crenshaw (1989) to address the links and relations between gender, race, class and other identity categories (A. Prasad, 2012). "Intersectionality is thus useful as a handy catchall phrase that aims to make visible the multiple positioning that constitutes everyday life and the power relations that are central to it" (Phoenix & Pattynama, 2006, p. 187). Therefore, intersectionality is the continuous and...

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