Content area
Full Text
abstract
Everyday discrimination, for example in the form of everyday racism or everyday sexism, is a concept that has motivated and influenced the debate about how a racial hierarchy controls the way organizations are structured and practiced. In this interview, social justice scholar Philomena Essed reflects on the relationship between her early work on 'everyday racism' and her newly theorized concept 'entitlement racism'. She wisely links this move to current political developments and to other 'isms' and 'phobias' such as sexism, classism, homophobia and Islamophobia. As such, an intersectional approach lingers all through the interview, and towards the end of the interview this link is succinctly unfolded by Essed and explicitly addressed in a way that surprises and amazes the interviewer as much as herself.
Introduction
Organizational scholars have for quite some time been occupied with the structures and dimensions of everyday (or subtle) discrimination (e.g. Deitch et al., 2003; Van Laer and Janssens, 2011), most notably perhaps in the form of everyday sexism and everyday racism. Authors have persuasively demonstrated how raced and gendered power hierarchies are constructed and reinforced through normalizing everyday practices such as jokes, storytelling, generalizations or even so-called compliments. In and of themselves, these practices can be said to be 'innocent', 'insignificant' or 'just for fun'. However, when they are continually reiterated, they become culturally normalized and end up functioning as systematic discrimination against minorities, which reinforce majority privilege (Ahonen et al., 2014; Holck and Muhr, 2017; Liu and Baker, 2016; Muhr and Salem, 2013).
Social justice scholar Philomena Essed has been a defining figure in the debate about everyday racism (see e.g. Essed, 1990, 1991, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2013; Essed and Goldberg, 2002; Essed and Hoving, 2014; Essed and Trienekens, 2008). As most race and discrimination research is conducted at a macro level, her remarkable and ground-breaking 1991 book 'Understanding everyday racism: An interdisciplinary theory ' initiated and cemented the value of a micro perspective, as she analyzed the everyday intersectional gendered social construction of race and racism in the Netherlands and the US based on interviews with Black women. She brilliantly demonstrated how racism is practiced through everyday subtle and accepted behavior.
Lately, however, the political discourse has changed. It has become more acceptable to speak about...