Race, Ethnicity, and the American Workplace

Catalog description

The U.S. workplace has long been one of the foremost spheres in which racial and ethnic inequality is created and perpetuated. This course investigates how racial and ethnic inequality affect our experiences in the workplace as well as how we as employees, managers, and the like, can positively impact upon our work environments against bias to promote equality and inclusion. Although most Americans largely perceive the employment relationship as one's personal relationship with his/her "boss," one's occupation and/or "job" encompasses much more than that. How we come to work at the jobs that we do is about our access to larger institutional structures within society including education, family background, and, importantly our ascribed location within the social hierarchy. At the beginning of the course, we will spend time studying race and ethnicity as dynamic social and political constructs that evolve through time and space. We will examine how these constructs relate to social stratification, intergroup and intragroup relations, and economic and political hierarchies within U.S. society. The objective here is to provide you with a better understanding of how and why race continues to be such a powerful stratifying agent in contemporary America. We will spend time discussing the enduring power of structural racism in U.S. society--it's evolution since slavery, and its ability to restrict Black & Brown achievement and success within all spheres. How has the Covid-19 pandemic and the BLM movement further brought to light the rigidity of our peculiar system of racial stratification? How can we work to promote true equity and inclusion now? How can we come to work as our "authentic selves" where everyone has a seat at the table? What has history taught us about these issues? And, how can we learn both as individuals and members of organizations to make racial…