Adia Harvey Wingfield Is Investigating How “Gray Areas” Perpetuate Racism at Work—and Telling Us What We Can Do About It

It’s been decades since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed with the intention to outlaw outright racism and discrimination in employment and other critical areas of life. Some of the key provisions in the act set out to protect Black Americans from being denied work opportunities, promotions on the job, or unfairly fired based on their race. (Race isn’t the only protected class under the CRA, nor do Black Americans explicitly benefit from the law, but it’s important to note that anti-Black racism was the thrust for passing the legislation).

Yet, as with many de jure efforts, there’s much work left to do in practice. The institutional backlash to the CRA, such as President Ronald Reagan reorganizing the Justice Department and the Supreme Court to impede federal power to enforce civil rights laws, attempted to undermine societal advancement while maintaining the appearance of being anti-racist. Today, it’s part of the reason many Americans spout the lie that our country has moved beyond race. The data bears a different picture.

Black Americans work disproportionately in high-stress, low-wage jobs. Black workers earn less than their white counterparts, even when employed in the same occupations with the same education and experience levels. Black workers are more likely to be unemployed and, during the COVID-19 pandemic, were more exposed to the virus and more likely to die than their white counterparts.

Black workers are underrepresented in high-status, high-paying jobs—comprising – just 5 percent of lawyers, for instance— and overrepresented in jobs that are low-paying and perceived as being low-status. Of the biggest and most powerful companies on the Fortune 500 list, just eight are led by Black CEOs, the highest number since the list was created in 1955. Black workers are also overrepresented in the jobs at the highest risk of vanishing because of workplace automation. Meanwhile, white workers are 50 percent more likely to hold future-proof jobs. These are the kinds of jobs that often build on education in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

And for those Black workers who do beat the odds, the reward is often a hostile work environment.

“For many Black workers today, racism is not a relic of the past,” writes sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield in her newly released book, Gray Areas: How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It. “It is not tangential. It is a core part of the Black experience, front and center in ways that elude even the most well-meaning white co-workers.”

Harvey Wingfield, a sociology professor at Washington University who researches racial and gender inequality in professional occupations, writes that while overt racism may be illegal, covert racism is ubiquitous and shows up in what she calls the “gray areas” of cultural, social, and relational factors. Those factors could be facing daily microaggressions from colleagues, or working in organizations that offer little-to-no support when Black workers receive racist hate mail. Or they could appear when Black nurses are relegated to the night shift, while their white counterparts enjoy the more desirable day shifts. Or it could be when gig workers get a racist review and are downgraded by the algorithm, blocking them from a lifeline to earning a living.

Black workers have a harder time getting a job: research shows that employers still discriminate against applicants whose names seem to signal Black identity, Harvey Wingfield writes, and those applicants are less likely to receive callbacks than white applicants with identical resumes. And once hired, Black workers are subject to different rules and harsher sanctions for the same infractions compared to their white counterparts. They’re often not considered a “fit” for professional jobs, though what “fit” entails is often ambiguous, subjective, and likely, racist. And the consequences for Black workers are severe in many areas of life, not just economically. Self-reported racial discrimination, or the anticipation of experiencing it, has been linked to heightened risk of hypertension, obesity, lack of lack, alcohol abuse, poor heart health, and depressive symptoms.

We spoke to Harvey Wingfield about what gray areas are and the research-based pathways, practical solutions, and checklists she offers in her book to help organizations do better. The following is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Brigid Schulte: Adia, you write about “gray areas” and argue that the way we work perpetuates racism. What are gray areas?

Adia Harvey Wingfield: I've focused most of my career on looking at issues related to race and gender in the workplace and Black workers, specifically in jobs where they are underrepresented — so usually in predominantly-white professional environments. I wanted to highlight how so many core aspects of work aren't really these race-neutral objective processes that we assume them to be. The workplace is one of the institutions where we still think that the person who works the hardest and the person who's the best qualified gets the job. But there's so much evidence to show that's not actually what happens.

I really wanted to shed light not only on the things that counter that belief but on the people who are affected by the erroneousness of that belief and the Black workers who deal with what I call the “gray areas” in the book. The everyday social, cultural, and relational processes of work really work against them. And put them in positions where it's this constant struggle to get into jobs and deal with the culture in jobs, to advance in jobs, and to make these workplaces places that work for them.

You profile seven people in your book who are navigating gray areas. One story that really struck me was the engineering professor named Constance. She was brilliant but really struggled at work. She had students who openly questioned whether she understood her own research. She was isolated from her mostly white male colleagues—one even told her her idea wouldn’t work, then published a paper on the same thing. So, her research and ability to network, appear at conferences, and build a reputation in the field really suffered. It was heartbreaking to read that she wound up lowering her expectations – deferring her dreams, so to speak – for her career. You write: “It’s not that she doesn’t fully grasp the science behind her work, or that she lacks the drive of the willingness to work hard. It’s that the gray areas of work hold her back.” You even title one of the chapters she appears in, “Going It Alone.”

I wanted to think about STEM fields in particular. These are growth industries. The knowledge economy is really important in U.S. society. And it's one of the few prevailing areas where we can still classify what sociologists would refer to as a lot of “good jobs.” If you get a STEM job or a job in the tech industry, in many cases, it's a high-paying job. It's pretty prestigious. The salary is good. Benefits are good. Rewards and prestige are pretty decent. But we also know that the tech and STEM fields, in general, have struggled with diversity. For Constance's story, you'd look from the outside in, and you would think she's sitting pretty. She's got this faculty job at this very high-status research university. She's a full professor at this point. She's a chemical engineer. She's doing the job that she’s trained for.

But when you look more closely behind the scenes at aspects of Constance's story, she’s in an organizational culture that, while it talks about diversity, does so in a very race-blind fashion that leaves her colleagues oblivious to overtly and implicitly racial challenges that she encounters, whether that's being shunned by co-workers, or students leaving very openly racist teaching evaluations.

There's no language or mechanisms to deal with that because the department is so committed to race-blind diversity. And so, for Constance, whether it's dealing with that or with trying to forge research connections and partnerships as the one Black woman in this department where most of her colleagues are white men, orthe challenges that are associated with trying to find someone to serve, as she puts it, as an advocate who can just help her navigate promotion, advancement, leadership, all of those roads are really blocked to her, despite purportedly being in a very merit-based scientific field.

Max’s story also blew me away.

Max is an emergency-medicine doctor. He works in in a hierarchical culture where doctors are very clearly at the top of the status heap.

But what Max found as a Black emergency-medicine doctor was that he had not an insignificant number of cases where patients would come in, and they would say, ‘I'll sue you if you don't get me a white doctor. I'm not going to let you treat me. And I'll go back out in the waiting room and wait for a white doctor to come on duty.’

I found that a very powerful example of a gray area. Just think about a person who's devoted four years to college, an additional four years to medical school, done a residency on top of that, studied, worked hard, and done all the things that are necessary to get into a very demanding job where you're committed to saving lives. And then have the people whose life that you're qualified and committed to saving basically say, ‘No, I won't let you do that because I can't trust that you're equipped and qualified.’

Max was this high-status person who dealt with pretty explicitly racist treatment from patients. But the facility where he was employed wasn't structured in a way that understood or knew how to deal with those types of challenges. There's no way to consider—what does that mean for your ability to get patients through the system? What does that mean for your ability to have relatively quick turnaround times? What does that mean for your patient satisfaction scores?

You write eloquently about the difference between being race-blind and being race-conscious. “Ultimately, the real utility of these colorblind frames is that they allow people to remain blind to the ongoing, persistent realities of contemporary racial inequality.” Explain why we should be striving for race consciousness.

That might sound really jarring to many readers because so many of our organizations, especially workplaces, are structured in that [race blind] way. Kevin, one of the other respondents that I described in the book, talks about this. He was working at this bank where the focus was on being race-blind because they wanted people to be able to get along. They wanted to avoid topics that seemed controversial and that might get their coworkers riled up in ways that seemed unproductive to the business outcome.

But for Black workers, those racial issues don't go away when they step across the threshold into the office. I think organizations that are more race-conscious recognize that reality and think about how they can address the experiences that workers of color, and Black workers specifically, have given that their reality is one where race and racial inequality are simply a part of their workplace experience.

You’re asking people and organizations to acknowledge that racial inequality does exist at a time when so many seek to paint a narrative that we’ve moved on.

It’s true. One of the things that's valuable about being able to do sociological research on this topic is that we have such a wealth of information to show that this idea that we've moved past race is simply not accurate. There's an enormous trove of data that documents racial disparities in pretty much every facet of U.S. life, whether we're talking about life expectancy, health, educational outcomes, economic outcomes, or wages and salary. Racial disparities are persistent, longstanding, and occur across pretty much every front. So one of the things that I hope will come out of this book being published is people thinking about what that means for the places they work, and if [racial disparity] is a reality, how could a company be structured differently? How it could change to be a place that does reflect and acknowledge the realities and experiences of Black workers who are employed there?

So, how could organizations change? You offer some concrete solutions in your book. What are they?

At the end of each section, I talk about things that people in different positions in the organization can do—whether you're a company leader, in HR, a DEI worker, or if you're just an everyday worker in a company, and you want to think about what your options are for making things better.

The book does include some solutions, but for the sake of brevity, here are three:

Hiring: When it comes to hiring, it's really important to be a reference. One of the things that I learned in researching this book is how much referrals and connections matter in terms of people getting jobs. I think upwards of 70 percent of people get jobs through their connections and existing relationships. But we also know that these relationships are highly segregated. Most of our friend networks, our neighborhoods, and our schools still remain pretty racially segregated and homogenous.

So I would suggest to people be a reference. Diversify your networks intentionally, and make it a point to refer Black workers for open positions at your company when you learn about them.

Organizational Culture: When it comes to organizational culture, it’s important to be an advocate and to speak up in support of company initiatives that are designed to create more diversity, especially if these are research-based. It's also important to speak out when you see people who are deriding company efforts to support more diversity. Offering support and offering it vocally in the moment can really matter a lot in setting a tone and shifting a culture.

Advancement: When it comes to advancement, I would suggest being a sponsor. We know that a lot of how people advance is related to the relationships that they have. We also know that Black workers are less likely than workers of other races to feel as if they have relationships and adequate face time with their managers and people who supervise them. So people, especially those who are in leadership roles, can really take the initiative of working to sponsor and connect with Black workers and to really train the next generation of Black leaders so that hopefully some of the dispiriting statistics that I cite in the last section of the book, showing just how much of a mismatch there is between Black workers in leadership and Black workers in the population, don't have to continue being our story.

Your book is coming out just as we’ve had a conservative Supreme Court ruling rejecting race-conscious college admissions, when affirmative action is dismissed as “woke,” and businesses and organizations wonder if their diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives will be struck down next. How does your book speak to this moment?

This is, in many ways, a pivotal and fraught moment. We are seeing a lot of retreat from the support for issues related to DEI that we saw just three years ago [after the murder of George Floyd]. This is in no way the same cultural moment that saw open discussion of systemic racism and companies pledging billions of dollars to try to address and eradicate systemic racism.

But we also know, if you take the long view of American history, this change in the culture should have been somewhat anticipated. Every moment of significant racial progress in the U.S. has always been followed by significant racial backlash. We had a Civil War and Reconstruction. That was followed by Jim Crow segregation. We had a Civil Rights movement. That was followed by mass incarceration and the destabilization of many urban areas. And so now we're at a place where something similar is happening.

But I think that for companies that want to move forward, and for individuals that want to move forward, there are data, and there are actual evidence-based interventions that do move the needle and that can yield results. It's particularly important to think about that because our population is continuing to diversify. It's just hard for me to see how companies meet the needs of an increasingly multiracial society if their workforces don't reflect that society.

Because of this cultural moment, because of the backsliding toward race blindness, let me ask you for the vision of why racial diversity and race consciousness, for addressing gray areas, is good for businesses and for society at large.

The way that I tend to think about this more is in terms of human capital and human potential. There was a piece you wrote not too long ago where you noted that the U.S. wastes several trillion dollars as a result of racial discrimination.*This isn't the America of the 1950s anymore. It's just not that America, regardless of how much some people might want it to be. So, if we want to think about how best to be prepared for the future that we are heading into, and the present that we are currently in, it just makes the most sense to try to minimize barriers that don't have to be there, and to eradicate obstacles that prohibit us as a society from fully including everybody and reaching our full potential.

Because I don't think everyone necessarily approaches this from the same moral standpoint, I don't make the moral argument that this is just what's right. But I think it's harder to counter the argument that if we want to have a functional society, I just don't see how you have that when you have a full 13 percent of the population facing systemic obstacles to moving into leadership roles and marginalized in workplaces and dealing with these systemic challenges in the labor market. *(Editor’s Note: The San Francisco Fed issued a report in 2019 that found gender and racial inequality cost $2.3 trillion a year. The Better Life Lab covered this report in our Working While Black podcast episode, where Harvey Wingfield also appeared. And, in 2020, a Citigroup report estimated that discrimination against African Americans has cost $16 trillion over the last 20 years.)

To close, when you think of your research for this book, as well as in your previous book, Flatlining: Race, Work and Health Care in the New Economy, what gives you the greatest pause, and what gives you the greatest hope?

I worry a lot about where the current moment will take us. I write about the U.S. being at this tipping point, not the first one, but one of many that we've had throughout our history, where I think we could go in one of two directions. We can move to a place where we do try to think more about how to bring everybody into all opportunities in the U.S. and make sure that unnecessary systemic barriers are not present. Or we continue along the track that we have been on and further marginalize and isolate large segments of our working population from access to meaningful, gainful employment. So that gives me pause.

Where I do feel some qualified optimism is that I think there are really large segments of the population that do want to move in a hopeful direction. The Black Lives Matter movement has been clocked as the largest social movement in American history. That is significant, and that's meaningful. There are large segments of the population that do want to think and talk about issues related to race and inequality and are open to hearing and learning about some of the challenges that are present. And what they can do to change them. So that gives me some optimism.