Imagine you encounter an organization celebrating it’s history in a relatively generic manner. “Our founder was amazing, we try to live up to the values he embodied when he built our company 75 years ago.” What inferences might you draw?
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These kinds of organizational history celebrations are quite common. Although this might serve motives to feel good about the organization or highlight its prestige, our work demonstrates that this undermines belonging + interest in joining among Black Americans
Many organizations have histories that marginalized Black Americans, a fact that Black Americans are particularly knowledgeable of. Therefore, when organizations celebrate their histories, it suggests that they are unaware of or condone this racist past.
This occurs for fictional orgs about which people could not possess knowledge and absent information about prior marginalization or racial makeup; the cultural context of historical racism leads history celebrations to be threatening absent content about that specific history.
Importantly, the negative effect of celebrating history vanishes when its clear that the organization has a history of having Black people in power, highlighting that this effect is specific to organizations that may have had a history of racism.
Shout out to co-first author @stephlreeves.bsky.social. Although we collaborated on this from the beginning, this started out as her dissertation work and she did a lot of the early heavy lifting on this project.
This work suggests that organizations may want to be careful about the ways that they talk about their histories; looking forward to future work on how organizations might be able to talk about their histories without these negative consequences, perhaps by acknowledging & making amends for racism.
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