Buried Many Things: How Racialized Organizations Achieve Racial Ignorance

Diana Graizbord, University of Georgia
Natalia Pires de Vasconcelos, University of Georgia

How do organizations produce and maintain racial ignorance (Mills 1997; 2007)? Building on interdisciplinary scholarship on agnotology and knowledge in organizations, and drawing on archival materials, media reports, organizational documents, secondary sources, and ethnographic observation of the “discovery” and subsequent reburial of the remains of enslaved and formerly enslaved people under Baldwin Hall, a building on the campus of the University of Georgia, we identify four strategies through which racialized organizations achieve racial ignorance: omission, equivocation, repudiation, and procedural juggling. By omission, we mean knowledge practices that actively leave particular people, places, and political possibilities out of official organizational accounts and narratives. Equivocation refers to the strategic deployment of vague or polysemous language to shore up uncertainty about facts and the historical record, thus raising doubts about what is known or could have been known. Repudiation refers to the active refusal and rejection of non-sanctioned organizational knowledge. It entails the denial of voices, sources, and types of knowledge, even within the organization, that disrupt official accounts and ways of knowing. Procedural juggling occurs when organizational actors juggle the norms and procedures that govern what they do, including how they conduct inquiry, produce public communication, or make decisions, with discretion. We argue that, together, these tactics produce racial ignorance in ways that deny humanity and meaning to those adversely racialized while protecting the reputation and racialized character of the organization.

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 Presented in Session 194. Thematizing Social Things: Heretical Literatures, Curricula, and Institutional Memories