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LEARNING TO WORK IN WHITE SPACES: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC AND LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF RACIAL AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION IN A MIDWESTERN AMERICAN ORGANIZATION BY JEREMY WILLIAM BOHONOS DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Human Resource Education with a concentration in Human Resource Development in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2019 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor K. Peter Kuchinke, Chair Professor Assata Zerai, Director of Research Associate Professor Yoon Pak Assistant Professor Jennifer Davis ABSTRACT Pairing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of a prominent talk radio program with workplace autoethnography, this dissertation explores life and language in a construction-sector business staffed almost entirely by White men. The multi-method approach facilitates intersectional analysis of racist, sexist, and homophobic talk while also attending to issues of class. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project would not have been possible without the support of my academic mentors and family. I am grateful to Assata Zerai, Peter Kuchinke, Yoon Pak, and Jenny Davis for their careful reading of my drafts and their thoughtful feedback. I benefited greatly from having such an intellectually and methodically diverse committee. I am especially grateful to Dr. Zerai for taking me on as a mentee from outside her department and for thoughtfully guiding me as I developed an intellectual framework to support my emerging voice as a researcher. I am similarly grateful to Dr. Kuchinke for encouraging me to explore methods, theories, and topics that pushed the boundaries of Human Resource Development. This project would have never taken shape if Khaula Murtadha had not impressed upon me the importance of connecting personal reflexivity to research and social justice action. Likewise, I remain indebted to early academic mentors like Anita Morgan and Tom Davis who whet my appetite for research and encouraged my early efforts. I was sustained through this process by the support of my father, mother, two sisters, grandparents, and wife. I am grateful to my family for many things, but none more so than your consistent efforts toward the righteous, the good, and the just. I am also indebted to my two sons for contributing to this project by providing me with ample portions of both motivation and joyful distraction. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF LITERATURE ON WHITE RACISM ................................14 CHAPTER 3: EXPLORING WORKPLACE DISCRIMINATION THROUGH AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS .........................53 CHAPTER 4: DESCRIPTION OF SETTING AND SELF ..............................................74 CHAPTER 5: CAUTION MEN AT WORK: RACE AND CLASS IN A WHITE MASCULINIZED CONSTRUCTION COMPANY .........................................................93 CHAPTER 6: MASCULINIZED RADIO: WHEN INJUSTICE DRIVES PROFIT .....121 CHAPTER 7: CATCALLING AS RITUAL IN A MASCULINIZED WORKPLACE: LINGUISTIC MARGINALIZATION ON THE AXIS OF GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND RACE ...............................................................................................................................145 CHAPTER 8: WHEN BLACK AND NATIVE LIVES DON’T MATTER: RACIALLY MOTIVATED VIOLENCE, KILLING, AND GENOCIDE IN MASCULINIZED WHITE WORKPLACE DISCOURSE AND HUMOR ................................................................163 CHAPTER 9: CONCLUSIONS ......................................................................................188 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................201 APPENDIX A: TIMELINE OF RESEARCH-RELATED ACTIVITIES ......................223 APPENDIX B: IRB APPROVAL LETTER ...................................................................224 iv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION On June 17, 2015, 21-year-old White male Dylann Storm Roof murdered nine African Americans while they worshipped in an historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Directly after the shooting, national media personalities and political commentators expressed surprise that someone so young would commit a racially targeted act of violence. Commentators were surprised because they believed in a metanarrative of American history that assured them that racism is declining; some even believed that we live in a post-racial society. According to this metanarrative, the Obama presidency was the harbinger of a new age for American race relations, and racists were old men whose racism would die with them. As I listened to commentators who expressed bewilderment at how a young White person in America could be this racist, I muttered under my breath, “Because we are taught to be racist.” By the time I turned off the news, I was almost as upset at the willful blindness toward the racism cultivated in White American youth, the unwillingness to question the metanarrative of racial progress, and the failure to discuss the role of education in developing racism as I was about the shooting. While I was outraged by Roof’s actions, I was not surprised by his youth. I have had many White mentors who used informal workplace interaction to teach me racism and many young White colleagues who embraced the lessons. My love for these mentors as well as their investments in me created an environment where access to the material and social benefits of White privilege made complicit acceptance of bigotry tempting. To me, Roof is not an aberration, and he is not impossible to relate to. While his murderous approach would be considered extreme to even most avowed White supremacists, his animus would have found quarter, if not outright encouragement, in some of my White workplaces. 1 In my research, I seek to explain how racism can be encouraged, taught, and developed in organizational contexts. I approach this from the perspective of a junior employee seeking to make his way in a world of work dominated by White men. I hope that a better understanding of how racism can permeate a workplace culture will enable activists, allies, and organizations to join together to disrupt hegemonic forms of racism that require young White men to either join in with or tacitly accept bigoted discourse. The racism that is taught to young White men does not typically manifest itself in overt racial violence; more often it manifests in ways that subtly harm organizations, employees, and prospective employees. In a recent study, White men who applied in person for low-wage jobs in New York were about twice as likely to be offered a job as compared to Blacks with identical qualifications (Pager, Western, & Bonikowski, 2009). In this study, Whites with criminal records were also more likely to receive job offers than Blacks without records. A popular explanation for these and other types of workplace inequities is Bonilla-Silva’s (2014) argument that “color- blind” forms of racial biases affect everyday decisions in the workplace. While I do not disagree that some of the disparate treatments of minorities in the workplace can be explained by color- blind racism, my firsthand experiences tell me that covert intentional bias is just as real. I know that when Black people applied for low-wage jobs in organizations where I worked, their applications were intentionally thrown in the trash. From a workforce education perspective, the most disturbing part is that my supervisors trained me to do the same thing. They also trained me to use naming conventions and voluntary racial information on applications to screen out minority applicants, and they taught me the rationales that they believed justified these off-the-books hiring policies. If asked, my mentors might not have admitted racism to an outside researcher. Their racism was not implicit or color-blind but rather covert and intentional. 2 I am one year younger than George Zimmerman. He was 28 when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin. Darren Wilson was 28 when he shot and killed Michael Brown. Two of the officers charged in relation to the death of Freddie Grey are under 30. Old White men do not have a monopoly on racism. Why? Because young men like me are learning it. We are learning it in a variety of settings, including the workplace. Purpose The purpose of this project is to advance research regarding diversity and race in the workplace. In this effort I will build on a framework for utilizing Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Human Resources Development (HRD) research as put forward by Rocco, Beriner, and Bowman (2014), Byrd (2007, 2014), and Alfred and Chlup (2010), by using Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approaches to explore majority group workplace relationships. I will seek to explore the complex ways in which straight White men with seniority can use workplace mentoring and informal learning to encourage the development of racist, misogynistic, and homophobic organizational cultures. I will also look at how media consumption patterns contribute to climates of racial exclusivity. My hope is that in bringing these issues to light, my research will help facilitate movement toward more just workplaces and toward a more inclusive society. While my study began as an exploration of workplace racism, I could not ignore the abundant evidence that organizational racism was linked with and reinforced by sexism, classism,

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