In the Name of Love: White Organizations and Racialized Emotions

Abstract

This article bridges the gap between insights from a theory of racialized organizations and insights from a theory of racialized emotions by asking what role these emotions play in organizations. Drawing on a combined four years of ethnographic data from two predominantly White organizations in the Pacific Northwest – a conservative evangelical mega-church and a progressive public high school – we argue that these two organizations address racial inequality with a set of racialized emotions that we call a “love discourse.” A love discourse is a seemingly apolitical way of addressing inequality that frames the solution to it as a matter of individual feelings of love and kindness rather than as a social problem that requires collective, political, or systemic solutions. A love discourse is grounded in and supports White racial ignorance. By providing a way to avoid politics, a love discourse allows two organizations with different political cultures and value systems to engage in diversity work that seems to address racial inequality, without actually challenging it. Love, in this sense, is a racialized emotion that appears to address racial inequality while also sustaining it.