The quiet purge: a qualitative exploration of sidelining, denigrating and dehumanizing racialized public servants in British Columbia

ABSTRACT This article presents a qualitative exploration of racialized public servants’ lived experiences with workplace racial discrimination in British Columbia, Canada. Specifically, introducing the concept of the quiet purge as the theoretical framework that is used to make sense of data, this study examines experiences of participants with racist pressures at work that had the effect of side-lining and pushing them out to the peripheries of publicly funded workplaces. After detailing a variety of strategies used to recruit 25 non-White participants who worked in the public service and took part in this study, findings would be presented as cultural denigration, accent-mediated dehumanization, emotional fatiguing and precarity-breeding work assignment. In analyzing these findings, this article will conceptualize these racist pressures as the quiet purge, or stratifying mechanisms that were designed to peripheralize and marginalize racialized participants in their respective workplaces. Subsequently, the article will briefly discuss my observations of intersectionality and conclude that, considering the fact that some of the experiences that were recounted by participants describe incidents that were glaringly, unambiguously and blatantly racist – struggles that are often seen as the hallmarks of earlier times – workplace racial discrimination in Canada is alive and requires urgent research and policy attention.