ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Organizational efforts to create and maintain an inclusive multicultural environment often face resistance by Whites, says a University of Michigan researcher.
“Without the support of Whites, organizations and educational settings will fail in their attempts to navigate and manage the complexities of diverse work forces and constituencies,” says Dr. Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, an associate professor of management and organizations at Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “In the face of the dramatic projected growth in demographic diversity, such failure could have severe economic, social and political consequences.
“Our research reveals that this resistance can have little to do with prejudice,” he adds. “Instead, it can stem from a basic human need to belong.”
Sanchez-Burks, Michigan doctoral student Flannery Garnett, Victoria Plaut of the University of California-Berkeley and Laura Buffardi of the Universidad de Deusto in Spain conducted a five-study investigation of White Americans’ perceptions of diversity initiatives both in the workplace and in the classroom.
Their research highlights two cultural ideologies that dominate the American lexicon of diversity: Multiculturalism, which explicitly acknowledges differences among groups and promotes the notion that differences associated with social identities should be valued; and Colorblindness, which emphasizes the sameness of people, that racial categories should be ignored or avoided and that differences based on social identity should be assimilated into an overarching unifying category.
They found that Whites do not perceive multiculturalism as an inclusive ideology the way minorities do. In four of the studies of college students and employees, the researchers show how Whites associate multiculturalism with exclusion as opposed to inclusion, but do not show this bias when Whites are explicitly included in the conceptualization of multiculturalism.
Moreover, Whites are less likely and slower than minorities to associate multiculturalism with their own self-identities, and the study shows that Whites’ aversion to multiculturalism varies as a function of an individual’s “need to belong.”
