The Racist Workplace: A Theory Emerging from Employees’ Systemic Encounters with Racism Across Professional Industries

Workplace racism is increasingly understood as a systemic organizational phenomenon rather than a collection of isolated interpersonal acts. Building on scholarship on racialized organizations, this qualitative study examines how employees experience systemic racism across professional industries and develops The Racist Workplace Theory to explain how multiple forms and mechanisms of racism become interconnected and mutually reinforcing in everyday organizational life. The analysis draws on 1,596 employee descriptions of workplace encounters that participants identified as racist. The submissions were collected from professionals working in 292 organizations spanning K-12 schools, higher education institutions, corporate workplaces, and other professional contexts in the United States. Through iterative qualitative analysis, encounters were organized into three empirically derived analytic categories and compared across sectors to identify recurring systemic patterns and context-specific differences. Participants reported overt racism, racial microaggressions, and racialized expectations alongside inequities in evaluation and promotion, exclusion from professional opportunities, and institutional minimization of racial harm. Cross-sector analyses revealed that racialized expectations, racist encounters, institutional gatekeeping, racialized outcomes, minimization and inaction, and normalization can operate as interconnected and reinforcing processes rather than as discrete phenomena. These processes assume context-specific expressions across K-12 education, higher education, and corporate workplaces while collectively producing and sustaining racialized workplace climates. The Racist Workplace Theory extends racialized organization theory by shifting analytic attention from the organization as a racial structure to the workplace as a lived social environment in which those structures are repeatedly enacted and encountered. The theory specifies how interconnected processes can produce, sustain, and reproduce racial hierarchy in everyday organizational life while generating racialized workplace climates that employees experience through conditional belonging, compromised credibility and safety, heightened vigilance, and other consequences. These findings underscore the need for systemic interventions that redesign organizational structures, decision-making processes, accountability mechanisms, and workplace racial climates rather than relying primarily on episodic or symbolic DEI initiatives.