Photo by Fred Zwicky

In a study of white teachers’ sense of belongingness at their schools, EPOL assistant professor Jennifer L. Nelson found that these teachers were often ill-equipped for discussions about racial issues with Black colleagues and students because they had little prior experience thinking about or confronting race in their family, educational and previous work environments.

White workers’ emotions about race and reactions to racial differences in the workplace are triggered by identity threat-induced culture shock, researchers suggest in a new study.

White teachers who worked at a school where the faculty was majority Black felt shocked, rejected, uncomfortable and anxious when racial discussions arose and their racial or professional identities were challenged, the researchers found. When triggered by feeling different – regardless of whether they were a racial minority or majority in their workplace –white teachers responded by practicing social avoidance, shunning intergroup relations and ducking conversations about race. 

“Most of the white teachers in our sample hailed from racially segregated social worlds – attending predominantly white high schools and universities” that left them unprepared to handle race relations in their workplace, said first author Jennifer L. Nelson, assistant professor of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who co-wrote the study with Tiffany D. Johnson, a business professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. 

Published in Work and Occupations, the findings were based on in-depth interviews and job-shadowing with 56 white teachers working in public high schools in a city in the southeast U.S. The study examined white teachers’ sense of workplace belongingness at five metropolitan schools with either majority-white or majority-Black faculty members, as well as these teachers’ emotional responses to being a different race from their coworkers and students. 

The researchers said individuals’ emotional responses to racial differences in the workplace are constructed in three stages, beginning with their racial socialization earlier in life, a formative process called imprinting; racialized emotions, their perceptions of a current race-related event at work; and racialized coping, their behavioral reactions to that event.

Imprinting – which encompasses individuals’ prior experiences with race in their family, educational and previous work environments – shapes young adults’ preparedness to deal with race-related discussions and issues in the workplace, Nelson said.

“During the interviews, all the teachers referred back to these earlier experiences and compared them with their current workplace at the time when race became salient for them,” Nelson said. “It was clear to my coauthor and me that imprinting was relevant to the range of emotions they felt when race became something they had to grapple with at work. The white teachers also realized they had a racial identity, too, even if they had not thought of it much in depth before.”

White teachers who were minorities at their schools encountered various types of identity threats – behaviors or incidents that made them feel devalued or disliked based upon a social identity such as their race or profession. Some believed that Black students and coworkers viewed them as professionally incompetent. Others recalled being confronted by Black students who said they were unqualified to teach African American history because they were white.

Read the full story from the Illinois News Bureau...