Cultural Racism in the Workforce & the Resulting Harm of Biculturalism

Both scholars and black professionals report that in mainstream institutions (elite law firms and Fortune 500 companies, for example) cultural blackness harms a black professional's career chances. As a result, black professionals wishing to succeed in the mainstream often cover their blackness and exhibit white cultural orientations in their professional lives. These professionals value their blackness, however, and continue to identify themselves as culturally black. But they perceive the costs of expressing it in their working lives, and so they reserve its expression for their personal lives. In this way, many black professionals are aptly described as bicultural. Although even career advice guides written by black professionals encourage biculturalism as a way to succeed in mainstream America, it is the thesis of this paper that biculturalism is not benign or harmless and is the result of black Americans' struggling to succeed under conditions of pervasive cultural racism. It will be shown that the necessity to be bicultural is itself an evil, creates an unjust "good black"/ "bad black" dichotomy, and that biculturalism substantially contributes to the black-white academic and economic gaps. Specifically, this paper will demonstrate that biculturalism: (1) causes grave harm to the entire African-American community through its substantial contribution to the creation of a "good black"/ "bad black" dichotomy that will be shown to diminish the adult opportunity sets of black Americans and to thereby produce opportunity structures and incentives that for black youth make joining the American mainstream less plausible and less attractive than it would be in the absence of the dichotomy; (2) that biculturalism is particularly evident in the case of elite law firms, which are in many ways the paradigmatic example of a professional environment that compels biculturalism; (3) that biculturalism requires blacks to perform an uncompensated but incompensable form of emotional labor that assaults and undermines the personhood of blacks with black cultural orientation; and (4) that integration amid conditions of virulent cultural racism compelled biculturalism. Section (5) will discuss the evidence on cultural racism, reviewing scientific evidence that supports its pervasiveness. Section (6) will discuss how biculturalism, through the "good black"/ "bad black" dichotomy, prevents cultural racism from being identified for what it is, and to this extent facilitates discriminatory labor practices that have devastating implications for the economic well-being of working-class blacks. As will be discussed below, there are at least three remedies that should be considered in the fight against cultural racism and in an attempt to reduce the necessity to be bicultural. They are: (1) redesigning race-based affirmative action to reach a more culturally diverse beneficiary group; (2) creating a parallel class-based affirmative action program that will expand white cultural identity; and (3) redesigning primary educational curriculum so that American youth have a more sophisticated understanding of non-white/non-European cultures. The paper concludes with some thoughts on why finding and implementing effective remedies against culture racism is of normative and practical significance for the future of the American nation.