Reclaiming voice through epistemic disobedience: a Black female anti-racist consultant perspective

This thesis critically examines three public works – 100+ Days of Anti-Racism Vlogs (YouTube videos) recorded during 2020, my book The Anti-Racist Organization: Dismantling Systemic Racism in the Workplace published in 2022, and the evolution of my advisory firm, HR rewired, founded in 2019 – to interrogate the persistence of systemic anti-Black racism in workplace environments. Through these works, the research explores how personal experience, organisational critique, and professional praxis converge to generate new knowledge and innovative methodologies for addressing entrenched anti-Blackness. It delves into the philosophical, structural, epistemological, and psychological mechanisms that sustain resistance to anti-racist efforts centring on Black employees.

Employing an autoethnographic approach, this thesis integrates personal narratives with cultural, social, and organisational critiques to challenge dominant knowledge systems. The first public work, 100+ Days of Anti-Racism YouTube videos, serves as a reflective artefact to analyse self-silencing and the reclamation of voice. Using Mignolo’s (2009) concept of epistemic disobedience and transformative learning theory, this analysis acts as an example, I believe, of the role of storytelling as a powerful tool of resistance. The second public work, The Anti-Racist Organization, is evaluated for its critique of organisational inertia, drawing on Mills’ (1997) Racial Contract Theory, Fricker’s (2007) epistemic injustice, and System Justification Theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994). Lastly, the third public works, my company HR rewired, functions as a case study for understanding the tensions between aligning anti-racism work with business imperatives and preserving its transformative potential within the context of racial capitalism and the commodification of anti-racism through neoliberalism.

The findings reaffirm that while Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives are often touted as an effective solution to racism, these efforts, exacerbated by epidemic ignorance and organisational and individual resistance, frequently fail to address the systemic anti-Blackness embedded in workplace structures.

This work opens pathways for further research into the psychological, cultural, and systemic roots of resistance to anti-racist initiatives. It also calls for deeper exploration of how racial capitalism and the commodification of anti-racism shape the field and impact Black professionals over time and poses questions to look for the further analysis of how maintaining an undiluted focus on the historical and current racial disparities that exist can better aid our understanding of both organisational and individual resistance and what it means for ongoing anti-racist practice. Ultimately, this thesis advances anti-racism practice by centring on Blackness and championing a sustained, unapologetic critique of the systems, professions, and frameworks that claim to address or alleviate systemic racism but often perpetuate its underlying causes.