The conversation of workplace racism cannot exist without acknowledging slavery, the exploitation of labor, and capitalism being utilized as a tool to construct this cycle of extracting immeasurable labor under such short pay to keep certain people, corporations in power hoarding wealth, as well as enabling inhumane working conditions for black and brown people. There is an intersection present at hand, between classism and race: it affects social mobility for many people of color, as seen throughout history and contemporary society; it is an everlasting issue that has infiltrated society ever since the conception of race, created as a result of power and greed. Colonizers/ white elite hoarded positions of power, as well as exerting financial control over BIPOC people in order to hold them in subservient positions and to have power over them.

Chattel slavery was one of the most common forms of slavery practiced in America. This system allowed people to be regarded as legal property, where they were “bought, sold and owned forever,” and it was legalized “and supported by the United States and European powers from the 16th – 18th centuries.” ((National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, Modern Day Abolition). Chattel slavery, the enslavement of first nations people, human trafficking, and child labor, are all forms of labor where people of color were exploited for resources in an environment where they were undergoing constant abuse and were in a cycle of physical, financial and psychological manipulation so that they could be used for the profit of slaveowner, wealthy elite, businessmen, corporations and other institutions of power.

Vagrancy policing, was arrests made of primarily black “vagrants” who would “wander abroad” or have no means of supporting themselves because they are unable to attain jobs, or any financial resources/ means; police would be “Eyeing the interracial crowd of longshoremen… arrested all black dockworkers as homeless and unemployed vagrants. The Louisiana criminal code of 1855 defined vagrants as “all idle persons” who live “wandering abroad” without “visible means to maintain themselves” (Bardes, 2018) This system reflected, as stated by Bardes “lengthier pattern of extensive and deeply intrusive post-emancipation vagrancy policing that sharply divided the occupied city and raised fierce local and national debates after the Civil War regarding blackness, criminality, labor, capitalism, and the limits and practice of freedom.” (Bardes, 2018) He continues to mention that “such vagrancy arrests as hallmarks of a postbellum criminal justice system that lacked ideological complexity and pursued only the harassment and redeployment of black labor. … New Orleans’s vagrancy policing encoded a deep apprehension regarding wage labor, human migration, and the disruption of normative power relationships between persons.” (Bardes, 2018) Bardes describes the vagrancy of New Orleans as a wave of reconstituting black labor in prisons, excluding black people from socially, financially, and physically integrating into society as free people. Bardes makes a keynote discussing the ratification of Louisiana’s constitution in 1868, “the city police, the Union army, and the Freedmen’s Bureau arrested thousands of children, women, and men on the charge of vagrancy, summarily sentencing all lengthy hard labor terms and often sentencing black arrestees to forced, uncompensated labor,” thus far demonstrating how vagrancy laws incriminated vast amounts of people to enter this forced labor system in prisons through long sentences, and coerced expansive labor terms with no pay. This was a method by which the government “comprehended emancipation and its destabilizing social and economic transformations” which also represented “a grave social crisis, demanding curative hard labor, lengthy carceral sentences, and expulsion.” (Bardes, 2018)

Vagrancy policing evolved as a means to “conform to conventional emancipation and southern criminal justice narratives,” thus indicating how it mirrored the emancipation proclamation where slavery still remained in the nation even if it was banned; vagrancy policing was another form of infiltrating slavery into society through the lens of the criminal justice agenda. Arrests made from vagrancy policing depict “racially prejudiced policing, white fixation on black mobility, and draconian labor control measures.” Black people were captured by police for not having jobs/ wealth after enduring enslavement; as a result, tied to the prison industrial complex to yet once again, be worked for labor in that institution. John K. Bardes continues to make an imperative point here, where he explains vagrancy policing as “initially, to be a fairly representative application of the Black Codes—the criminal laws designed to rebind freedpeople to plantations—demonstrative of postbellum efforts to reconstitute slave labor.” This system was designed to recirculate the Black Codes, where black people being free from slavery were enslaved again, through meticulous measures, in which criminal laws practiced the reconstitution of slave labor by criminalizing/ arresting black people. “The paradoxical status of these arrestees—free yet confined, emancipated yet sentenced to penal labor—disrupts the formulation of slavery and freedom as antithetical categories, while highlighting how emancipation was a nuanced, negotiated, and contested process.” (Bardes, 2018)

Workplace racism traces back as early as the 19th century when people of color were exploited and coerced to perform a lot of physically taxing/ heavily rigorous/ strenuous labor while also undergoing atrocious working conditions. Immigrants were targeted to take on agricultural and industrial work, where “Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican workers built railroads and harvested crops for low pay in dangerous and abusive conditions. In the mid-20th century, the federal government’s exploitative ‘bracero program’ authorized temporary entry for Mexican workers to undercut domestic wages, break strikes, impede union organizing, and solve labor shortages without providing workers a living wage or meaningful path to citizenship.” In these workspaces, people that were working in these conditions were not regarded as humans yet treated as a machine for oil production; they didn’t work in humane conditions, weren’t granted any rights: having breaks when they needed them, not being granted to living wages, have any protection from their bosses/ people in authoritative positions that may abuse their power, and much more. Additionally, workplace racism works in conjunction with the exploitation of labor as people with marginalized identities such as immigrants/ undocumented people, including young children, often take on jobs where they are forced to execute a lot of physical tasks/ demands. These jobs endanger their safety/ livelihood and they are left with no option besides taking on these jobs because they are trying to make ends meet. “An exception to Federal child labor laws permits children as young as 12 to work in the fields for unlimited hours before and after school. Researchers have documented nicotine poisoning among child laborers who work several hours a day for years in North Carolina tobacco fields, and suffer constant headaches and nausea. These children and their parents usually are poor immigrants from Mexico or Central America.” Children as young as 12 years old were allowed to work in dangerous conditions and were being overworked; child labor was legalized and milked from immigrant families because corporations/ businesses make the active decision in refusing to pay a person the living wage that they deserve, yet instead attract this cycle of keeping disadvantaged communities of people to work in their places of employment, dismissing any suitable working conditions. “Undocumented and non-citizen workers of all ages face disproportionate safety risks in the workplace and a higher likelihood of fatal work injury than other American workers. They are often paid less than minimum wage, denied overtime pay, and sometimes denied pay altogether. In Florida alone, more than a dozen employers have been prosecuted for the abusive exploitation of thousands of workers in the past decade.” Undocumented workers undergo substantial/ extensive abuse from their places of employment, are threatened to be reported to authorities if they fail to comply/ stay subject to abuse by higher level staff, are denied receiving proper pay, denied any sort of health insurance/ common employee benefits at work, and many more; undocumented people are often left with no choice but to comply because they have to make a living to survive. 

Historically, professionalism ties hand in hand with eurocentrism; conformation to Eurocentric beauty standards was detrimental to impacting the job prospects of people of color in corporate environments. This primarily affected black people (women) who faced discrimination based off of their hair texture/ wearing natural hairstyles and were forced to straighten their hair/ wear straight-haired wigs to seem more “professional.” Places of employment would require white presenting appearances in order to even be considered as an applicant. Assimilation to eurocentrism/ “white passage” was adopted as a mechanism for many black and brown people in order to even seek different positions in their black people had to white-pass to seek a different position. Conformity to white standards and uplifting them is a survival tactic for a lot of BIPOC people in workplaces, in order to hold on to their job/ position. Authoritative roles in workplaces are often readily accessible by white/ white presenting people, as a major percentage of black and brown people work a lot of blue-collar versus white-collar jobs.

Next: Section 3 : Statsitics and Research