We Challenge You to Join the Movement: From Discourse to Critical Voice

Abstract

Despite the advances made since the civil rights era, racial and ethnic differences are still salient and politically divisive in the United States. Businesses increasingly have diversity, equity, and inclusion goals and business management faculty can play an important role in helping them achieve those goals. In this article, we argue that businesspersons, especially leaders of enterprises that have diversity, equity, and inclusion goals and the faculty who educate them, have a responsibility to help identify issues regarding, and solutions to, some of the world’s most pressing problems and can do so through consciousness-raising experiences aimed at helping their students develop a critical voice that signals they are more likely to contribute to a respectful and productive work environment. Five illustrative scenarios are set forth as consciousness-raising experiences that faculty members can draw on as tools to prepare students to use their critical voice as socially and culturally conscious future organizational leaders. Although the scenarios can be applied to multiple causes, we offer the Black Lives Matter movement, a social justice movement that has gained global attention, as a frame for this discussion.