Racism continues to permeate American society and brings about social injustice as it privileges whites while marginalizing people of color. The endemic nature of racism identified by critical race theorists suggests that all American organizations are plagued by this social ill, yet very little research in human resource development explores racism in organizational settings. The purpose of this paper is to use participant observations of white and Black researchers to document how white-dominated leadership deploys procedural rules and microaggressions to marginalize Black participants in a small urban municipal government setting and the ways members of the Black community work to resist racial marginalization. K E Y W O R D S human resource development, local politics, racism, small urban, whitenessRacism continues to permeate American society (Bell, 1992;Dixson & Anderson, 2018) and brings about social injustice as it privileges whites while marginalizing people of color (POC) (Bonilla-Silva, 2014;Delgado & Stefancic, 2017;DiAngelo, 2018). Human resource development (HRD) research has been critiqued for failing to adequately address issues of race (Bohonos, 2019;Johnson, 2019;Rocco et al., 2014). The endemic nature of racism identified by critical race theorists suggests that all American organizations are plagued by this social ill, yet very little research in HRD explores racism in organizational settings.Emergent scholarship is calling for a greater emphasis on social justice in HRD research (Bohonos et al., 2019;Byrd, 2018;Collins, 2019), which requires more attention be paid to the effect of racism on organizational practice. Additionally, Sparkman (2019) suggests that there is an imbalance in the HRD diversity literature in which theoretical research is much more prevalent than empirical studies and calls for an additional empirical work to aid in the development and refinement of HRD diversity theory. BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH QUESTIONSAs first-and second-year doctoral students in HRD, the researchers formed a friendship based on a shared interest in research on racial justice. As our relationship grew, we noted perspectives from our respective positionalities, Black man and white man, were lacking in the field's research about race. In response, we began a project enabling us to compare our Black and white observations about race. This approach builds on research that explores differentiated experiences between women of color and white women (Childers & hooks, 1990), and Black men (hooks