Why do the majority of (white) academics within management and organization studies (MOS) endorse discourses of equality, diversity and inclusion on the one hand yet ignore the epistemic injustice suffered by black scholars on the other? We demonstrate how white supremacy within a historically racist academia marginalizes non-white bodies from knowledge production and dissemination by embedding epistemic injustice in MOS, and diminishing their utility globally. To expose the multifaceted harm caused by white supremacy, we reflect on black scholars’ experiences of epistemic injustice, conceptualizing their work (i.e. black scholarship) as underpinned by epistemic struggle and epistemic survival. We conceptualize epistemic struggle as striving to produce and disseminate knowledge in the face of difficulties and resistance generated by structural and agential powers. Epistemic survival denotes the sustained presence of black scholarship through compromise, collusion and radicalism. To this end, we propose collective intellectual activism based on cross-racial coalitions to eliminate epistemic injustice and locate black scholarship at the center of MOS.

We adopt and extend the concept of ‘noncooperative space’ to analyze how (aspirant) black women intellectual activists attempt to sustain their efforts within settings that publicly endorse racial equality, while, in practice, the contexts remain deeply racist. Noncooperative spaces reflect institutional, organizational, and social environments portrayed by powerful white agents as conducive to anti-racism work and promoting racial equality but, indeed, constrain individuals who challenge racism. Our work, which is grounded in intersectionality, draws on an autoethnographic account of racially motivated domestic violence suffered by our lead author. Our analysis suggests that (aspirant) black women intellectual activists must develop courage to sustain their ‘voice’ within noncooperative spaces. However, the three interlinked dimensions of noncooperative spaces—namely, deceiving design, hegemonic actors’ indifference to racism, and (some assimilated gatekeepers’) false equivalence—may gradually erode a black female scholar’s courage. This forces her ‘voice’ to vanish temporarily, or even permanently. Courage is thus fragile and depletable. Yet, courage can be regenerated, resulting in regaining voice. Consequently, we propose courageous collective action by white allies and black and brown individuals who voluntarily and officially cooperate within and across various spaces to achieve racial equality.

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Drawing on the autobiography of an immigrant Black African female scholar, we introduce and conceptualize the notion of dual structural advantages that racism potentially affords elite White male academics. These hegemonic scholars enjoy two types of possible advantage. First, as gatekeepers to a racist academic system, powerful White male scholars protect their interests by epistemically excluding the ‘Other’ from knowledge production. Second, these hegemonic agents ironically utilize racism as a hermeneutical resource for ‘impactful’ research output, grounded in progressive, anti-racist theorizations in collaboration with Black male scholars. Such work is disseminated and perpetuated through elite academic outlets, thus substantially leveraging the agents’ careers and university rankings. Foregrounding double advantages in debates on racial equality accentuates the necessity of changing the agential practices of elite White male scholars in order to transform racist institutions.

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