Friday, March 28, 2025 | 6pm to 7:30pm
25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Room 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan
How does racism influence the formation and development of organizational life in a racialized community? In this paper, Prof. Simon Yamawaki Shachter extends on Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness to explain community organizations’ roles and development. Combined with the concepts of oppositional consciousness from social movements and decoupling from organization theory, Prof. Yamawaki Shachter builds a processual model of organizational life for racialized communities. He shows how the model explains the development of 19th and early 20th century Chinese organizations in the U.S., and describes how the community formed an incomparably large, sophisticated, interconnected, and politically-active organizational field at such an early point in U.S. history. The organizations that developed—based in historical Chinese migrant organizations that responded to anti-Chinese racism—looked different from past and contemporary Chinese or U.S.-based organizational fields. This case and theoretical model show the types of organizations and stages of development for the organizational life of communities that face racism.
