Gray Areas Audiobook By Adia Harvey Wingfield cover art

Gray Areas

How the Way We Work Perpetuates Racism and What We Can Do to Fix It

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Gray Areas

By: Adia Harvey Wingfield
Narrated by: Lynnette R. Freeman
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About this listen

A leading sociologist reveals why racial inequality persists in the workplace despite today’s multi-billion-dollar diversity industry—and provides actional solutions for creating a truly equitable, multiracial future.

Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to advancement and mobility—ignored and failed Black people. While explicit discrimination no longer occurs, and organizations make internal and public pledges to honor and achieve “diversity,” inequities persist through what Adia Harvey Wingfield calls the “gray areas:” the relationships, networks, and cultural dynamics integral to companies that are now more important than ever. The reality is that Black employees are less likely to be hired, stall out at middle levels, and rarely progress to senior leadership positions.

Wingfield has spent a decade examining inequality in the workplace, interviewing over two hundred Black subjects across professions about their work lives. In Gray Areas, she introduces seven of them: Alex, a worker in the gig economy Max, an emergency medicine doctor; Constance, a chemical engineer; Brian, a filmmaker; Amalia, a journalist; Darren, a corporate vice president; and Kevin, who works for a nonprofit.

In this accessible and important antiracist work, Wingfield chronicles their experiences and blends them with history and surprising data that starkly show how old models of work are outdated and detrimental. She demonstrates the scope and breadth of gray areas and offers key insights and suggestions for how they can be fixed, including shifting hiring practices to include Black workers; rethinking organizational cultures to centralize Black employees’ experience; and establishing pathways that move capable Black candidates into leadership roles. These reforms would create workplaces that reflect America’s increasingly diverse population—professionals whose needs organizations today are ill-prepared to meet.

It’s time to prepare for a truly equitable, multiracial future and move our culture forward. To do so, we must address the gray areas in our workspaces today. This definitive work shows us how.

©2023 Adia Harvey Wingfield (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers
African American Studies Black & African American Workplace Culture United States Employment Business
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Editorial Review

A hard look at diversity
When a white person tells me, "I don’t see your color," I see danger. Colorblindness doesn’t help Blacks in the workplace and hides those “gray areas.” In Gray Areas, a must-listen, sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield points out that gray areas include the hiring process, which can be challenging for Black candidates. There are assumptions that Black women with children might be risky hires because of child care issues and a lack of support at home. There is friction between white women and Black men because of the perception they are not perceived as congenial. Once hired, the next challenge for Black employees is to advance. Wingfield offers solutions for companies–such as leadership taking on the job of mentoring and sponsoring new hires, conducting special task forces to identify the problems and creating checks and balances, and, most important, setting Black employees up for success. She urges companies to consider the importance of color consciousness instead of colorblindness for positive results. —Yvonne D., Audible Editor

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