A Martin Luther King Day reading list about race in the workplace

At Quartz at Work, we often think about the workplace as just another arena in which life happens. It’s a setting for relationship building, creative quests, minding mental health, finding purpose—but also the constant, often unconscious reinforcement of life’s inequalities, including those built into the world’s racial and socioeconomic power structures.

We also think work can provide an opportunity to make a conscious effort to lean into diversity and the innovation it brings, and to create a more equitable economy by rethinking the way companies and the people who run them go about their business. In other words, the workplace can be a source of the kinds of changes needed to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of racial and economic equity a reality.

Over the past year, the need to connect the lines between injustices outside the office, in white supremacist movements and police violence, for example, with corporate workplace norms—which have been shaped by white culture—has felt especially pressing. That urgency inspired Quartz at Work senior reporter Sarah Todd to spearhead a fantastic, jam-packed series of stories in 2020 about how to build antiracist companies, and inspired several thoughtful essays by contributors and staffers investigating the experiences of Black Americans in the workplace, past and present.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.