Decentering Whiteness in the Workplace

What would your workplace look like if whiteness were no longer its invisible norm? If policies, leadership, and everyday interactions didn’t unconsciously revolve around white comfort, values, and cultural norms—but instead truly reflected equity and inclusion for all?

In Decentering Whiteness in the Workplace: A Guide for Equity and Inclusion, Dr. Janice Gassam Asare says not enough organizations are asking this question. She argues that while many companies issued statements or posted Black Lives Matter squares after 2020, most never examined the deep structural problem: the ways whiteness itself is centered in their culture. According to Asare, decentering whiteness—shifting systems, language, and thinking away from white norms—is the only path toward real equity at work.

Understanding White-Centering

Asare defines white-centering as “actions and behaviors that prioritize, uplift, amplify, and venerate white people and white culture above others.” It shows up whenever white comfort dictates decision-making—such as avoiding words like “white supremacy” in trainings—or when white feelings are prioritized over the harm experienced by racialized employees. In a conference anecdote that opens the book, Asare describes how a white woman derailed a Black woman’s story about hair discrimination by comparing it to her own experience as a redhead. This, she says, is white-centering in everyday life: the compulsion to re-center one’s own feelings, even in discussions meant to highlight others’ pain.

White-centering, Asare notes, is just one expression of white supremacy culture, which she defines as a system of beliefs and institutions designed to preserve white power and privilege. “Whiteness” here is not an ethnicity but a social construct—a set of norms and systems built over centuries to associate whiteness with freedom, goodness, and leadership (drawing on historians like Theodore Allen and Nell Irvin Painter, whom she cites). To decenter whiteness, organizations must first recognize their own participation in this structure, then consciously reimagine who their systems serve.

From Awareness to Accountability

The book’s central framework—the 3 A’s model of Awareness, Acknowledgment, and Accountability—proposes that liberation starts with self-recognition. Many organizations become stuck at awareness: issuing statements or hiring consultants but failing to accept that their policies, metrics, and leadership pipelines are built for the comfort of whiteness. Real transformation, Asare argues, demands the kind of acknowledgment that includes apology, transparency, and systemic change. Accountability then requires structures that keep equity continuous and measurable, not optional or symbolic.

This journey applies to individuals as much as institutions. Asare vulnerably shares her own moments of internalized whiteness—longing for straight hair, desiring thinness, equating education with respectability—to show how white beauty and success standards shape identities even among Black professionals. She insists that everyone, including Black and non-Black people, must examine how they’ve internalized and reproduced white-centered thinking in order to uproot it within their workplaces.

Why This Work Matters

Why should white employees or organizations care about decentering whiteness? Asare stresses that white supremacy culture harms everyone: it encourages perfectionism, scarcity mindsets, and disconnection. It limits imagination and empathy for all workers. By creating systems designed for a dominant few, companies suppress creativity and alienate the majority—undermining their long-term sustainability. DEI efforts that leave these systems untouched will always fail, she warns, because they try to diversify within white frameworks rather than redesign them.

Throughout the book, Asare mixes scholarship, case studies, and personal narrative to show how workplaces can instead recenter equity. She unpacks white-centered dynamics in hiring, promotion, evaluation, policy, leadership, and even empathy practices, offering examples—from Wells Fargo’s “fake diversity interviews” to Starbucks’ mishandling of racism cases—that illustrate how good intentions collapse when white perception outweighs marginalized experience.

A Vision of True Inclusion

The book’s message is both confronting and hopeful: equity work is not a one-time training or checklist but a continuous unlearning of whiteness. “Equity will never be a reality while whiteness is being centered in our workplaces,” Asare writes. To achieve justice, institutions must center their most marginalized—especially Black employees—because only then will freedom cascade outward to all. Quoting the Combahee River Collective, she reminds us: “If Black women were free, it would mean everyone else would have to be free.”

By the end of Decentering Whiteness in the Workplace, you’re left with a powerful question: what if we built workplaces where white comfort wasn’t the measure of professionalism, value, or belonging—but where humanity, in all its difference, defined success? That is Asare’s invitation and challenge—to reimagine not just more diverse offices, but workplaces grounded in justice.

Before you can decenter whiteness, Asare insists, you have to understand what whiteness actually is—and how it was constructed. Whiteness did not exist as a natural category; it was invented. Drawing on historians Theodore Allen and Nell Irvin Painter, she traces how whiteness was not biological but political, created to maintain hierarchy and control in the early American colonies.

How “White” Became Synonymous with Power

In the 1600s Virginia colony, there were no “white people”—that label would only emerge decades later. Allen called whiteness an “all-class association” that united European laborers by granting them privileges over Africans. It provided poor Europeans with just enough of a racial benefit to prevent cooperation with enslaved Africans. Painter adds that white identity fused with freedom: to be white meant to be free, and to be Black meant bondage.

From there, “whiteness” evolved into a legal and moral system. The 1790 naturalization law restricted citizenship to white immigrants. Irish and Jewish migrants—initially marginalized in Europe—earned “whiteness” by distancing themselves from Black communities and embracing anti-Black labor practices. As Asare notes, whiteness survives by continuously absorbing new groups to maintain dominance, a process that continues today as demographics shift toward a non-white majority in the U.S.

Whiteness, Blackness, and the Construction of Otherness

Whiteness can only exist through its opposite, blackness. It defines itself in contrast: rational versus emotional, civilized versus primitive, free versus enslaved. Native Americans were portrayed as “red savages,” Asians as laboring outsiders, and Mexicans as inferior—each category reinforcing white normality. By the late 19th century, policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act codified this racial hierarchy into the nation’s structure.

Asare connects this history directly to the workplace. Modern hiring and promotion systems still operate as if “white” is the default employee profile. The preference for straight hair, “neutral” accents, and elite university degrees—all coded markers of whiteness—echo centuries-old constructs of who qualifies as capable and trustworthy.

Why This History Matters Now

Understanding whiteness as an invention liberates you from believing it’s inevitable. It reveals that our work systems were never neutral—they were built with whiteness as the model. Undoing that pattern means questioning every assumption about merit, leadership, and professionalism. Asare’s message is simple: when you realize whiteness is man-made, you also realize it can be unmade.

“First came whiteness,” Asare quotes her colleague Joquina Reed. “Supremacy shortly followed.”

Hiring decisions, Asare says, are often where workplace whiteness begins. From job postings to interviews, the entire process can prioritize white candidates—even when companies claim to value diversity. The bias isn’t always overt; it’s encoded into language, technology, and networks.

Job Descriptions that Code Whiteness

Job postings often idealize an imaginary “perfect fit” who mirrors white, Western norms. Phrases like “all-American” or “native English speaker” subtly exclude candidates of color. Even degree requirements and vague culture-fit criteria can replicate white privilege. Asare references Abercrombie & Fitch’s “all-American” aesthetic and its discrimination lawsuits to show how “desirable” quickly becomes code for white.

She advocates rewriting job listings through an equity lens: consulting bias reviewers, cutting unnecessary education barriers, and expanding where openings are advertised. When one client shifted from LinkedIn to targeted Black professional networks and Twitter’s DEI circles, they radically diversified applicants—proof that small changes can decenter white defaults.

Algorithms Aren’t Neutral

Technology disguises bias as objectivity. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), used by nearly all Fortune 500 firms, often filter out resumes with nontraditional job gaps or foreign names. By prioritizing degree prestige or linear career history, ATS algorithms reproduce white advantage. To counter this, Asare suggests anonymizing resumes and combining automated tools with human review by trained equity professionals.

Interviews and “Fit” as Gatekeeping

The idea of “culture fit,” Asare warns, may simply mean “fits into whiteness.” From name and accent discrimination to “similar-to-me” bias, interviews can subtly reward proximity to white norms. Structured interviews with standardized rubrics and diverse panels help curb this, ensuring objective comparisons rather than subjective comfort. Her rubric example for a DEI consultant role pushes evaluators to use evidence-based scoring instead of gut feelings.

Referral Programs and Token Diversity

Even well-meaning referral hiring reinforces exclusion: white employees refer people like themselves. Unless intentionally redesigned, these programs circulate the same homogenous talent. Asare suggests implementing referral initiatives that specifically focus on underrepresented candidates, with structures to avoid token hires.

Her message is blunt: it’s not enough to diversify a candidate pool if the process itself still centers white norms of legitimacy, polish, and belonging. True inclusion means rethinking who we imagine when we picture “perfect for the job.”

Beyond hiring, whiteness is embedded in every workplace system—from evaluations to promotions and customer interactions. These structures decide whose behavior and performance are seen as valuable, and whose are penalized.

Biased Performance Reviews

Traditional performance systems often favor white norms of communication, tempo, and emotion. Employee evaluations by managers or customers can be skewed by unconscious bias. Asare recalls being rated lower by customers who refused her service as a Black teller—or by students who described her as “unapproachable” for using the same Socratic method as her white male colleague. Studies confirm these racial gaps in academia and service industries alike.

Promotion Without Equity

Whiteness shapes who advances. The “broken rung,” a term from McKinsey’s report, refers to how Black employees—especially women—struggle to reach managerial levels despite strong performance. Mentorship and sponsorship, when withheld because of bias or discomfort, perpetuate inequity. Leaders must provide constructive feedback equitably, Asare notes; withholding it from fear of offending marginalized employees is itself paternalistic.

Whiteness in Customer Focus

Businesses often center white consumers in product design and marketing, alienating their founders or core audiences of color. Asare points to the SheaMoisture backlash—when a Black-owned brand erased Black women from its ads—as an example of internalized white gaze. To grow sustainably, she says, companies must expand customer definitions beyond whiteness and build feedback loops with diverse consumers.

Every system—evaluation, advancement, service—reflects what (and who) the organization values. Unless redesigned with marginalized people at the center, those systems will continue rewarding proximity to whiteness rather than fair performance or innovation.

Workplace policies often look neutral on paper—but they’re written by and for white culture. Dress codes, bereavement leave, even “return to office” mandates can exclude, disadvantage, or harm employees with different cultural backgrounds.

The Myth of the Neutral Policy

Asare shows how seemingly routine policies—like forbidding headscarves or “unprofessional” hairstyles—enforce white aesthetics as professional. She recounts Brittany Noble Jones’s firing after wearing her natural hair and Abercrombie’s discrimination against a Muslim woman wearing a hijab. Even grooming rules, like Domino’s beard ban, once unfairly targeted Black men with sensitive skin.

Other policies replicate white family structures. Standard bereavement leave might exclude grandparents, aunts, or uncles—even in cultures where extended family is immediate family. Health insurance plans that recognize only nuclear families ignore caregivers for elders or multi-generational households common among Black, Latine, or Asian communities.

The Problem with “Professionalism”

Professionalism itself, she writes, is a racial construct. Lawyer Leah Goodridge calls it a tool to police non-white behavior. The very traits praised as “professional”—neutral tone, straight hair, subdued dress, punctuality—mirror white, middle-class norms. Questioning professionalism’s operational definition is essential to building equity-based workplaces.

Workplace Design and Control

Post-pandemic “return to office” campaigns, led mostly by white leadership, prioritize surveillance over safety. Future Forum research showed 97% of Black employees preferred remote or hybrid work due to fewer microaggressions, yet many leaders insisted on “culture building” in-person. This reveals whose culture they meant to restore.

Decentering whiteness in policy means asking radical questions: Who wrote this rule, and who benefits from it? Whose comfort or tradition does it protect? Inclusion requires rewriting handbooks with the most marginalized employee in mind, not the imaginary universal worker who just happens to be white.

Even when workplaces aim for diversity, white voices often remain the loudest—and the most trusted. From meetings to mentorships to who gets quoted in reports, white perspectives still set the standard of authority.

The Silent Weight of the White Voice

Asare examines how white voices dominate meetings and DEI discussions. She tells of being hired to advise a company on employee resource groups (ERGs) only to have white leaders override her suggestion to make them safe spaces for employees of color. Predictably, those ERGs failed. She interprets this not just as bad management but as the belief that legitimacy requires a white stamp of approval—a mindset deeply embedded in organizational life.

Meeting Dynamics and Gaslighting

In meetings, non-white employees are interrupted or ignored, only to see their ideas validated when repeated by white colleagues. Asare encourages leaders to use round-robin participation, where every voice is heard without interjection. She also identifies two silencing tools: racial gaslighting (dismissing racism because others didn’t notice it) and tone policing (criticizing emotional expression over content). Both serve to reassert white control of emotional norms.

Data, Research, and the “White Measuring Stick”

Even in DEI research and training, white voices dominate. Studies often define “success” by whether white employees changed behavior—not whether marginalized employees feel safer. Company “Best Places to Work” rankings rely on white perceptions of comfort, masking harm. Asare’s advice: disaggregate data by race and let marginalized employees’ experiences drive definitions of progress.

By making space for all voices—not just the confident or comfortable ones—leaders can start dismantling the invisible hierarchy where whiteness speaks first and loudest.

Few areas reveal the hypocrisy of white-centering more clearly than the DEI industry itself. Asare uncovers how diversity work, designed to dismantle oppression, often reproduces the very hierarchies it claims to challenge.

White Leaders in Anti-Racism

Over 75% of chief diversity officers in U.S. corporations are white. White DEI firms often receive the most funding and corporate contracts, while consultants of color are underpaid or passed over. Asare critiques the tendency to idolize white “anti-racism educators” like Robin DiAngelo, whose bestseller White Fragility became emblematic of white expertise in racism. The irony, she notes, is stark: those who’ve never lived racism are seen as its teachers.

She also points to the phenomenon of “blackfishing” or “race-fishing,” where white individuals impersonate people of color to profit from DEI credibility—an extreme symptom of the system’s white hunger for centrality.

Centering White Comfort

Asare admits that early in her career, she avoided words like “white privilege” to make white clients comfortable. Many consultants do the same to stay employable. But she came to see that protecting white feelings sustains inequity. “Coddling whiteness will not lead to liberation,” she writes. Even simple choices—like using stock photos of only white people in slides—reinforce white comfort as the benchmark.

A Practice of Courage

To decenter whiteness within DEI itself, organizations must prioritize marginalized-led collectives and measure impact by the wellbeing of their most oppressed employees. They must redefine “safe space” to mean safe for truth, not just safe for whiteness. True DEI, Asare argues, should make power uncomfortable enough to transform. Otherwise, diversity remains decoration for white supremacy culture.

Empathy, Asare warns, has become a fetish in anti-racism conversations. After George Floyd’s murder, calls for “more empathy” abounded—but empathy rarely changes systems. You can feel someone’s pain and still maintain an oppressive structure that produces it.

Empathy Bias and Spectacle

Drawing on psychologist Paul Bloom’s book Against Empathy, Asare explains that empathy is inherently biased: we empathize more easily with those who look like us, which in a white-dominant society means empathizing with whiteness. She highlights “missing white woman syndrome”—media’s obsession with white victims while ignoring missing Black women—as evidence. Even videos of Black death, she argues, have become tools for temporary empathy rather than catalysts for justice.

Performing Pain for White Learning

Asare condemns the expectation that employees of color relive their trauma for white enlightenment. After Floyd’s murder, many organizations invited Black employees to “share their stories.” But recounting racism on command can reopen wounds while comforting those responsible. She calls this empathy theater—a performance that keeps power unexamined.

From Empathy to Action

Instead of empathy, Asare promotes education and compassionate listening. Education builds understanding through historical and structural truths; compassionate listening asks you to hear without centering your own feelings. Her rule of the three R’s—listen without the urge to Respond, Relate, or Recommend—turns conversation into respect. Justice, she insists, requires systems change, not momentary emotion.

Empathy can mobilize hearts, but only accountability transforms systems. “We don’t need more empathy,” Asare writes. “We need more equity.”

Decentering whiteness isn’t just external—it’s internal. Asare admits that, for years, she tried to live up to white ideals of beauty, success, and intellect. Her honesty challenges readers of all races to confront their own internalized whiteness and the ways it shapes self-worth.

Internalized White Beauty

Asare recalls being bullied for her lips and hair as a child, begging her mother to straighten her 4C curls to appear “more normal.” She even considered lip reduction surgery at twelve. Only later did she realize that her yearning for Eurocentric thinness and straight hair came from centuries of beauty hierarchies equating whiteness with desirability.

The hair-typing system itself, she notes, originates from a eugenicist who studied African “purity” in colonial Namibia—a reminder that even beauty science has racist roots. Learning this history helped her reclaim love for her natural self.

Respectability and Education

Asare realized she’d equated white education and class markers with virtue. Earning a PhD, attending predominantly white institutions, and disdaining HBCUs were all ways she sought validation from whiteness. “No matter how accomplished I was,” she writes, “I could never graduate from my Blackness.” Her story links deeply with what sociologists call respectability politics—the belief that assimilation can buy safety.

Practicing Humility and Accountability

Personal healing, she says, starts with awareness, community, and humility. That means consuming diverse content, surrounding yourself with people who correct you, and welcoming critique as growth. Ask yourself regularly: Do I want this because I truly desire it—or because whiteness told me I should? This simple question, she says, reveals how deeply white norms infiltrate our daily choices.

Unlearning whiteness within is lifelong work. But as Asare demonstrates, freeing yourself from internalized whiteness is what makes you capable of building equitable systems beyond yourself.

Equity doesn’t come from treating everyone the same. It comes from giving the most marginalized what they need to thrive. For Asare, that means centering Black employees—not as an exclusionary move, but as a justice strategy that lifts everyone.

The Curb-Cut and Triage Effects

Using metaphors from policy and medicine, Asare explains that when you design for the most marginalized—like “curb cuts” for wheelchair access—everyone benefits. Similarly, the “triage method” prioritizes those with the most urgent needs. In the workplace, triaging means addressing harms for Black and underrepresented employees first so the entire culture heals.

Collecting Specific Voices, Not Generic Data

She emphasizes qualitative feedback: one-on-one interviews, safe focus groups, anonymous surveys disaggregated by race. Lumping all “BIPOC” employees together erases unique experiences. A Middle Eastern worker’s needs differ from a Black woman’s; an Afro-Latina’s from an immigrant African’s. Tailoring interventions—mentorship, sponsorship, or external coaching—requires this nuance.

Designing Targeted, Equitable Programs

From leadership assessments to pay reviews, every equity initiative should ask: Who benefits most? Who is left behind? Asare cites coaching organizations like C-Suite Coach that specifically train and mentor minoritized professionals. Education topics should include overlooked intersections—like colorism, accent bias, caste discrimination, and generational trauma—to deepen awareness.

Centering marginalized employees is not reverse discrimination; it’s smart design. When Black employees’ safety and growth are prioritized, all employees gain fairness. The point is not to replace one center with another—but to build workplaces where everyone belongs because no single group holds the center.

Asare closes her book by turning philosophy into practice. Her 3 A’s model—Awareness, Acknowledgment, and Accountability—offers a strategic path to move workplaces from insight to sustained change.

1. Awareness

Step one is seeing whiteness clearly. Leaders must analyze data, hold focus groups, review policies, and confront incidents that reveal bias. Education, speaker series, and even book clubs can spark understanding—but Asare warns against stopping there. Reading without action becomes performance. Awareness alone doesn’t change power.

2. Acknowledgment

Acknowledgment means admitting harm publicly and internally. Asare points to historical apologies from professional associations—the American Medical and Psychological Associations—for upholding racism. Workplaces, too, should admit past inequities, apologize transparently, and design systems to repair damage. This may include hiring DEI partners or allocating resources for restitution-like initiatives.

3. Accountability

Finally, accountability converts good intentions into structure. Leaders must build measurable goals for equity, regularly assess progress, and accept consequences for regression. Employee evaluations should include “equity skills.” Feedback loops and anonymous reporting channels must ensure safety and follow-through. True transformation, she notes, happens when equity is normalized—budgeted, measured, and rewarded like any other key performance goal.

Change is slow and messy, Asare concedes, but a workplace unwilling to be uncomfortable will never be just. By linking inner work with systemic reform, her framework makes decentering whiteness not a slogan, but a lifelong organizational habit.