UCLA

People are generally rewarded for their generosity both within (Grant & Ashford, 2008) and outside of organizations (Shore & Tashchian, 2013). However, in the present research I posit that Black Americans who give back to their communities are vulnerable to biases in hiring because their volunteer work with Black organizations may be viewed by White gatekeepers as indicative of a politicized Black identity that then elicits intergroup threat. When I use the term “Black organizations”, I am referring to organizations that serve predominantly Black communities. When I use the term “White organizations”, I am referring to organizations that serve predominantly White communities. In Study 1, I attempted to show that Black job candidates who volunteer with Black activist organizations (organizations that have explicit political agendas) and Black job candidates who volunteer with Black non-activist organizations are both evaluated less favorably than a Black candidate who volunteers with a White non-activist organization. The purpose of this study was to begin to provide evidence suggestive of my proposition that when Black individuals give back to Black communities, such behavior may be perceived by Whites as indicative of a politicized Black identity. As I posited that perceptions of politicized Black identity elicits intergroup threat for White Americans, in Studies 2 and 3 I attempted to demonstrate how Whites’ evaluations of Black individuals who volunteer with Black organizations are influenced by intergroup threat. With Study 2, I examined how the salience of intergroup threat, as it pertains to the prevalence of anti-White regard among Black Americans, affects evaluations of the hireability of a Black job candidate who volunteers with a Black as opposed to a White organization. With Study 3, I examined the role of intergroup threat by examining how the relevance of Black volunteer work to the American racial status hierarchy (whether Black communities being helped are in the United States or abroad) affects Whites’ evaluations of Blacks who volunteer with Black communities, particularly when Whites have a strong personal desire to maintain the existing social hierarchy. In Study 4, I attempted to demonstrate the ways in which perceptions of politicized Black identity and intergroup threat explains White Americans’ evaluations of a Black job candidate who volunteers with a Black organization as opposed to a White organization. In this study, I also compared evaluations of Black job candidates who volunteered with either Black or White organizations to White job candidates who volunteered with either Black or White organizations. I included the comparison with the White job candidates in order to demonstrate that the aforementioned relationships are specific to Black job candidates, and that White job candidates are not evaluated differently based on the race of the communities they serve through their volunteer work. The fifth and final study tests an alternative explanation for Study 4’s findings: perceptions of a politicized Black identity, based on a Black candidate’s volunteer work with a Black organization, elicits group esteem threat as opposed to intergroup threat for White evaluators. This alternative explanation is based on the notion that politicized Black identities bring to mind Black Americans’ grievances about the racial transgressions of White Americans. In response to a depiction of their ingroup in a negative light may, White evaluators might then react with low evaluations of Black job candidates who volunteer with Black organizations. The alternative explanation was not supported. Implications and potential future directions are discussed.