Racism is an OHP Concern
Racism of any form represents what is often a long-standing, systemic threat to the success, health, and well-being of minority group members. The Society for Occupational Health Psychology (SOHP) formally affirms the rights of all minorities to be free from these forms of violence and injustice. Recent highly publicized events of anti-Black racism, injustice, and police violence against Black people underscore the extent to which changes are needed in law enforcement and the justice system. The changes required to those systems are complex and will involve policy-related efforts at international, national, state, and local levels. The problems associated with anti-Black racism, however, are not confined to the legal system; they affect success, health, and well-being in all areas of life and living, including education and work. Policy changes alone will be insufficient to create and sustain the changes we need in these domains, mainly to ensure access to safe and healthy work, including how we all respect, treat, and generally support each other every day.
These will not be easy changes to accomplish, given that minority group members disproportionately experience unsafe and unhealthy work environments, higher incidences of discrimination and mistreatment at work, and more precarious forms of employment. The roots of what we are coming to grips with as a society are complex and systemic, and unfortunately not abnormal occurrences for minority group members. We cannot ignore that these types of events have deep psychological, economic, and social roots, and will require multifaceted resolution efforts. Issues of racism, injustice, and pervasive bias are problems that we all have
to work together to address. Racism is an issue with occupational health implications (e.g., safety, trust, respect, well-being). We, as OHP professionals, have knowledge and competencies that can help to address these issues.
The changes that need to happen can be informed by our theory, research, and direct efforts to translate what we know into useful guidance for policy makers, organizational leaders, and the general public. From our ongoing collective efforts to address worker health, safety, and well-being, we already know that a powerful pathway to such changes is through personal and social experiences in work environments. Our workplaces and working groups can and should protect, reinforce, and sustain dignity for all workers. This requires trust, support, and a variety of other psychological and social resources that OHP professionals understand well through their research and practice efforts.
We (your SOHP leaders) call on all OHP professionals to take direct steps to support anti-racism efforts through research and interventions that focus on individual workers, groups, organizations, and society more generally. These efforts can begin through natural extensions and translations of existing work on bias, injustice, fairness, and other related topics, and by increasing our attention in research and intervention efforts to all forms of bias and injustice that occur in work settings and our broader communities.
At the level of our profession, it is also time for SOHP to take steps to enhance diversity within our field. The current executive committee is actively discussing ways to do this, both in terms of improving minority representation within our leadership team and in terms highlighting relevant topics in society-level communications and events (e.g., webinars, newsletters, special conference sessions). Most immediately, we commit to highlighting science and practice efforts that respond to this call in future SOHP newsletters (please share work to feature with any member of the SOHP executive committee). In addition, the SOHP leadership team will advocate to increase representation and engagement of minority OHP scholars and practitioners on the editorial boards that steer the peer review process for our core journals. These efforts can help to focus our attention on what we can do collectively to facilitate anti-racist attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that can affect our scholarship (research and teaching) and practice efforts.
Our OHP knowledge and experience base can be valuable to policy makers, organizational leaders, and workers who are searching for and/or may need guidance as they also work to appropriately address these issues. These matters are complex and emotionally charged, but avoiding them and assuming a stance of neutrality is not acceptable. We must acknowledge that racism, bias, and injustice are morally unacceptable and bad for worker health, safety, and well-being, just as they are bad for organizational and societal functioning.