University of Denver Winter 2023

Dismantling these organizational ways of being may seem impossible, but Byron finds hope in his students. “Undergraduate students, in particular, have a lot of experiences that they’re trying to understand and explain, and CRES provides a lens to view and deconstruct those experiences,” he says. “I see it as planting seeds, in a way, because then those students develop their own critical analy ses and engagements and go out and affect the world.” Because CRES is interdisciplinary, with coursework in law, history, sociology, psychology, criminology and more, graduates can draw on different approaches and method ologies once they enter the workforce. “Most people abstractly want equality. The sticking point is howwe get there and the path we take,” Byron says. “When people can look beyond the preoccupation with bad individ uals, when they can understand the data and understand what’s really happening at an institutional level, there may be more room for allyship and systemic solutions.”

ternity spaces, which takes the analysis beyond individual interactions and prompts questions about how the design of these institutions may foster such behavior. To illustrate his point, Byron shares this scenario: “A Black man goes into a store and is surveilled or followed by the worker in the store. The story may be, ‘Oh, that’s just a Karen being a Karen. She’s surveilling this person unfairly.’ It’s kept at the individual level. But what people don’t think about is there are probably store policies directing this worker to profile certain customers. Companies hire loss-prevention teams, for example, that tell them to do this to reduce theft.” Byron’s recent work on employment discrimination across eight states shows how loopholes are built into laws— including the Civil Rights Act—that allow organizations to get away with discriminatory practices. For example, an exception in Title VII called a “bona fide occupational qualification,” or BFOQ, gives companies permission to discriminate against certain people if they can prove it’s in the best interest of their business, primarily when it comes to privacy, safety or authenticity. A case brought by an Asian employee against the Walt Disney Co., to name just one instance, found the company was justified in letting the employee go because he was not “culturally authentic” enough and lacked the requisite familiarity with Norway to work at a Norwegian-themed restaurant in Epcot Center. Though BFOQs were meant to be a limited exception, such rulings, Byron says, underpin the logic of “fit” that is found in other employment discrimination cases—noting that a tiny fraction of claims ever make it to court. This issue, Byron argues, is bigger than Disney or a single worker in a store. “It’s embedded within different types of laws and within policies across many organizational types. Until we pay attention to that, we’re never going to bring about any meaningful change. We’re so focused on the ‘bad apples,’ right? But even if we got rid of all the bad apples, we’d still have inequality because it’s embedded within these organizational logics and ways of being.”

What can individuals do to chip away at institutional inequality? Byron shares some tips at magazine. du.edu.

WINTER 2023 • UNIVERSITY of DENVER MAGAZINE | 29