Race and Crisis Communication

Organizations face a wide range of potential crises ranging from rumors about the company, to environmental catastrophe, to product tampering and consumer death. By their nature, crises can be, to some degree, anticipated but not completely eliminated. All crises have the potential to inflict harm to the organizational image, but few are as potentially damaging as those involving race. Such crises have the potential to garner significant negative attention from the public, press, and important stakeholders.

Racially oriented crises have affected large companies such as Texaco, Denny's, and Cracker Barrel restaurants as well as smaller groups and organizations and even state and local governments. Although it is impossible to completely inoculate a company from racial crises, a thorough and annual review of practices and communications can identify potential for racial crises in areas such as hiring practice and procedures or customer relations. However, a racial crisis can erupt from a single statement or event.

Researcher Gail F. Baker (2001) has written that racial crises generally take one of three forms: actions, words, or symbols. Restaurants refusing to serve members of a particular ethnic population, or an organization with an apparent history of failure to hire or promote members from a particular population are two examples of activities that can and have resulted in racially oriented crises stemming from actions. Public or even private communication from a prominent member of an organization that includes racial slurs or other derogatory comments would be an example of words leading to a potential racial crisis. However, even a less prominent member of an organization (e.g., a mid-level manager) can create a similar crisis with the use of inappropriate words. In the heat of crisis escalation, if the organization does not separate itself from the individual, that person can be characterized as representative of the whole organization, thus fostering the crisis. Corporate or organizational symbols could include a logo, caricature, or design that is associated with the organization. Such symbols can, and have, led to crises requiring some form of change on the organization's part. A prominent example of such change was seen when high school, college, and professional teams across the nation changed their mascots from names or caricatures that might have been deemed offensive to some groups to images that moved away from potentially derogatory ethnic identification. For example, many teams formerly called “Redskins” were renamed with tribe names from their region.

When a racially oriented crisis occurs, organizations must respond quickly with the crisis response strategy that they deem appropriate. The full range of crisis strategies can come into play, from denial to capitulation. Organizations responding to racially oriented crises need to carefully measure the current level of attention to the alleged wrongdoing, the assessment of their own level of error, the type of response desired by affected publics and stakeholders, and the costs and appropriateness of those responses. Decision making, which includes all of those factors, will frequently not lead to an obvious decision on the appropriate steps to take, thus making the public relations or crisis manager's decision a difficult one.

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