تحقیقات حسابداری انتقادی در زمان نژادپرستی Critical accounting research in hyper-racial times

1. Introduction We write this essay in the midst of a world shocked and stunned by the assault on the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, which left nine people dead and one wounded in what, by all accounts, was a racially motivated attack. As much of the world witnessed what one commentator described as, “the worst crime motivated by racial hatred in recent memory” (Gee, 2015), for many in the African American community, the massacre at Charleston came as little surprise. Instead, it was seen as the inexorable conclusion to a lengthy and sustained campaign of racial violence levied upon their community. The violent incident—though it was conducted by a “lone-wolf” white supremacist—came in the aftermath of a string of deadly police encounters between white officers and unarmed black people which, starting with the February 2012 killing of Trevon Martin in Miami, appeared to be occurring with increasing frequency and ferocity. In an article published in the Miami Herald just days after the Charleston attack, Leonard Pitts Jr articulated well the sentiments of many in the African American community: [L]et them go to Baltimore, let them go to Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, St. Louis, Miami. Let them go to any of a hundred cities and talk to black people who are sick of hearing how America overcame, learned its lesson, reached the Promised Land, yet somehow, sister can’t get a loan, dad can’t find a job, brother has to factor stop-and-frisk encounters into his travel time to and from school and Walter Scott gets shot in the back while running away . . . .If what happened in Charleston was extraordinary, and it was, this is the ordinary, the everyday of existing while black that grinds your faith down to a nub and works your very last nerve. Especially when the background music is provided by a bunch of people who don’t know, don’t know that they don’t know, and don’t care that they don’t know, singing operatic praise to a faded myth [of racial equality]. As we reflected on the critical accounting literature on race over the past 25 years and pondered its paucity, we asked ourselves whether critical accounting scholars by dint of their silence on the racial dramas of our times are part of that other chorus—the one that sings praise to the faded myth of a post-racial world. Concerns about the lack of critical accounting engagement with race and racial injustice are not new. In a 2003 article, Annisette posed the question “why the critical silence on race?” (2003, p. 640). She pointed out that in light of twentieth- and twenty-first century events, and the inherent ambiguity of the very concept of race, there were “no shortage of opportunities for critical inquiry into the multiple ways racial phenomena can be played out in the [accounting] profession” (2003, p. 671). Six years later, characterizing race as “one of the most potent forces of our times”, Annisette expressed concern about the limited research impact of critical accounting historians on the field and suggested that this was a consequence of the narrow focus of historical studies on the accounting–race nexus (2009, p. 463). She further argued for needed shifts in the literature which, in her opinion, would serve to enhance the research impact of critical histories of race and accounting (2009, pp. 463– 465). In this paper, we argue that precious little has changed in the critical accounting literature since these observations.