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Prior to COVID-19 in the United States, wearing masks in public occurred during Mardi Gras in New Orleans or on Halloween. Before Coronavirus, there was a common notion that only criminals wore public masks to hide their identities during criminal activities like robbing a bank. When public health experts began recommending masking to slow the spread of the COVID-19, that created a unique choice for Black men, especially those living and working in predominately White communities (Cineas, 2020). Frighteningly, that means that Black men face a predicament that Whites likely did not (Cineas, 2020). Wearing a mask is one of the most manageable and most useful virus protections, but it also creates a dynamic where police and others could perceive them as threatening, menacing, or even criminals based on historical prejudices, societal myths, and stereotypes of African-American men (Cineas, 2020). This dynamic represents a heavy burden in the form of stress, anxiety, and worry that Black men consistently carry as they navigate their personal and work lives. This onus concerns how to protect themselves from the virus while simultaneously managing their appearance to
make them seem safe or non-threatening to those in Caucasian communities (Cineas, 2020; Felix, 2020). Understanding the complexity of this balancing act is a challenge. Comprehension also represents a potential opportunity for managers and leaders to take employee engagement, diversity, equity, and inclusion to a new level in the workplace.
African-Americans in the U.S. are experiencing some lopsided health impacts of COVID-19 (Lahut, 2020). Emerging data has revealed that African-Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but represent 30 percent of the COVID-19 cases and approximately one of every three U.S. COVID-19 deaths (Aleem, 2020) and even considerably higher percentages in some states. However, for African-American males, navigating this pandemic has created complex quandaries about wearing masks to protect themselves from COVID-19 (Newton, 2020). There have been media claims and community perspectives regarding a worried preponderance of whether wearing masks will result in being perceived as criminally threatening (Newton, 2020). To be accepted and inhabit into non-African-American organizations, Black men have often tailored the way that the look and dress in ways that make them look less concerning, different, or threatening, but wearing masks at night or in various work environments can create some complexities (Newton, 2020). There is a gap of peer-reviewed exploration of this phenomenon, and additionally, the question arises regarding how these complexities and concerns affect African-Americans not only in their communities, but in their workplaces and their interactions with co-workers, supervisors, managers, and others. Furthermore, is important to understand how these complexities, as well as the interactions with managers impact organizational cultures and the existence or creation of psychologically safe or unsafe community and work environments. Such is a critical question and challenge for organization development in these settings.
The field of organization development (OD) is rooted in the socio-behavioral, organizational, and basic sciences for the engagement of human systems to develop system-wide effectiveness, capacity, and overall well-being in organizations and communities (Shufutinsky et al., 2020), including doing the necessary work for the advancement of human potential and society (Burrell et al., 2021). Engaging, open, and safe organizational cultures are critical to this aim of well-being and humanism (Schein, 2010; Shufutinsky, 2019). Psychological safety is vital part of positive and productive organizational cultures, and is relevant during normal times and in highly disruptive environments, such as those we have been facing in 2020 and 2021.