Negotiating Race in the Workplace after Trump

As we approach the two-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s election as the forty-fifth president of the United States, this seems an appropriate time to consider his ongoing impact as a negotiator. I do so with some reluctance. Unfortunately, President Trump’s negotiation posture and explicit communications have both directly and indirectly pandered to white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and other racially hostile organizations. This seems to have galvanized such groups to more openly pursue their divisive and racist activities since the Trump presidential campaign began, including in the workplace. As an illustrative example, after one Latina woman mentioned to her colleagues that she was upset by Trump’s referral to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” during his presidential campaign, several white co-workers tormented her by posting pictures of an angry-looking Trump as her computer screensaver, sending her racist memes and “jokes,” signing her up as a Trump campaign volunteer, and repeatedly calling her an “illegal immigrant,” despite the fact that she was a natural-born U.S. citizen (Foley 2016). Because of Trump’s explicit and implicit messages, employees of color now face intensified hostility as they navigate matters of race that arise in workplace disputes. As someone with a career focus on fairly resolving workplace disputes who has recently authored a publication entitled “Negotiating while Black” to help employees negotiate race-based workplace concerns (Green 2017), I don’t expect analyzing Trump’s effect on racial conflict in the workplace to be a pleasant endeavor. The first black man to hold the position of U.S. president, Barack Obama, may have spoiled us for eight years with his eloquent and thoughtful communications on matters of race. I found analytical explorations of Obama’s impact on race-based negotiations in the workplace exhilarating. With his unique background, he recognized that members