A Knowledge Synthesis of Anti-Black Racism in Accounting Research*^†

INTRODUCTION

OECD countries are becoming increasingly diverse. As stated in OECD (2018), “The variety of groups defined by individual characteristics, such as gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, disability, LGBT status, or age, has increased considerably in the labor market and in society more broadly.” This description aptly applies to Canada, a key OECD country. Canada's population increasingly consists of visible minorities and foreign-born people, and by 2031 racialized people could make up almost a third of the population (Statistics Canada 2018; Ufodike and Vredenburg 2020). The 2016 Canadian Census “identified 7,674,580 people as belonging to the visible minority population, making up 22.3% of the Canadian population. The three largest visible minority groups were South Asian (5.6%), Chinese (4.6%), and Black (3.5%)” (Statistics Canada 2017). However, this 22.3% visible minority population does not include Indigenous peoples, who constitute 4.9% of Canada's population (Statistics Canada 2017). Collectively, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) account for almost one-third of Canada's population.

Despite its increasingly diverse population, Canada, much like the United States, has a history of social exclusion, social injustice, and economic inequality between racial groups that dates back to the first contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples. Specific to Black people, for example, in 1911, Canada's prime minister signed an order-in-council (PC 1911-1324, also known as the “black ban”) which prohibited the immigration of people belonging to the then designated “Negro race” because they were deemed unsuitable for the Canadian climate and its immigration requirements (Order-in-Council PC 1911-1324 1911).

Lehman et al. (2016, 43) argue that “in advanced capitalistic economies, immigration policy is linked to economic development and is a highly contested political issue.” Economic and political imbalances between racial communities in Canada have been redefined with each new wave of immigration, as evidenced by the fact that Canada has scrapped and denounced the head tax only to impose a variant of it (i.e., the now normalized right of landing fee), which immigrants are still required to pay. Racial discrimination toward BIPOC continues in OECD countries and globally. Indeed, the pervasiveness of racism is a key tenet of critical race theory (CRT), which argues that racism is the norm as opposed to an exception to the general rule. CRT also argues that racism is inherent in institutions such as the law and is tolerated by a large segment of society who are either beneficiaries of racism or have no incentive to resist it.

Consequently, anti-Black racism remains a significant problem and a major cause of societal frustration, as exemplified by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that followed the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota in May 2020. On the downside, the BLM protests resulted in an all-out assault on CRT by then US president Donald Trump, culminating in a ban on teaching the key tenets of CRT in Florida through the enactment of House Bill 7 (also termed the Stop Woke Act). On the positive side, following the BLM protests, the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications adopted a statement of principles to be more inclusive; this has subsequently been adopted by the Canadian Academic Accounting Association, if not yet by the American Accounting Association (Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications n.d.). Furthermore, academic publications such as the Journal of Business Ethics have called for special issues on racial justice and business ethics (Journal of Business Ethics 2020), which demonstrates the urgency and breadth of this social justice movement. A similar reflection in accountancy¹ research is equally timely, as little scholarship explores discrimination against BIPOC in the accounting field. Despite the relative immaturity of the term “BIPOC,” it is surprising that it did not appear in any accounting study in the ABI/INFORM Global database as of December 15, 2020.

Based on the foregoing, this study focuses on the discrimination and marginalization of Black people and conducts a structured literature review (SLR) of anti-Black racism and discrimination in accounting. This is one of three papers that rely on the same problematization and methods in a larger project whose objective was to identify, review, critique, and summarize the most relevant accounting studies of discrimination and marginalization more generally to identify gaps in the literature as well as avenues for future research. In the larger project, we identified four themes: anti-Black racism (the focus of this paper), imperialism and postcolonialism, intersectionality, and diversity. Of the 161 articles reviewed for the project, 25 articles are on anti-Black racism. In particular, in this paper, we rely on professionalization literature (Annisette 2003; Sian 2006), complemented by critical (accounting) race literature (Lewis 2015a, 2015b). Professionalization in this context refers to the use of a profession to discriminate against a group, or groups, of people.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. First, we discuss our theoretical approach for the study. Next, we describe our methods, followed by our findings, which summarize existing studies of anti-Black racism. The paper ends with a discussion and conclusion that presents our observations and suggestions for future research.

THEORY

Hammond and Streeter (1994) acknowledge the existence of racism in the accountancy profession (see also Sian 2006; Oldroyd et al. 2008; Harney 2011; Kyriakidou et al. 2016). Although most research on racism in accounting uses case studies, few scholars have adopted specific theoretical perspectives to examine the topic and consequences of the social construction of race on marginalized groups. Lewis (2016) suggests that the general lack of theorization is the result of accounting scholars' assumption that research on racism is better suited to the fields of human resources (HR) and sociology. He argues that most race-related studies in accountancy have been “under-theorized and under-researched” (Lewis 2015a, 1) because specific theories surrounding race and racism are seldom applied to these types of analyses. Consequently, there remains a dearth of research on “how specific racialized processes interact to create long-term structural exclusion and subordination” (Lewis 2015a, 2). To address the perceived shortcoming of research on the issues of race and racism in accountancy, Lewis (2016) advocates for the use of CRT as a framework for examining racialization in this field. CRT holds that racism is a normal feature of society, not an exception to the norm; racism is inherent in institutions such as the law, and it has endured because large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it given that it “advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class people (psychically)” (Delgado and Stefancic 2017, 7). Thus, to examine racialization in accountancy comprehensively and bring theorization into the field, we adopt CRT to discuss anti-Black racism in accountancy research. CRT and critical accounting theory demonstrate how accounting and societal structures, including laws, institutions, organizations, and professions, function as a multidimensional system that excludes, subjugates, and diminishes the agency of Black people.

Since the 1980s, scholars have attempted to highlight the role of accounting as a tool of discrimination and examine the effects of this discrimination on the professionalization of the field (Firth 1981). The literature has examined this topic in terms of gender biases, discrimination against racialized people in elite professional accountancy projects, the historical influence of colonialism on the development of professional accountancy, and the role of the accounting field in imperialism. Research on the professionalization of accountancy has explored how various social structures, in which ascriptive criteria prevent the entry of racialized people into this profession, have been put in place by the accounting elite (Annisette 2003). By extension, research has also revealed that professional accountancy associations, as established by the societal elite, have remained closed to all but a small group of individuals whose social background reflects that of the most powerful groups in society (Annisette 2003).

In this vein, Annisette and Prasad (2017) lament accounting scholars' laissez-faire attitudes toward the subject of race and its interrelatedness with the profession. They argue that the indifference of critical accounting scholars (and the accountancy profession as a whole) toward research on race reinforces the notion that race “is an irritating residue of a past historical moment and not a deeply embedded feature of existing social structures” (Annisette and Prasad 2017, 13). They state that there have been only 32 publications about race and the accounting profession since Hammond and Streeter's (1994) call for more research on this subject.

Furthermore, the current literature places an overwhelming emphasis on using historical research to study race and the accountancy profession. Although acknowledging the importance of history in generating a comprehensive understanding of the contemporary dynamics of race relations within this profession, Annisette and Prasad (2017, 13) contend that the emphasis on history “has limited the scope of critical accounting research to fully expose accounting's involvement in the racial practices of our times.” For historical research on this topic to align with contemporary racial issues, they advocate for “accounting history research that would illuminate the variability, diversity and contingency of race and so expose accounting's involvement in its social construction” (Annisette and Prasad 2017, 13).

Lewis (2015a) states that CRT offers researchers a platform on which they can engage in a discourse around racism in accountancy and the key issue of racial disparity, which many people find an uncomfortable topic. Adopting a CRT perspective of anti-Black racism would help us create and engage in a meaningful discussion on diversity, drive the emancipation agenda, and consolidate the discourse of race and racism within contemporary accountancy scholarship. In particular, CRT is antipathetic to the notion of racial objectivity and colorblindness and centralizes race as a lens through which scholars can connect a range of other inequalities. CRT highlights the idea that meritocracy is inherently self-serving and advantageous only to the most powerful, dominant race in a given society. It also challenges the idea of an inherent pluralism of society and invokes “white bean counting.” Lewis (2015b, 7) explains that in white bean counting “the definition[s] of objectivity, merit and worth … are saturated by white cultural mores [norms].”

In the next section, we describe the methods we employ to conduct the SLR.

METHODOLOGY

As a part of the larger knowledge synthesis project on discrimination and accounting, we performed an SLR following Massaro et al.'s (2016) and Roussy and Perron's (2018) approaches, which entail writing out a literature review protocol, developing the research questions to be addressed by the SLR, determining the types of studies to be included, carrying out a literature search, measuring each article's impact, defining an analytical framework to be used, testing both the reliability and the validity of the literature review, coding and analyzing the data, and, finally, developing research questions to be answered in future research.

We reviewed accounting articles, irrespective of their methodology or theoretical perspective, published in the ABI/INFORM Global database from 1972 to 2020. The ABI/INFORM Global database is a leading source for disseminating research studies and measuring their impact within accounting studies, which are classified in this database as subjects 4100 to 4199. Following Roussy and Perron (2018), we excluded papers that were not written in English and those that were not peer reviewed. Gendron (2019, 1) argues that the internationalization of accounting research has resulted in “downplaying or marginalizing certain ways of speaking, thinking, investigating, and writing.”² Thus, we must acknowledge the relevant body of work in languages other than English; however, this study was constrained by the fact that its authors read only English. Nonetheless, we attempted to increase the breadth of the study by including various articles from trade journals such as The CPA Journal if they were marked in the database as peer-reviewed.

We began by establishing our review protocol. For the larger project, we identified and agreed on key database search words related to discrimination, including “First Nations” OR “Indigenous” OR “Aboriginal” OR “discrimination” OR “racism” OR “black” OR “anti-black” OR “ethnic minority” OR “immigration” OR “racial” OR “moral” OR “slavery” OR “visible minority.” Next, we searched the ABI/INFORM Global Database ID 1000001. As noted above, we included all relevant papers irrespective of their theoretical and methodological approaches. We also searched the database manually for papers published after 2017, resulting in the inclusion of five additional papers. Hence, 620 papers were selected for the initial screening.

Thereafter, we exported the references to Covidence, a tool that enhances the reliability of SLRs. The following steps were performed in Covidence. First, we imported the 620 references, then we coded the data (step 8 of Massaro et al.'s (2016) SLR framework), and finally, we analyzed the identified themes, which for this study focused on anti-Black racism. Table 1 shows our application of Massaro et al.'s (2016) 10-step SLR framework. Steps 1–8 were for the larger study (the entire 620 articles imported into Covidence), while steps 9 and 10 were specific to the 25 articles for this paper.

Our analysis and coding were consistent with Yin's (2009) approach of examining theoretical propositions, creating a description, using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data, and examining rival theories. Specifically, we used an iterative process (Yin 2009) to check, compare, and theorize the findings of the selected literature to ensure methodological rigor. Finally, we used the coded papers in our findings as in vivo texts (direct quotations) and abstractions (to themes) after applying various theoretical insights to the data.

Second, we reviewed the abstracts of all the articles to determine which should be selected for the full-text review. To ensure reliability, all abstracts were reviewed by at least two authors, with at least two votes required for a paper to be selected for the full-text review, thereby providing intercoder validity. Each article selected for the full-text review was also tagged with a preliminary theme and papers unrelated to discrimination were deemed irrelevant. After excluding irrelevant papers, 161 articles were selected for inclusion in the full-text review. Some of the exclusions included articles on tax discrimination and Black-Scholes models, which arose following our keyword search.

The 161 articles included in the final review were of varying impact. Specifically, they had been published in high-quality Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) A or A*³ (13 A* journals and 30 A journals) accounting and auditing journals, well-regarded peer-reviewed journals (ABDC B—47 journals or C—68 journals), and, to a lesser extent, peer-reviewed practitioner journals. Our measurement criterion for the impact assessment was each journal's ABDC ranking; however, given the limited body of research on anti-Black racism, we also included unranked peer-reviewed journals and practitioner journals to avoid overlooking any “interesting research and to work around the disadvantages of overly rigid rules” (Roussy and Perron 2018, 347). Table 2 presents the references of the reviewed papers. Table 3 describes the ABDC rankings and themes of the 161 papers, including the 25 papers identified as being relevant to the anti-Black racism theme.

Table 3 shows that 17 of the articles were published in A* or A journals, potentially leading to the false assumption that accounting journals are interested in the subject; however, the realization that, of the 13 journals ranked A* by ABDC, only one (Accounting, Organizations and Society) accepted related work for publication leads to an alternative conclusion. Furthermore, all the papers published in Accounting, Organizations and Society had only two authors/first authors (Hammond and Annisette). Overall, existing accounting research on anti-Black racism is conducted by a small group of dedicated researchers, primarily in the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada and South Africa.

Third, the 161 papers were analyzed in accordance with Massaro et al.'s (2016) requirements for defining an analytical framework and initial themes were developed. Finally, we documented our SLR protocol and read, critiqued, and summarized the articles selected for the full-text review. Although one researcher performed the search, at least two researchers were involved in coding each paper. If there was a tie following these two reviews, the third researcher's decision was used as the tie-breaker. For validity, we measured the numbers of articles per year and per journal. Based on our detailed reviews, we then analyzed and coded the articles according to our four developed themes (Massaro et al. 2016): anti-Black racism (25 articles; the focus of this paper), imperialism and postcolonialism, intersectionality, and diversity.

Table 4 shows the distribution of the 25 articles on anti-Black racism by journal. Eight of the 13 articles (61%) published in A journals were published in only 2 of the 30 such journals: Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA) and Meditari. Meditari had 5 articles, 3 of which were by the same lead author, and CPA had 3 articles, which represented the most recent body of work on the subject (i.e., all publications after 2011). The 3 CPA articles were also by three different authors and published in three different years, suggesting CPA had the broadest distribution of anti-Black racism articles, perhaps because of the natural fit of racism research with the critical nature of research it publishes.

In 2016, CPA ran a special issue on equality, diversity, and inclusion, in which Kyriakidou et al. (2016) argue that previous special editions of major journals (Accounting, Organizations and Society, 1987, Vol. 12 (1); Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 1992, Vol. 5 (3); Accounting, Organizations and Society, 1992, Vol. 17 (3/4); Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 1998, Vol. 9 (3); Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 2008, Vol. 21 (4)) all focus on equality, diversity, and inclusion through the lens of gender. This special issue thus aimed to spur further research on equality, diversity, and inclusion in accounting beyond the previous focus on gender.

A similar special issue by CPA in 2004 that focused on imperialism illuminated and arguably spurred the subsequent interest of accounting scholars in accounting imperialism and gave prominence to the voice of the subaltern (the emancipation agenda). Annisette and Neu (2004, 4) argue that such a focus on imperialism permitted these special issues “to begin to explore the theme of diversity within unity and unity within diversity.” This paper attempts to do the same for the subject of anti-Black racism research that—despite the CPA's special issue in 2016—has not yet gained momentum, as no accounting or business journal had run a special issue on racism research as of 2020.

Table 5 illustrates the distribution of the 25 anti-Black racism papers by year of publication. An analysis of Table 5 shows that no scientific interest in anti-Black racism and accounting existed before 1994. In 1972, Joseph Cramer—one of the 150 Black certified professional accountants (CPAs) in 1963, a time when the AICPA had 120,000 members—published an article in The CPA Journal (a practitioner journal). Cramer was one of only nine Black people in the United States with a PhD and CPA qualification and the first Black faculty member in accounting at Penn State (Penn State 2011). From 1994, the most impactful research on anti-Black racism in accounting was performed by a small group of dedicated (primarily Black) researchers (e.g., Marcia Annisette (Canada) and Anton Lewis (United States)) and White female researchers such as Theresa Hammond (United States). Hence, research on anti-Black racism and indeed racial discrimination struggled to gain broad interest in accounting research.

In addition, Table 5 shows that following years of increased interest in discrimination research (between 1994 and 2015 for anti-Black racism), interest across all areas of discrimination has decreased since 2016, while, sadly, discrimination has not gone away. An ironic but compelling example of the prevalence of racism in modern society was reported by CBC News in March 2023. In that report, the Canadian government admitted that the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which is the agency responsible for investigating allegations of racial discrimination in Canada, discriminated against its own Black and racialized employees (Thurton 2023).

Each of these subthemes is addressed in detail below, after introductory comments about anti-Black racism literature in accounting.

FINDINGS AND INTERPRETATION

This section presents critiques and summaries of the 25 studies on anti-Black racism, followed by observations of the current gaps in the literature or “promising research avenues” (Roussy and Perron 2018, 350). Previous research has often outlined the bias toward minority groups in White-dominated contexts. Studies have examined in detail how professional accountancy developed by excluding people from its membership based on gender (Essed 1991; Backmon et al. 1997) and social class (Lehman et al. 2018); however, there is still a dearth of research on anti-Black racism in accountancy. While some research conducted in the United States (Backmon et al. 1997; Malone 2001) has examined racism against Black people as a minority group in the accounting profession, these studies have primarily focused on public accountants. Researchers have investigated the barriers to the entry and advancement of Black public accountants and the need to encourage more Black people to join this field (Ross and Traub 2008; Lehman et al. 2018). Other authors have focused on the efforts made to increase and encourage more Black people to become professional accountants and the barriers that hinder these efforts (Edgley et al. 2016; Drumgo 2019). However, race and racism in the accounting profession require further research if bias against Black accountants is to be meaningfully addressed.

Annisette (2003, 669) describes race as the “third major axis of social differentiation,” noting that race, as a basis for a more in-depth critical interrogation of the accounting profession, has not enjoyed the same degree of research prominence as class and gender. Understanding anti-Black racism within accounting professionalization is imperative because of the fundamental changes in the racial composition of predominantly White societies during the 20th century (Annisette 2003). Demographic changes arising from growing minority populations in countries such as Canada, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom have led to the redefinition of these countries as multicultural societies. Thus, there is a growing need to critically examine how professional accounting associations within these now multicultural societies have responded to such sociodemographic change (Annisette and Prasad 2017; Sian 2007; Lehman et al. 2016). This need is especially relevant today, as shown by recent events that have exposed the increase in anti-Black racism, leading to the advent of the BLM movement and emergence of the term “BIPOC.”

The professionalization of accounting in predominantly Black countries has also been investigated. Sian (2007) examines racism in professional accountancy practices in Kenya from a social exclusion perspective. He notes that social exclusion and ethnocultural stratification are evident within this postcolonial system's socioeconomic and political structures, specifically in the practice of professional accountancy. He argues that the sluggishness of professional accountancy in adopting novel hierarchical and social structures in post-independence Kenya highlights the culpability of the profession in promoting racial segregation and social exclusion.

Next, we discuss the papers reviewed on anti-Black racism, organized into four subthemes.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Massaro et al. (2016) argue that SLRs should develop meaningful insights and propose future research paths. This section provides final remarks on anti-Black racism in accountancy and proposes several avenues for future research. However, we first acknowledge the limitations of this research, particularly our exclusion of non-English papers, which marginalizes non-English research and researchers (Gendron 2019). This limitation is because the only language all four authors share is English. To go some way to overcome this limitation, we obtained an English translation of Gendron's (2019) relevant article in Spanish.

The opportunities for future research on anti-Black racism in accounting are numerous. Although anti-Black racism is not exclusive to professional accountancy, it is blatant in the field and facilitated by demand for accounting services by capitalistic corporations. Although significant efforts have been made, and are still being made, to increase the number of Black people in professional accounting, their historical exclusion from the profession has been difficult to overcome. Research on anti-Black discrimination in accounting occurs primarily in the United States and South Africa, with some notable exceptions. Further research within Canada, the United Kingdom, and the former colonies of the British Empire in Africa and other continents could provide insightful and comprehensive information on anti-Black discrimination in the accountancy profession globally.

To address the lack of theories on anti-Black racism research in accountancy, we propose that future research should apply other accounting theories. Although CRT is important to the field, scholars should also engage with and synthesize multiple theoretical perspectives to examine the underlying issues of racism in the accountancy profession. For example, practice theory (Schatzki 1996, 2001) could be used to propose pragmatic ways to achieve a more inclusive profession, while actor-network theory (Latour 1987) could be used to understand how various actors in the accounting profession espouse or resist racism. Studies that adopt institutional theory (including institutional logic, institutional entrepreneurship, and new institutional sociology) could also examine how institutional arrangements (i.e., contextual issues) influence anti-Black racism in the accountancy profession.

In 2018, to the bewilderment of many, US President Trump decried immigration from Haiti and other Black African countries, which he referred to as “shithole” countries (Watkins and Phillip 2018). Similarly, in Canada, immigration personnel referred to a group of Black African countries as the “dirty thirty” (Boudjikanian 2021). These attitudes suggest that in the hierachy of racialized peoples and immigrants, Black people are at the bottom. In fact, a report examining workplace racism at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada describes “repeated instances of employees and supervisors using offensive terms with their racialized colleagues” (Boudjikanian 2021). Little surprise then that those African countries have a much lower Canadian visa approval rate than non-African countries. In the first half of 2020, for example, the approval rate for Canadian visas for students from Nigeria was 12% compared with over 90% for Japan and 70% for Tunisia, a non-Black African country (Irete 2022). The artificial intelligence now used by Canadian immigration can be expected to machine-learn these racist attitudes toward applicants from Africa. Given that accounting has been implicated in discriminatory immigration policies in Europe (Agyemang 2016), future research could investigate the role played by accounting in sustaining discriminatory practices in Canada's immigration processes and the hiring practices of its capitalistic corporations, such as requesting “Canadian experience,” which normalizes discrimination against immigrant professionals. This discrimination against immigrant professionals by HR practices is often framed as being in the public interest but is steeped in the stereotype that only work experience obtained in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom (and other predominantly white countries) is equivalent to Canadian experience while professional experiences obtained in other racialized countries are inferior.

Racism in professional accountancy is understudied, and some of the papers that do examine this topic focus on the colonial aspects of marginalization. Therefore, a prospective avenue for future researchers would be to investigate the racial inclination of professional accountancy bodies in OECD countries, including Canada, and how demographic changes and laws aimed at addressing equality have shaped professional accountancy qualifications since the 1970s. Furthermore, race remains an inherently ambiguous concept in the literature, as racism is treated as though it were homogeneous, with different forms of racism—such as anti-Asian racism, which has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic, and anti-Semitism, which has grown with the rise of populism—seldom acknowledged as distinct forms of discrimination. This attribute makes the concept of racism intriguing for future accountancy research, as there would be no shortage of opportunities for critical inquiry into how various forms of racism play out in accounting.

Future research should also investigate whether any progress has been made in increasing the number of Black academics overall, specifically in leadership positions. These studies should examine the impact of an increased number of Black academics (where that is the case) on the mentoring and retention of Black students and whether the lack of Black accounting academics is related to the academic performance of Black accounting students. This research could provide greater insights into previous findings that mentoring is more effective when mentors and mentees share various commonalities. Hammond (1995, 146), for instance, argues that “mentoring is crucial to the retention of African-American students” and “when African-American faculty are available, they often help to buffer African-American students from some of the difficulties associated with the sometimes-inhospitable environment which may exist in predominantly white institutions.”

The lack of Black academics has been highlighted as a primary factor hindering the number of Black people entering the accountancy profession; however, research on Black accounting academics, as well as their barriers and success factors, is limited. There are few Black role models and those who do manage to overcome the social, political, and economic barriers still face the stigma of being from a race perceived as an improper fit for the job (Moyes et al. 2000). Although the experiences of Black academics, both established and prospective, may have changed in the wake of the BLM movement and institutional reforms introduced to tackle discrimination and promote equality, future research must investigate the experiences of prospective Black academics to validate or refute past claims. It would also be interesting to understand the extent to which the reforms introduced by governments and universities have reduced discrimination in the academic environments of those countries. Research investigating the experiences of junior Black accounting academics and researchers, including the opportunities available to them to develop their careers, would be integral to understanding current discrimination against Black scholars.

In 2022, 50 publishers representing over 15,000 journals announced plans to analyze the diversity of authors represented in journal publications and identify whether biases during the editing and reviewing processes influence which articles are published. This will be achieved by asking “scientists about their race or ethnicity—as well as their gender—in an initiative that's part of a growing effort to analyze researcher diversity around the world” (Else and Perkel 2022). Consequently, it would also be helpful to examine the proportion of Black accounting academics employed in high-ranking universities compared with lower-ranked ones in countries such as Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Relatedly, it would be of interest to understand which journals publish research by Black academics the most and least frequently.

The larger study which we conducted found that one dimension of accounting research on Indigenous peoples embraces the emancipation agenda. However, Black people, as Indigenous Africans, are mostly excluded from this body of work since the advent of slavery and/or immigration has resulted in Black people becoming a diaspora in OECD countries. As such, future research on anti-Black racism could take on a more active role in investigating discrimination and marginalization even before those issues play out publicly as societal outrage (e.g., the BLM movement of 2020). If this does not occur, accounting research will always only respond to, and never lead, societal change.

However, accounting research has been shown to be able to lead to societal change. The CPA's special issue of 1998 that focused on gender diversity led to its special issue of 2016 (taking diversity beyond gender to race), while its special issue of 2004 that focused on imperialism and giving a voice to the subaltern led to its special issue of 2019 (the emancipation agenda). The intervening years also motivated a body of research that may not previously have been seen as mainstream.

Finally, the scarcity of Black accounting students, practitioners, doctoral candidates, and academics is generally explained as a supply-side problem. However, research shows that this perspective fails to fully explain the underrepresentation of Black people in the profession and makes the error of rationalizing the scarcity of Black people in professions as always a supply-side issue. Depending on the site of investigation, the scarcity of Black people across the spectrum of accounting roles (undergraduate students, graduate students, early career professionals, management, and academics) can be a demand-side problem just as often as a supply-side problem. In reality, although the absence of diversity in a profession may start as a supply-side issue, it is usually sustained by demand-side stagnation. Consequently, studies that investigate viable practice-based solutions are an avenue for future work as they will advance research on how best to improve diversity and inclusion in accounting. Furthermore, studies that investigate the demand-side explanation of Black and BIPOC underrepresentation in accounting and other professions are also necessary. As Delgado and Stefancic (2017) argue, racism is normalized, implying that efforts to eliminate it must be targeted and sustained to be effective.

This study set out to document the accountancy literature on anti-Black racism and identify avenues for future research to motivate further studies that may also explore new theories to better understand anti-Black racism in accountancy and strengthen society by proposing ways to overcome it. We find that the opportunities for future research to achieve either or both aspirations are numerous. This body of work—a sociology of exclusion—will advance societies' understanding of the many forms of exclusion and steps necessary to address them.