November Blog  Racial Discrimination in Organizations:

During this month our readings included a Case Study article written by Patricia S. Parker about the Coca Cola organization and a racial discrimination lawsuit that was filed against this Coca Cola a massive corporation known around the world that has been in business since the end of the civil war based in Atlanta Georgia.  The article discusses the racial discrimination was taking place within the company, the attempts by Coca Cola company to resolve the racial discrimination complaints and avoid ruining its good reputation, and the results of the discrimination lawsuit and the follow up requirements placed on Coca Cola to  change the corporate culture.and end racial discrimination. It is my opinion Coca Cola could have avoided this lawsuit if they had been listening to the employees withing their organization of all races.
Coca Cola organization failed to actively listen to the employees who were complaining of racial discrimination or other racial insults and ignored the culture that was developing or continuing in the company. It caused me to think back about the chapter we studied  in the class about active and critical listening and the 4 ethical pitfalls that were pointed out by Dwight Conquergood (1985).  Coca Cola was initially formed in  the south an area of the country where a culture of discrimination against African Americans or Blacks was the norm and therefore many racial discrimination practices went unrecognized. However, as a corporation that was growing developing and moving into all parts of a racially diverse world and selling its product to people of all races they failed to pay attention to the internal racial struggles that were taking place inside Coca Cola.
  They may have fallen into one or more of Conquergood's(1985) ethical pitfalls. For example, their selfish pursuit of financial gain may have prevented them from having meaningful communications about racial problems described by Conquergood as Custodian Rip Off, or perhaps they only heard what they wanted to hear and believed that because they had at least one black executive they had no racial discrimination issues, described by Conquergood as Enthusial Infatuation. It is possible that they failed to recognize the similarities between the employees and the need for equal treatment and instead focused on the differences in employees and sensationalized the culture which Conquergood described as Curators Exhibitionism but I think they most likely engaged in what Conquergood identified as  Skeptics Cop Out believing and accepting cultural beliefs about different races and simply ignoring the problems and refusing to engage in any meaningful discussions or analysis of the racial issues that existed in their corporation and it ultimately caused them to pay big in this lawsuit.
Reference

Conquergood, D. (1985). Performing as a moral act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance. Literature in Performance, 2(5), 1-13.