White adjacency as borrowed safety: a cultural technology of organisational whiteness

White adjacency is often described as a racial gradient partial proximity to whiteness afforded to some racialised subjects. This paper reconceptualises adjacency as borrowed safety: a fragile, conditional form of organisational protection that stabilises whiteness while disciplining those who appear to benefit from it. Drawing on Black studies, critical race theory, and organisational scholarship, I argue that borrowed safety is not an individual attribute but a cultural technology through which organisations unevenly distribute credibility, belonging, and protection. Through this lens, proximity to whiteness becomes a mechanism of governance, enabling institutions to incorporate certain racialised workers without granting full legitimacy. I theorise three mechanisms borrowed credibility, borrowed belonging, and borrowed protection to show how adjacency operates simultaneously as cushion and constraint. By reframing white adjacency as an organisational practice, the paper offers a sharper vocabulary for understanding racialised power, conditional inclusion, and the subtle architectures through which whiteness maintains itself.