Violence is engrained in the everyday life of societies and organizations. While far-right politicians and sexually abusive executives have garnered increased media attention of late, violence is not confined to overt incidences and events. Rather, violence is inherent in our cultures, where oppressions along the lines of gender, sexuality, race, class and dis/ability intersect in our everyday lives.

Leadership is a vehicle through which this violence becomes not only normalized but romanticized. Hegemonic masculinity, as defined by the qualities of individualism, control and conquest that served to justify centuries of patriarchy, white supremacy and European colonialism, is instilled into our ideas and ideals about leadership. Leaders and aspiring leaders in turn contort their identities in line with the fantasies of leadership to convince others and themselves that they are ‘leaders’. As we saw with the media representations of Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg and Carolyn McCall, corporate executives are most readily recognized as ‘leaders’ when they conform to traditional white elite-class gender norms.

Anti-racist feminist thought and activism offer a wealth of knowledge in the resistance against interlocking oppressions in our organizations and society. Yet as leadership has been sculpted from the very ideologies of imperialism, white supremacy and patriarchy, we have historically failed to recognize it beyond narrow celebrations of heroic individualism. In our neoliberal era alongside the rise of capitalism, leadership has been further moulded in the image of professional success and material wealth. As such, the efforts of those from the margins who struggle towards social transformation are rarely permitted into the sacred definitional boundaries of leadership.

This book

Leadership, and its glorification in our cultures, is problematic. In the Global North, our ideas and ideals of leadership are set in the values of imperialism, white supremacy and patriarchy. From the mid-20th century, leadership began its eventual rise to its sacred status with the conceptualization of charisma. The charismatic leader was sculpted from Enlightenment fantasies, standing as an independent and autonomous subject who exerts his spirit on the world through his decisive thought and energetic action. He is governed only by his inner conviction and repudiates the communal concern for others as a trait of the ‘weaker sex’. Such was the leader who sailed from Europe armed with weapons in the name of colonialism.

In Feminism Without Borders, Chandra Talpade Mohanty makes the call to challenge the dominance of Western feminisms, and build autonomous feminist communities that are geographically, historically and culturally based. Anti-racist feminisms represent a diverse, global set of movements that have variously sought to identify and challenge the interlocking systems of power that undergird our social and political institutions. Some of the theories cited in this chapter were developed decades ago and have been deconstructed and reconstructed many times over the years. Even more so than the previous chapters, this chapter relies on footnotes to explore the nuances of more complex ideas.

Known by many names over the years including multiracial feminism, decolonial feminism and women of colour feminisms, I choose the term ‘anti-racist feminisms’ in this book because it places the struggle against gender and racial oppression upfront. Anti-racist feminisms acknowledge the diverse interests, standpoints and intellectual traditions of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Chicanx, Middle Eastern and Asian feminisms, and embrace a joint political interest in ‘[excavating] the silences and pathological appearances of a collectivity of women assigned as the “Other” ‘ as she is produced in Western systems of knowledge. Although anti-racist feminisms have pollinated diverse disciplines including legal studies, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, history, and film and literature studies, they are scarcely known in leadership studies.

By drawing these complex, distinct and localized movements together, I do not mean to imply that they somehow can, or ought to be, reduced to a homogenous categorization. As I hope the following sections will show, I deliberately include a range of voices, some familiar and famed and others perhaps little known, expressing differing and even conflicting perspectives. For example, some of the Indigenous intellectuals I cite do not necessarily identify as feminists, preferring instead to theorize from the philosophical traditions of their own heritage. Nor do scholars who may be seen as ‘Black’ agree with this label and the fixedness it can imply. Blackness comprises distinct and uneven global positions within Africa and throughout the African/Black diaspora, so that women who may be incorporated into ‘Black’ feminism in Britain might be excluded from ‘Black’ feminism in the United States.

In the wake of the Brexit vote in June 2016, The Guardian reported that white people in Britain had started wearing safety pins in a public show of solidarity with immigrants. The symbol of the safety pin conveyed the idea that immigrants had nothing to fear from them – that they are ‘safe’. In the aftermath of Trump's election, white Americans also wore safety pins in order to show support to those made most vulnerable by the new president's rise to power, such as people of colour, especially Muslims, members of the LGBTQ community, and undocumented migrants and their families. Although the intentions behind this gesture may have been genuine, some people were seen to be sporting the safety pin as an identity statement. ‘Look at me! I’m a good white person!’ Yet there was no action or strategy behind what then became an empty emblem of white guilt. In fact, the hollow gesture was easily co-opted by white nationalists, who wore safety pins in attempts to trick those distraught by the election outcome. The safety pin trend highlighted that allyship had become appropriated by some white people into a desirable social status that was denuded of all its commitment to change.

A safety pin, on its own, is insufficient to protect marginalized people. Allyship demands civic engagement, strategy and action. Perhaps the most poignant distinction is that being an ally is not a status that white people can designate themselves. It can only be assigned by those marginalized who recognize the ally's struggles towards solidarity.

These words of theologian Jennifer Harvey capture why it is so vital that white people take responsibility for white supremacy. Despite the ways white people are personally (albeit often unwittingly) implicated in the everyday reproduction of white supremacy, there is still a considerable number who refuse to believe that they should be held accountable to dismantle it.

Diversity seems to bear a certain ambivalence in our cultures. In some privileged contexts, it would appear that diversity has acquired a new sort of value. Organizations often claim to be enriched by diversity. They purport that attracting and maintaining a diverse workforce makes them more creative and innovative, while also allowing them to appeal to a wider customer base. Meanwhile, multicultural societies like to boast about their tolerance, inclusivity and easy access to a smorgasbord of ethnic foods. Yet lurking beneath this outer layer is a growing unease with diversity and apparent threat to white patriarchal power. On the back of the ‘whitelash’ that elected Trump, it appears that many people see diversity as an unwelcome incursion. More than a handful suspect that diversity is a nefarious apparatus of reverse discrimination against white people.

This contempt for diversity and its management has propelled people like James Damore to file class action lawsuits for reverse discrimination. Damore was dismissed from Google in 2017 after violating Google's code of conduct when he posted an internal memo attributing the reason fewer women than men worked in the technology industry to biological gender differences. He alleged that Google discriminated against white men while applying ‘illegal hiring quotas to fill its desired percentages of women and favoured minority candidates’.

Abigail Fisher sued the University of Texas after she was denied admission to the institution in 2008. She claimed that she was unfairly rejected in favour of minority applicants with poorer academic credentials. However, Fisher failed to place in the top 10 per cent of her graduating class, which would have guaranteed her admission to the University of Texas. Among the 47 accepted students with lower overall scores than Fisher, 42 were white, four were Latino and one was Black. Further, 168 Black and Latino students with scores identical to or higher than Fisher's were also denied admission.

Cases like Damore and Fisher provide insight into the ways white supremacy and patriarchy operate through an obstinate sense of entitlement. Google belongs to men. As women are biologically unsuited to a technology career, or so Damore's memo implied, they stole the jobs from more qualified men. Likewise, the University of Texas belongs to white students.

An inhospitable world

In November 2016, the United States Republican nominee, Donald Trump, was elected to become the country's 45th President. The night that his victory was announced, former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader, David Duke, described the event as ‘one of the most exciting nights of my life’. Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order halting all refugee admissions and temporarily barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries from travel to the United States. Although the original order was forced to be rescinded after it met with immediate protests and severe criticism, the United States Supreme Court eventually upheld a moderated version of the ban that settled on immigration restrictions against people from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

In the year leading up to Trump's election, Britain's vote to leave the European Union (Brexit) was steered by a campaign that relied heavily on anti-immigration rhetoric. In June 2016, Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) at the time, issued a poster where ‘BREAKING POINT’ shrieked in red lettering across a photograph of thousands of refugees fleeing war and persecution in Slovenia in 2015, imploring voters that ‘we must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders’. Although this poster, which bore a startling resemblance to an anti-Semitic Nazi campaign, was widely condemned by politicians, the message tapped into an emotional undercurrent of nationalism flowing beneath this once voracious empire.

Enshrining figures like Trump and Farage in positions of power legitimized a virulent backlash to change. At a white nationalist rally in August 2017, an attendee drove his car into a crowd of anti-fascist counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, fatally injuring social activist Heather Heyer. In his response, President Trump condemned what he described in his statement as ‘hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides’, generating the impression that he saw the white nationalists and anti-fascist counterprotesters as equally culpable in the violence.

Following the Brexit vote, police statistics showed a significant increase in race-based hate crime including verbal abuse and death threats, physical assaults, arson attacks and stabbings. The targets of such attacks in the UK were primarily Eastern European migrants and Muslims. Islamophobia meanwhile remains a firm feature in the United States.

The growing prominence of female executives in the last decade appears to portend a new era for women in leadership. The success of women like Sheryl Sandberg, whose business manual Lean In calls on women to ‘forge a path through the obstacles, and achieve their full potential’, has contributed to the idea that gender equality will be won in the free market of corporate leadership. In our postfeminist times, sexism is believed to be a relic of the past. Enlightened contemporary organizations have demolished systemic gender barriers and any odd case of discrimination is the fault of a deviant manager. With fervent conviction in their inherent meritocracy, organizations hold firm to an overriding focus on individual freedom. In this feminist utopia, female professionals are exhorted to ‘lean in’ and seize the myriad opportunities to become leaders.

This optimism requires turning a blind eye to systems of power and histories of oppression. Feminism, when recast in neoliberal terms, becomes an individualistic, entrepreneurial project. For example, both academic studies and practitioner handbooks have concluded with recommendations for women to cultivate an effective leadership style that strikes a balance between masculine and feminine behaviours, such as combining assertive agency with communal qualities of kindness, friendliness and helpfulness. As such, leadership continues to promote a hyperagentic individualist ideal, where women are told that we can single-handedly transform ourselves into valued commodities to be sold and traded as ‘leaders’. Meanwhile sexism becomes popularly characterized as an ‘unconscious’ bias that otherwise well-meaning managers can learn to overcome at half-day workshops.

The limitations of this individualism was demonstrated a few years ago when Marissa Mayer was appointed CEO of Yahoo. Six months pregnant at the time, Mayer negotiated for a nursery to be built in her office so that she could balance her caring responsibilities with her work. Although Mayer was able to utilize her wealth and position at the company to her and her family's benefit, she faced intense criticism when eight months into her appointment, she issued a ban against working from home.

Leadership has been a blank canvas on which we paint the fantasies of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy. Its romanticization through charismatic, transformational, authentic, servant, ethical and sustainable leaderships has been vulnerable to corruption. Even when leaders convince others and themselves that they are benevolent and inclusive, they can nevertheless enact colonial, racial, economic and gendered violence. Leadership may not, and perhaps should not, be redeemed.

Speaking within just the Anglophonic world, we have at our disposal language that more precisely and accurately captures the activities that so-called ‘leaders’ do. Administration, coordination, collaboration, communication, supervision, team-building and decision-making may be more useful descriptors for the day-to-day practices of people whose work involves responsibility to others. Relinquishing broadbrush illusions of leadership may also allow us to name the activities conducted in governments, organizations and communities that may have been obfuscated by the romance with leadership, including domination, discrimination and exclusion.

While we may imagine leadership to be exemplified in the gripping speeches delivered by charismatic CEOs or the bold decisions handed down in the executive boardroom, these activities only occasionally feature in the mundane reality of managerial work. What makes business and organizations function is the work that happens in the space between people; the unglamorous processes of coordination, collaboration and communication that knit the various and varied activities of workers together. Anti-racist feminist thinking would also remind us that what makes the seemingly heroic work of leadership possible is the oft-invisible labour that is disproportionately performed by women and people of colour as carers in the organizational and domestic spheres. Leadership and organizations are reliant on the work that happens at home, including the people who cook, clean and care for workers and their families that enable them to continue working. To celebrate individual leaders in our societies is to fixate on a narrow and relatively insignificant part of humanity. It overlooks life's rich interconnectedness in favour of a romance that serves only to bolster the status of our society's elites.

In his 1996 article, ‘Leaders who make a difference’, organizational psychologist and leadership consultant Manfred Kets de Vries sprung to leadership's defence:

Reading his impassioned plea for leadership in 2020 is a strange experience. The extensive promotion of leadership by scholars and practitioners in the last two decades has since lifted leadership to a sacred status. Leadership is now more widely assumed as a vital force for good and commonly regarded as a panacea for all manner of organizational and societal problems. Ket de Vries’ evocative words tapped into a neoliberal yearning for hyperagency. He encourages the reader to imagine ourselves as King Henry V commanding our army at the Battle of Agincourt. The hypnotic repetition about our power to effect ‘strategic transformation and change’ and ‘transform strategic constraints’ in our ‘vital role as catalysts of change’ lulls us into the seductive belief that we can and we will single-handedly change the world.

Within this romance with leadership is a love song to white masculinity. The early formation of leadership studies took shape around the values of the European Enlightenment, which instated rigid gendered and racial hierarchies. At the centre of leadership stood the figure of the autonomous European man from whom leadership gloriously emanated. He represented ‘orderliness, rationality and self-control’ while the Others he colonized and enslaved represented ‘chaos, irrationality, violence and the breakdown of self-regulation’.

We are living in times beset by the seemingly constant reporting of ethical scandals and corruption. The start of this century saw the collapse of corporations including Enron, HIH Insurance and WorldCom due to the fraudulent actions of their leaders. During the 2008 financial crisis, banking leaders were accused of hubris, greed, and even of being psychopaths. As the news stories of unethical leaders multiplied, some returned to leadership to suggest that it too was the solution. Far from calling leadership into question, many scholars and practitioners counteracted the mounting examples of ethical failures with ever more glorified characterizations of leadership as quintessentially moral and good. Under this prevailing logic, the antidote to bad leadership is always good leadership, where exceptional individuals are believed to be able to deliver their organizations from crises while conveying confidence, hope and optimism, and maintaining trust.

The glorified nature of leadership constrains the theorizing, development and practice of leadership. If leadership is believed to be intrinsically ethical, critical dialogues around the ways leadership perpetuates violence are silenced. Abiding fantasies about leadership can inflict harm on followers as well as leaders themselves. Particularly during times of crises or uncertainty, followers can experience a sense of alienation and helplessness. These feelings can also be exploited by leaders who may construct organizational or societal crises in order to foster followers’ reliance on heroic figures. Heroic ideals also promote leader narcissism and intensified identity work. Professionals from all levels of an organization can feel pressured to strive towards ‘leadership’ by anxiously pursuing a self-image more in line with contemporary corporate values. However, leadership fantasies continue to be perpetuated by corporations, the media, business schools and consultancy firms that trade in the valuable commodity of ‘leadership’.

This chapter introduces the range of theories that have sought to articulate the moral and ethical dimensions of leadership. It will focus primarily on ethical leadership, both philosophical and social scientific strands of this theory, and critique its promotion of individual heroism. It will illustrate the limitations of an individualist approach through the examples of benevolent sexism and racism, which reveal the structural and ideological machinations of white patriarchal power. In particular, the figure of the white saviour is explored in more depth, tracing its origins back to colonial discourses and showing how it has shaped contemporary ideas of ethical leadership.

Addresses the role of government in Australia through the life cycle of its automotive industry, from its success in attracting manufacturers, promoting the development of the industry, protecting and supporting, encouraging rationalization – and then being conflicted between that purpose and opening the market to imports, losing its grip on the industry, and finally succumbing to the temptation simply to subsidize it.