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.