Teacher Leadership for Love, Solidarity, and Justice: The Invisibilized and Contested Practices of Teacher Leaders of Color

Despite widespread acknowledgment of teachers of Color as critical agents of change, white supremacist, colonial, and cis-heteropatriarchal ontologies of “teacher leadership” marginalize the counterhegemonic leadership they embody. Guided by critical leadership and feminist of Color scholarship, I develop and employ an embodied raciolinguistic analysis to examine how a Latina teacher leader of Color facilitated organization-wide action in the educational interests of Black students. My analysis demonstrates that her discursive and embodied practices as a non-Black woman of Color and “official” teacher leader were simultaneously (re)constructed as catalysts and hindrance for racial progress within and across social spaces. Grappling with these possibilities and tensions at interpersonal, institutional, and societal scales, she reflexively adapted her practices to recenter Black leadership while facing professional consequences. Arguing for radical social change by amplifying the multi-faceted and contested nature of counterhegemonic teacher leadership, I offer implications to foster the critical ingenuity needed to lead in love, solidarity, and justice for and among communities of Color.

Contending discourses of black autobiography: respectability, authenticity, and masculinity

After historicizing the politics of racial representation in the slave narrative, this article considers how race, gender, and class intersect historically in the autobiographical production of Black men in the United States. At the dawn of the Jim Crow era, Black autobiography conformed to a cultural politics of racial synecdoche, which avowed that racial progress depended on the respectability of esteemed individuals. Dominated by aspirational figures who presented themselves as racial emblems, Black autobiography became closely aligned with the imperatives of Black middle-class formation, actuating a discrete form of racial publicity that erected disciplinary boundaries around Black self-presentation and silenced disreputable figures. With the emergence of criminal and sexual self-reference, whether subtle or striking, in the narratives of Black men, autobiographers like boxer Jack Johnson, scholar J. Saunders Redding, and writer Claude Brown, disrupted the class-bound constraints that had determined Black autobiographical production, staging an internecine class struggle over the terms of racial representation—that is, between contending discourses of racial respectability and racial authenticity

How narratives of racial progress create barriers to diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizations

Despite recent statements in support of racial justice many organizations fail to make good on their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In this review, we describe the role of the narrative of racial progress—which conceives of society as rapidly, naturally, and automatically ascending toward racial equity—in these failures. Specifically, the narrative of racial progress: 1) envisions organizations as race neutral, 2) creates barriers to more complex cross-race discussions about equity, 3) creates momentum for less effective policy change, and 4) reduces urgency around DEI goals. Thus, an effective DEI strategy will involve organizational leaders overcoming this narrative by acknowledging past DEI failures, and, most critically, implementing significant, immediate, and evidence-based structural changes that are essential for creating a more just and equitable workplace.

On racial capitalism, structural change and the liquidation of Whiteness

This article analyses ‘racial capitalism’ as a cohesive but at times contradictory project. Understanding that both capitalism and White supremacy are constantly evolving, the objective here is to understand the political and economic currents that produce shifts in the composition and structure of institutional dispossession. To do this, I look at the abolition of slavery, the legislative victories of the civil rights movement and the current realignment of corporate classes in support of police and criminal justice reform as moments of structural change in the narrative history of ‘racial progress’ in the United States. The shifts and currents which undergird these structural changes typically occur when White supremacy challenges the integrity of capitalism and the corporate class. Expanding on existing literature that posits Whiteness as a ‘wage’, I argue that White identity functions as an asset with some level of liquidity – that is to say, it can be readily converted and exchanged. By understanding these underlying shifts and the ways in which corporate classes may seek to liquidate Whiteness, I argue, radical activists can better anticipate coming iterations of White supremacy and class exploitation.

Psychological Science Is Not Race Neutral

In their analysis in a previous issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, Roberts and colleagues argued that the editors, authors, and participants throughout subfields of psychological science are overwhelmingly White. In this commentary, we consider some of the drivers and consequences of this racial inequality. Drawing on race scholarship from within and outside the field, we highlight three phenomena that create and maintain racial inequality in psychology: (a) racial ignorance, (b) threats to belonging, and (c) racial-progress narratives. We close by exploring steps that journals and authors can take to reduce racial inequality in our field, ending with an appeal to consider the experience of scholars of color in race scholarship and in psychological science more broadly.