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Empirical
Journal of School Leadership
2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–32
© The Author(s) 2022
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sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/10526846221095752
journals.sagepub.com/home/jsl
Subverting Whiteness and
Amplifying Anti-Racisms:
Mid-Level District Leadership
for Racial Justice
Vidya Shah
1
, Nada Aoudeh
1
, Gisele Cuglievan-Mindreau
2
,
and Joseph Flessa
2
Abstract
This counternarrative study positions two distinct bodies of literature in conversation:
mid-level district leadership in the literature on educational change and anti-racist
approaches to leadership framed through Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness
Studies. Interviews with twelve, mid-level district leaders committed to anti-racism in
Ontario, Canada, reveal fundamental differences in leaders’knowledges and capacities
compared to those identified in the literature on educational change and promoted in
the corresponding leadership frameworks in Ontario. In centering power, racialization,
and whiteness as a logic of oppression, anti-racist approaches to leadership funda-
mentally reconstitute conceptions and enactments of leadership. Findings speak to the
importance of knowledge(s) about race and racialization, racism and intersecting
oppressions, and how whiteness subverts anti-racist efforts. Findings also speak to
developing capacities such as: visioning that both owns historical injustices and imagines
future possibilities; organizing and collectivizing as a means of power sharing and
decentering the individual leader; facilitating difficult learning in the face of racist
resistance and multiple frameworks; securing accountability for rights by building
informal accountability structures while advocating for formal ones; aligning resources
and creating structures in support of students from historically oppressed
1
York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
2
OISE/UT, Toronto, ON, Canada
Corresponding Author:
Vidya Shah, Department of Education, York University, Winters College, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON
M3J 1P3, Canada.
Email: vidshah@edu.yorku.ca
communities; and, sustaining the self in the face of the impending harm in doing this
work. With a focus on whiteness, this study invites scholars and practitioners to turn
the gaze upward and consider what might need to be undone and unlearned from
multiple and intersecting systems of oppression, what the authors refer to as unleading.
Keywords
mid-level district leadership, anti-racism, whiteness, counter-storytelling, unleading
Ontario school boards are facing tremendous challenges in addressing historical and
contemporary manifestations of colonialism and racism in K-12 schooling. This is
evidenced by various Ontario Ministry of Education school board reviews (Ontario
Ministry of Education, 2015;2017;2020) and several media reports and social media
campaigns about the negative experiences of racialized students, families, and edu-
cators in Ontario. The current neoliberal and race-neutral approach to schooling in
Ontario inadequately address the history and ongoing manifestations of racial injustice
and perpetuate significant racial achievement and opportunity gaps in student outcomes
(Shah, 2018a). Apolitical, ahistorical, and one-size-fits-all approaches in Ontario
schooling are no more evident than in hiring and promotion practices and leadership
development initiatives. These practices and initiatives are often rooted in the Ontario
Leadership Framework (Institute for Educational Leadership, 2013) and the corre-
sponding District Effectiveness Framework (Leithwood, 2013), policy frameworks that
fail to support leading for social justice (Kowalchuk, 2017), and reproduce whiteness
(Logan, 2018). Conceptions, enactments, experiences, and accountabilities of lead-
ership are in/formed by intersecting identities, epistemologies, and structural
boundaries that govern the limits, possibilities, and contradictions of leadership.
Leadership is not neutral. As Davis et al. (2015) have argued, CRT must review school
leadership standards that have largely ignored race and racism.
There is a tremendous need for practicing and aspiring leaders to challenge white
supremacy in schools and society to support principals and educators in bettering meet
the needs, aspirations and realities of racially oppressed students and holding the
system to account. This empirical study explores the intersection of two bodies of
literature that are usually separate: the bureaucratic impulse of mid-level school district
leadership that is largely absent on conversations of racism and the transformative
impulse of anti-racist pedagogies that do not adequately articulate the particularities and
practices of district-level leadership. This study does not add race to existing
frameworks of mid-level leadership; it rebuilds the very frameworks upon which mid-
level leadership is constructed with the goal of racial and intersecting justices. In
particular, it explores the knowledges and capacities of twelve, mid-level district
leaders committed to anti-racism across several school districts in Ontario, Canada. In
Ontario, mid-level district leaders are known as Superintendents of Education and carry
significant sway in both school-level and district-level reforms and accountabilities.
2Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
Mid-Level District Leadership
While the significance of school districts is often in question, districts can be sites of
innovation that inform provincial or national policy, they play an important role in
adopting, resisting, and adapting central initiatives to their local contexts, and they
serve as important sites of critical democracy in public education (Anderson, 2003;
Levin, 2013;Rorrer et al., 2008;Trujillo, 2012). There is also a growing body of
literature on the direct and indirect impacts of district leadership on teaching quality and
student learning (Burch & Spillane, 2004;Honig, 2008,2009,2012;Honig & Copland,
2008;Honig & Rainey, 2012;Leithwood et al., 2010;Lesaux et al., 2014;Marzano &
Waters, 2009;Psencik et al., 2014;Waters & Marzano, 2006).
With direct oversight over principals, schools, and school communities, and with
accountabilities to senior district staff, mid-level district leaders are well-poised to
influence anti-racist learning and practices in both schools and district structures. This
study features two important overall roles of mid-level district leaders, the first of which
is brokering and buffering. Burch and Spillane’s (2004) important work on leading
from the middle is one of the first studies to examine the role of mid-level district staff in
improving student achievement as leaders at the intersection of schools and districts.
Mid-level district staff were reconceptualized as brokers of resources, knowledge and
ideas both within and across the district, and performed roles such as tool designers,
data managers, trainers, support providers, and network builders. They played an
important role in two-way communication in support of improved instructional
practices, the translation of district goals to strategies, and enacting policies and making
them relevant at the classroom level. Honig (2009,2012) similarly describes the
important role of brokering among central office staff in fostering change initiatives,
which consists of bridging (working to change or develop policy) and buffering
(working with policy and reducing the number of initiatives within schools). In this
study, we question what brokering and buffering look like in the context of anti-racist
reforms. How does racist resistance and structural racism influence buffering? How do
mid-level district leaders change or resist racist policies and develop anti-racist
policies?
Second, mid-level district leaders play an important role in instructional leadership.
Several studies identify the importance of instructional leadership among mid-level
district leaders and the important role of professional learning communities in that
process. Lesaux et al. (2014) name the importance of mid-level district leaders in
facilitating professional learning that is focused on a community of practice, provides
deep content knowledge, situates the reform within district practices and goals, and
provides a safe environment for participants. Connected to the idea of bridging and
buffering described above, mid-level district leaders also build collaborative rela-
tionships, broaden overall participation, and facilitate opportunities for district-level
and school-based staff to co-construct meaning in professional learning communities
(Burch & Spillane, 2004;Ernst & Chrobot-Mason, 2010;Honig, 2008,2009,2012,
2013). In this study, we question the race-evasive nature of this learning that fails to
Shah et al. 3
account for history, context, and power. How are collaborative relationships and
professional learning constituted differently in districts that center marginalized voices
and disrupt systems of oppression?
In these learning spaces, support to principals must be differentiated, responsive and
locally relevant (Anderson et al., 2012;Honig, 2010;Mania- Singer, 2017), and include
intensive differentiated on-the-job mentoring. In examining how mid-level district
leaders engage this responsibility, Honig et al. (2014) speak to the prominence of
central office administrators working with principals to integrate research-based ideas
into their instructional practices, often challenging pedagogies and instructional
leadership practices. For this to be possible, Syed (2014) explains the importance of
district administrators reallocating and reassigning resources to ensure that principals
can focus their time on instructional leadership. These approaches also speak to the role
of distributed leadership theory, which Marzano and Waters (2009) explain as a critical
aspect of effective leadership that promotes defined autonomy. Here, district-level
leaders establish nonnegotiable achievement and instructional goals for school prin-
cipals while providing them with the autonomy to administer and lead their schools in
achieving these goals. In this way, both leadership and power are distributed. Scholars
such as Bolden (2011) suggest this is an important departure from many educational
systems where leadership is distributed without accompanying power. In this study, we
question what research-based ideas are used and what values underlie how resources
are spent.
What is largely absent from the research on district and mid-level district leadership
is a focus on the ways in which positional power and social capital influence rela-
tionships, policies, principal learning, brokering, and all aspects of professional
learning and instructional leadership. These absences are also notable in the Ontario
Leadership Framework and District Effectiveness Framework. Anti-racist approaches
to mid-level district leadership remain largely underexplored. This paper diverges from
existing literature on mid-level district leadership in that it examines the knowledges,
skills, and beliefs of mid-level, anti-racist district leaders.
Theorizing Anti-Racist Leadership
As scholarship on district leadership and district reform largely ignores issues of race
(Trujillo, 2012;Turner, 2020), this study seeks to explore anti-racist mid-level district
leadership using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS).
CRT scholars seek to understand and transform the relationships between race, racism
and power (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001), asserting that racism is a normal, everyday
experience for people racialized non-White. CRT posits that racism is a historical and
contemporary system of oppression constituted by socially constructed notions of race,
differential racializations, and structural mechanisms that perpetuate racial inequality
and white domination (Bonilla-Silva, 2001;Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). CRT
entered the scholarship on educational leadership in the 2000s (Agosto & Roland,
2018). In a review of the literature on educational leadership and CRT, Capper (2015)
4Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
identifies six key tenets in leading for racial justice: (1) the permanence of racism; (2)
whiteness as property; (3) counternarratives and counter-stories; (4) interest conver-
gence; (5) a critique of liberalism; and (6) intersectionality.
While this study explores all of these tenets, we focus on two in particular. First is the
critique of liberalism that promotes the myths of neutrality and meritocracy that
manifest in color-evasive ideologies and approaches and promotes an incrementalism
that privileges White comfort over racial justice. We agree with Allen and Liou (2019)
who posit that school leadership should begin with the premise that White supremacy is
a hidden curriculum entrenched within schools. Race and intersectional identities
remain an under-theorized aspect of educational leadership (Ospina & Foldy, 2009), as
do racism and intersectional oppressions. Leaders’consciousness of racial identities
impact conceptions and enactments of leadership for freedom and liberation (Agosto &
Roland, 2018;Capper, 2015;Santamar´
ıa, 2014;Santamar´
ıa et al., 2015;Shah, 2018b).
Challenging the neutrality and coloniality of liberal educational leadership also centers
other ways of knowing. For example, we might highlight leadership collectives that
challenge formal roles and individual notions of leadership (Armstrong et al., 2013;
Rodela & Bertrand, 2018;Santamar´
ıa, 2014), the importance of engaging community
(Khalifa et al., 2016;Lopez, 2016;Santamar´
ıa, 2014;Santamar´
ıa & Santamar´
ıa, 2015;
Theoharis & Haddix, 2011) or the role of spirituality and ancestral knowledges
(Dantley, 2010;Frick et al., 2019;Khalifa et al., 2019). Several scholars (Galloway &
Ishimaru, 2015;Gooden & Dantley, 2012;Khalifa et al., 2016;Lopez, 2016;
Santamar´
ıa, 2014;Santamar´
ıa & Santamar´
ıa, 2015;Theoharis & Haddix, 2011) have
called for centering race in educational leadership learning and practice. For example,
Gooden and Dantley (2012) present a five point framework for leaders to be responsive
to the demographics of public schools: prophetic voice, self reflection, critical theory
grounding, pragmatic edge, and racial language. The discussion of each of these
components connects theory/learning to the practice of transformation for students and
schools.
Second, this paper centers whiteness as property (Harris, 2008;Ladson-Billings &
Tate, 1995). While initially conceived in a legal context as related to home property,
Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) draw comparisons to schooling, emphasizing ex-
amples such as the property as disposition in which students are rewarded for con-
formity to white norms and cultural practices, reputation as a form of property that
identifies whiteness and Blackness with higher and lower status, respectively, and the
right to exclude through formal and informal practices such as streaming, access to
specialty programs, and white flight. Radd and Grossland (2019) argue that education
leaders tend to invest time and energy into making “white spaces”available and
accessible to racialized learners without restructuring the system or making whiteness
visible, thereby reinforcing white supremacy. Amiot et al. (2020) explored the ways in
which educational leadership both perpetuates and interrupts whiteness as property in
teacher expectations, classroom instruction, teacher–student and parent interactions,
school discipline practices, and teacher perceptions. In their analysis of educational
leadership and whiteness, Allen & Liou (2019) assert meritocracy is a form of property
Shah et al. 5
and White people have ownership over meritocracy because “the racial contract es-
tablishes Whiteness as an opportunity structure”(p. 684). As such, whiteness as
property operates through constructions of “achievement”and “smartness”as mea-
sured by narrow, one-size-fits-all standardized tests that reinforce notions of White
superiority. To disrupt whiteness as property, educational leaders are called to inter-
rogate their own investment in Whiteness and develop the political will to breach the
contractual expectations of White supremacy (Allen & Liou, 2019).
Closely connected to CRT is the scholarship of CWS (Nayak, 2007), which explores
the ways in which whiteness is invisibilized and normalized in everyday operations and
interactions. Gillborn (2015) defines whiteness as “a set of assumptions, beliefs and
practices that place the interests and perspectives of white people at the center of what is
considered normal and everyday”(p. 278). CWS theorists have examined how
whiteness is invisible only to those who inhabit it (Ahmed, 2004;Leonardo, 2002);
embodies the racially ideal subject (Ahmed, 2004); is ahistorical and in denial of its
own creation (Leonardo, 2004); and is a global signifier of privilege (Leonardo, 2002).
Khalifa et al. (2013) speak to the myth of neutrality that privileges a culturally specific
form of leadership (white, Eurocentric, patriarchal) as neutral, thereby maintaining the
normalized and invisibilized nature of whiteness. Blackmore (2010) similarly names
the universality of whiteness and the resistance of white educators in confronting
racism.
In speaking about white leaders, Toure and Dorsey (2018) assert that white leaders
need to develop a white racial literacy. Similarly, White leaders must engage in critical
reflections of white racial identities accompanied by actions (Blackmore, 2010;Diem
et al., 2019;Irby et al., 2019). For example, Allen and Liou (2019) speak to under-
standing the role of racial othering as selfing, which is the political process of Whites
defining what and who is White in relation to pathological constructions of Black,
Indigenous and racialized peoples as Others. Shah (2018a) describes the ways in which
whiteness informs and undermines leading for social justice and calls for social justice
leadership to disrupt whiteness at the individual, interpersonal and systemic levels,
while not recentering whiteness. Relatedly, in a study with participants in a leadership
preparation program, Diem and Carpenter (2013) expose the non-neutrality of silence,
noting five different types of white silences and calling for particular forms of learning
for White leaders. Swanson & Welton (2019) suggest that professional development
can support leaders in confronting complicity in racial inequity and engaging in the
emotional labor to deal with the emotive responses and resistance to race/racism/anti-
racism as a necessary part of anti-racist learning. Continuing to name and identify the
ways in which the logics of whiteness deny, ignore, silence, stall, lie, divert, and subvert
anti-racist actions, is necessary for a more fulsome enactment of anti-racist leadership.
Methodology
Given our interest in building a greater understanding of the potential and limitations of
mid-level district leadership for anti-racism, we turned our attention to the knowledges
6Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
and practices of 12 Superintendents of Education, mid-level district leaders engaging in
anti-racist leadership in five Ontario public school districts. This is a counternarrative
study, which is part of a larger, multiple-case study focused on anti-racist district
reforms. The lead author has strong connections with mid-level district leaders
throughout Ontario and drew on those connections to inform the sample, and some
participants were known by the research team and through media/social media to have
initiated and sustained anti-racist reforms aimed at addressing racial and other dis-
parities in student achievement, well-being and experience. The sample of 12 par-
ticipants intentionally spanned identities, positions, and school districts. We generated a
wide pool of mid-level district leaders engaging in anti-racist work, rather than
carefully crafting a stratified sample that would limit the breadth of challenges, en-
actments, and possibilities of this work.
Five of the participants identified as Black, four identified as racialized as Asian or
Middle Eastern, and three identified as White. Six identified as male and six as female.
To protect the identity of participants, we describe a range of experiences that par-
ticipants described in both childhood and their professional careers, including racism,
anti-Black racism, growing up in a lone-parent household, being a lone-parent, growing
up in poverty, struggling financially at present, and experiencing faith discrimination.
Importantly, none of the participants identified as Indigenous, as having a disability, or
as queer or gender non-conforming, which is a limitation of this study. At some point,
eight of the twelve participants held board-wide equity superintendent portfolios and all
twelve had direct responsibilities for a cluster of schools over the course of their careers.
At the time of the interviews, two of the twelve participants held more senior district-
level positions and spoke to the transitions between mid-level and upper-level lead-
ership. Five of the twelve also held various positions with the Ontario Ministry of
Education connected to equity in education across multiple domains. The five school
districts within which the participants work are in southern Ontario, characterized by
superdiversity with regards to race, language, ethnicity, place of birth, abilities, faith,
socioeconomic status in both urban, suburban and rural contexts, gender and gender
identity, immigration status, sexuality, and family status. With this breadth of contexts
in terms of identities, positions, and district, we heard a range of perspectives from mid-
level district leaders engaging these complexities towards anti-racist practices and
outcomes.
We draw on counternarratives (or counter-storytelling), a theoretical and meth-
odological instrument of CRT to challenge deficit and dominant narratives of both
students and communities of color, as well as of anti-racist leaders that are often
constructed as troublemakers, narrowly focused, and “radical.”Instead, we explore the
expertise and contribution of these leaders to larger discourses of leadership. Solórzano
and Yosso (2002) explain counternarratives as “a method of telling the stories of those
people whose experiences are not often told”(p. 26). Counternarratives (Bell, 1987;
DeCuir & Dixon, 2004;Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) are used as a methodological tool to
reveal and interrogate stories of racial privilege and other dominant narratives that
circulate discursively as the natural order of things (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). They
Shah et al. 7
insist on a recognition of the experiential knowledge of people of color as a way to
counteract the stories of the dominant group (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). While 9 of the
12 participants are leaders of color, all identify their practice as a form of resistance
against racism and other subordinations.
We initially intended to employ oral history methodologies because our goal was to
explore how these mid-level leaders initiated and sustained reforms. However, as we
began the interviews, we realized that participants wanted to share less about anti-racist
reforms and more about their lived experiences in racist institutions, the knowledge and
capacities required to subvert the persistence of whiteness, and the struggles they have
experienced given their contexts and identities. The semi-structured interviews focused
on participants’lived experiences in racist institutions, the knowledge and capacities
required to subvert the persistence of whiteness, and the struggles they have expe-
rienced given their contexts and identities. Interviews were between 1.5 and2 hours and
were conversational nature, with several questions and probes used flexibly throughout
the interview (Merriam, 2009). Interview questions explored identity, understandings
of anti-racism, and the knowledges, capacities, and challenges of anti-racist leadership.
We used the constant comparative method, making comparisons between interview
data, the theoretical framings of CRT and CWS, and our own experiences, hunches and
questions as researchers. Categories were formed and re-formed. Initially, coded data
based on identities and experiences, contexts, understandings of anti-racism, and
strategies and tools. The analysis deepened over 10 months, with ongoing dialog within
the research team, presentations at research conferences, follow-up conversations with
participants, and tracking district leadership and activities on Twitter to ensure con-
temporary relevance. We realized that what was emerging was a spectrum of
knowledges and capacities that spoke to differences in the awareness of racial dynamics
and racial literacy, how the mechanisms of whiteness enable white supremacy, and
abilities to develop and sustain accountability systems for racial justice. The spectrum
of responses provided clear distinctions between leaders that were interested in learning
and facilitating learning on anti-racism and those that were able to enact their un-
derstandings through systemic and structural changes towards anti-racism. We in-
tentionally chose not to present findings as a spectrum for clarity and to support the
political and pedagogical will to reorient leadership constructions and enactments. It is
important to note that some data was intentionally removed from this analysis in
consultation with participants, as their exposure in a public forum would undermine the
work of disrupting white supremacy.
Knowledges and Capacities of Anti-Racist Leaders
Findings presented here demonstrate knowledges and capacities that emerged from
participant responses of twelve mid-level district leaders committed to subverting
whiteness and amplifying anti-racism. Knowledges are all-encompassing orientations
to changing anti-racist discourses, which require commitments to both learning and
unlearning. Capacities are embodied enactments of anti-racism that are heavily
8Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
influenced by knowledges and capture the complexities of working within a system.
Knowledges and capacities interact iteratively and holistically, and change over time
with learning, practice, and accountability.
Knowledge(s)
Knowledge about race and racialization. Participants had a very clear understanding of
how their social identities afforded or denied them access and opportunity and how
these identities were mediated by time and context. This includes racial self-awareness
of how one learns, resists, and responds to feelings of racial discomfort, and what
sustains one’s commitment to leading for anti-racism. As one participant shares, “Not a
day goes by where I don’t question, well, where I am in this continuum. And if I have
done enough to disrupt.”Knowledge of self also includes understanding the promises
and limits of their racial literacy. Another participant notes, “I am fully aware that in
years to come, people might look and say, that thing I was doing is coated in whiteness.
And I’m going to have to, if I’m alive, say, ‘You know what? You’re right. I didn’t catch
that.’” Knowledge of self also means engaging a more nuanced and complex expe-
rience of self that enters into the shadows and considers the beingness of anti-racist in
addition to anti-racist knowledge and action. One participant expressed the importance
of noticing the how our egos subvert anti-racist work.
Many participants explained when they first came to know they were raced and
demonstrated an understanding of how their racial and intersecting identities are read
and responded to in the world. Racialized participants spoke to not seeming “too smart”
or “too oppositional”and several Black participants spoke to their White colleagues
assuming that their focus on Black students was “advancing their own agendas”or
“focusing on pet projects”instead of building system capacity. As one Black female
explains, “There are all the other micro-aggressions. ‘Yo u’re so well-spoken.’Yo u
know, ‘You ’re so smart’…Someone once asked me what kind of life I had that I would
be so successful. Another Black female participant shares:
There’s that constant piece that you’re dealing with and always having to try to prove
yourself, right? And to articulate and demonstrate your legitimacy in sitting around the
senior team table, for instance. I don’t think necessarily my white male colleagues have to
even think about it just by virtue of their body. They’re legitimately in the space.
Understanding how they were racialized also helped participants decide when and
how to speak and how to collectively strategize for the larger goal of racial justice, as
described later on.
Most importantly, participants reflected on how limited conceptions of anti-racism
uphold White supremacy for leaders of various racial identities. White participants
spoke to White people feeling safer speaking with them about issues of equity. One
White participant shares:
Shah et al. 9
So, what I’ve noticed is it doesn’t matter how explicit I am about my commitment to be an
educator who pushes for anti-oppression and anti-racism. It doesn’t matter how explicit I
am. White people still say shit to me that they really shouldn’t say. So, I have this
wonderful opportunity to know truth explicitly from White people’s mouths that racialized
people doing this work don’t hear. They know and they suspect, and they get it through
anything from microaggressions to overt racism. But I hear it.
White participants noted their need to continuously engage in identity-specific
learning, such as how White privilege, White saviourism, and whiteness operate in
schooling and in relationships with students, families, and communities.
Several participants shared that while it is important for leaders to represent the
racial diversity of students and families, it is as, if not more important for leaders to have
anti-racist orientations. Several participants noted that districts demand an alliance to
whiteness and some participants described the challenges of Black, Indigenous and
leaders of color enacting whiteness to protect and be protected by White power. As one
participant states:
And I would say for most racialized people, probably the easiest way to maneuver yourself
is where you live and operate through whiteness and don’t interrupt it. That’s the safest
way, it’s the easiest way. People like you don’t get any pushback; you’re not perceived in
any way that’s negative. You’re you know, if it’s a guy, “You ’re a good guy. I really like
working with so and so.”And so, I would say that that’s the easiest way to maneuver and to
get to your goal, to get to the whatever the top of the hierarchy is. If that’s your goal, that’s
the easiest and probably the most beneficial way to get there as the racialized person.
Another participant shares, “I actually think that racialized bodies who protect white
people are the most dangerous people in this work.”This participant makes clear that
racial identity does not predict racial literacy or consciousness regarding how power
operates in the institution. When racialized bodies become complicit in upholding
whiteness they become “dangerous”as their support of whiteness is read as the le-
gitimacy of existing structures, rendering it possible to dismiss those who name and
challenge racism as having a ‘personal agenda’or ‘being angry’. Knowledge of race
and racialization requires both racial self-reflection and an awareness of how and why
we are racialized differently.
Knowledge about structural racism and intersecting oppressions. Several participants
shared that they start with the premise that schooling upholds and perpetuates white
supremacy, anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism and other racisms. One par-
ticipant shares how this awareness influences his work:
However, you do have to accept that you have a racist system, you have anti-Indigenous
racism, anti-black racism in the system, and you have to be an anti-racist if you’re going to
work in the system. We haveto come to understand that being an anti-racist or working in a
10 Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
racist system is not a personal attack on you, but it’s [the system is] made that way, you
know? You may have good intentions around your particular identity, but if you’re
working in a system and we know the outcomes are racist, then you have to become an
antiracist.
Participants were clear that anti-racist leadership explores every aspect of schooling
through the lens of race and racism and no aspect of schooling is race- or racism-neutral.
One participant explains the distinction between “saying the right”words and iden-
tifying racism structurally:
But when you put it to a specific context where a racialized Black administrator is having
challenges and resistance within their school, when the story is being relayed, it’s spoken
about as, “I acknowledge that racism exists in society.”And then the ‘but’, in the true ‘but’
sense, “But there’s some gaps in her working, in her performance.”And so, my pushback
is we are the top leaders here. We’re asking others to be able to name what it is that we see.
So, in sharing this story, you need to be able to say definitively racism is at play here.
The role of anti-racist leaders, then, is to identify and counteract policies and
structures that result in the differential treatment, well-being, experiences and success
of racially oppressed populations of students, staff, and families. This requires laying
bare the connections between everyday racist practices, racist ideologies, and racist
structures and policies. For example, participants spoke to connections between deficit
thinking, low expectations, and educational streaming. One participant shares an
example of student suspension data:
And I think it’s around the level of conversation. So, when you’re thinking about your
suspension data, what kind of lens are you using to look at that, to identify that Black boys,
although they make up 11% of the population, they’re thirty 33% of the students
suspended?
Knowledge about structural racism includes an awareness of the political landscape
(Horsford et al., 2011), a leader’s role and responsibilities within that landscape, and
where they might find support and resistance for their anti-racist work. One participant
explains:
When there is pressure from the trustees, that puts pressure on the Director, who then puts
pressure on the Superintendents, which is why the equity conversation is a difficult one to
have. You have to be careful of power, because power, as we know, gets nervous when you
try to disrupt it. And it has mechanisms of asserting itself and maintaining the status quo.
This knowledge also includes historical and contemporary understandings of how
racism operates in structures within and beyond education. One participant drew
Shah et al. 11
connections between education and the child welfare system, while another participant
drew connections between education and justice and policing.
Participants also made clear distinctions between anti-racism and anti-oppression,
noting that while they attend to multiple forms of oppression, special attention must be
paid to racism as it is often obscured in conversations about equity and justice. As one
participant asserts:
Then you need to look at concepts such as colonialism and you need to look at white
supremacy and you need to look at misogyny, patriarchy, all of those pieces. I think the
equity piece, you know, still comes back to Spec Ed sometimes and funding school boards
because it’s safe when we’re talking about ability. But once you get into anti-racism pieces,
you’re really getting to structures and policies.
Participants named the significance of understanding the intersections of race and
other social identities in experiences of schooling, and, more importantly, how the
intersections of racism and other systems of oppression create particular experiences of
marginalization for students and staff. For example, one participant spoke to staff
affinity groups that are often siloed and pitted against one another, because leaders fail
to address the intersectional oppressions that connect them.
Knowledge about how whiteness subverts anti-racist efforts. Several participants stated that
it is also important to understand how the logics of whiteness subvert anti-racist efforts.
One participant spoke about the ways in which language is resisted and coopted to
reproduce whiteness:
So, I find that as new terminology comes out and it becomes more and more critical, people
get very uncomfortable with the terms. So, when we first started to talk about
white privilege, people were like, “What?”Now people wish we were talking about white
privilege because white fragility is a harsher term. Then everybody gets used to
white fragility and we start talking about anti-oppression and anti-Black racism and
Islamophobia and anti-Indigenous racism. Now they’re starting to embrace that termi-
nology, but they don’t know what the hell it means. We can’t use terminology if we don’t
know what it means, and we have to have a shared understanding.
Participants noted several ways in which whiteness operates in school districts,
including: stalling anti-racist efforts; denying or ignoring racial injustice; using “all
lives matter”rhetoric to deracialize systemic approaches and suggesting that race-
neutral policies are more inclusive of all students; remaining silent on issues of racial
injustice; not responding to requests for accountability; associating “professionalism”
with compliance to whiteness; promoting racialized leaders are most aligned to
whiteness; and, protecting racist leaders by moving them to a different school, area, or
educational institution with no financial or professional repercussions. One participant
explains how whiteness permeates the Ontario Leadership Framework:
12 Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
Yeah, the entire leadership framework is disastrous. What do we value? We value
consensus-making. We value people who assume positive intentions. We value certain
types of leadership and it’s all focused on whiteness. It’s about how you do this work and
be nice. So that’s what we value and that’s what we get. And where is anti-oppression
sitting in the leadership framework? So, I would say it needs to start from those pieces.
And then you have to get rid of people and say, “No, this is the type of people that we’re
looking for.”
Participants also identified how trustees and teachers’unions uphold whiteness in
subverting anti-racist practices such as stalling de-streaming efforts and protecting
racist educators.
Some participants asserted that claiming hurt emotions in the context of anti-racist
work is a political tool that serves to stall or reverse anti-racist actions. A South Asian
participant describes her thoughts and response to a White colleague: “I do not know
why you are crying about this …I’m like, no, you’re crying because this has really
impacted you to the core. Because we’re questioning your power of privilege and that’s
why you’re crying.”While we explore this concept thoroughly in another paper, it is
important to note that several Black and racialized leaders spoke to the ways in which
whiteness regularly harms them and that understanding how these tactics operate helps
them navigate the institution of schooling. For example, districts often disguise white
solidarity as “being a team player”and use it as a tactic to silence any disruption to
whiteness and to isolate racialized leaders. Finally, some participants spoke to the ways
in which they respond to various levels of whiteness. As one participant shares:
So, I think one of the things we have to think about is how we address our own internalized
whiteness and how we address white people when we hold them accountable. I’m not
saying not to hold them accountable. I’m not saying not to address whiteness and the
impacts of whiteness or not to speak about race and the implications of racism. I’m saying
we need to address all those things. How we do it is in ways that allow white people to not
feel like everything is their fault, like it’s them as individuals, but to understand systems of
whiteness over time as colonial structures and how they have actually continued to impact
people. And we will not dismantle whiteness without white people.
Capacities
Capacities speak to lived enactments and embodiments of leadership for anti-racism
that emerged across participant responses. Many of the capacities recognize skillsets of
anti-racist leaders that are often unacknowledged in traditional leadership models.
Visioning. Participants spoke to recognizing and resisting traditional discourses of
schooling that have long harmed racialized and marginalized students, prior to
imagining future possibilities for transformative and liberatory education. We call this
capacity visioning. Participants’largely viewed the purpose of schooling as a
Shah et al. 13
transformative mechanism to redress historical and contemporary injustices to create
spaces in which “all students can learn because they feel safe and a sense of belonging”.
As another participant shares: “One of the things I always said to my principals was
when I was superintendent, was ‘Yes, I serve you. But I also serve the teachers. I also
serve all the staff, office staff, custodial staff, the students and the community. So, I saw
myself as the superintendent for all of them.’” Many participants saw leadership as
“unavoidable,”a“call”that decenters individual, short-term conceptions of leadership
and instead envisions leadership as an intergenerational, collective project. One par-
ticipant shares the risks and possibilities of responding to this call:
Know that you’re walking into a minefield. You will have to take risks. You will get
through it. You will make missteps. But keep the vision in your head like, “We ’re doing
this.”We may not see it in our lifetime, but how do we be the best ancestors we could be for
the children that are going to follow us? I didn’t just wake up and have this voice
right…This is an intergenerational project for dismantling white supremacy and furthering
the work of anti-racism that would allow all children to be successful. I think that’s
something that we need to keep emphasizing, that this is not about leaving people out. It’s
actually about expanding success.
Several participants saw it as their responsibility to humanize racialized children,
acknowledging explicitly that “every child can learn,”“every child has a right to be in
school,”and “no child is disposable.”One participant shares an approach in which she
models this:
It was when I would visit classrooms with principals. I would kneel and talk to the Black
students. They perceived I talked to the Black students more frequently than other students
and they called me on it. And, a Black boy would be sitting outside of a classroom, and I
would kneel and talk with him about why he was outside and how important learning was,
how he was feeling, and what he was thinking, and if he was ready to go back in. And I
knew what I was doing. I would hold his hand and take him back into the classroom and sit
with him to model to the principal and the teacher. And they took affront to that.
The majority of participants spoke to the significance of centering the voices of
communities that have been historically oppressed, and engaging in acts of redress,
restoration and reconciliation in affirmation of the saying, “nothing about us without
us”. In addition to being accountable to themselves, participants spoke about being
accountable to students, all communities, ancestors, and future generations. As one
participant explains:
So, I know I’m never going to be a sellout in terms of who I am because, I mean, I would
not be able to sleep at night. I like to say, you know, all those folks who were on the return
slave ship and jumped ship, that was a way of resistance. Right? Those are the bones that
are holding me up. I can’t then say I’m not going to do the work.
14 Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
For many of these participants, the work spanned generations, communities, and
possibilities.
Organizing and collectivizing. Organizing and collectivizing acknowledges how power is
mediated by position/role, social identities, and their intersections, and how leaders use
this awareness to build collective networks of power to disrupt racism. Many par-
ticipants described themselves as “identifying with communities”instead of simply
“standing alongside them,”thereby being both of the board and of communities.
Several Black participants also spoke to the importance of representation in their
relationships with parents. As one Black participant shares:
Once, for the parents, once they saw they had an SO that looked like them or similar, then
they would then start saying, “We were wondering if we could... We were told we can’t go.
Why not? Where is that written?”... You know what I think it’s about? You know, this
whole idea of who’s worthy. Yeah, it’s such big question of who deserves to have a
wonderful school where they feel comfortable and have input into how the things run and
that works for, you know, all families and students. This whole idea of worthiness.
Participants saw their role as building strong relationships between various com-
munities and the school board, thereby envisioning leadership and responsibilities
beyond the walls of the district. Several participants described sharing power with
community partners in authentic decision-making processes, actually creating struc-
tures for communities to hold the district to account and drawing on community re-
lations to activate outside pressure for the larger goal of racial and intersecting justices.
As one participant explains:
And I said be the strongest community, be the strongest advocates. Because I do my work
with integrity. And if I have a community base that’s saying we do need X, Y and Z, I’m
willing to do it. Right? But you guys sometimes need to ask for it. Yeah. Even though I
know what is right to do, it’s hard. I still need the request. I still need them pushing it …
The community has played a buffer in pushing, like really pushing us. And I remember
saying to this community advocate, that’s what I need. I need a very strong community.
Another participant explains the importance of being connected to community as a
form of protection to continue engaging in anti-racist work:
Yes, I have real support in the community because folks know the work that I am doing.
So, I can always call on them about support. And I tell folks you need that connection. And
I can call on them when things go wrong. And one of the things that I do is whenever we
have any racist incident, I immediately let community members know this has happened.
So, I e-mail them that all this has happened …That’s to build trust so that folks know
where you stand. And also because of the fact that you’re still are a political organization.
Shah et al. 15
Some might say, you are undermining it. But no, you’re working to make sure that [the
right] things happen.
Many participants noted that relationships with communities hold them to higher
levels of responsibility, integrity, honesty, and purpose, than relationships within the
district alone.
Facilitating difficult learning. Facilitating difficult learning involves centering identity,
power, difference, and oppression in every aspect of facilitated learning with school
principals and staff. Participants shared examples such as sustained professional
learning about race and racism, turning to research and/or anti-racist theories to ground
their work, and supporting principals and teachers in translating research and theories
into everyday practices. Many explained the significance of explicitly naming and
differentiating between anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, other
racisms, and intersecting systems of oppression, and having shared anti-racist ter-
minology among educators in their family of schools. Participants also spoke to ex-
pecting racist resistance from educators, principals, colleagues, and superiors and
addressing it both directly and indirectly. In describing successful superintendents, one
participant explains, “They understand resistance. They have a consciousness of how
they’re moving through the resistance that they’re going to face. So, they’re not going
into it naively.”
Participants naming use identity-based data and research studies to highlight dis-
parities, share counternarratives of students and families, ask difficult questions,
identify myths and inconsistencies, and connect the dots between anti-racist concepts
and their manifestations in structures, policies and practices. One participant shares
how the data facilitated learning:
It caused the educators to think about their role in creating space for racialized students and
Black students to participate and to acknowledge how their perceptions created barriers for
students …The data shows how we think about these students. Right? People said it’s
because they don’tfill-in-the-blank. Don’t do their homework. They don’t come to class.
They don’t ... whatever. And when those beliefs were surfaced, then they needed to be
dealt with because they probably wouldn’t have said some of that without the data on the
table because we’re very, very good at hiding our racist beliefs.
Several participants described organizing anti-racist book clubs as models for
principals to later engage with their staff and providing differentiated and responsive
learning given the local contexts and the racial un/awareness of school principals and
staff. However, several participants expressed difficulty applying their anti-racist
learning structurally and shared a desire for examples and resources that deeply
embed anti-racist theories in school improvement planning, teacher evaluations, ac-
countability systems, resource allocation, curriculum planning, student programming
and placements, and more. As one South Asian participant explains, this difficulty is
16 Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
because of assumptions of neutrality and meritocracy that permeate educational change
literature:
The work is anchored in whiteness. It’s like, [White male scholar] and others like him, who
see equity work as a distraction and they believe that if you just do the right achievement
work, instructional work, then all kids will fly. And that absolutely erases and dismisses us.
But that has been the white way of doing achievement and well-being, right? And so, one,
they don’t even know. And two, I think for a lot of them, they’re scared because it opens
them up. And it’s like saying, “Shit! We haven’t actually done right by kids for …forever.”
Another participant asserted that despite how leaders are socialized, they must
continuously to engage in their own learning:
I think that they are caught up in meritocracy, caught up in the way in which
whiteness has created this perception of success and how you get success. How
whiteness has created this notion of neutrality and universality and they’re caught up in
that. And I think if you’re in education and in the GTA, you have opportunities to
engage in learning to disrupt that, and if you haven’t made a conscious effort to learn
how to do that, then you don’t want to. Right? So, at one point I was thinking that
people are ignorant, and they just don’t know. I’m switching from that now. I’m
thinking that there’s an intentionality around that, that people really don’t want to learn
and it’s safer that way.
In follow-up conversations, several participants named that much of their own
learning comes from critical educators on social media that call out trends, practices,
and ideas that maintain whiteness. As one participant explains, “I learn from and with
people in education and community with the least investment in whiteness, who are
often the most punished and least protected. So, I learn from them and also actively
work to protect them.”
Sustaining accountability for racial justice. Participants described abilities to leverage their
positional power to create informal mechanisms for sustaining accountability upward,
horizontally and downward, and advocating for formal accountability structures. One
participant described moving between the formal and informal as “working the grey”
and “being creative with the boundaries.”This capacity also involves knowing how to
translate between anti-racist concepts and neoliberal contexts.
Participants used multiple strategies to sustain accountability upward, such as:
naming racist practices and inconsistencies at leadership tables, asking difficult
questions of superiors, naming the role of politics and positional power in decision-
making, shining a light on the performativity of anti-racism work, calling out corruption
in the school board or in professional associations, and using external crises (e.g.,
human rights cases and negative media/social media) as an opportunity to push for
change. Several participants spoke to the importance of collectivizing in sustaining
accountability upward, as one participant explains:
Shah et al. 17
You have to be subversive and strategic. And so, how do you prepare for these meetings?
Who’s going to speak if you have people that you are close with? You have to know where
you sit. What are we going to do? What are we going to speak to? You know, how are we
going to talk to it from different vantage points? It’s all strategy. And then when you work
in a space where they do not want to hear that, then it becomes subversive.
Another participant speaks to advocating for processes to ensure that the voices most
marginalized in and by the system are centered in decision-making:
I said to them, we don’t have any Indigenous superintendents and there’s not any on the
horizon as far as we know right now in terms of self-disclosure. Then, we should actually
pay a Knowledge Keeper or Wisdom Keeper or an Elder to be present at all the senior team
meetings with the goal of providing advice on governance and self-determination.
In sustaining accountability horizontally, participants drew on their personalities and
relationships with colleagues, used external supports such as identity-based data and
academic research as political and pedagogical tools, and had multiple people “own”
the work. A few participants spoke about helping colleagues navigate mistakes re-
sponsibly. One participant shares:
And I’ll say part of it is encouraging people not to be fearful. There’s a lot of fear, too …
So, they’re worried about making mistakes in that regard …I think it’s convincing people
to do the right thing. And if you make mistakes along the way, you own the mistakes and
you learn from them. And that’s a tough thing. That’s a tough thing at the leadership level
to have people be comfortable with.
Participants that were comfortable integrating anti-racist principles into systemic
structures, such as developing different criteria for leadership standards, spoke to the
tremendous labor of modeling these skills for their colleagues and teaching them how to
challenge perceived neutrality.
In sustaining accountability downward with principals, coaches, and teachers,
several participants described setting clear expectations for racial literacy and anti-
racist work in schools and measures of impact/accountability that are “specific and
responsive to the local community.”Several participants spoke to setting clear ex-
pectations early on. As one participant describes:
We’e going to be collaborative about this work, but we’re not being collaborative about
deciding whether or not we’re doing this work. This is a thou shalt. Yeah. You know,
understanding that I’m going to hold you accountable. I will with humility. But I’m going
to do it. And if you’re if you if you’re not able to demonstrate that you are committed to this
work and that you’re a learner in this work, well, then there’s gonna be accountability
measures and structures as a result.
18 Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
Participants described co-creating knowledge with staff and gradually releasing
support while increasing accountability over time. Several participants spoke to
influencing through dialog and questioning. As one Black female participant explains:
Also having those one-on-one conversations with principals when they say I don’t see
color and it is viewed as a badge of honor. And, you know, being very frank that if you
don’t see color, that you don’t see that I’m a Black female and that Blackness and my race
is part of my identity. So, let’s unpack that a little bit to see what your intent is. But what
does it really mean? We’re all racialized beings, and that has to be part of everyone’s
individual identity. And further, when you say that to students, what are you saying to
them? How are they seen? How are you supporting them?
When anti-racist expectations were not met, participants spoke to addressing their
concerns directly with staff and revisiting the conversation after some time to assess
whether changes had been implemented. When expectations were consistently unmet,
some participants spoke to demanding change in human resources and employee
services departments, that often protect racist behaviors and punish anti-racist be-
haviors. As one participant asserts:
I think part of it, too, is navigating employee services around responses to actions or
thoughts that are not appropriate, in a way that sends the message that these students are
valuable. And actions like that can’t be supported. So, I understand the progressive piece
around whether you’re working with students or staff. But at times, we need to be more
definitive, more angry and upset at what we’re seeing at the hands of educators who are
very highly paid. So, I think how we consequence for harm needs to catch up in our
system. And so those rules and procedures I think are a bit of a barrier.
Some participants spoke to being firm about their intention and inviting teachers and
leaders to transfer families of schools if they were not in agreement.
Aligning resources and creating anti-racist structures. Participants identified examples of
aligning human and financial resources towards students from historically oppressed
communities as acts of recognition, redress, and resolution. Several participants spoke
to building structures as counternarratives to pervasive deficit constructs of students
and staff and as mechanisms for reversing racist pipelines. Examples of structures were
both formal and informal, such as: programs that create access and opportunity for
racialized students; networks/conferences/workshops based on affinity groups for
students and staff; early and ongoing supports, coaching, and mentorship for racialized
educators; and training for racialized educators interested in leadership opportunities. In
speaking to how he mentors educators into leadership positions, one participant notes:
Often times with people who have the potential to go further, they don’t necessarily have
the skillsets that will help them to navigate and by that, I’m talking about the cultural
Shah et al. 19
capital to negotiate white colonial structures. So, how do you build relationships and then
leverage them? When are the moments that you speak up and when is the moment to step
back? How do you work to pedagogically document because you know that you will be,
your work will be torn apart? So how do you start intentionally from the beginning doing
that in order to make sure that that doesn’t happen?
Several participants described creating structures that demonstrate Black student
excellence, from awards, to small-scale initiatives such as student conferences, to
district-wide programs.
Vertical alignment between district structures/policies and the learning and resources
provided to school principals was identified as important to enact structural changes.
Horizontal alignment of resources and expertise across departments was also identified
to break down silos and ensure that anti-racist and anti-oppressive ideologies were built
into every aspect and function of the district. Some participants spoke to taking in-
tersectional approaches to avoid essentializing the experiences of entire groups of
students and Oppression Olympics. As one participant recalls:
A comment was said in our senior team today. “We’re so focused on this one thing.”And
the person who said it was a Brown person …But we know that Black youth are the ones
who are hit hardest. And the various intersections with that …I think those comments are
made more often than not, to be honest. We have the oppression Olympics, right? Why are
we only focusing on this group? What about that group? As if we’re all monoliths and
siloed.
In follow-up conversations, a few participants spoke to the difficulties in working
with more privileged families that resist anti-racist reforms intended to increase access
for Black, Indigenous, and racialized students in specialty programs, Gifted classes, or
French Immersion. Leadership in sustaining anti-racist cultures in response to pro-
cesses of the social reproduction of power requires further dialog and analysis.
Sustaining the self, sustaining the collective. Several participants spoke to how personal
this work is, blurring lines between professional responsibilities and personal risk,
learning and fulfillment. The majority of participants, especially Black and other ra-
cialized SOEs, spoke to the tremendous emotional and psychological toll this work
takes and named the need for support systems both inside and outside of the district. As
one participant shares:
It’s very isolating, can be very isolating, very demoralizing. You know, questioning if
you’re on the right track. But somehow you have to establish some sort of partnership or
allyship with somebody to be able to work that through, so it gives you sort of sustenance,
gives you a little bit more of a critical mass. But that is very difficult.
20 Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
Several explained needing to develop a thick skin, not being afraid of conflict, not
being concerned with niceness and “politeness,”being comfortable with not fitting in,
and expecting people to sabotage you to uphold white supremacy. As one participant
describes:
And it’s actually harder to disrupt in those spaces because you also stand out more. Like
when I was a principal I could go to the big meetings and then sit there and choose to be
silent or choose to be loud or whatever and go back and close the doors of my school and
do what I knew needed to be done, right? As a Superintendent, you’re in the room. You’re
in the decision-making room and if you choose to disrupt, you better be ready to deal with
it.
A third of the participants spoke to developing or strengthening a spiritual practice to
stay grounded and manage stress, and one quarter spoke to having an outlet such as
writing, speaking, or creating programs/workshops to make sense of the atrocities they
were experiencing and build collective momentum for their ideas beyond their school
or board. One participant shares the importance of healing as central to anti-racist
leadership.
The other thing is invest in your healing work. So, how we heal from the impact of racism
and institutional racism, as well as all the ways that in the bodies that we’re in, have had to
suffer and struggle. Invest in your healing work. Otherwise, when you get in that position,
you’re just going to replicate whiteness.
Participants also spoke to the power of collective care. One participant shares:
What I would say to people moving into these roles is find the people who are doing it so
that you can develop a network around you, because you will not survive this by yourself
without eroding a whole lot of yourself.
Participants spoke to fostering community among anti-racist educators across
various levels and departments of the school board, and between school boards, to
provide emotional support in challenging white supremacy and to innovate and
strategize for racial justice. Some participants spoke to the importance of surrounding
themselves with people with whom they could grow in their vision towards equity. One
participant explains:
What was helpful is there were a lot of allies in that specific grouping, which I would say
were like-minded leaders. And so, we fed off of each other. That grouping was the envy of
our board because of the synergy that we had and the laser like focus we had on equity. So,
I think we were like minded individuals that we’re always pushing and there might have
been a couple on the periphery ... So that kept the momentum going, kept us pushing.
Shah et al. 21
Others spoke of surrounding themselves with people who challenge their thinking
and call out their complicities in whiteness, troubling the ways in which whiteness
praises and promotes silence, denial, and compliance. One participant explains:
…keep your critical friends around you. So, they may not be in the same leadership. They
may not. They may be doing similar work. They may not be. But they will keep you true to
why you’re there. And I think one of the things that I’ve said to myself first and to the
people who know me is in any moment, where you feel like I’m no longer in this role as to
serve the bigger vision of the work that we have to do for our communities, then you need
to tell me, because I need to step out of it because it’s easy to be sucked into this.
Sustaining the self requires collective care, and collective strength requires self-
reflection.
Discussion
With direct oversight of schools and with the ability to influence school board structures
and policies, this study makes clear that mid-level leaders have an important role to play
in subverting whiteness and amplifying anti-racism. To lead in such a way that disrupts
structural inequities and changes disparate outcomes and experiences of Black, In-
digenous, and racialized students does not involve simply adding the lens of anti-racism
to an existing framework of mid-level district leadership; it requires centering and
fostering different knowledges and capacities. We talked to a number of mid-level
district leaders trying to lead for anti-racism and draw our recommendations from their
experiences. Centering Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies and inter-
sectional theories reconstructs mid-level district leadership that accounts for power,
identity, and systems of oppression. For example, while research on mid-level lead-
ership involves facilitating instructional learning, we identify the importance of
learning about racism, whiteness, and white supremacy, centering difficult knowl-
edge(s), expecting and responding to resistance, and explicitly naming and identifying
the relationship between various racisms. While research on mid-level leadership
speaks to the importance of buffering and brokering, we name the importance of
resistance to expectations of conformity and compliance in a system steeped in
whiteness, which challenges the very notion of buffering and brokering that leaves this
system intact. Finally, while local responsiveness in mid-level district leadership in-
volves responsiveness to local schools, this study extends responsiveness to include
communities most marginalized by schooling and the sociopolitical contexts of
schooling.
Speaking to leadership more broadly, this study makes it clear that research and
practice must disrupt neo/liberal, individualized approaches to leadership promoted in
the literature on educational change that perpetuate myths of color evasion, neutrality
and meritocracy. Leading for anti-racism requires not only an understanding of the
psychic and material consequences of anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Black racism, and
22 Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
Table 1. Comparing the Ontario Leadership Framework and an Anti-Racist Leadership
Framework.
Ontario Leadership Framework Anti-Racist Leadership Framework
Knowledges
Cognitive Resources
•Problem-solving expertise
•Knowledge of effective school and classroom
practices that directly affect student
learning
•Systems thinking (especially important for
system leaders)
Knowledge about Race and Racialization
•Knowledge of self
•Personal accountability
•Understanding how racialization mediates
access and power within the district
Knowledge about structural racism and
intersecting oppressions
•How structural racism operates institutionally
and understanding the political landscape
Knowledge about how whiteness subverts anti-
racist efforts
•How some people/ideas/practices are
protected, and others are punished
Capacities
Setting Directions
•Building a shared vision
•Identifying specific, shared short-term goals
•Creating high expectations
•Communicating the vision and goals
Visioning
•Undoing structures, imagining future
possibilities
•Seeing schools are sites of social reproduction
created to uphold colonialism, white
supremacy and intersecting forms of
oppression
•Schooling is a transformative mechanism to
redress historical and contemporary
injustices
•Humanizing all children
•Centering the voices of communities that have
been historically oppressed
•Constructing leadership as an
intergenerational, collective project
Building Relationships and Developing People
•Providing support and demonstrating
consideration for individual staff members
•Stimulating growth in the professional
capacities of staff
•Modeling the school’s values and practices
•Building trusting relationships with and
among staff, students and parents
•Establishing productive working relationships
with teacher federation representatives
(continued)
Shah et al. 23
Table 1. (continued)
Ontario Leadership Framework Anti-Racist Leadership Framework
Developing the Organization
•Building collaborative cultures and
distributing leadership
•Structuring the organization to facilitate
collaboration
•Building productive relationships with
families and the community
•Connecting the school to the wider
environment
•Maintaining a safe and healthy environment
•Allocating resources in support of the
school’s vision and goals
Organizing and Collectivizing
•Using an awareness of how power is mediated
by position/role, social identities, and to build
collective networks of power to disrupt
racism
•Identifying with/in communities
•Building strong relationships, sharing power
with communities
•Drawing on community relations to activate
outside pressure for the larger goal of racial
and intersecting justices
Improving the Instructional Program
•Staffing the instructional program
•Providing instructional support
•Monitoring progress in student learning and
school improvement
•Buffering staff from distractions to their work
Facilitating Difficult Learning
•Centering identity, power, difference, and
oppression in every aspect of facilitated
learning with school principals and staff
•Explicitly naming and differentiating between
different racisms/oppressions
•Expecting and working with resistance
•Using identity-based data/research to highlight
disparities/surface deficit thinking
•Learning how to resist neutral approaches to
educational change and applying anti-racist
ideologies to structures, curriculum,
programming
•Engaging in their own learning from those with
the least investment in whiteness
Securing Accountability
•Building staff members’sense of internal
accountability
•Meeting the demands for external
accountability
Securing Accountability for Racial Justice
•Securing accountability upward—Naming,
calling out, asking difficult questions, using
external crises to push for change,
strategizing and subverting, advocating for
marginalized voices to be centered
•Securing accountability horizontally—Drawing
on their personalities and relationships, using
external supports (data, research), supporting
colleagues in navigating mistakes responsibly
•Securing accountability downward—Setting
clear expectations for anti-racist learning/
practice, co-constructing difficult
knowledges, asking difficult questions, holding
educators accountable, involving human
resources/employee services when needed
(continued)
24 Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
other forms of racism, but a comprehensive understanding of how whiteness upholds
the system of white supremacy that maintains the very need for anti-racist leadership
and practice in schooling. This important distinction invites leaders to extend the gaze
upward to interrogate the mechanisms and grammars of whiteness that enact harm on
Black, Indigenous and racialized students, families, and staff. These and other
knowledges are completely absent in the Ontario Leadership Framework (The Institute
for Education Leadership, 2013), which participants described as a guiding, yet highly
flawed document that is central to training, hiring, and promotion practices in Ontario,
reinforcing the perceived universality and neutrality of leadership. In fact. multiple
school boards have created parallel leadership frameworks that center equity, anti-
racism, and anti-coloniality in response to the limits of the Ontario Leadership
Framework. Below we highlight the differences between the current neoliberal
Table 1. (continued)
Ontario Leadership Framework Anti-Racist Leadership Framework
Aligning Resources and Creating Anti-Racist
Structures
•Aligning human and financial resources
towards students from historically oppressed
communities
•Building structures as counternarratives
(reversing pipelines, mentoring/networking
for students/staff)
•Aligning vertically—being skeptical of
neoliberal policies, translating to anti-racist
policies/structures that influence resource
sharing)
•Aligning horizontally to break silos that contain
equity and anti-racism to one section of the
district
•Planning and implementing change
intersectionally
Social Resources
•Perceiving emotions
•Managing emotions
•Acting in emotionally appropriate ways
Sustaining the Self, Sustaining the Collective
•Blurring the personal and professional
•Developing relations, a community of
educators
•Developing a thick skin
•Inviting a spiritual practice (challenging Judaeo-
Christian values and orientations)
•Seeking outlets beyond work (writing,
speaking)
•Investing in one own’s healing
•Surrounding oneself with people who can
support you and can hold you to account
Psychological Resources
•Optimism
•Self-efficacy
•Resilience
•Proactivity (especially important for system
leaders)
Shah et al. 25
approach to leadership and a proposed anti-racist leadership framework based on
findings from this study (Table 1).
These differences provide a fundamentally different orientation to the knowledges
and capacities required to lead for anti-racism that account for power, difference, and
resistance. It is also important that we draw attention to a limitation of this study: the
paucity of anti-colonial politics and orientations towards racial justice. For example,
findings in this study do not name the limits of a liberal framing of recognition
(Coulthard, 2014) for Indigenous students, families, and communities, or important
differences between equity- and sovereignty-seeking groups. Additional research and
theorization are required to explore the connections between CRT, CWS, and anti-
colonial approaches to leadership for racial justice that acknowledge connections and
intersections and recognize the distinct goals of Indigenous self-determination and
sovereignty. These findings also signal concerns about the near complete absence of
representation of Indigenous Superintendents of Education in Ontario and the absence
of anti-colonial commitments and orientations in educational institutions and in the
scholarship on educational leadership.
Conclusion
This study applies a Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies frame to
understand the knowledges and capacities of mid-level district leaders in disrupting
historical and contemporary manifestations of white supremacy in schooling. And, like
all frames, including seemingly neutral, positivist frames, they are both true and partial.
The significance of studies like these lie not in the creation of a one-size-fits-all ap-
proach to leading for anti-racism, but in the undoing and unlearning of traditional
approaches to leadership steeped in whiteness that create harmful conditions for Black,
Indigenous, racialized, and other marginalized students, communities, and staff.
Educational leadership scholarship would benefit from analyzing how leadership skills
and capacities through multiple, subjugated frameworks, such as anti-coloniality,
disability justice, abolitionist frameworks, and queer theories, support leaders in
identifying what needs to be undone and what needs to be unlearned (Genao &
Mercedes, 2021).
Perhaps, instead of solely focusing our attention on the scholarship and practice of
leading (at any level), we might turn our attention to the scholarship and practice of
unleading. What might it mean to construct leadership capacities as undoing and
unlearning practices and ideas that uphold systems of oppression? For example, what
might it mean to undo and unlearn aspects of whiteness such as hierarchy, individ-
ualism, compliance, power over, silence, denial and ignorance? As such, we might
question our attachment to knowledge and knowing as “not everything is known or
knowable”(Sium et al., 2012, p. XI). In doing so, we might shine a light on the harmful,
common-sense assumptions and practices of leadership and invite constructions and
enactments of leadership offered by subjugated knowledge systems.
26 Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant.
ORCID iDs
Vidya Shah https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3413-9994
Joseph Flessa https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1787-5650
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Author Biographies
Vidya Shah is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University in
Canada. Her research interests explore anti-racist approaches to leadership and school
district reform.
Nada Aoudeh is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Education at York University in
Canada. Her research explores gendered Islamophobia and leadership counter-stories
in public education.
Gisele Cuglievan-Mindreau is a PhD candidate in Educational Leadership and Policy
at OISE, University of Toronto. Her research interests include critical approaches to
social justice and equity in local education policy.
Joseph Flessa is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the Ontario In-
stitute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, where he directs the EdD
program. A former teacher and principal, his recent work focuses on school-level
leadership in comparative context.
32 Journal of School Leadership 0(0)
