Subverting Whiteness and Amplifying Anti-Racisms: Mid-Level District Leadership for Racial Justice

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 fundamentally 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 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.