“Race” versus “ethnicity”? Critical race essentialism and the exclusion and oppression of migrants in the Netherlands

Howard Winant subordinates “ethnicity” to “race” as the central structuring principle in society. By contrast, Andreas Wimmer takes racism as a particular form of ethnic boundary making. Their debate in this journal (vol. 38, no. 13, 2015) mainly concentrates on the US. This article brings the critical race (CR) literature on migrants’ exclusion and oppression in the Netherlands to this debate. It discusses several essentialist shortcomings of this literature. First, CR authors do not contextualize “race” and racism, which repeatedly results in misreadings of the Dutch context. Second, their imposed totalizing notions of racism undermine the explanatory value of the concept. Third, the evidence for their claims remains inconclusive. Fourth, their contributions to the struggle against migrants’ exclusion and oppression are limited. To avoid these shortcomings, I argue for a differentiation between “race”/racism and “ethnicity”/ethnicism as two separate concepts that need to be applied and understood in a non-essentialist way

‘Leadership from the margins: Practising inclusivity with “outsiders within”

The invisible dominance of white elite class masculinity remains a defining feature of leadership theory and practice. This chapter draws on the work of Black feminist, Patricia Hill Collins, to theorise inclusive forms of leadership that are done by those on the periphery of organisations and society. Specifically, I draw on Collins’ concept of ‘outsiders within’ to interpret the leadership of a biracial multigenerational Chinese Australian woman chief executive officer (CEO) who attempted to support gender and racial diversity in her company. I suggest that we can look towards people who are traditionally denied the title of ‘leadership’ for an ethico-politics of inclusion that resist the normalised power structures of leadership

A comparative analysis of intersections of gender and race among black female school leaders in South Africa, United Kingdom and the United States

In this chapter we use intersectionality theory to do a cross-cultural analysis of three black women leaders’ experiences of leadership in relation to their gender and race in the leadership of schools from three different contexts: England, South Africa and the United States. Through a life-history methodology, black women leaders were interviewed using a set of topics that focused on the interviews and allowed some flexibility to follow up interesting unexpected contextual patterns. The findings suggest that women’s constructions of success are strongly shaped by their gender and race and are deeply rooted in their cultural and familial histories as sources of courage, inspiration and values. These deep-rooted values compel them to practise leadership that is inclusive, fair and socially just. We conclude that the intersectional role of race and gender is significant and needs to be understood alongside the intersection with other aspects of identity such as culture, ethnicity and family background in order to bring stories of black women’s successful leadership to the fore