Abstract
In management studies, whiteness is learnt through the discipline’s epistemic norms and conventions, received intellectual history, conceptual canon, driving logics and institutional frameworks. The foundational white epistemology of management produces and secures racial inequality while insisting that race is irrelevant and racism is obsolete in a post-racial imaginary. In this conceptual piece, I explore how scholars of colour and our knowledge experience a phenomenon of seen invisibility. This dialectical condition is reproduced through mechanisms and practices by which our discipline is disciplined within the prevailing racial order. After analysing examples of these normalised mechanisms and practices through the testimonies of scholars of colour who research, review, teach and edit management theorising in the Global North, I discuss how we might unlearn whiteness in our discipline through epistemic resistance.
You take in things you don’t want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along should not be an ambition.
Introduction
Anti-racist and decolonial scholars are bearing witness to the hostile and uncertain times in which we live (Bassel and Emejulu, 2018; Emejulu and Sobande, 2019; Sharpe, 2016; Walcott and Abdillahi, 2019). In her foreword to the edited collection, The Fire Now (Johnson et al., 2018), Christina Sharpe documents the ‘prohibitions and catastrophes’ that characterise the violent realities for communities of colour right now (p. xvi): Brexit, Trump, Kenyan ethnonationalisms, deportation flights, ‘Punish a Muslim Day’, the British government’s purposeful destruction of documents of the Windrush generation and then their pursuit of deportation, Go Home vans, the horrific Grenfell fire, drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, Black people detained, murdered in stores, in churches, while praying, walking, standing, shopping, talking on the phone, getting lost.
The day Philando Castile was killed during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, I attended a management conference to present a paper on race, and a professor in the audience asked me if race even really mattered in 2016. Four years later and the world seemed to have woken up to racial injustice. When 2020 saw Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd join a long list of Black Americans who have been killed by law enforcement, the Movement for Black Lives rallied an estimated half a million people in the United States (Buchanan et al., 2020) and further motivated demonstrations in 117 cities worldwide (Haddad, 2020). As mounting research reported how Black Americans were more than three times as likely as white Americans to be killed by police (Kahn and Martin, 2016), another professor pointed to an article about racism in academia on social media and quipped that it was ‘extreme’.
Why is it that the world can seemingly grieve the loss of Black lives, but management studies remains ignorantly, obstinately, self-satisfyingly white? The blame does not lie with individuals in the examples of individual professors above. Rather, the whiteness of management studies is a structural and cultural problem that is ‘(re)produced through the discipline’s received intellectual history, its concepts and epistemic assumptions, its canon, driving logics, and institutional frameworks’ (Houdek, 2018: 294). In this article, I seek to contribute to critical whiteness analyses of management studies, which has explored the ways organisational and social life are shaped by white supremacy and the possibilities for anti-racist management theorising and practice (Ahmed, 2012; Grimes, 2001; Liu, 2017; Nkomo, 1992, 2021; Nkomo and Al Ariss, 2014; Swan, 2017a, 2017b). I do so by drawing on my experiences researching, reviewing, teaching and editing to explore how whiteness pervades our discipline through the institutionalised processes of knowledge production and dissemination. I propose epistemic resistance to dislocate the racial norms and conventions, expanding management theorising and practice to encompass anti-oppressive possibilities.
Race matters for management because the institution has become a powerful force with unprecedented legitimacy among the global elite (Vijay and Varman, 2018). Management studies as a discipline has been central to the dissemination of managerialism across public and private domains. Management has served an ideological function, promoting capitalism (and its entanglement with white supremacy, colonialism and patriarchy) as an inevitable and ideal way of life. In practice, management enacts violence through the exploitation of workers, manipulation of consumers and the degradation of natural resources that has led to our current climate catastrophe (Vijay and Varman, 2018). In these pandemic times, it has become especially evident how this violence is wrought along racial lines (Roy, 2020). Interrogating and interrupting whiteness in management and organisation studies allows us to identify how management’s racialised violence is normalised and the points where we may intervene with anti-racist resistance.
This conceptual piece begins with an overview of critical whiteness studies as the theoretical framework from which white epistemology (Fredericks, 2009; Mills, 2007; Moreton-Robinson, 2004) can be understood. In recognising how contemporary configurations of race were born from European colonialism, I supplement my theorising with postcolonial theory to situate the pervasive practices of white epistemology in its historical context (Boussebaa, 2020; Boussebaa and Brown, 2017; Go, 2018; Nkomo, 2011; Westwood and Jack, 2007). Specifically, I draw on the concept of seen invisibility (Fanon, 1994) to theorise how anti-racist knowledge is subjected to institutionalised disciplinary techniques that produce and preserve whiteness in management studies. I discuss the wider context of the neoliberal university, before detailing the varied practices in our discipline that maintain white epistemology. I conclude the article by reflecting on ways we may unlearn whiteness with epistemic resistance, through which the decolonisation of knowledge may be possible.
Whiteness: we have been here before
Before critical whiteness studies was solidified through the writings of Peggy McIntosh (1988), David Roediger (1991, 1994) and Ruth Frankenberg (1993), whiteness had been charted for a century by intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin. In the context of whiteness studies, critiques of whiteness and white supremacy do not assume an essentialist character among people who are racialised as white. Essentialist approaches to the study of racism tend to be preoccupied with the racial attitudes of people with epidermal whiteness as opposed to the ‘specific mechanisms, practices, and social relations that produce and reproduce racial inequality at all levels’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2001: 48). Following whiteness studies, I understand race as a mode of social organisation and control built on the assumption of discreet categorisations based on an unchanging biological nature (Bhattacharyya, 2018). Far from a fixed biological categorisation, whiteness has mutated through history to distinguish those who could be considered fully human from subhuman (Levine-Rasky, 2013; Moreton-Robinson, 2004) so that power and capital could be distributed accordingly (Harris, 1993; Jacobson, 1998). Indeed, whiteness is indivisible from capitalism, though neither fully encompasses the other (Bhattacharyya, 2018). Originating from the South African anti-apartheid movement, racial capitalism is the understanding that ‘dynamics of capitalism – accumulation/dispossession, credit/debt, production/surplus, capitalist/worker, developed/underdeveloped, contract/coercion, and others’ are articulated through race (Jenkins and Leroy, 2021: 3). Cedric Robinson (2000 [1983]) argued that capitalism’s emergence in Europe exaggerated pre-existing social differences into ‘racial’ ones. Both whiteness and colour were fabricated in the West. Racialisation first enabled the English bourgeoisie to rationalise the low wages and mistreatment of Irish migrant workers and later, the enslavement of Black people (Robinson, 2000 [1983]).
Ruth Frankenberg (1993) offered an understanding of whiteness via a tri-partite model comprising (1) a location of structural racial advantage; (2) a standpoint from which white people look at themselves, others and society; and (3) a set of unnamed and unmarked cultural practices. The location and standpoint of whiteness converge with its practice. Cheryl Harris (1993), for example, has demonstrated how the law enshrines white power, affirming its ascendancy in social relations by controlling who is designated ‘white’ and then legitimising their property rights. Race historians have traced the ways those racialised as white then internalised their status and superiority and shored up their power through participating in both the social and economic oppression of non-white people (Jones-Rogers, 2019; Sleeter, 2011). Such accounts have led scholars like David Roediger (1994: 13, emphasis in original) to observe that ‘it is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false’.
Through its ‘doing’, whiteness is produced, regulated, adapted and subverted (Nayak, 2003). Within the contemporary Western post-racial imaginary, the doing of whiteness maintains its social ascendancy and control over cultural and material resources (Sleeter, 2011), all while insisting that race is irrelevant and racism is obsolete (Bonilla-Silva, 2015). These practices are predominantly (though not exclusively) carried out by those who are racialised as white as they have the most to gain from white supremacy and yet most often struggle to see white power (Sleeter, 2011). Later in this article, I will discuss the ways white scholars are divesting/disinvesting from white supremacy. Whiteness is therefore a condition rather than a colour (Lipsitz, 2018) and the study of whiteness as follows is concerned with the structural dimensions of power rather than individual white people.
Whiteness is also always inflected by ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and dis/ability, and does not manifest as universal, unconditional, and evenly distributed power and privilege (Twine and Gallagher, 2008). Power multiplies with each intersecting privileged identity beyond whiteness, and this power takes on different shapes depending on the sociopolitical context. For example, whiteness in the context of the United States and United Kingdom is commonly associated with economic, legal and social advantages, and the assumptions of belonging as ‘insiders’ (Garner, 2012). When white people travel to non-white countries, they may experience senses of being Othered as ‘outsiders’ yet often retain social advantages as the global economic and cultural elite. Intersecting oppressions never negate white power; one can be working-class, queer and disabled, and still possess advantages over non-white working class, queer and disabled people.
White epistemology
As a locus of power (Levine-Rasky, 2013), whiteness operates in and through epistemic violence to assert the dominance of its knowledge and suppress or dismiss the knowledge of other groups (Spivak, 1988). The academy, in particular, has served throughout history as a key institution through which white epistemology is produced and protected. In the name of scientific ‘truth’, disciplines such as physiognomy and phrenology were advanced in order to justify the European colonial project. While in our contemporary age, the academy carries a reputation for being bastions of progressive politics, our colonial history remains deeply entrenched in academic culture, while mundane practices sustain the prevailing racial hierarchy (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). The resilience of scientific racism attests to the contemporary dominance of white epistemology (Saini, 2019).
Anti-racist and decolonial scholars have long critiqued ‘the limits of knowing and the epistemology of those who profess to know’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2004: 75). They have compellingly demonstrated how Western philosophy defined the white masculine bourgeois self as the ideal knowing subject (Moreton-Robinson, 2004; Noxolo, 2020; Richardson, 2018). Indigenous people and people from the Global South are in turn reduced to the objects of study – the so-called native informants – and rarely acknowledged as knowing subjects in their own right (Foley, 2003; Fredericks, 2009; Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Mignolo, 2009; Shilliam, 2018). This epistemic violence silences marginalised groups and erases their knowledge (Spivak, 1988). Over time, marginalised people can come to internalise epistemic violence, accepting the knowledge that they are inferior (Yancy, 2017).
Whiteness establishes this demarcation between knowers and the known and yet disappears behind this knowledge. As Yancy (2004) describes, whiteness hides from its own historicity and particularity in order to present itself as universal. Whiteness defines itself as the human norm and can only be glimpsed in representations of what it is not – not Black, Brown, Red, Yellow – not different, deficient and deviant (Dyer, 1997; Gaffney, 2015). As an epistemological a priori, whiteness extends a taken-for-granted ‘way of knowing and being that is predicated on superiority’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2004: 76; see also Mills, 1997).
While whiteness vanishes from view, Blackness, as theorised by Frantz Fanon (1994), takes on a paradoxical condition of seen invisibility, which describes being simultaneously seen and unseen. Throughout colonial narratives, Black people are hypervisible as exotic and peculiar objects of white voyeurism, yet absent as knowing subjects (Sharpley-Whiting, 1999). In contemporary academic institutions, people of colour report a dialectical experience of being highly visible as trespassers of white places (Puwar, 2004) and being socially invisible when we are denied recognition and validity under the white gaze (Petherbridge, 2017). The specific mechanisms that maintain the seen invisibility of people of colour and their knowledge have not been explicitly examined; however, the next section will discuss some mechanisms of epistemic violence before concluding the article with possibilities for epistemic resistance.
Having established the fragmented, intersectional nature of whiteness, it is also important to recognise that ‘people of colour’ collapses together differences across racial, ethnic, class, religious, gender, sexual and dis/ability lines. Loretta Ross (2011) describes how the term emerged at the International Women’s Year Conference in Houston in 1977 where a group of Black women proposing a Black women’s agenda encountered other racialised women who wished to join their proposal. This alliance first led to the creation of the term ‘women of colour’ before later expanding to ‘people of colour’ to include those who identified as men and otherwise.
Ross (2011) recounts a specific historical moment where people of colour came together as a political community with a solidaristic commitment to working in collaboration with others living under the oppressive conditions of white supremacy. As Ross critiques, people over time came to reduce this ‘political designation to a biological destiny’. Perhaps most problematically, ‘people of colour’ came to be applied to anyone and everyone who is not white, including members of the global majority whose relations to whiteness, colonialism and capitalism are very different than those in the US context from which the term originated. When I make references to ‘people of colour’ in this article, I speak simply of those who identify with this political designation. This term is distinguished from ‘non-white people’, which I use when talking more generally about people who are not racialised as white. In examining the patterns of racial subjugation, I nevertheless recognise that our experiences vary dramatically based on intersecting power axes of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, class, caste, religion, gender, sexuality, dis/ability and neurodiversity. I use ‘people of colour’ not as an assertion of any monolithic group who experience oppression the same way, but as an invitation and yearning for solidaristic struggles against white supremacy.
I am not from the United States, but I began identifying as a woman of colour in rejection of the dominant label ‘ethnic minority’ in my country, a label originating from white institutions that has been used to culturally and epistemically fix non-white people as objects. I was born in the Global South and migrated to Australia as a child. My experiences left me with internalised white supremacy throughout most of my life that I have only begun unlearning in the last decade with anti-racist and decolonial communities. I do not and cannot speak for all people racialised as non-white as my sexual, class and bodily privileges and my location in the Global North shelter me from many forms of oppression. I speak only for myself, in hopes that other scholars engaging in anti-racist and decolonial epistemic resistance – in recognition of the limitations of my standpoint – may want to listen.
Mechanisms of epistemic violence
Despite arguments of a post-racial society, the academy continues to preserve the white epistemology that guides our scholarly agenda, interests and standards (Farr, 2004). Mukandi and Bond (2019: 254) characterise academia as ‘a frontier of racist violence, where the thinking that grounds state-based racist violence is taught, legitimated, and fostered’. Inherent to white epistemology is the denial of non-white people as knowers, which enacts epistemic violence by failing to recognise their ability to provide testimony (Dotson, 2011). Both Patricia Hill Collins (2000) and Linda Alcoff (2006) have spoken at length about this mechanism of epistemic violence, where their knowledge is persistently undervalued by virtue of being women of colour. Audiences practice ignorance as an active act of unknowing (Mills, 1997), where non-white people are perniciously associated with a lack of credibility (Sullivan and Tuana, 2007).
Within academia, research about race that seeks to challenge the prevailing racial order is recurrently deemed less relevant, less rigorous and less legitimate. For example, scholars of colour, especially Indigenous scholars, who attempt to define their own self-representations are confined by dominant assumptions about the racialised Other (Moreton-Robinson, 2004). When they challenge racist stereotypes about their own people and communities, their knowledge is often regarded with suspicion (Mukandi and Bond, 2019). Within the long-held belief that a fundamental ‘fault of colour’ is a lack of self-control (Perkins, 2004), people of colour seeking to redefine their own cultures and communities are seen as making amateurish, biased and undisciplined plays at knowing.
White fragility is another mechanism through which white epistemology is preserved. Robin DiAngelo (2018) proposed the term white fragility to describe her observation of how white people can be astonishingly bad at discussing racism (see also Nelson et al., 2018; Yancy, 2018). When questions about race and racism are brought up, she noted how white people often react with histrionic displays of anger, fear and shame. DiAngelo, who identifies as white, clarifies that this ‘fragility’ is not some innate attribute that suggests white people have a lower tolerance for dealing with racial stress. Rather, she shows that white fragility is a form of epistemic violence, which is used as a bullying tactic to silence non-white people who threaten white power.
Non-white people learn to anticipate fragility and backlash and ‘smother’ their own knowledge among certain audiences (Dotson, 2011). Epistemically advantaged audiences often intentionally and unintentionally invalidate the worldviews of non-white people specifically because their advantaged social positions shield them from experiencing the material realities of racial injustice. For example, Alcoff (2006) describes this experience in the classroom when she raises issues of race and her students become vigilant critics of her bias as a woman of colour. The invalidation of her knowledge causes harm above and beyond her encounters with racism; she has already been spoken for by the oppressor (Spivak, 1988).
However, whiteness is not only something that white people do to non-white people. Whiteness has travelled from Europe across the globe through both colonisation and neocolonial ideologies that manifest in local cultural practices such as cosmetic whitening (Twine and Gallagher, 2008). As non-white people, we can internalise white epistemic violence, accepting self-ressentiment (Yancy, 2004, 2017) and becoming agents of white supremacy ourselves (Lipsitz, 2018). Sometimes our complicity with white power is a quasi-voluntary move, seeing too many before us labelled as ‘troublemakers’ and subjected to brutal forms of silencing and marginalisation (Ahmed, 2012; Gabriel and Tate, 2017). In choosing assimilation, non-white scholars take the chance to secure a particle of white recognition and patronage, which have become increasingly valuable resources in the neoliberal university.
My interest in this conceptual article is not to reiterate the general racialised practices of organisations. Barriers to people of colour’s recruitment, pay and career progression have been well-documented in the existing literature (Bell et al., 1993; Booth et al., 2012; Deitch et al., 2003; Nkomo and Al Ariss, 2014; Parker, 2005). I am interested specifically in how white epistemology and the mechanisms that maintain its control are institutionalised in the knowledge production and dissemination of management studies. I illustrate with examples of how white epistemology is reinforced through mundane practices in the academy and theorise how we may engage in anti-racist and decolonial epistemic resistance. By focusing on white disciplinary practices in this article, I do not imply that other forms of epistemic violence around masculinity (Bell et al., 2020), cisnormativity (O’Shea, 2019), heteronormativity (Worst and O’Shea, 2020), able-bodiedness (Williams and Mavin, 2012), religion, class and caste do not exist or do not matter as much as whiteness. Nor do I presume that the mechanisms and practices recounted are only exerted by white people on non-white people. Our oppressions are complex, dynamic and intersecting (Collins, 2000) and ought to be challenged on all fronts. To examine the cultural practices that maintain white power and privilege in our discipline, the next section will include a brief outline of the wider context of the neoliberal academy that supports the cultural practices of whiteness.
Life in the neoliberal university
As higher education experienced public defunding and moved towards private funding models, the forces of performativity, marketisation and neoliberalism have shaped the ways we produce and disseminate knowledge (Manathunga and Bottrell, 2019). In this article, I take neoliberalism to be the complex set of practices organised around the universalisation of market-based social relations (Giroux, 2014). The neoliberal university is a discursive and performative space in which the ideal academic subject is constructed as one who acts, speaks, thinks, produces and behaves in line with an economic rationale (Peruzzo, 2020). Given that systems of oppression are interlocking (Collins, 2000), white cultural practices in academia inhere neoliberal values.
Despite scientific knowledge being persistently idealised as neutral ‘discoveries of truth’, the political economy informs who gets to research and what they research. Universities on the whole have refused to address the reproduction of Western imperialism and global inequities in our system (Manathunga and Bottrell, 2019). Eurocentric curricula promoting mostly white ideas by white authors secure the hegemony of white epistemology (Bhambra et al., 2018; Esson, 2020; Go, 2018; Lewis, 2018). Meanwhile, Anglo-American university league tables and journal rankings have reinforced the dominance of the English language, intensifying the precarity of scholars in the Global South who are compelled to conform to the epistemic norms of the Global North (Boussebaa and Tienari, 2021; Kothiyal et al., 2018). In recent years, student activist movements such as ‘Why is my curriculum white?’, Rhodes Must Fall and Liberate My Degree have challenged the racial capitalist ideology underpinning higher education, but we have yet to see these critiques engaged with, let alone addressed, in meaningful ways. Within our culture of post-racial civility, many white liberal academics appear to be convinced of their distance from the problem, framing white supremacy as ‘forever elsewhere’ and ‘never us’ (Houdek, 2018: 296).
Within management studies, scholars have observed the ways science has become a force for the production of capital and wealth (Boussebaa and Tienari, 2021; Jones et al., 2020; Vijay and Varman, 2018). Capitalism, in our scholarship and curricula, can become an all-consuming way of life as knowledge creation and communication are increasingly attuned to the needs of business. The pressures for university staff to serve corporate interests are enforced through top-down managerial control, with growing performance metrics demanding external research funding, industry partnerships and publication outputs from aforementioned journal rankings that favour positivistic, functionalist scholarship (Jones et al., 2020). Staff cuts across a number of UK business schools during the COVID-19 pandemic also reflected the valorisation of pro-capitalist scholarship where some university administrators suggested that critical management studies and political economy were irrelevant to business.
Vijay and Varman (2018: 6) show how violence is perpetuated in management studies through the promotion of a capitalistic agenda involving the ‘scientific management of workers, manipulation of consumers, and exploitation of natural resources’. The epistemic hegemony of parochial US values upholds both capitalism and whiteness as normal and legitimate characters of management knowledge (Vijay and Varman, 2018). Although there is rising interest among academic journals for empirical research from so-called emerging markets, namely, Asia, manuscript submissions are still required to conform to Western epistemological norms and Anglophonic standards. As such, Western scholars researching Asia through a capitalist lens frequently rise to the top of disciplines in a familiar role of the colonial explorer uncovering knowledge and extracting resources from exotic lands.
In the following section, I explore the institutionalised mechanisms and cultural practices by which our discipline is disciplined within the prevailing racial order. My own experiences researching, reviewing, teaching and editing are interwoven with the stories that have been generously shared with me by friends and colleagues who also engage in anti-racist and decolonial theorising in management studies. These testimonies are not intended to offer an exhaustive overview of the racialised experiences of scholars of colour and are not formally conducted as interviews or autoethnographic inquiry. I share these examples to illustrate the widespread, casual occurrences that are typical for many people in our discipline. They are not presented as realist accounts of white epistemic violence but are intended to collectively evoke a sense of the routine disciplinary and disciplining processes scholars of colour encounter in our continual struggle to be recognised as knowing subjects. Like all microaggressive encounters, there is no way to know the ‘true’ intentions of the individuals who inspired these examples, and this is not the aim of these testimonies. Collectively, they illustrate the toll that white epistemology can take on scholars of colour and the need for epistemic resistance in our discipline.
Disciplining management knowledge
When we disappear
My work keeps coming back from review marked as ‘atheoretical’. Doesn’t seem to make any difference that I cite Alcoff, Alexander, Collins, Davis, Hartman, Lugones, Tuck, Sharpe . . . reams and reams of references to women of colour, it’s like reviewers just can’t see them there. I may as well have not cited anybody at all.
Within the white episteme, we develop normalised assumptions about who knowers are and what they look like. In my undergraduate studies in Australia, I was taught that management was invented by Taylor and Fayol (cf. Cooke, 2003) before extending my learning through Drucker, Mintzberg, Porter and Lewin. Colleagues in the US and UK report similar academic lineages, as do scholars in the Global South (Nkomo, 2011). After all, the science of governance and control is intricately bound to imperialist notions of the West as rightful rulers of the savage, untamed, feminised and childlike East (Said, 1978). As I turned to postgraduate research, the canon of knowledge was expanded to psychologists and sociologists like Maslow, Seligman, Vroom, Bourdieu, Foucault and Giddens. While some feminist academics may have tried to diversify their reading lists, the overall experience of my university studies has traditionally reinforced the ascendancy of white (masculine) ideas by white (male) authors (Esson, 2020; Lewis, 2018). I am not making a judgement here about whether or not individual racially privileged thinkers are worthy of our study but noting how they are more readily associated with legitimate knowledge. The underlying hidden curriculum of the business degree collects the pedagogical and administrative practices that perpetuate assumptions about the competencies of the ideal student and scholar (Bhambra et al., 2018). This hidden curriculum is shaped by our colonial history, where its legacy persists in the systems of knowledge and power that are alive in the present (Go, 2018).
The invisibility of non-white thinkers is maintained through selective blindness. When familiar white names surface in manuscripts, we are comforted by their allusions to thought and theory. Non-white people, especially those who identify as women and non-binary, are systematically excluded from academia and management curricula (Gabriel and Tate, 2017; Stockdill and Danico, 2012). Their names and theories thus become unrecognisable in our discipline. The call to ‘strengthen the theoretical foundation’ through the peer-review process often feels like a demand to cite more white ideas by white authors. Even as I revised this manuscript, it struck me how natural and instinctive it felt to reach for white authors in attempts to ground my theorising more firmly within management studies. Whether I was developing my theorising around violence, resistance or the mechanisms of neoliberal self-making, white authors continually surfaced as the authoritative voices in our field which I felt compelled to cite.
Beyond their invisibility, there is also little interest to read and recognise non-white scholars as knowers (Collins, 2000). Where I was repeatedly told during my PhD that ‘everybody’ studying power needs to read Foucault, my white colleagues are rarely motivated to engage with the work of non-white philosophers irrespective of the relevance of their theorising to our research. As Bryan Mukandi remarked in the middle of a dialogic essay with Chelsea Bond, ‘I have this urge to link this conversation to Descartes or Derrida, because experience has taught me that two Black scholars in conversations are unlikely to be deemed philosophical’ (Mukandi and Bond, 2019: 256).
I’m in a seminar where a senior white male professor I’ve not met before delivers a presentation in my research area. He starts talking about theories I frequently explore in my work, and on his next slide, he quotes key lines of argument from my recent articles. But he doesn’t mention me at all. Two established white scholars in my field are cited instead. I am furious, but contain my anger, and ask during the Q&A why he has reproduced my work but not cited me. He makes an excuse, ‘the citation must’ve disappeared during the editing process’.
The difficulty of seeing non-white scholars means that their ideas can sometimes be detached from their unseen bodies. These orphaned ideas then appear in the discipline as scientia nullius, free to be claimed by white explorers and collectors. The lack of care in recognising non-white thinkers highlights a racialised element bound to our historical confinement as the known rather than the knower (Moreton-Robinson, 2004). That an unthinking object could generate knowledge worth knowing seems so foreign that it requires correction by white (re)possession.
Within the prevailing racial power asymmetries, intellectual theft from non-white scholars is rarely identified or understood as such. The continual disappearance of non-white scholars from theories they developed (Alexander-Floyd, 2012) is normalised through white editorial processes. When invited to perform peer reviews, too often we are the token voices that point out intellectual appropriation, only to have our serious concerns smoothed over by handling editors and relegated to ‘minor revisions’ (Dar et al., 2021). The reproduction of non-white scholars’ invisibility in our field is then perpetuated among the emerging generation of academics who consume our ideas yet remain oblivious to their sources.
One of my fellow associate editors is giving a talk at a conference workshop in the UK, promoting our critical journal to prospective authors. As she’s talking about our constructive review process, I overhear two Indigenous academics beside me. One of them is thinking about putting in a submission but her friend interjects, ‘I wouldn’t bother. The only paper that journal’s ever published on decolonial theory was written by a white woman’. I couldn’t believe it, so I pulled out my phone and searched ‘decolonial’, then ‘postcolonial’ and ‘anticolonial’ in our journal’s database. They were right.
Whiteness lends a certain comfort that racialised bodies do not. Whiteness is the embodiment of disciplinary normality and maintains a reassuring status quo untainted by ethnic difference. The ‘globalisation’ of business schools has been in effect a process of what Boussebaa and Brown (2017: 8) call ‘Englishization’ – a quasi-voluntary conscription into neocolonialism where research, teaching and editorial processes grant legitimacy to scholars based on their English proficiency. Englishization is fundamentally a process of imperialism, shaping both scholarly identity work and knowledge making in line with the norms and conventions of Anglo-American cultures (Boussebaa and Brown, 2017; Boussebaa and Tienari, 2021). The fetishisation of academic journal rankings in business schools further serves to shore up notions of Anglo-American ‘excellence’ (Gupta and Nair, 2019).
Language is a key way through which knowledge is whitened. Scholars who are not native English speakers struggle to be recognised as coherent and intelligible (Gantman et al., 2015; Houdek, 2018). Kothiyal et al.’s (2018: 143) study of Indian business scholars reported the ways Indian English is frequently perceived by editors and peer reviewers as ‘“jerky,” “absurd,” “weird,” and “improper”’. Indian scholars remain fixed in the role of the native who never quite learns to mimic the master’s ways. They are compelled to conform to white epistemological norms yet the work of such scholars is often ultimately judged to be ‘inferior, derivative, imitative, replicative, and irrelevant’ (Kothiyal et al., 2018: 146).
Indian scholars as a consequence, like many others in the Global South, are bound within relations of dependency with Anglophonic scholars in the Global North. White scholars tend to be brought into coauthoring relationships where they are seen as addressing a ‘lack’ among Global South scholars (Kothiyal et al., 2018) and in doing so, perpetuate the dichotomy between white knowers and non-white objects of study (Moreton-Robinson, 2004; Shilliam, 2018). White scholars cash in the dividends of their white privilege when they claim coauthorship status for furbishing manuscripts by non-white colleagues in line with white norms (Kothiyal et al., 2018). These collaborations are often well-intentioned, yet in lending their racial privilege to bolster the legitimacy of non-white scholars’ knowledge, they reinforce that privilege. Anglophonic scholars of colour in the Global North perform whiteness when they fulfil a similar role as the colonial translator. By understanding racial violence beyond something that only white people do to non-white people, our own conscription into white neocolonial relations can be interrogated.
When I arrived at the university, my department paired me up with a senior white male academic under their mentorship program. He suggests we coauthor a paper based on some data from my previous research project. After I sent him the first draft of a literature review on critical race theory, it returns to me with all the mentions of ‘white supremacy’ changed to ‘white-dominated’. I point out to him that ‘white supremacy’ is the accurate theoretical term within the field. ‘I know, I know’, he waves his hand. ‘But it’s such a confronting term’.
Whiteness operates through a grammar that structures the cognitions and emotions of racial matters (Bonilla-Silva, 2012). Normalised linguistic rules suppress anti-racist and decolonial critique by rendering some terms unspeakable. These kinds of collaborative relationships based on white Western patronage can lead to the whitening of knowledge, limiting intellectual pluralism, criticality and creativity (Kothiyal et al., 2018) while also providing a mechanism for tone policing within white bourgeois norms of civility, respectability and decorum (Houdek, 2018). Intrinsic to the whitening of anti-racist and decolonial knowledge is a growing pressure to reproduce neoliberal values, especially within business schools. White fragility (DiAngelo, 2018), in the intolerance and distaste for racial critique, is enshrined through research collaboration. White scholars can couch their desires for racial comfort and the maintenance of the racial order as neutral assertions of scholarly expertise.
The professor in the testimony above is helping the junior colleague ‘succeed’ by domesticating anti-racist theory in an instrumental exercise to maximise their chances for publication. Within the hypercompetitive neoliberal university, such domestications may become increasingly difficult to reject. The assumed superiority of white epistemology is bound to assumptions of its propensity to generate economic capital (Vijay and Varman, 2018), where white knowledge becomes more marketable and thus more valuable in securing career advantages in the academy. The peer-review process is another channel through which racial critique can be tempered and tamed. During the peer-review process for this manuscript, one anonymous reviewer reflexively critiqued their own sense that my section above, ‘Whiteness: we have been here before’, was too ‘heavy’. They initially suggested that the more positive, hopeful messages in ‘Unlearning whiteness’ could be moved up front, while the critique of white epistemic violence could be dispersed throughout the latter section. The reviewer noticed their own assumptions about racial comfort and gave me permission to cite their comments.
The white explorer mastering foreign knowledge has historically elicited awe within a colonialist imaginary. After Said, Bhabha and Spivak, decolonial scholars who have offered sustained and important challenges to management tend to become homogenised and invisibilised in a sea of brownness (cf. Ahmed, 2012). Management studies typically exalts the white ship that cuts through the brown waves, too easily seeing white scholars emerge as the ‘real’ theory generators (Westwood and Jack, 2007), while non-white scholars disappear through white editorial processes and citational practices (Mott and Cockayne, 2017). However, there are signs this trend is beginning to change as subfields like critical management studies are attracting larger numbers of scholars of colour and scholars from the Global South, while continued dialogue around anti-racist and decolonial modes of scholarship is disrupting the hegemony of white knowers and knowledge (Muzanenhamo and Chowdhury, 2021).
When we appear
Just as we disappear, fading into the shadowy peripheries of management studies, we can stand out and stick out as the invaders of white spaces (Puwar, 2004). The following testimony comes from a Chinese early career scholar working in Australia who continues to collaborate with her former supervisor and colleagues in China: I completed a very disconcerting performance review. My Head of Department was clearly unimpressed with my publications but she wouldn’t say why at our meeting. My papers are all in ‘reputable’ journals . . . I actually published more papers than her last year even though I’m Level B and she’s D. A few days later she sends me her report. My research was given an overall poor rating and her feedback noted: ‘works with too many foreigners’. My area is literally international management. But what really annoyed me is that I did have a publication with two Australian colleagues, but they’re Asian Australian so she assumed from their names they were foreigners.
The racialisation of non-white scholars not only becomes hypervisibilised in management studies, but it is almost always framed as a problem. When too many of us appear to congregate, we can trigger a fearful protectionism resembling anti-immigration sentiments of an ‘invasion’. That coauthors need to be located in Australia is not a formal requirement set by this academic’s institution. However, seeing the profusion of Asian names on her publication list, even when they were Australian, prompted her manager’s suspicion and discomfort. This experience highlights the diffuse assumptions in our discipline, including the notion that white bodies are entitled to recognition as the ‘real’ theory generators of the field (Westwood and Jack, 2007). That emerging non-white scholars are not only overcoming the language hurdles but producing knowledge (even in an area such as international management) suggests a violation of our pernicious disciplinary rules.
While scholars from the Global South are often expected to work with Western coauthors, sometimes to the detriment of their theorising (Kothiyal et al., 2018), those scholars may be punished when they seemingly succeed in producing knowledge without white patronage. This academic’s performance review reproduced the whiteness of the discipline. Whiteness emerged through the profound belief that foreign bodies, signified in this case by Asian names, were aberrations to the racial order of our knowledge production practices, and this violation was serious enough to call the academic’s entire work performance into question. Again, under the performative pressures of the neoliberal university, seeking white patronage may become a necessary practice for career security and advancement.
My PhD is looking at entrepreneurship through intersectionality theory. When I presented my progress to the department at my end-of-year assessment, my assessor, a white professor, praised my research design but queried whether or not ‘all those American theorists’ I was using would be ‘relevant in the Australian context’. I was baffled. The PhD student presenting before me was studying strategy in healthcare and used mostly American business strategy theorists. The student after me used Bourdieu and no one asked him how a French theorist is relevant to the Australian context.
American theorists have risen to dominance alongside the growing influence of US imperialism in the academy. As this student’s experience suggests, ‘American theorists’ in their case is code for Black American theorists who lead intersectionality theorising. White American theorists are normalised within the status quo of knowledge production and dissemination in the case of the business strategy student, as are white European philosophers. Blackness is hypervisibilised here, yet the assessor cannot or will not articulate that Blackness does not belong in the white epistemological conventions of management. By challenging intersectionality’s fit with the research context, the objection to Blackness can be framed as a neutral, apolitical observation. Meanwhile, this assumption reflects the marginalisation of racialised knowledge in the academy as niche interests relevant only to a small, insular community (Black Americans) that are often devalued beside the supposedly timeless, universal theories produced by white thinkers.
The hypervisibility of non-white people is grounded in an assumption of homogeneity. This gives rise to tokenism, where the appearance of one non-white person can be equated to the inclusion of all non-white people. In knowledge production and dissemination, this practice is reflected in the superficial citation of high-profile non-white scholars. For instance, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1986, 2003), who has advanced groundbreaking critiques of the Eurocentric and colonising discourse of white feminist theorising in the Global North, has challenged the ways her work is frequently misread and misappropriated. By mentioning her name, citations to Mohanty becomes ‘totemic symbols’ that enable authors to ‘continue the doing of whiteness as usual’ (private correspondence with Diana Mulinari cited in Mohanty, 2013: 980). Where the knowledge of non-white scholars is not stolen or invisibilised altogether, they are ‘trafficked across borders’ and domesticated into the white Eurocentric globality (Mohanty, 2013: 981; see also Alexander-Floyd, 2012).
One of the most familiar totemic symbols in management studies is Sara Ahmed (2012, 2017), whose critical theorising around feminism, diversity and inclusion has been immensely influential in our field. When I once questioned authors in a peer review about their reproduction of racist stereotypes and the virtually exclusive use of white theorists in a study about migrant workers, the authors sought to address my concerns by inserting a small handful of citations to Ahmed while assuring me in their response letter that they were ‘big fans’ of her work. Ahmed’s (2012: 35) bold and sustained critiques about the ‘sea of whiteness’ that characterise academic life disappear while her brown body is held up as an alibi against racism.
At an international conference stream on diversity on inclusion, a South Asian PhD candidate delivers a presentation of her doctoral research. In the Q&A, I raise my hand and commend her analytical insight but express my disappointment that she applied a Bourdieusian lens. ‘Why do we need to keep using white European men so much?’ I complain. She asks why I haven’t asked that same question to every white person who presented before her that day.
The promising emergence of anti-racist and decolonial voices in management studies has enhanced the hypervisibility of non-white scholars as sites for radical transformation. Beyond the totemic symbols of the discipline, a similarly homogenising and dehumanising practice is produced when we see fellow non-white scholars as soldiers to draft into our epistemic revolution or when white scholars see them as harbingers of diversity that release them of their own responsibility to anti-racism. Either treatment does not leave room for non-white scholars’ agentic articulations of their knowledge creation and communication. The student was right to challenge me and assert herself as a knowing subject who can choose her own theorists to adopt. Her judgement of Bourdieu’s value to her scholarship cannot be overridden by a generalised critique of whiteness that in my impatience, leapt to a wholesale rejection of philosophers racialised as white. My assumptions also betrayed a double standard where white scholars’ reproduction of white power might be criticised but ultimately accepted as ‘natural’ expressions of their racial privilege and fragility; yet non-white scholars are issued the burden to ‘save’ their discipline from whiteness.
Across these testimonies, the lived experiences of anti-racist and decolonial scholars reveal a dialectical opposition between being seen and unseen (Fanon, 1994; Petherbridge, 2017; Sharpley-Whiting, 1999). Specifically, non-white scholars and their knowledge are invisibilised through cultural practices of whiteness in the academy. Refused as knowers, our work is therefore frequently read as ‘atheoretical’, especially when we build on the knowledge of other non-white scholars, and our work is prone to white appropriative possession. This marginalisation is most acute for Indigenous scholars and scholars in the Global South whose work is held to rigid Anglophonic standards and often regarded with disbelief, suspicion and contempt (Boussebaa and Tienari, 2021; Dotson, 2011; Kothiyal et al., 2018).
Relational encounters through coauthoring, editing and peer review can reproduce white epistemology. The invalidations of our knowledge by sceptical audiences are integral practices of epistemic violence (Dotson, 2011). Non-white scholars are often compelled to work with white coauthors for their power and patronage in navigating Western academic conventions and signalling credibility. However, such relations of dependency sustain the epistemic and linguistic standards that marginalise non-white, non-Western knowledge, while preserving white racial privilege. Non-white scholars in the Global North also perform whiteness when they intellectually extract from scholars in the Global South. Meanwhile, the example of the international management scholar also suggests that racialised markers like a foreign name are sometimes enough to delegitimise a scholar and their knowledge, even if they are located in the Global North and possess gender, sexual, class, caste and bodily privileges.
While at times we disappear, we can also reappear as hypervisible invaders of the white academe. Our hypervisibility is varyingly regarded as a threat, a problem to be fixed, and as a totemic symbol of diversity and inclusion, mentioned but not used, cited mostly to deflect critiques of racism. The invisibility and hypervisibility of non-white scholars are thus predicated on an assumption of homogeneity. Our tokenistic inclusion in articles, projects, editorial boards, and university departments and faculties is assumed to represent the inclusion of all non-white people and serves to prove that academia is a post-racial institution free of prejudice. Yet when scholars of colour act as knowers in our own right through solidaristic communities with one another and our allies, the prevailing racial order is unsettled, sometimes prompting visceral and brutal acts of violence that attempt to restore white power and privilege in the academy.
The seen invisibility of non-white scholars, to adopt Fanon’s (1994) term, could be understood in reverse with the academy’s treatment of whiteness, where white scholars and their knowledge may experience unseen visibility. The presumed inherent validity, worthiness and impartial universality of whiteness often propel white knowledge to the pinnacle of their discipline. White scholars are predominantly regarded as legitimate, rightful knowers, even (and sometimes especially) when they are seen to be uncovering non-white, non-Western contexts. Yet the imperialist and white supremacist ideologies that fuel white knowledge’s ascent in our discipline remain hidden from view (Yancy, 2004). Disciplinary mechanisms that marginalise non-white scholars are rarely recognised as ‘racist’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2015), but are instead accepted as the normal, natural, neutral, if not even benevolent practices, that govern ‘good’ scholarship.
Unlearning whiteness
Domination is not inevitable. Anti-racist and decolonial voices in management studies have multiplied in the last decade, following the path that has been cut for us by pioneers such as Stella Nkomo (1992; Bell et al., 1993; Nkomo and Al Ariss, 2014), Patricia Parker (2001, 2005) and Eduardo Ibarra-Colado (2006). At the same time, growing numbers of management scholars racialised as white including Elaine Swan (2017b), Deborah Jones (Jones and Creed, 2011) and Diane Grimes (2001), just to name a few, have chosen to divest and disinvest themselves of white power and privilege (Lipsitz, 2018). There are many more scholars who do not necessarily publish papers about whiteness but support anti-racist interventions through editing, mentorship and convening conference streams.
White anti-racist scholars also pay a price for their epistemic resistance. They are often labelled a particular brand of troublemaking – race traitors (Ignatiev and Garvey, 1996) – and barred from professional networks, career advancement, leadership positions, journals and institutions for refusing to fall in line with the attendant hierarchies of white supremacy. While they are subjected to these forms of retaliation for their acts of perceived race traitorship, their tenacious resistance signals the ethico-political possibilities of solidarity and allyship in our field. Together, anti-racist scholars of all racial identifications have made significant strides in bringing issues of epistemic violence to the fore, but management, as well as the wider academy, remain foundationally white and colonial, and there is much work ahead.
In the face of white epistemology, anti-racist and decolonial scholars have cultivated communities of epistemic resistance (Chowdhury, 2019; Medina, 2013; see also Mignolo, 2009) through which hegemonic knowledge may be decolonised. These resistive projects have included informal grassroots teach-ins (John, 2015) and independent radical presses (Grant, 1996). In the academy, these communities, spanning small local reading groups to international networks such as the Decolonizing Alliance, have sought to reconfigure management’s norms and conventions. They cross disciplinary borders, marshalling alternative epistemologies advanced by scholar-activists who expose and transform the ‘silences, occlusions, and deficiencies’ of our white canon (Houdek, 2018: 295). They understand that epistemic resistance is a shared responsibility to interrogate the discursive and imaginative processes through which racial groups and their standing in the social order are conceptualised and communicated (Medina, 2013).
Anti-racist and decolonial epistemologies provide the grammar and vocabulary to name white power and privilege (Bonilla-Silva, 2012). They allow us to bring the invisible dominance of whiteness into view (Dyer, 1997). Whiteness in the discipline extends beyond skin colour and reveals deeper connotations of intellect, self-control, scholarly identity, and Western civilisation and superiority (Moreton-Robinson, 2004; Perkins, 2004; Twine and Gallagher, 2008). We need to recognise the inherent racialisation of management theorising that has historically presented white middle-class cis-gender heterosexual able-bodied Anglo-American men as the most legitimate knowers in the academy, while upholding their knowledge as not only neutral and universal, but inherently worthy. More importantly, we need to accept responsibility for the harm our cultural practices cause and cultivate an imperative for change (Medina, 2013).
As José Medina (2013) explains, epistemic resistance is both structural and subjective, retrospective and prospective. Injustices concerning knowledge, interpretation and representation necessarily involve the subjectivity of the academic agent, while the agent’s standpoint within systems of power inexorably informs their epistemic practices. In taking collective responsibility for change, we must be able to understand how histories of epistemic violence overlap with our present and future and be prepared to intervene in their trajectories of harm.
Editorial practices may be the most immediate frontier for change. Editors should be encouraged and empowered to subvert the reproduction of white epistemology. Superficial ‘body count’ exercises like the tokenistic inclusion of non-white authors will not be adequate when so many of us have learnt through self-ressentiment to mimic and uphold whiteness (Yancy, 2004; see also Lipsitz, 2018). Conversely, the wholesale rejection of white authors may overlook valuable insights into ways whiteness may be undone from within (Gaffney, 2015; Sleeter, 1996). Journals can begin restructuring disciplinary norms and conventions by accepting pluralistic logics, philosophies, methodologies, languages and writing styles. This intervention would require editors to reflexively interrogate their own visceral assumptions about what constitutes ‘normal’, ‘legitimate’ and ‘good’ scholarship. The process would need to recognise the highly embodied and affective ways we experience non-white scholars and their knowledge as out of place. The perception of their ‘jerky’ language (Kothiyal et al., 2018: 143) or ‘heavy’, ‘confronting’ concepts (DiAngelo, 2018) needs to be critically examined by editors and peer reviewers through a critical whiteness lens.
Our classrooms, too, are spaces where anti-racism and decolonisation may be fostered. We could reasonably ask ourselves as management educators, why are our curricula so white? The growing number of international students who undertake business degrees through white curricula institutionalises a model where natives of the Global South submit to their superior colonial masters to learn about capitalism, governance and control. Theories and practices, that are in a large part, based on slavery (Cooke, 2003).
Our disciplinary conventions, scholarly canon and whitewashed histories provide the materials that reproduce and justify existing racial hierarchies (Bhambra et al., 2018). We can begin with decolonising the knowledge base of business degree programmes (Andrews, 2018). The neoliberal, capitalistic, functionalist definitions of management need to be recognised for their highly racialised formation through colonialism and the plantations. We could learn with our students alternative practices of ‘management’ from beyond the white Western episteme as well as the Indigenous movements and movements led by queer, trans, disabled, working-class and Dalit people of colour and global majority peoples that have resisted imperialist attempts to manage. For Kehinde Andrews (2018), decolonising the knowledge base in universities will lead to the decolonisation of staffing, as in order to do such degrees a justice requires a range of staff and expertise beyond the tokenistic inclusion of ‘diversity’ on the reading list.
The next generation of management scholars would accordingly develop a more critical orientation to knowledge and knowing. They would be exposed to pluralistic conceptions of management and the resistance against it. Management curricula would not shy away from its colonial past, but it will also give students a range of tools to intervene in its traditions of racial violence (Cooke, 2003; Medina, 2013). The emerging generation must learn to see non-white scholars as knowing subjects in their own right and not objectified as either passive native informants (Kothiyal et al., 2018; Moreton-Robinson, 2004; Petherbridge, 2017) or monolithic harbingers of anti-racist, decolonial liberation.
Concluding remarks on epistemic revolution
However, both the solidaristic struggles of epistemic resistance and the radical dreaming of their possibilities are premature (Dar et al., 2021). We first need to ask: is the discipline ready to respond?
Any attempts to decolonise a discipline are related to wider projects to decolonise the university, which is also connected with broader aims to demarketise and democratise the university and dismantle interlocking systems of oppression in society at large (Bhambra et al., 2018). Challenging Eurocentric knowledge systems is an important part of anti-racist and decolonial projects, but alone, it is insufficient to bring about change without also addressing neocolonial and capitalistic violence (Richardson, 2018). White configurations of people, resources and spaces (as reflected in the examples of mentoring, student assessment and performance evaluation in the earlier testimonies) serve to ensure that anti-racist and decolonial knowledges do not come to exist (Richardson, 2018). So critical, reflexive editors may wait all year to develop and support pluralistic approaches to management, but those submissions will never come when the scholars who could produce them are denied employment, tenure or funding, and marginalised, bullied and worked to exhaustion in the performative neoliberal university (Gabriel and Tate, 2017; Jones et al., 2020; Manathunga and Bottrell, 2019; Mukandi and Bond, 2019; Stockdill and Danico, 2012). Transforming white epistemology requires transforming the white world.
This article explored how the lived experiences of non-white scholars reveal a dialectical opposition of seen invisibility (Fanon, 1994; Petherbridge, 2017; Sharpley-Whiting, 1999) in which they are denied as knowing subjects, their knowledge invisibilised, yet their racialised bodies made hypervisible as invaders of the white academy. We stand out and stick out because we are out of place (Puwar, 2004), varyingly treated as problems to be fixed or totemic symbols to exploit. I have suggested that white scholars may enjoy a reverse experience of unseen visibility, where their bodies and their knowledge are assumed to be legitimate, universal and inherently worthy, yet the mechanisms of epistemic violence that have systematically enabled this power and privilege are hidden from view.
While the testimonies reveal that these patterns of racialised experiences can span geographic, ethnic, class and gender differences, the intersectional and socially constructed nature of race introduces complexities to racial oppression. Defenders of the prevailing racial hierarchy may not simply identify as white but are also typically middle-class, cis-gender, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical and located in the Global North. Multiple privileges inevitably shape institutional and societal standing, which provide a certain level of protection to engage in white practices and reap the rewards of unseen visibility.
The hopeful, solidaristic, resistive practices of anti-racist and decolonial scholars and our allies reveal the ways we could cultivate alternative epistemic communities that recognise and celebrate knowledge beyond imperialist capitalist white masculine ideals (Chowdhury, 2019; Moreton-Robinson, 2004; Richardson, 2018). Their survival, however, depends on structural transformations in the discipline, the academy and society at large. My own testimony highlights how privileged scholars of colour in the Global North can slip into violent practices, even under misguided pursuits for anti-racism. Our epistemic revolution must entail continual reflexive interrogation, holding space for the diverse standpoints and voices with anti-racist and decolonial movements, and led by the interests and needs of our most marginalised members.
