Dr Lace M Jackson, Staff Tutor and Regional Academic at the Open University in the Faculty of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care
As a child born in the UK to Jamaican parents who were part of the Windrush generation, I felt quite sheltered from direct experiences of racism until I arrived at primary school. It was in those early years that although at the time, I did not recognise it as racism, I was subjected to it in the way I was spoken to and treated by some white teachers, who struggled to see me as a child as opposed to an object to have power over. I also experienced racial bullying from a fellow white pupil, who I realise now was suffering from an inferiority complex. He was a blue-eyed, fair hair traveller and so to feel big, he attempted to make me feel small. Unfortunately, he picked on the wrong person as I had always been a fighter. Treatment meant to silence me, only made me more determined to prove them wrong. Whilst for me, these experiences were very rare, still, the scars they left made a visible difference to the choices I made in both my life and career. Most notably was my time working in a large local authority where oppressive practice and discriminatory language and behaviours felt embedded in the very fabric of the institution.
In social work we are taught to engage in professional curiosity. Therefore, being a naturally inquisitive person, I wanted to understand the ‘why’ of this human condition racism or what through my research I define as ‘Shadism.’ Fundamentally, although it may not have been fully known to me at the time, I was questioning why people like me, a Global Majority women, were not considered or legitimised as leaders. Despite occupying senior strategic roles, it constantly felt like I/we have to fight, like Phyllis Wheatley, to prove ourselves to those leaders above us, to our white and sometimes similar peers and followers alike.
This led me on to my doctoral journey exploring the personal and professional challenges of Global Majority Leaders in the UK. I particularly felt it important to centre my research in a UK context, acknowledging that despite the UK colonising around 80% of the world as we know it, its dirty laundry remained on the shores of the USA, the Caribbean, in India and Africa. I like so many contemporaries were beginning to ask those uncomfortable questions as to the reason this gaslighting on epic proportions was continuing to be held in place.
So, when I first decided to publish a small monograph of my PhD thesis, I was fatigued by lots of thoughts, including the fear of vulnerability, hypervisibility and the potential racial backlash seen by so many Global Majority academics, particularly in the UK. However, I felt that I owed it to the many Global Majority leaders, who, through their ‘pain and struggle’ as bell hooks (1991) so aptly described it, shared their battle stories and the epic genres of their lived experience of leadership from a UK perspective.
By drawing on critical race theory (CRT), (Delgado & Stefancic, 2011), the book aims to illuminate the underlying contextual and power structures of societies like the UK, where these leaders’ identity and construction is shaped, experienced, and practised. When so much of the leadership literature is dominated by those from the USA and other Eurocentric continents, I have reasonable assurance that my book is essential, as it explores the challenges that individuals of African, Caribbean, Asian and Southeast Asian descent (Global Majority leaders) living in the UK face in attaining, practising, and experiencing leadership within organisations.
Secondly, C R T is also used to uncover the dominant genres and occluded themes hidden within the narratives of Global Majority leaders as they share the fine-grained details of their lived experience with and about leadership. With these two lenses, the book allows us to understand and theorise how, through the shaping and influencing of meaning, Global Majority leaders continue to develop and practice leadership, presenting implications for theory, policy, and practice.
My book Global Majority Leaders: The Experience and Practice (2024) is offered as an important contribution to critical leadership practice and organisational studies and in response to the UN Sustainable Goals related to reducing inequality, decent work, and economic growth. Key findings in the book have the potential to influence leadership practice and as a valuable resource tool helping to promote inclusive and accountable institutional strategies by offering emancipatory ways to exercise leadership in the UK and beyond.
Dr Lace M Jackson is a Staff Tutor and Regional Academic at the Open University in the Faculty of Health, Wellbeing and Social Care. Lace also works as a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Bedfordshire and is the Managing Director of Purple Lace Consultancy Ltd specialising in Safeguarding, Organisational & Leadership Development.