8 - In Conversation with Helena Liu: Redeeming Leadership – a Project of Critical Hope

Summary

DB and NF: Could you tell us about your understanding of racial literacy and how you might educate on race and racism in your teaching?

HL: I’ve never heard the term ‘racial literacy’ used before, but I immediately feel an affinity with it. The way it lands with me is just like how we’d talk about financial literacy in the business school, where it's about one's understanding of money, financialization and financial institutions. So when I hear the term ‘racial literacy’, I imagine it involves one's social, theoretical and critical understanding of race, racialization and systems of racial power.

That said, racial literacy can be a hard sell in the business school. There is a rich history of presenting business and its attendant neoliberal, capitalistic norms as politically neutral. It is not uncommon for business students to start and end their degrees believing that they are simply learning the ‘true’ reality of the world rather than a specific ideology that promotes performance, productivity and profit.

I think critical race theory is so vital to anyone working in and around organizations, and that's why I teach it to my students who are current and future professionals. Not all universities will take this kind of work seriously. And if it is even brought into a curriculum, there are the dangers of being co- opted by those who may take a groundbreaking concept like intersectionality and dilute it down to be about how ‘everybody has different identities’. So there are countless opportunities for domestication and co- optation with anti- racist education.

Anti- racist work is constantly facing resistance from people who think, ‘Why the hell do we have to learn this?’ and potentially become even more stubborn about their racism because it seems like there's some sort of managerial mandate to learn critical race theory. Some of my recent experiences suggest that there is great promise in creating spaces in the margins of the academy, or beyond the academy altogether.