We learned your French

We learned your English

Your Dutch

Your Spanish

Your Portuguese

You learned our nothing

You called us stupid

That’s white privilege

And I’m sure it probably hurts for you to hear those two words

Kind of like gunshots and explosions

From those commissioned to protect you

Whisking past your ears

What is white privilege?

— Kyla Jenée Lacey

Excerpt from White Privilege

Introduction

In 2021, critical race theory (CRT) turned into a political rallying cry in the United States when Republican legislatures campaigned to ban it from public schools as a supposedly ‘divisive’ subject (Schuessler, 2021). In the span of a few months, CRT went from a somewhat esoteric field developed by legal scholars in the 1980s to the subject of contentious media debate, with Fox News mentioning ‘critical race theory’ over 1,900 times in just four months (Power, 2021). Florida Governor, Ron Desantis, proclaimed that CRT is ‘basically teaching kids to hate our country and to hate each other based on race’ (Kruse, 2021). The campaign against CRT had material consequences for anti-racist educators around the country, with teachers like Matthew Hawn dismissed from his position after sharing with his students the poem by Kyla Jenée Lacey at the top of this article.

Despite the moral panic over CRT, few of its detractors appeared to be able to articulate precisely what it is, using the term instead as a dog whistle to derail anti-racist ethics. Many critical race theorists who developed the field to study and transform the relationships between race, racism, and white supremacy were perplexed by the sudden public outcry (Delgado et al., 2017). Central to CRT is the understanding that race is a fundamental organising principle of social life. Yet arguably, the fear, anxiety, and contempt elicited by the notion that public schools are discussing race, however misplaced, exemplify the importance of an anti-racist ethics in education. Specifically, this article located within the special issue on Racial Justice and Business Ethics, speaks to fellow business school educators and administrators about the challenges of anti-racist business education that is reflected in, yet extend far beyond, the recent furore over CRT. I conduct an autoethnographic inquiry of my own experiences as an anti-racist educator working in Australian business schools to answer the research question: What are the barriers to anti-racist teaching in business schools? To answer this question, I engage the storytelling traditions of CRT to share my own experiences as a management academic attempting to teach anti-racism in business schools within a world witnessing the depreciating value of Black lives (Andrews, 2018a; Sharpe, 2016; Wilderson, 2020). My experiences illustrate how barriers to anti-racist education interweave individual/interpersonal, institutional, and ideological domains of power and thus require multilayered solutions to overcome in business schools.

While this article focusses on North American knowledges and practices, the imperative for anti-racist education is not confined to North America. At a Black Lives Matter demonstration in West Hollywood in 2020, a white Australian reporter asked a protestor to explain police brutality to her audience who she explained has no experience with Black death at the hands of police. Except that by 2021, at least 474 Indigenous people in Australia have lost their lives in custody while no police have been convicted in any of those cases (Mao, 2021). The reporter’s ignorance is shared among many white Australians who believe that racism is something that happens ‘out there’ in the U.S. and therefore irrelevant to us. White supremacy was exported around the world through European colonialism and thus education, globally, needs to attend to localised expressions of race, racism, and white supremacy.

I begin by offering an overview of the racialised nature of business to show why an anti-racist ethics is paramount to business. I then discuss the research around anti-racist education, including critiques of conventional teaching practices in business schools. This theoretical groundwork helps me make sense of my experiences as an anti-racist educator, which I illustrate through vignettes of my attempts to introduce anti-racism into my classrooms. Through the analysis of my experiences, I offer some reflections of the practices and conditions that make anti-racist teaching possible within business schools.

Race, Racism, and White Supremacy in Business

Despite its recent malignment by conservative politicians, CRT has long served as an anti-racist ethics to understand and change how race and racism function in society. Foundational to this movement was that idea that racism is ‘normal, not aberrant, in American society’ (Delgado et al., 2013, p. 2). CRT has been immensely influential, and among its many pollinations include both business and education. Race is integral to business because capitalism is racist (Dar et al., 2021). The prevailing structure of the economy justifies the flow of capital towards white people and white institutions. Anti-racism therefore inheres an ethical imperative to redress the economic dispossession of Black people. An anti-racist ethics of business is transgressive and calls for a commitment to transform work, organisations, and the economy.

In 1992, Stella Nkomo (1992) advanced a pathbreaking critique of the silence of race in management and organisation studies in her article, ‘The emperor has no clothes: Rewriting “race in organizations”’. She argued that race is and has always been constitutive of organisations even though it has not been explicitly acknowledged in much of business scholarship. Nkomo’s review of the literature showed that the dominant psychologistic paradigm of management and organisation studies produced largely quantitative studies that saw racism as tantamount to measurable prejudicial attitudes. She argues that this research was primarily motivated by understanding how Black workers could assimilate into white institutions while ignoring the sociological dimensions of race. Nkomo called on the discipline to dethrone the emperor and decentre white men as the hegemonic producers and gatekeepers of knowledge. Her critique, now 30 years on, has challenged us to see racism as more than individual attitudes and interpersonal conflict, and to recognise it instead as a social and political phenomenon maintained within the broader system of white supremacy.

When I refer to white supremacy, I follow its conceptualisation in CRT as an ideology that confers unearned privilege onto people racialised as white and upholds the belief in white people’s physical, intellectual, cultural, and moral superiority (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Yancy, 2012). White supremacy is distinguished from racism, as racism is understood as the mundane, everyday acts that maintain white supremacist structures and cultures (Gillborn, 2006). Where racism tends to focus on interpersonal relations as well as institutional practices, white supremacy focusses instead on the cultural norms and conventions that maintain racial oppression in society. Yet, despite concerted efforts in CRT to identify and challenge racial injustice over the past few decades, white supremacy remains ‘a pervasively malignant and malicious systemic illness’ (Yancy, 2018, p. 1) and ‘as embedded in the fabric of North American society as ever, coded into the DNA of the system’ (Andrews, 2018a, p. xv).

The white supremacist ideology of business rationalised colonialism and chattel slavery, framing the arguments for these institutional practices primarily in terms of the economic benefits for the white propertied class (Harris, 1993). In the current age, business continues to be regarded as an apolitical phenomenon while the disproportionate flow of capital to white people and white institutions is rarely interrogated as an expression of racial inequity (Delgado et al., 2017). Nkomo’s (1992) intervention made way for more research that demonstrated how white supremacy is fundamental to management and organisational knowledge and practice. Bill Cooke (2003), for one, pointed out how the origins of management is overwhelmingly credited to the North American railroads project, yet prior to the railroads, plantations gave shape to contemporary managerial theories and practices through the ‘management’ of slaves. The legacy of antebellum slavery endures in management today with the commodification of workers and pervasive mechanisms of industrial discipline and control (Ruef & Harness, 2009). Meanwhile, the work of Joan Acker (2006, 2012) was instrumental in extending an intersectional approach (Collins, 2019; Crenshaw, 1989) that recognised how organisational hierarchies are simultaneously racialised, gendered, and classed, in a framework she referred to as ‘inequality regimes’. At the same time, Eduardo Ibarra-Colado’s (2006) rich body of work around epistemic coloniality has shown how Anglo-American knowledges impose a neoliberal rationality that deems indigenous Latin American knowledges abnormal and illogical.

These interrogations paved the way for studies that traced the pervasive presence of race, racism, and white supremacy in business. This includes the public policies and financial practices of redlining, which refused to insure mortgages in and around Black neighbourhoods, enabled racial segregation throughout the 20th Century (Rothstein, 2017). Subsidised suburban homes designated for whites allowed white families to accrue wealth via their home equities while Black families were largely confined to urban slums (Rothstein, 2017). The creation of racially segregated neighbourhoods further drove spatialising practices of environmental racism that exposed people of colour to increased air, water, and noise pollution (Dickinson, 2012). Under the guise of servicing the financially starved Black neighbourhoods, the 1980s saw the rise of subprime mortgages that disproportionately devastated Black borrowers when the subprime market collapsed (Hernandez, 2009). The effects of these policies and practices are seen in the persistent economic disparity today where median Black wealth remained around 12 per cent of white wealth in 2019 (Fry et al., 2021).

Research has also shown that racism shapes recruitment, retention, performance management, and pay and promotion (Bell & Nkomo, 2001; Booth et al., 2012; Greenhaus et al., 1990; Härtel et al., 1999; Parker, 2005; Rosette et al., 2008; Van Laer & Janssens, 2011; Wyatt & Silvester, 2015). Black workers are persistently impeded in their ability to gain employment and progress in their careers, earning less money and concentrated in occupations with lower status compared to white workers (Whitaker, 2019). The everyday experiences of Black workers are also marked by insidious incidences of mistreatment and microaggressions (Deitch et al., 2003; Pierce, 2012; Puwar, 2004). When entrepreneurs of colour start their own companies, they are less likely to gain venture capital funding and are often regarded as less creditworthy by banks, even when they have a good credit history (Fairlie et al., 2022). The rise of Black entrepreneurial districts after abolition (known as Black Wall Streets) overcame considerable racial barriers and fostered funding access and the acquisition of business skills for Black businessowners. However, many of these districts that provided economic opportunities and a refuge from racial hostility were destroyed by both public policy and violence (Prieto et al., 2022). It is clear that race, racism, and white supremacy are integral to business yet despite their relevance to a range of business disciplines, they rarely feature in business school curricula.

Given these complexities, I apply a framework adapted from Collins and Bilge (2016) to navigate the multilayered expressions of race, racism, and white supremacy in business education. Specifically, I will examine the barriers to anti-racist education across three interconnected domains of power: (1) individual/interpersonal, (2) institutional, and (3) ideological. The individual/interpersonal level is concerned with people’s senses of self, their lives, and how they relate to one another. I have combined the individual and interpersonal domains in recognising that individual experiences of race are relationally constituted. The institutional level is concerned with how racism and white supremacy are organised and structured.

The ideological level addresses the white supremacist nature of business and society and attends to how cultural norms and conventions of anti-Blackness are normalised and legitimised in everyday life (Nkomo & Al Ariss, 2014; Ray, 2019). An important aspect of this domain is the recognition that white supremacy is produced, defended, and disseminated in the academy (Arday & Mirza, 2018; Dar et al., 2021; Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012; Muzanenhamo & Chowdhury, 2021). The research and teaching activities of universities play a key role in upholding white supremacist constructions of business knowledge and practice and therefore academics have an ethical responsibility to foster more inclusive and liberatory classrooms (hooks, 1994). As there have been comprehensive critiques of race scholarship in recent years, the focus of this article will be on the teaching activities of business schools. While there is an overlap between those who research and those who teach race, anti-racist scholarship and education present their own possibilities and challenges such as those relating to institutional support, industry partnership, funding, and student feedback. The next section will explore the literature on anti-racist education and its implementation in business schools.

Anti-Racist Education

Like business, education is an institution through which racism and white supremacy are normalised. In Gloria Ladson-Billings (1998, p. 18) definitive analysis, she outlines three ways a ‘white supremacist master script’ is maintained in educational practices. First, the curriculum whitewashes history and builds domesticated images of happy multiculturalism (see also Ahmed, 2008a). Second, instruction tends to assume a racialised and classed deficit model, where teachers expect failure from Black students and are exhorted to find ‘“the right strategy or technique” to deal with (read: control) “at-risk” (read: African American) students’ (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 19). Third, racial biases are ingrained in standardised tests, where assessment design serves to provide a scientific rationalism for Black students’ supposed deficiency.

Alongside these educational practices, Ladson-Billings (1998) also recognises two institutional factors that compound Black disadvantage, including poor school funding in Black-dominated districts and desegregation policies that cater to white students and their families. In higher education, funding disparities are reflected in the underrepresentation of non-white students at elite institutions (Andrews, 2018b). The underrepresentation of Black faculty, especially in higher-ranked positions, has further contributed to exclusionary curricula that neglect to reflect and engage the students. A 2020 report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that white people accounted for 75 per cent of full-time academic faculty in the U.S., rising to 80 per cent at the full professorial rank compared to just 4 per cent of Black professors (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020). Canadian studies similarly show that ‘visible minority’ and Indigenous faculty combined comprise 25 per cent of full-time academics, although more detailed data on race and rank are not collected (Universities Canada, 2018). In both cases, the racial diversity of faculty was far below the diversity of the student base, which is 46 per cent in the U.S. (Espinosa et al., 2019) and 43 per cent in Canada (Universities Canada, 2018). In response, students have launched campaigns like Rhodes Must Fall and Why is My Curriculum White? in 2015 to pressure universities to address the raciality and coloniality of higher education (Peters, 2018). At the same time, academics of colour and their allies are challenging white supremacy and helping to raise consciousness around the importance of anti-racism in business education (Liu, 2022).

Research of education policy has also revealed that white supremacy undergirds the sector. Examining the priorities that policy sets, the beneficiaries it privileges, and the outcomes it produces, Gillborn (2005, p. 496) concluded that the norms and conventions of the education system ‘encode a deep privileging of white students and, in particular, the legitimisation, defence, and extension of Black inequity’. He specifies that with regard to policy priorities, racial equity has ‘been at best a marginal concern, at worst non-existent’ while the use of central reform strategies to boost educational outcomes have worked against racial equity yet are nevertheless promoted as ‘best practice’ (Gillborn, 2005, pp. 496–497).

Even in the earliest interventions, education scholars committed to CRT foresaw the dangers of institutional co-optation. Ladson-Billings (1998), for example, recalls the radical pedagogical strategies that have been proposed to address racial injustice such as cooperative classrooms and multicultural education that were diluted into trivial and superficial activities. In more recent years, calls to ‘decolonise the university’ have rarely resulted in meaningful systemic change within universities and academia. So that while institutions such as Birmingham City University laid claim to being the first university in Europe to offer a Black Studies program in 2016, one of its professors, Kehinde Andrews (2018b), considers that the program was in a large part supported by the university because of its marketing and revenue generation potentials rather than any sincere commitment to racial justice. Birmingham City followed in the steps of American colleges such as San Francisco State College, where the Black Studies program was founded in the 1960s after students and faculty protested for five months. Andrews (2018b) suggests that American universities were eager to look proactive by hiring Black academics but stripped the revolutionary agenda from Black Studies curricula, ultimately curtailing Black education from becoming ‘the instrument for change’ it was intended to be (Hare, 1972, p. 33; see also Cann & DeMeulenaere, 2020). Education institutions have thus long demonstrated Ahmed’s (2007) analysis of the ways organisations make performative gestures towards anti-racist ethics without a genuine commitment to change.

Critical scholars working in business schools have raised ethical awareness of the ways our teaching contributes to growing global inequities. Despite business schools becoming signatories of the UN Principles of Responsible Management Education and expanding their ethics courses in the wake of high-profile corporate scandals and managerial malfeasance in the 2000s, business schools continue to be complicit in upholding oppressive and exploitative regimes (Fotaki & Prasad, 2015). Fotaki and Prasad (2014, p. 105) exhort business educators to ‘integrate their values of social justice into management education’ with greater critical reflexivity. Following Paulo Freire’s (1970) concept of conscientização, management education has the potential (and arguably the moral obligation) to use the classroom to deepen students’ sense of their social embeddedness and highlight the unjust systems in which we all live (Fotaki & Prasad, 2014, 2015; Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012; Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021).

It seems then that anti-racist pedagogy is not confined to curricula and instructional designs that address race and racism, but also requires critical consciousness on the part of the educators, and institutions that are meaningfully committed to the liberation aims of anti-racist education (Cann & DeMeulenaere, 2020; Liu, 2023). To explore the multilayered practices and conditions that make anti-racist education possible, I draw on my own experiences as a critical race educator who has taught in a number of business schools over the last 14 years. In the next section, I will discuss how autoethnography as a research method allows me to engage storytelling to reveal insights about the challenges and possibilities for anti-racist education in business schools.

Methods

Autoethnography

Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of research and writing involving the study of the author’s personal lived experiences that offer insights into sociological phenomenon (Ellis, 1998; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Reed-Danahay, 1997). In addition to their memories, autoethnographers may draw on diaries, memoirs, letters, and e-mails to help them build an understanding of their perceptions of themselves and their social reality in relation to the sociopolitical context (Haynes, 2011; Vickers, 2007). Although autoethnography prescribes no fixed form or format, autoethnographic writing enables the author and the readers alike to ‘make sense of their experiences and enter into dialogue through empathic understanding’, so that they may ‘analyse and understand personal experience as part of a larger social and political system’ (van Amsterdam, 2015, p. 270). Autoethnography does not presume that research is about the objective discovery of ‘truth’ (Haynes, 2011) and instead, compels researchers to recognise themselves as inseparable instruments of their inquiry. By speaking from the self (Ellis, 1998), autoethnography resonates with CRT in the ways it engages storytelling to invite understandings of social reality from marginalised standpoints (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). This article adopts an autoethnographic approach to answer the research question: What are the barriers to anti-racist teaching in business schools?

Autoethnography has long offered rich insights into teaching. Autoethnographic studies from the perspective of teachers illuminate the complex processes navigating the relational dynamics inside the classroom as well as the sociopolitical dynamics of the university (Humphreys, 2006; Sinclair, 2007). Autoethnographic studies from students expose their visceral experiences of marginalisation in the academy as well as the institutional and ideological forces that promote uncritical knowledge (Blackwell, 2010; Prasad, 2013; Taylor, 2020). Autoethnography enables a deeper exploration of teaching sensitive, unconventional, or controversial subjects such as race and racism, and has the potential to elicit knowledge about the possibilities for anti-racist education in business schools.

Central to CRT is the technique of counter-storytelling to reveal understandings of society from the standpoint of marginalised peoples. Yet, frank and honest critiques of racism can be challenging and engaging in anti-racist scholarship remains risky. Critical race scholars in our field have often revealed that they have been dissuaded from researching race at some point in their careers (Liu, 2019; Muzanenhamo & Chowdhury, 2022; Nkomo, 2021). At best, race is seen as irrelevant and racism as obsolete, where the most extreme examples of slavery, genocide, and white extremism are deemed relics of the past (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Delgado, 1990). At worst, discussions of race are experienced as tantamount to accusations of racism itself, triggering shame, denial, and rage among those who feel they are the targets of blame (Yancy, 2018). Commitments to and protections around academic freedom do not always extend as far as anti-racism and doing this work bears personal and professional risks (Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021). Doing autoethnography requires continual reflexive interrogation of ethics (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). Specifically, my accounts here invariably relate to others—my colleagues and students—who are being represented in particular ways by my words. As such, I need to emphasise that none of my accounts are indictments about the individuals involved. Indeed, to protect their anonymity, names and other identifying features are not mentioned and efforts have been made to disguise the people present in these interactions (Bottrell et al., 2019; Haynes, 2011; Sparkes, 2007; Watson, 2000). This practice is important because ultimately, anti-racist education extends beyond the actions of individual social actors. My writing does not pretend that I am an objective, detached observer but recognises instead that my knowledge moves through me, the flesh and bones of a woman of colour, and is invariably shaped by my standpoint. Like all autoethnographies, my accounts here should be understood as simply constructing personal stories ‘inspired by partial happenings, fragmented memories, echoes of conversations, whispers in corridors, fleeting glimpses of myriad reflections seen through broken glass, and multiple layers of fiction and narrative imaginings’ (Sparkes, 2007, p. 522). I choose words to capture the visceral realities of everyday racism through the kinds of ‘expressive discourse that unsettle us, that make us uncomfortable with its daring frankness that pulls us in even as it unnerves’ (Yancy, 2012, p. 30).

Research Context

The institutions in which the narratives of my teaching take place are mid-sized universities in Australia that boast racial diversity among both students and faculty. Indeed, all the universities at which I have taught avow diversity, inclusion, equality, and social justice among its values. Yet, racism is systemic and endemic in the settler-colonial nation of Australia. As in North America, Australia enforced immigration restriction since its federation in 1901, heralding the White Australia Policy (Ang, 2014; Hage, 1998; Jayasuriya et al., 2003). The Policy reflected the nation’s aspirations to maintain a homogenous white identity by outlawing the permanent settlement and deporting non-white migrants (Curthoys, 2003). The White Australia Policy was officially abolished in 1973 with the establishment of multiculturalism. Unlike the laissez-faire approach of the U.S., Australia resembles Canada in its deliberate management of state-sponsored diversity, touting an ‘amalgam of policies designed to supervise incorporation and address diversity’s consequences for communal relations and identity’ (Walsh, 2012, p. 282).

Given Australian anxieties about our colonial past, constructions of race are usually euphemised as ‘ancestry’ or ‘culture’. Although Australia’s diversity is often hailed as a cornerstone of its ‘successful multicultural society’, it is described as being underpinned by our common values and commitment to ‘freedom, security, and prosperity’ (Department of Home Affairs, 2018, p. 7); code for libertarianism, border controls, and capitalism. White supremacy thus undergirds Australian multiculturalism and in the present neoliberal context, non-white people are increasingly seen in terms of their economic value to a parochial and protectionist Australia (Liu, 2017; Stratton & Ang, 2013; Walsh, 2012). Multiculturalism serves as ‘an alibi against racism as well as a criterion of cultural capital through the consumption of difference without any apparent interrogation’ (Banerjee & Linstead, 2001, p. 705). As Hage (1998) remarks, multiculturalism is not what Australia is, but what it has.

Teaching Anti-Racism

I began my PhD in 2008 and taught across a wide array of courses around management, including human resource management, performance management, international business, industrial relations, and management strategy. Early in my career, subject discussions of race were more modest, starting with a single lecture on business ethics (usually inserted at the end of the semester) that presented existing research around racial discrimination in organisations (e.g. Booth et al., 2012; Deitch et al., 2003; Rosette et al., 2008) for around 15 min. This limited acknowledgement belied CRT principles as the subtext of my curriculum was that racism is abnormal and aberrant (cf. Delgado & Stefancic, 2013). I stayed silent on the historical and structural contexts of this discrimination and thus implied that organisations should seek to stamp out discrimination under vague assumptions that equated diversity with goodness (Ahmed, 2008a, 2008b, 2012). I adopted this neoliberal approach to race as it was consistent with the hegemony of management pedagogy where discrimination is treated as the rare result of a few ‘bad apples’. Eliminating discrimination, was therefore, assumed to be a simple and routine task undertaken by managers for the greater good of both the organisation and its employees. In the final year of my PhD, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was fatally shot in Sanford, Florida. That following week when my students and I were expecting to discuss stereotypes, we shared stories of how our own lives had been marked by racial stereotypes. Students of colour talked openly about when they had feared for their own safety. Our classroom became a space where we could develop our collective consciousness around racism and grieve the loss of Black lives. The possibilities for more radical and meaningful anti-racist education were revealed to me.

In 2018, I redesigned my third-year undergraduate management subject to engage in critical interrogations of work and organisations. Each module of my 12-week curriculum weaves into one another. We learn about Mills’ (2000) concept of the sociological imagination first so students may appreciate how business is socially embedded and shaped by power. We then move on to understanding neoliberalism and capitalism through the history of management, organisational implications of gender and sexuality under patriarchy, race under white supremacy, culture under imperialism, so that by the end of the semester, they have developed an intersectional understanding of power. In the lecture on race under white supremacy, students and I spend an hour and a half exploring the social construction of race (Frankenberg, 1993), racialised organisations (Ray, 2019), white supremacy at work (Bonilla-Silva, 2001; Pierce, 2012; Puwar, 2004), intersectionality (Collins, 2019; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Nash, 2019), anti-racist interventions (Liu, 2020), and solidarity and allyship (Dreher, 2009; Swan, 2017). Anticipating that students may be surprised by such an extensive exploration of CRT in a management subject, I share with my students why I am moved to bring social issues into the classroom.

figure a

I present hooks’ (1994) words from her book Teaching to Transgress in the first week of semester. I acknowledge that business education by default tends to be presented as apolitical but that student-led movements have demanded a moral reckoning that I feel called to answer. I also confess that while I was a student, I rarely saw myself reflected among my lecturers or reading lists, and came to believe racist presumptions of my incompetence (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012) until engaging with hooks’ (1994) work showed me that learning could liberate.

The following series of vignettes illustrate the barriers I have met in my attempts to introduce CRT into my classrooms. The first three stories show the different ways students resist or struggle with anti-racist principles. The fourth story recounts the response from a colleague who acted as a gatekeeper in deciding what was and what was not to be included in the degree. Finally, the fifth and last story highlights the psychoemotional tolls anti-racist teaching takes on the educator. In each of the proceeding vignettes, I apply the multilayered framework to show how the barriers to anti-racist business education interweave individual/interpersonal, institutional, and ideological domains of power.

The university distributes a student survey in the third week of semester, designed to provide early feedback for educators about students’ experiences of the subject. Some of the comments I receive include: ‘I honestly did not understand the purpose of this subject’, ‘this subject felt more like a sociology subject than a management subject’, ‘I expected to learn about how to make strategic decisions regarding management, all that happened in this subject was learning about social issues which are not relevant to a business degree’, ‘I am really disappointed in the university for having me study this subject… it feels like this subject was designed more for money making rather than educating management students about long-term impacts of their careers’, ‘I wish there was a greater focus on the real world implications of management, such as employment relationships, how management is relevant to businesses in the long term, how to adopt relevant management qualities in order to succeed as a management professional, balancing employee needs as well as business needs, legal implications of management, redundancy, termination, recruitment, etc.’ But the more certain students question the relevance of race to the ‘real world’ of business, the more urgent and important it feels to challenge the invisibility of white supremacy. And regardless of what students write in the surveys, every semester, a growing number of students of colour will linger after the last of their classmates file out of the lecture hall. They often murmur a ‘thank you’ and hold their gaze with a silent understanding between us that we recognise one another.

What may appear to be resistance to anti-racist principles from individual students is rooted in institutional and ideological domains of power. The neoliberal ideology of business schools is firmly embedded not only among faculty and administrators but also among the students. Many students are committed to their self-making as ‘professionals’. Inculcating themselves in capitalist logics is understood as tantamount to their ‘success’ in the ‘real world’. What counts as ‘success’ and what it means to be in the ‘real world’ are both discursive constructs that were previously developed in large part by universities. Graduate ideals ranged from a broad liberal education to more technical knowledge and skills in professional and vocational degrees with the overarching expectation that it was the employers’ responsibility to apprentice graduates into jobs (Boden & Nedeva, 2010). However, governments have played a major role in reshaping graduate ideals from the mid-1980s, transferring the onus of developing job-specific skills onto universities and passing training costs onto students (Boden & Nedeva, 2010). Higher education is increasingly seen by students as a product to be consumed in order to secure long-term financial returns, thereby constraining university agency over curriculum design and pedagogical practices (Boden & Nedeva, 2010).

Understanding these discursive struggles over graduate success can illuminate why a student perceived an alliance between my subject and the profit-making impetus of the university. My subject with its focus on social issues was ironically seen as a cynical money-making exercise on the part of the university while job-specific subjects with their emphasis on money-making are deemed for greater professional and social good. Dominated by an economic rationale, job-specific subjects are perceived as supporting students to secure employment (Boden & Nedeva, 2010) while a subject centred around social issues, deemed as promising little or no financial return, is the self-serving ploy of universities to steal student tuition. White interests and values are therefore maintained under the seemingly apolitical ideal of ‘employability’.

With the hope of cultivating conscientização (Freire, 1970), I adopt autoethnography as an overarching framework for my subject. After introducing students to autoethnography in the second week of semester, they write a vignette each week, reflecting on how that week’s topic emerges in their professional and personal lives. For the week on race and white supremacy, I ask students to: ‘reflect on an arresting moment of when the racial identity of yourself or someone else became apparent to you. Consider how race was implicated in your social environment growing up such as how race was discussed (or not discussed) in your family, in your neighbourhood, in your community’. While this prompt elicits raw and insightful accounts of my students’ racial identifications and confrontations with white supremacy, there is also a common trope that emerges in the submissions of those who struggle to identify and name racism. Their accounts are startlingly similar. The story goes that the student works a part-time job at a retail store with a Black colleague. A white customer comes in one day and loudly remarks, ‘I don’t want to be served by this person.’ Hence, the student discovers racism for the first time in their life. They conclude their reflection by remarking on the importance of treating everyone with kindness and respect regardless of the colour of their skin.

How students conceptualise and articulate examples of racism are constrained by white supremacist ideology. Before enrolling in my subject, many of my students assume racism is an overt and intentional act of prejudice towards someone on the basis of their skin-colour, a narrow view that Nkomo (1992) critiqued 30 years earlier. CRT understandings of racism in both its institutional and ideological forms remain invisible, hence why CRT is sometimes seen as an overreaction, sowing division and discontent where there need not be. The trope of the ‘bad apple’ racist, so often caricaturised by someone who overly and explicitly proclaims their prejudices for the world to see, belies the reality of everyday racism as increasingly subtle and covert (Essed, 1991; Nkomo, 1992). Growing studies of microaggressions (Pierce, 1974; Torino et al., 2019) and benevolent racism (Esposito & Romano, 2014) underscore the ways racism has shifted over the decades as it has become less socially acceptable to express blatantly prejudicial views in many professional and public spaces. Contemporary forms of ‘racism without racists’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2006) tend to be expressed via ostensibly neutral or even complimentary attitudes that nevertheless uphold white supremacy. From this perspective, racism is condemned at the same time it is minimised as an anomalous practice that is ‘no longer an insurmountable—or even significant—obstacle to mobility and success’ (Esposito & Romano, 2014, p. 73). So struggling to discuss race and see racism beyond these myths yet needing to fulfil institutional requirements to complete their degree, many students are compelled to tell stories about racist ‘bad apples’ when pushed at this prompt.

When we meet in the classroom, I attempt to fracture the construct of the ‘bad apple’ racist. I share with them my own vignette to illustrate the expectations for the assessment, choosing to recount an experience where a former student revealed that one of my unnamed white colleagues refers to her as ‘the Selena Gomez girl’ for their likeness after telling her that her ethnic name is too hard to pronounce. Many students are stunned after I read my vignette aloud as they begin to consider how racism can be casual, even seemingly jovial. Not least of all, my choice to show how a teacher can perpetuate racism prompts students to re-examine the incidences of everyday racism in their own lives, especially in imbalanced power relations.

The previous stories illustrated how students can resist and struggle with anti-racist analyses of business, respectively. These tensions presenting at the individual/interpersonal level in fact reveal institutional and ideological dynamics that shape the ways we understand race and racism in the context of business and impede our collective capacity to engage in anti-racist ethics in business education. The next story shows how even students who ostensibly embrace the critical principles of the subject can struggle with white supremacist ideology.

In one semester, four white women who have formed a group approach me at the end of my lecture on gender and sexuality under patriarchy to tell me how much they are enjoying the subject. They seek my advice on how they could make the topic the focus of their final assessments and I suggest various ways they could explore the intersectionality of gender and sexuality (i.e. the privileges and oppressions of being cisgender heterosexual women) or gender and capitalism (i.e. the rise of postfeminism). A couple of weeks later, they visit my office hours to show me their draft presentation where each of them shared stories of their gender disadvantage in the workplace, and I emphasise again the assessment’s focus on intersectional analysis. I’m dismayed that at their final presentation, it seems nothing has changed, and the presentation concludes with liberal exhortations for organisations to value women and individuated recommendations for women to be more confident at work and ‘lean in’.

With white feminism as the dominant frame in business studies over the last few decades, gender is often treated as tantamount to ‘diversity’ and gender inequality is assumed to be the most important, if not the only, form of social injustice in organisations and society (Bilge, 2013; Tomlinson, 2018). White feminism refers to the oppressive frame within women’s liberation movements that elevated elite white women’s needs, interests, and challenges above those of Indigenous women, women of colour, working class women, and queer, trans, and non-binary folks (Combahee River Collective 1983; hooks, 1994; Lugones, 2014; Taylor, 2017). White feminist ideologies reduce social justice to a liberal notion of cisgender, heterosexual, elite class, able-bodied, white women gaining the same power as privileged white men (Heizmann & Liu, 2022). Business is particularly pernicious in the ways radical, liberatory work is diluted into more conservative calls for ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’. For many of my students, I have come to accept that my subject on its own is inadequate to bring students through an awareness of interlocking systems of oppression (Combahee River Collective, 1983) and they require more opportunities for critical reflexivity before some are ready to grapple with the ways they benefit from or participate in domination.

A colleague tells me that they are looking for volunteers to develop online modules for the advanced MBA that will focus on cultural intelligence, ethics, the purpose of business, and diversity, ‘particularly gender’. She explains that the idea is that it will be a sort of ‘detox’ course that is designed to challenge established business conventions. She identifies the white male professors who have committed to contributing the first three topics and asks if I would be interested in delivering the diversity module, adding that her and her co-coordinators thought that my recently published research would fit the topic of diversity. I hesitate, doing the split-second mental assessment about whether I should comply or resist. I thank her for thinking of me but clarify that my publications have argued that diversity management treats people of colour as resources to be used for the benefit of white people and white institutions. My advice for thinking about and practising diversity differently would entail dismantling the interlocking systems of imperialism, white supremacism, capitalism, and patriarchy. I offer that my module may be suitable for her detox course, but there would be no hard feelings if she prefers to get a different take. The out I offer to my colleague is graciously taken. She adds that my angle on diversity management is ‘too confrontational’ at the start of the program for the students and thanks me for being so upfront.

White supremacist ideology is reproduced and reinforced via curricula when institutional gatekeepers specify the focus of business school degrees. The institution prided the course for being more socially conscious and set out with the aim of challenging conventional business thought and practices, but I inadvertently bumped up against the limits of this consciousness. My interest in race (and not just gender) and my insistence on naming the oppression of racism and white supremacy (and not just promote a happy concept of diversity; Ahmed, 2008b) were judged as too confrontational.

These invisible barriers of epistemic respectability are erected throughout business schools. I have learnt over the years that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to engage in anti-racist education informed by institutional norms and shaped by the privilege and power of the educator. As a light-skinned, cisgender, straight, able-bodied, and neurotypical woman of colour, I am usually able to get away with much more radicality than my more marginalised peers. ‘You make intersectionality less scary’, said a white woman to me once after a workshop. It was intended as a compliment, but it highlighted for me the anti-Blackness that pervades anti-racist business education. I experience the difference between when I speak from marginalised and privileged standpoints, where my anti-racist lectures are more likely perceived as the biassed, self-interested whining of a person of colour but my lectures on queer and trans issues as a cisgender heterosexual person are lauded as generous, even heroic.

Inherent to the happy conceptualisations of diversity is that oppression is always something that happens ‘out there’ (Ahmed, 2008b; Dar et al., 2021). Business convention of constructing racism as an overt and aberrant incident means that it can be treated as something created by a few ‘bad apples’ in organisations rather than something institutionalised and endemic to the culture. The institutional and ideological focus of my anti-racist education has repeatedly violated the invisible boundaries throughout my career. As Ahmed (2017) describes, when you name a problem, you become the problem. Anti-racist education holds up a mirror to individuals and institutions who often see themselves reflected in the critiques. Rather than address racism and white supremacy, institutions may blame the anti-racist educator as the source of institutional injury (Ahmed, 2018).

figure b

In a dark theatre, I am in the middle of my lecture on race and I begin explaining the concept of white supremacy while the slide behind me transitions to a picture of an advertisement for Pear’s soap from the 1890s, showing a moustachioed colonial general washing his hands at a basin while the border around this picture depicts British ships and a light-skinned fully-clothed figure giving a bar of soap to a dark-skinned half-naked figure sitting on the ground. Below the illustrations, the copy reads, ‘the first step towards lightening the white man’s burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness’.

The sea of students before me are enshrouded by the dark but slide projections at the front of the room cast their faces in an eerie glow. Three white students sitting together in one of the foremost rows elbow one another and I noticed for the first time in the lecture that one of them is discreetly propping his phone up on the desk and snapping pictures. I freeze. I imagine him sending my department chair a photograph of my slide with ‘WHITE SUPREMACY’ as the big bold header, complaining about being forced to learn about race. I try to keep talking but now I notice someone else a few rows behind extending their arms to snap a picture of the slide. I envision the lot of them marching into the school building, circulating a petition for my immediate dismissal. But they are smiling. As are the three students in front. I think of how they could post my slides on Facebook, shaming my institution for giving me a platform for ‘divisive content’ or even ‘reverse racism’. I stammer through the rest of my lecture and ask if there are any questions before I dismiss the class. A hand shoots up at the front of the theatre, ‘Will your slides be made available online?’ My face burns hot. It dawns on me that I forgot to upload the slides to our subject portal before the lecture this week. That’s why the students were taking photographs. I apologise profusely and promise the slides will go up the moment I get back to my office. The students file out the classroom, smiling, laughing, and thanking me for a great lecture.

This story shows how anti-racist educators grapple with internalised barriers. Fear is a constant companion to my work. Department chairs have physically recoiled at my mention of the term ‘white supremacy’, and co-teachers have removed the words from our joint lecture slides and later confessed their personal disdain as the rationale. Colleagues have declared that they do not want to be associated with me and my profile as a CRT educator. There have been material professional and personal consequences for my use of CRT in my teaching (Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021). I bring the trauma of backlash (Yancy, 2018) into my classrooms. In that lecture theatre, I was suddenly reminded of my vulnerability, of the risks to my career and livelihood as an untenured faculty member at the time if my superiors were to learn of the content of my curricula. Although CRT survives as an interdisciplinary movement forty years in the making, its frank discussions of race and racism still struggle to gain legitimacy in the academy. The principle of anti-racism is continually up for debate; its status as a ‘real’ area of study repeatedly called into question.

Discussion

The preceding section examined the barriers to anti-racist business education through the analysis of five stories drawn from my personal experiences as an anti-racist educator. These stories show that the challenges to anti-racist business education interweave through individual/interpersonal, institutional, and ideological domains of power and thus require multilayered practices and conditions to overcome. Starting with the ideological level, business schools tend to assume the cultural norms and conventions of white supremacy and deny the role of race and racism in business and society (Arday & Mirza, 2018; Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012; Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021). Racism is often treated as irrelevant or obsolete, and where racism is acknowledged, it tends to be constructed as an overt but rare occurrence that ‘good’ managers can and should eliminate from their organisations. When racism is understood as systemic to white supremacist organisations and the society at large, it is often then experienced as too confrontational for a presumed white audience.

Students in higher education are no monolith. While student-led movements are calling for anti-racist curricula and pedagogy (Andrews, 2018b; Arday & Mirza, 2018; Bhambra et al., 2018), many students in business schools find it harder to recognise race and racism as legitimate or relevant to their education. Institutions and individuals alike are enmired in both white supremacist and neoliberal ideologies that have seen education policy shift towards the social construction of education for employability. Some business students may enter their degrees with the expectation that their subjects provide job-specific training (Boden & Nedeva, 2010). Not only is business believed to be detached from society but for some students, bringing social issues such as race and racism into the classroom is seen as a wasted expense at the cost of their future careers. However, my students of colour are the least likely to experience classes on race and racism as irrelevant. For some, it is a powerful and validating avowal of what they struggle with in their personal and professional lives yet rarely have the opportunity to analyse and discuss. It is a reflection of institutionalised racism and white supremacist ideology that both the real and imagined comfort of white people are prioritised over the recognition and representation of people of colour who must continue to embody their racialised subjectivities amid marginalising and denigrating practices (Burke, 2018). An anti-racist ethics demands institutions provide marginalised students with the resources and opportunities to access privileged forms of knowing while cultivating spaces for transformation (hooks, 1994).

I may choose whose voices are included in my curricula and whose experiences are centred in my classroom, but one 12-week subject in their degrees may make little difference if their other 23 subjects, organisations, communities, and society reinforce what Ladson-Billings (1998, p. 18) calls the ‘white supremacist master script’. Even for students who are not ostensibly resistant to the study of race and racism in their subject, they may struggle to conceive of race beyond dominant constructions of racism as explicit prejudicial attitudes and overt interpersonal violence (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). By only recognising these forms of racism as racism, they are unable to identify more subtle forms of institutionalised and ideological racism in organisations and society. These cultural controls around what ‘counts’ as racism mean that we can maintain the belief that racism is located in rare and aberrant cases of ‘bad apples’ and potentially divest of the ethical responsibility to challenge racism and white supremacy (Yancy, 2012). From a white feminist frame, racial and other forms of oppression are sustained by focussing on gender as the only site of diversity (Bilge, 2013; Collins & Bilge, 2016; Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012; hooks, 1994; Tomlinson, 2018). Despite my attempts to explicitly trouble this ideology with intersectionality, many students struggled with fully recognising and respecting knowledge produced outside a white standpoint.

Individual academics attempting to adopt anti-racist pedagogical practices may make little difference without institutional support (Andrews, 2018b). To teach about race and racism critically, meaningfully, and effectively, my experiences suggest that institutions would benefit from clear and consistent commitment to academic freedom (Hoepner, 2019; Orr, 2018). Institutions that espouse values of social justice and equity, diversity, and inclusion need to match those proclamations with policies and structures that resource academics to provide anti-racist education. This may also involve providing training and development programs around designing and delivering anti-racist curricula and pedagogical activities. I have devoted considerable time beyond my normal workload to researching education scholarship and experimenting with pedagogical practices on my own. I am privileged enough to have the capacity to do so given my secure employment in full-time ongoing positions that many of my more precariously employed colleagues do not, despite their personal interest and commitment to anti-racism.

Currently, anti-racist education relies primarily on the ethical will of individual academics (Fotaki & Prasad, 2014, 2015; Liu, 2023). Critical scholars engage with considerations around race and power usually beyond (or perhaps even contravening) institutional expectations because we often feel a moral imperative to foster conscientização in our classrooms (Freire, 1970). Anti-racist educators assume a significant psychoemotional burden, tarrying with fear and anxiety of student and institutional backlash for presenting ‘confrontational’ ideas. The recent public outcry against CRT highlights the persistent precarity of anti-racism (Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021; Yancy, 2018). I choose to open myself to resistance and backlash because to stay silent is to reinforce white supremacy in the business school. I grieve the years in the academy where my health and wellbeing were eroded by racism and sexism, but I remain so that I may fight for the survival of other marginalised scholars. Even if institutions may not be hostile towards anti-racist education, anti-racist educators face the risk that public backlash may exert pressure on institutions to suspend or terminate the employment of individual teachers exposed for teaching CRT as growing examples in the U.S. have shown. The psychoemotional tolls of teaching anti-racism in a white supremacist world also means that academics developing anti-racist curricula and pedagogical activities may require mentoring, counselling, and other forms of care around resistance and backlash (Liu, 2023). While I understand that safety can never truly be guaranteed, a degree of security is needed in anti-racist education. Otherwise, the intellectual, emotional, and moral labour of anti-racist education ends up falling on those who are most harmed by racial injustice.

Institutions seeking to meaningfully support anti-racist education will need to be aware of the dominant norms and conventions of the discipline that may impede anti-racist education (Liu, 2022). For example, the neoliberal ideology of business and the dominant constructs of ‘employability’ in the field may pose hurdles for convincing some students why learning about social issues is worthwhile (Fotaki & Prasad, 2014, 2015; Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021). How institutions communicate their values around justice, equity, diversity, and critical thought more broadly, reflected in the marketing and promotion activities that drive student recruitment for example, may help shape student expectations around the purpose of a business school education. As they need to do with staff, universities have a duty of care to students, and they need to recognise that Black students are particularly vulnerable to the harm caused by white supremacist policies and practices in higher education institutions and proactively work to mitigate those harms.

The overall lack of systemic change in the academy despite decades of political organising and the perpetual hostility against anti-racist ideas and interventions in the academy make some of these interventions seem out of reach. I often wonder if anti-racist education is possible within white supremacist institutions and an anti-Black world (Andrews, 2018b; Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021; Sharpe, 2016; Wilderson, 2020). As the interventions of an individual anti-racist educator may be limited, so too might be even the most sincere and committed institutions within a wider sociopolitical culture scarred by white supremacy. Perhaps then universities are not necessarily the answer nor the only frontiers for anti-racist education. Grassroots political movements and collectives have long engaged in their own forms of education, hosting teach-ins (John, 2015) and consciousness raising circles (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983a, 1983b; Sung, 2015; Taylor, 2017). These forms of liberatory education allow academics to leave the confines of the Ivory Tower and take a stance in the world beyond the academy (Bottrell et al., 2019; Burawoy, 2004). To do so is not merely an act of resistance against an anti-Black work but is necessarily an act of love for and solidarity with Black lives.

Summary and Conclusions

Summary of Findings and Possibilities for Anti-Racist Education

In this supposed time of racial reckoning, anti-racist education plays a critical role in connecting our activities in the academy with wider social issues (Burawoy, 2004). Whether or not individual academics or politicians believe race is important has become moot as growing numbers of students across increasingly diversified campuses are demanding programs that acknowledge racism and white supremacy through grassroots movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Why Is My Curriculum White? (Andrews, 2018b; Arday & Mirza, 2018; Bhambra et al., 2018; Liu, 2023). The moral imperative to tarry with the past and present atrocities of racism cannot be ignored.

This autoethnographic inquiry of my experiences as an anti-racist educator working across business schools in Australia explored the implications of bringing CRT into the classroom. In answering the research question: What are the barriers to anti-racist teaching in business schools? my analysis highlighted the challenges that impede anti-racist business education interweave through individual/interpersonal, institutional, and ideological domains of power. So that while many individual academics may have the will to become liberatory educators, institutional constraints and oppressive ideologies can frustrate their efforts to build inclusive curricula and apply anti-racist pedagogies. That said, these challenges also point to the possibilities where the current social order may be transformed.

Individual academics can drive a degree of meaningful engagement with anti-racist principles and practices. While race and racism were scarcely acknowledged early in my teaching career, I have gradually introduced more substantial and sophisticated challenges to white supremacy (and its intersections with imperialism, patriarchy, and capitalism) in my classrooms. Year by year, I notice more of my colleagues doing the same and not shying away from frank and honest discussions about injustice in their teaching. I also receive a growing number of e-mails from business school educators around the world who share stories around the ways they are introducing CRT into their curricula and troubling the dominant assumption that business is somehow ‘neutral’ and divorced from social issues. I believe these efforts have cultivated spaces where students can find some recognition for their own lived realities with racism. Curricula that assume business is race-neutral tend to promote an ethics of whiteness that perpetuates the denial of racial oppression in everyday life (Yancy, 2012). In between student-led movements and the growing cases of anti-racist education, business students may gain a growing consciousness of the liberatory potential for intellectual and social transformation (Andrews, 2018a; Arday & Mirza, 2018; Burke, 2018; hooks, 1994).

Institutions need to play a greater role in reinforcing stated values of equity, diversity, inclusion, and social justice with structures and resources that support anti-racist teaching. Training and development, mentorship, and psychoemotional care, alongside clear protections for academic freedom are vital dimensions of what is necessary to provide anti-racist education. Institutions cannot undo white supremacist ideology in business and society, but they may be able to shape students’ expectations around the purpose of higher education in ways that deepen students’ sense of their social embeddedness within the interlocking systems of oppression in which we all live (Collins & Bilge, 2016; Fotaki & Prasad, 2014, 2015; Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021; Taylor, 2017).

The hegemony of white supremacy in the academy and society has remained in continual tension with anti-racist education. Although CRT was first introduced thirty years ago, it still triggers political outrage and moral panic today. My experiences as an anti-racist educator have often led me to question whether anti-racist teaching can even be fostered within the academy. I suggest anti-racist education needs to be imagined and practiced as a cultural project and political movement, where transformation is cultivated across ideological, institutional, and individual/interpersonal levels. The white supremacist master script inscribed in education policies and structures is unlikely to be dismantled by individual academics working alone or even by individual institutions committed to racial justice. Collective efforts around and beyond the academy like workshops, teach-ins, and consciousness raising circles may be better equipped to develop an anti-racist conscientização than standalone subjects in a conventional business degree. As the number of students, academics, and administrators committed to anti-racism grows, collaborative efforts between them will more likely generate the cultural and political shift necessary for meaningful anti-racist education.

Research Limitations and Future Research

As I began writing this article, news was emerging every week of educators who have lost their jobs because they brought issues of race and racism into their classrooms. The political malignment of CRT persists and many of us wonder if our livelihoods are also at risk. As an autoethnography, this study has limitations that may be addressed through future research. Centring on my own experiences, I cannot speak to wider patterns and trends of how anti-racist education is delivered across business schools. Further empirical studies can help canvass the diverse ways in which CRT is introduced in the classroom as well as the tactics or strategies by which educators navigate student or institutional resistance to anti-racist ideas. This research agenda can also showcase the curricula and instructional designs that integrate an anti-racist ethics into various business school subjects.

Given growing cases of academics who have faced disciplinary action or the termination of their employment due to teaching CRT, future research could delve more into the professional and personal risks of being an anti-racist educator and the implications of this for both individual educators and racial diversity in higher education institutions more broadly. This line of inquiry would also help us to understand the costs of doing racial justice work and the kind of resources and support needed for institutions and other community organisations who wish to make a meaningful commitment to racial justice and liberation.

Despite the backlash against CRT, it is more important than ever that business schools and universities in general engage honestly and meaningfully with the realities of racism and white supremacy in an anti-Black world. While Black people are targeted, harassed, oppressed, and murdered, we have a moral imperative to teach anti-racism, and even when there are no more losses of Black life to grieve, anti-racist education will serve as a collective memory of white supremacy and its violences.