Weaving Color Lines: Race, Ethnicity, and the Work of Leadership in Social Change Organizations

Abstract

For social change organizations working to address intractable social problems throughout the US tackling race may not only be unavoidable, it may also represent a way to fully engage stakeholders in social change work. We argue that illuminating the relationship between race and leadership can advance our understanding of how social change leadership happens in practice. We build upon scholarship that emphasizes the ways in which seemingly essentialist, intractable racial categories are actually mutable, and the simultaneous emergence of academic research calling attention to the constructed and collective dimensions of leadership. Using a constructionist lens to analyze narratives from 22 social change organizations and building six of these as in-depth cases, we document three distinct means of understanding race, explore how they help to do the work of leadership, and suggest ways in which they seem to move their work forward.

Building bridges from the margins: The work of leadership in social change organizations

“…In our study on "naming and shaping identity," we first looked for organizations in which race-ethnicity was central to organizational work practices. From this search, three grounded categories emerged: "multiple narratives," "cultural traditions," and "lived experience" (Ospina & Su, 2009). "Engaging dialogue about difference" came out of an analysis that coded for specific enablers of dialogue across difference, including "making race discussable" and "connecting events"-workshops or other events that had an emotional impact, bringing down barriers among groups (Foldy & Ospina, 2008).…”

A critical review of race and ethnicity in the leadership literature: Surfacing context, power and the collective dimensions of leadership

“…But the connection between power and identity is taken as a given, rather than as a factor to incorporate in the analysis. Scholars from other fields emphasize leaders' response to an external environment where raceethnicity is influential and, ubiquitous, resulting in systemic inequities (Evans, 2007;Kezar, 2000;Ospina & Su, 2009). They make power dynamics central to the analysis.…”

“…For example, capitalizing on the theoretical convergence described earlier, Ospina and Su (2009) considered how race-ethnicity infused meaning into the social context which was used to advance social change work. Because the policy contexts where the work was embedded were highly racialized, information about them was not just supplemental background data, but the raw material from which to explore how leadership emerged.…”

“…They focus on the response of leaders to rapid demographic change (Evans, 2007), explore responses to racialized environments through leadership enactments (Kezar, 2000;Loder, 2005;Lomotey, 1993;Tillman, 2004) or challenge interpretations of these enactments based on one single identity marker like race (Reed & Evans, 2008). Other studies, in management, document explicit efforts to shape representations of race-ethnicity in these environments (Foldy, Goldman, & Ospina, 2008;Ospina & Su, 2009). We discuss each of these approaches below.…”

In the Service of Self-Determination: Teacher Education, Service-Learning, and Community Reorganizing

“…Developing a collective identity and accessing cultural practices have been discussed in the literature on critical education and agency (Irizarry, 2009;Ling, 1989), as has the literature on community organizing for educational justice (Ospina & Su, 2009). There have also been dynamic discussions of service-learning projects within critical pedagogy, ethnic studies, and sociocultural learning.…”