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Building Racially Responsive Leadership
Get PDFThe global Black Lives Matter protests in response to the killing of George Floyd ignited an immense response from Canadian higher educational institutions, who avowed to strengthen their commitment to addressing systemic anti-Black racism. Students and employees urged higher education leaders to acknowledge, redress, and correct the prevailing racial injustices impacting diverse Black communities. This call to action moved Canadian higher education leaders to examine gaps within leadership structures, practices, and policies through a lens of critical race theory (CRT) on how to confront emergent racial realities. Combatting these racial realities requires leaders to build racial literacy skills and develop equitable organizational strategies. This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) presents a possible solution that bolsters the capacity of higher education leaders in a metropolitan college in Canada to advance racial equity across leadership structures by making race salient in institutional goals, adopting anti-racist approaches, and building racially responsive behaviours towards realizing organizational equity outcomes. Racially responsive leadership (RRL; Harper, 2017) is a proactive leadership approach that authentically and with intentionality builds racially just environments to heighten institutional accountability, with a goal to improve the lives, experiences, and outcomes of diverse Black communities. This OIP incorporates principles of RRL and transformative leadership to realize deep change through creating new knowledge on equity leadership practices that develop multiple layers of accountability. Through building racial literacy among leaders, inspiring collective action to construct equitable leadership structures, this OIP is focused on how leaders can implement organizational equity outcomes to address the perils of systemic anti-Black racism
