# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
The Palgrave handbook of minority entrepreneurship

# data[].attributes.subject
The Palgrave handbook of minority entrepreneurship

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Indigenous organization studies: exploring management, business and community

# data[].attributes.subject
Indigenous organization studies: exploring management, business and community

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Underdog entrepreneurs: a framework of success for marginalised and minority innovators

# data[].attributes.subject
Underdog entrepreneurs: a framework of success for marginalised and minority innovators

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
John Hervey Wheeler: Black banking and the economic struggle for civil rights

# data[].attributes.subject
John Hervey Wheeler: Black banking and the economic struggle for civil rights

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Race and retail: consumption across the colour line

# data[].attributes.subject
Race and retail: consumption across the colour line

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Diversity and inclusion in the global workplace aligning initiatives with strategic business goals

# data[].attributes.subject
Diversity and inclusion in the global workplace aligning initiatives with strategic business goals

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Black Africa 1945 - 80: economic decolonization and arrested development

# data[].attributes.subject
Black Africa 1945 - 80: economic decolonization and arrested development

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Rich thanks to racism: how the ultra wealthy profit from racial injustice

# data[].attributes.subject
Rich thanks to racism: how the ultra wealthy profit from racial injustice

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
The wealth of (some) nations imperialism and the mechanics of value transfer

# data[].attributes.subject
The wealth of (some) nations imperialism and the mechanics of value transfer

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Decolonizing wealth: indigenous wisdom to heal divides and restore balance

# data[].attributes.subject
Decolonizing wealth: indigenous wisdom to heal divides and restore balance

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
In good company: an anatomy of corporate social responsibility

# data[].attributes.subject
In good company: an anatomy of corporate social responsibility

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Africa's competitiveness in the global economy

# data[].attributes.subject
Africa's competitiveness in the global economy

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Discovering the spirit of Ubuntu leadership: compassion, community, respect

# data[].attributes.subject
Discovering the spirit of Ubuntu leadership: compassion, community, respect

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Sustainable industrialization in Africa: towards a new development agenda

# data[].attributes.subject
Sustainable industrialization in Africa: towards a new development agenda

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Decolonising management theory: a critical perspective

# data[].attributes.subject
Decolonising management theory: a critical perspective

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Looking beyond the numbers: the struggles of Black businesses to survive: a qualitative approach

# data[].attributes.subject
Looking beyond the numbers: the struggles of Black businesses to survive: a qualitative approach

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Internationalization of management, neoliberalism and the Latin America challenge

# data[].attributes.subject
Internationalization of management, neoliberalism and the Latin America challenge

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Lending a hand: Black business owners' complex role in the civil rights movement

# data[].attributes.subject
Lending a hand: Black business owners' complex role in the civil rights movement

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Challenging anglo-saxon dominance in management and organisational knowledge

# data[].attributes.subject
Challenging anglo-saxon dominance in management and organisational knowledge

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Supplier diversity programmes are failing Black-owned business

# data[].attributes.subject
Supplier diversity programmes are failing Black-owned business

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Insidious procedures: diversity awards legitimise unfair organisational practices

# data[].attributes.subject
Insidious procedures: diversity awards legitimise unfair organisational practices

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
The historical origins of ethnic (white) privilege in US organisations

# data[].attributes.subject
The historical origins of ethnic (white) privilege in US organisations

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Reflections on the continuing denial of the centrality of race in management and organisation studies

# data[].attributes.subject
Reflections on the continuing denial of the centrality of race in management and organisation studies

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Critical perspectives on international business

# data[].attributes.subject
Critical perspectives on international business

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Race and class: a journal on racism, empire, and globalisation

# data[].attributes.subject
Race and class: a journal on racism, empire, and globalisation

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Journal of sustainable development in Africa

# data[].attributes.subject
Journal of sustainable development in Africa

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
Journal of Asia entrepreneurship and sustainability

# data[].attributes.subject
Journal of Asia entrepreneurship and sustainability

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.headline
International indigenous journal of entrepreneurship, advancement, strategy and education

# data[].attributes.subject
International indigenous journal of entrepreneurship, advancement, strategy and education

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.body
READ HERE

# data[].attributes.body
https://blackpoundday.uk/

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.green-park.co.uk/insight-reports/bame-100-business-leaders-2019/s56145/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Green Park's research has found a distinct lack of ethnic minority representation in senior leadership positions, as black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) professionals still face a number of challenges and barriers in and out of the workplace.

We want to inspire a shift in the attitudes and practices of leading organisations by banishing the age-old myth that diverse talent does not exist.

The BAME 100 Business Leaders index is designed to showcase the UK's leading ethnic minority talent, still chronically underrepresented in boardrooms across Britain's private, public and third sectors.

The annual index uniquely profiles one hundred ethnic minority leaders who any organisation looking for a board member, should be prepared to consider.

METHODOLOGY

Throughout the year, Green Park monitors and maps diverse executive talent across the UK's private, public & third sector organisations, producing extensive and varied talent pools of ethnic minority leaders.

During this initial mapping stage, Green Park identified over 600 diverse leaders who made up the 2019 BAME 100 Business Leaders longlist.

To this longlist, a proprietary scoring methodology was applied, focussing on professional experience and governance expertise, with the top scoring individuals making our 2019 BAME 100 Business Leaders shortlist.

The shortlist was evaluated by an independent assessment panel, overseen by Green Park's Chairman and the founding Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips. Consisting of esteemed leading figures from some of the UK's best-known and most highly successful private, public & third sector organisations, the panel identified the final 100 leaders whose experience and expertise they perceived as most suitable for a board role.

THE ASSESSMENT PANEL

Lord Victor Adebowale - Chief Executive |Turning Point

Peter Cheese - Chief Executive | CIPD

Chris Cummings - Chief Executive | The Investment Association

Colleen Harris - Deputy Lieutenant | Greater London Lieutenancy Ltd

Sir Kenneth Olisa OBE - Chairman | Restoration Partners

June Sarpong MBE - Co-Founder | The Wie Symposium

David Tyler - Chairman | J Sainsbury's PLC

Iqbal Wahhab OBE - Chief Executive | Impact Dining

EXTRACT FROM THE FOREWORD
RAJ TULSIANI
CEO | Green Park

Even in less disruptive times, being part of the team at Green Park wouldn't be a choice for the fainthearted. We set ourselves high standards and tough tests. The first letter in our CREED value set is "C" - for courage. And the final "D" stands for diversity. As we've discovered in our company's short life it can take bucketloads of the first to deliver a thimbleful of the last. But that's what our teams do, day in and day out, putting talented leaders from all backgrounds in front of our clients.

I'm incredibly proud of the several hundred names our practice leaders, their associates and researchers have assembled to be considered for inclusion in this list. This year, our assessors had to be more ruthless in their selection of our 100 finalists than ever before, due to the range of high-quality talent available. The truth is that today's businesses and institutions simply have no excuse to say that they can't find people of colour to approach.

The fact is that whilst this year's survey results are encouraging for Green Park, the picture isn't so great for our sector as a whole. Whilst the gender picture is improving, when it comes to minority hirings at senior level, the UK is flatlining at a moment when its international profile should be changing to suit our global ambitions. And without delivery of this vital quality - diversity - we don't see how we can expect people to trust the top echelons of our society.

I hope that we never hear anyone utter the words "we'd love to have more diversity, but...." again. The talent is right here in these pages, ready to serve.
T o download our 2019 BAME 100 Business Leaders executive summary, please click the green download button below.
For a further discussion about our BAME 100 research, please contact Fiona McIntosh on +44 (0)203 145 3445 or Fiona.Mcintosh@green-park.co.uk.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Green Park's research has found a distinct lack of ethnic minority representation in senior leadership positions, as black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) professionals still face a number of challenges and barriers in and out of the workplace.

# data[].attributes.body
https://theblack.report/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The first qualitative report on Black startup founders in the UK.

Read The Report

© Copyright 2020, The Black Report. All rights reserved.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The first qualitative report on Black startup founders in the UK.

# data[].attributes.body
www.business-live.co.uk/enterprise/small-and-medium-enterprises/black-history-month-12-inspiring-19070677

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We want to champion the work of Britain's black entrepreneurs and throughout Black History Month will be celebrating black-owned businesses from around the UK.

On Black Pound Day, last Saturday (October 3), we invited businesses from across the UK to get in touch with us using the hashtag #IAMBOB.

The #IAMBOB campaign is part of the work BusinessLive is doing to represent all the communities it serves - and to highlight the importance of black-owned companies to the UK’s economic recovery.

BusinessLive has spoken to some of those companies to find out a bit more about the work they do.

BOXD

(Image: @girl_behindthelens)

London-based BOXD is an online store selling curated gift boxes for tweens and teens. The business was founded during lockdown by Mads Panchoo and now employs two people.

Mads had the idea for BOXD two years ago, but says she didn’t have the time to pursue her idea until now.

“During lockdown, I noticed a massive shift towards online shopping, and as I had my 14 and 10-year-olds at home, I asked them what they thought of receiving cool gifts by post. They loved the idea and BOXD was born!”

Mads says her goal over the next 12 months to three years is to work with corporate clients.

“Although the boxes are aimed at teens and tweens, the majority of what BOXD sells also works for adults and would make refreshing, modern gifts for clients and employees,” she said.

“I think there's going to be a continued shift towards supporting smaller businesses and showing clients and employees you appreciate their work,” she explained.

She is also hoping to work with event producers and supplying gifts and goody bags to parties, weddings.

“If I'm dreaming big, it would be large scale events like the MTV Music Awards, MOBOs and the Brits.”

Althea Tomlin Skincare

(Image: Althea Tomlin Skincare)

Althea Tomlin, owner of Nottingham-based organic vegan skincare brand Althea Tomlin Skincare, was inspired to set up her company after a trip to Malawi in 2009.

Then in her late 50s, Althea said she wasn’t planning to found her own company but “felt compelled" to set up a business after her trip to Africa “changed her life” - and she launched in 2010.

The business, which also has an outlet in Hertford, employs one full-time and four temporary part-time staff.

“[When I went to Malawi] it changed my life and perceptions of nature and Africa itself. I spent weeks in a remote village, some 200km from the capital Lilongwe and 3km from the nearest shops, with local villagers.

Stay up to date with our daily newsletter, email breaking news alerts and weekly round-ups. To sign up, find out more and see all of our newsletters, follow the link here

“I lived with the villagers in a mud hut as they did, and had been doing for centuries, without electricity, running water, or simple things like soap or toothpaste that we take for granted every day.”

She added: “It made me realise that everything that was good in life came from the land - roots, plants, trees, seeds, and even sand.

"This was my inspiration to create a brand with natural ingredients as close to nature as possible.”

Althea says over the next three years she would like to capitalise on growing the Althea brand online, improve my brand awareness within the independent beauty salon sectors, and promote her business to a wider section of the small independent beauty salon market.

Ametrine Coaching & Consultancy

(Image: Twitter Public)

Former police inspector Irene Afful is the founder and director of a coaching and consultancy firm in Liverpool specialising in equality, diversity and inclusion.

Irene, who became the first black female inspector in the history of her force in 2003, set up Ametrine as a sole trader in 2017.

It provides support to organisations to set, design and deliver on their equality objectives, developing opportunities to diversify.

She said: “[When I was in the police] I was dismayed at the lack of diversity within the force and particularly at senior ranks.

“I made it my mission to try and improve this situation and bring more minority groups into the service and to coach and mentor minority group staff for promotion.”

Irene developed a positive action leadership programme, the Phoenix Leadership Programme, which was instrumental in increasing the recruitment of minority groups in the police force.

After leaving the police, Irene says she felt compelled to do something to address the “dearth of representation” of ethnic minorities in all fields of business and employment.

“I didn’t see many business leaders who looked like me so I developed my coaching and consultancy business,” she said.

Over the next three years Irene says she would like to increase her portfolio to work with more organisations to increase diversity and develop talent pipelines for the progression of ethnic minorities, particularly women.

She said: "I would [also] like to be in a position to be able to take on staff from minority groups to build their skills and economic empowerment and to broaden the company’s reach."

Myana Naturals

(Image: Youmna Mouhamad)

The Swansea-based start-up was founded in 2019 by Dr Youmna Mouhamad, who has created an applicator to help with the maintenance of Afro hair.

Dr Youmna is a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise fellow and has a bachelors degree in chemistry and physics from Marseille Aix University, an Mphys in Physics from Leeds University and a PhD in polymer physics from Sheffield University.

After obtaining her doctorate, she joined Swansea University College of Engineering as a research scientist, gaining expertise in the field of printed electronics.

Using her knowledge in the field of printing and coating, she developed the Myana Naturals applicator.

In July, she was awarded an Enterprise Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering to bring the Myana Naturals applicator to market.

Youmna says she is planning to launch her product to the UK market in spring next year.

She is also the winner of the Women in STEM category at the Womenspire 2020 awards, which recognise the achievements of some of Wales’ most remarkable women.

PM Noble Consultancy Services

(Image: Jeannine Knickelbein)

Patricia Miller set up her business in 2014 and is a self-employed practitioner, working with SMEs who need help with social media management, copywriting, promotional material and website content.

Based in Enfield, Patricia says she “barely recognises” the company she started six years ago.

“I now want to help empower other small business owners and start-ups through my day-to-day business journey by sharing resources and recommendations,” she said.

“I have grown along with my business while facing challenges and want to continue to be open to change and adapt accordingly.”

Patricia says “getting through these tough times” has made her even more determined to continue.

“Before lockdown, I started to think about the direction of the business. I thought back to when I started my business and my desire to work with under-represented people,” she explained.

“I’d love to collaborate with compatible charities and social enterprises as I feel there is a lot of scope there to make a real difference over the coming year. Uncertainty has a way of bringing people together.”

Lyah's TV

(Image: Lyah's TV)

Suzanne Lamba and Erick Lamba are the creators of Lyah's TV - a new family-run black Barbie doll show on YouTube.

The husband-and-wife team, who are based in London, started Lyah's TV in July 2020 to fill the gap in representation when it comes to doll shows on YouTube.

Suzanne says the show aims to promote black families, black dolls and black history in a “fun and educational way” for children.

“We aim to work with black-owned doll companies in our shows to encourage not only the watching of more diverse dolls on TV, but also playing with dolls that look like them," she said.

“Our ambition for Lyah's TV is to become more than just a YouTube channel but to also become a regular on children's TV channels.

“This can be through Netflix, BBC and others. Our aim is to reach as many children as possible and to extend to different platforms.

She added: “As we will be working with black-owned doll companies we hope that this growth will also help to support them.”

Lorénzo Black

(Image: Leonard Reid)

Clothing brand Lorénzo Black is based in Preston, Lancashire.

Founder Leonard Reid said he had always thought about starting his own clothing company and decided to finally launch his business during lockdown.

“I had no work, gym, football, tennis or any forms of social interaction to keep me busy.

“This was the perfect opportunity for me to sit down and put pen to paper, thinking how I could build a brand.

“I reached out to a few friends to ask for their opinion on my brand name and what kind of image I was going for, and after receiving a lot of positive feedback I decided to go for it and get some products made.”

Leonard says he launched three weeks ago with four hats and has now sold more than 60, as well as launching two more styles.

“I believe this is phenomenal considering the short time I have been working on the brand.

“I am also in the process of having some t-shirts made, hopefully these will be ready for purchase within the next two weeks.”

Bistro Noir

Bistro Noir in Lark Lane, Liverpool (Image: Liverpool Echo)

Bistro Noir is a restaurant run by Maria Julienne in Liverpool serving world cuisine.

The business has been trading for nine years and currently employs five staff.

Maria, who has worked in the food industry for 21 years, says her dishes are inspired by her multicultural background.

These include curry goat, jerk chicken, Korean chicken, lentil dhal, salt and pepper chicken burgers.

Maria says “getting through Covid” is her biggest priority at the moment.

Luther Marketing

Birmingham-based Luther Marketing Group was founded by Michael Melhado in April 2017 and provides a range of telemarketing services for UK SMEs.

The business, which is named after US activist Martin Luther King, employs four people and is 95 per cent owned by Michael, who has worked in direct marketing for more than 25 years.

Before setting up his business, he spent 15 years working in senior business-to-business client delivery roles.

He has worked in hi-technology, logistics and material handling, and professional services, with companies such as ADP, Capita, Dell, Jungheinrich, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Samsung, XPO, and Volvo.

He said: "There are two main business goals: firstly, I would like create a digitial plaform for my business so effectively moving much of what we do online and secondly, I hope to open two further offices that could give, in time, ownership opportunities for the managers of these sites."

Before moving into direct marketing, Michael spent seven years working as a college IT lecturer. He is currently undertaking a part-time professional doctorate in social practice.

The YT Group

(Image: Melissa Bent)

Melissa Bent runs hair loss, hair replacement and advanced aesthetics clinics in London, Leeds, Crewe and Sheffield.

Melissa said she started educating herself about hair loss when her own hair began falling out, causing her distress.

She said: “I started to think how others feel if this happened to them and my hair loss education journey began.

“I now help people all over the country. We have the very best technology in today's market and offer services like hair restoration, scalp micropigmentation and laser hair retention therapy.”

The YT Group is also a national contractor for the NHS for cancer and alopecia patients and manufactures custom wigs.

Melissa says the company has also started a register to donate areola tattoo for mastectomy patients once a month for people who have breast cancer.

She added: “In this industry a lot of people are all about the money, we put people first and run an ethical business, giving advice and treatments to people who need it.”

Capo Customs

(Image: Capocustoms)

Gabby Simmons-Bird, 27, said she wanted to use her artistic and design skills to personalise trainers and produce distinct products.

She set up her online custom trainer business earlier this year and is currently doing all the design work, marketing and selling herself.

She said: “I wanted to give people the opportunity to have designs unique to them, using traditional skills - stitching, painting, sewing - with a variety of fabrics - leather, fabric, cloth - to transform off-the-shelf trainers into distinct, beautiful and personal items that stand out.”

Gaby said she “got a taste” for running her own business when setting up and running a music video company which fell foul of Covid.

Looking to the future, Gabby says her plan is to continue making “beautiful trainers, good profit, extend her range of personalised products, and raise the profile of BAME entrepreneurs”.

The Hot Seat Hairdressers

(Image: Andrea Griffith)

In September 1995, Andrea Griffith decided to become a freelance hairdresser.

She converted a room in her home in Reading into a fully fitted equipped salon.

“I have single-handedly managed to build up a very successful business for myself with the help of my dedicated clientele most of which have been with me from the beginning,” she said.

“My clients include all nationalities and I am now appointment-only as I have been fortunate to run a continuous diary. I also do home visits for clients unable to come to the salon."

Andrea says she attends seminars to update and improve as fashions change, with her particular interest being colour technique.

“I enjoy my work and feel proud to be a successful black woman and encourage others in our black community to follow their dreams.”

Do you run a black-owned business or know someone who does? Email businesslive@reachplc.com and share your story. Tell us your company name, date your business was founded, where you are based and what inspired you to set up. We would love to hear from you!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
12 inspiring black-owned companies in the UK

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
BusinessLive shines a spotlight on some black-owned companies as part of its #IAMBOB campaign

# data[].attributes.headline
Who are the 36 BAME people among the UK's 1000 most powerful?

# data[].attributes.subject
Who are the 36 BAME people among the UK's 1000 most powerful?

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/sep/24/who-are-36-bame-people-uk-1000-most-powerful

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An analysis conducted by the Guardian and Operation Black Vote has established that of the 1,049 most powerful people in Britain, just 36 are from ethnic minorities - and only seven of those are women.

Who are they?

Sajid Javid vide

Javid is the secretary of state for communities and local government. Since he became MP for Bromsgrove in 2010, he has also served as business secretary, culture secretary, and both economic and financial secretary to the Treasury.

At 25, Javid became the youngest ever vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank, later moving to Deutsche Bank where he was a senior managing director.

Priti Patel

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Steve Back/Barcroft Images

Patel is the secretary of state for international development. She has also been employment minister and exchequer secretary to the Treasury, and she was appointed by David Cameron as the first UK-India diaspora champion. She has been Conservative MP for Witham since 2010.

Ivan Menezes

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Menezes is the chief executive of Diageo, a FTSE 100 company and the world's largest producer of spirits. He is also chairman of the UK charity Movement to Work and a council member of the Scotch Whisky Association.

Indian-born Menezes sits on the global board of the Kellogg school of management at Northwestern University, having previously studied there. It has been ranked as one of the best business schools in the world. He is also a non-executive director of the US fashion retailer Coach, Inc.

Rakesh Kapoor

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Kapoor is the chief executive of the FTSE 100 company Reckitt Benckiser. The company is a global producer of health, hygiene and home products, such as Durex, Dettol and Clearasil. Kapoor rose to become chief executive of the company in 2011, having worked there since 1987.

Rakesh Shaunak

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Shaunak is chairman of MacIntyre Hudson accountants, one of the top 20 accountancy firms as ranked by the Institute of Chartered Accountants. He has been a partner in the firm since 1985. He is also the managing partner for its education unit, acting on behalf of a number of schools and education bodies.

Sir Harpal S Kumar

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Dan Mullan/Getty Images

Kumar is the chief executive of Cancer Research UK, one of the UK's biggest and most successful charities. He holds honorary doctorates from two universities, and was a Baker scholar at Harvard Business School - making him part of the top 5% of his class.

Kumar was knighted in 2016's New Year honours list for services to cancer research. He is chair of the National Cancer Advisory Group and a member of the National Cancer Transformation Board.

Clive Adams

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Clive Adams with Salvation Army members from Zimbabwe (left) and India. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

Adams is the territorial leader of the Salvation Army in the UK and Republic of Ireland - its equivalent position to chief executive. The charity operates in 128 different countries and was named as the fourth largest US charity by Forbes in 2015, while also ranking highly in the UK. Adams is a teacher by profession, born in South Africa.

Farrah Storr

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images for Eco

Storr is the editor of the international fashion magazine Cosmopolitan. Before that, she edited Women's Health. The magazine, which she helped to launch in 2012, became the UK's bestselling health and lifestyle publication under her leadership.

Previous roles include deputy editor at Top Santé and features director at Marie Claire in Sydney.

Edward Enninful

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Image

Enninful is the editor of British Vogue. Although the magazine is almost a century old, he is its first black, and first male, editor.

Enninful was fashion and style director at W Magazine before making the unusual transition from stylist to editor. Aged 18, he was the youngest fashion director ever for an international publication, i-D. He holds an OBE for his services to diversity in fashion.

Muhammed Butt

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Matt Alexander/PA

Butt is the Labour leader of Brent council, one of the UK's most diverse boroughs. He is on the Local Government Assocation's board for culture, tourism and sport.

Sachin Shah

Shah has been leader of Harrow council since May 2016, and was previously its cabinet member for finance. He is the youngest minority ethnic leader of a council is London. Shah grew up in Harrow and attended local comprehensive schools.

Jas Athwal

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Athwal is the leader of Redbridge council, which turned Labour for the first time in 2014 under his leadership. He is also the council's first leader from a BAME background.

He was first elected to the council in May 2010 and became leader of the Labour group in October 2011.

The colour of power: why is the British establishment so white? - video

Ravi Govindia

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Ravi Govindia, centre, with David Cameron and a Wandsworth resident. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Govindia is the Conservative leader of Wandsworth council. He has been a councillor since 1982, and sits on the government's panel of experts on estate regeneration.

In recognition of his services to government, Govindia became a CBE in the 2016 New Year honours list.

On the Putney Conservatives website, Ugandan-born Govindia talks of the pain of having had to leave the country during Idi Amin's dictatorship.

Chris Hughton

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images

Hughton is manager of Brighton Hove and Albion football team. Under his leadership, Brighton were promoted to Premier League status last year, for the first time in the club's history.

Before management, Hughton had a 13-year stint at Tottenham Hotspur, and was the first dual-heritage player to represent Ireland.

Magnus Djaba

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: picture supplied by Saatchi

Magnus Djaba is the global president of the world's most famous advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi. Renowned for campaigns such as T Mobile's "Life's for Sharing", he also helped to establish Kevin Bacon as the face of EE. Since Djaba joined as London CEO in 2011, revenue at Saatchi & Saatchi has grown by 50%.

Rishi Shori

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Rishi Shori, left, with Ivan Lewis MP and Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester. Photograph: Goodman/LNP/Rex/Shutterstock

Shori is the Labour leader of Bury council. He is the first ever BAME leader of a council in Greater Manchester and the youngest leader Bury council has ever had.

In May 2017 he was appointed to Greater Manchester's mayoral leadership for young people and social cohesion by the mayor, Andy Burnham.

He was first elected in 2009, and has held the portfolio of adult care, health and housing. Under his leadership, the council was ranked as having the best adult care services in the north-west.

Tariq Mahmood Ahmad

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Laurent Gillieron/EPA

Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon is a Conservative life peer, the minister of state for the Commonwealth and United Nations and the prime minister's special representative on preventing sexual violence in conflict.

He has been minister for skills and aviation security and minister for countering extremism and was previously vice-chairman of the Conservative party. Before politics, he worked in banking and finance.

Sam Gyimah

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Tal Cohen/Rex/Shutterstock

Gyimah is the minister for prisons. He was previously a minister for education.

Before he was elected as the Conservative MP for East Surrey in 2010, he had a career at Goldman Sachs and was an entrepreneur.

He studied PPE at Oxford, where he was elected the first black president of the Oxford Union in 50 years.

Alok Sharma

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Alok Sharma with David Cameron. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA

Sharma holds the combined portfolio of housing and planning in the Conservative government.

He held on to his seat in Reading in this year's election, despite predictions he would lose it. In his time as an MP, he has been on the Treasury select committee and the science and technology select committee. Before going into politics, he was a chartered accountant.

Humza Yousaf

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Andrew Cowan/Scottish parliament/PA

Yousaf is the Scottish government minister for transport and the Islands.

He was elected to the Scottish parliament in 2011 when he was only 25, making him the youngest MSP ever elected. His progression to minister for external affairs and international development came quickly, a little over a year later, making him the youngest ever - and first BAME - member of the Scottish government.

Yousaf is also a columnist at the Glasweigan paper the Evening Times.

Marvin Rees

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Adrian Sherratt for the Guardian

Rees is the mayor of Bristol, the first directly elected mayor of African descent in Europe.

Rees has varied experience across journalism, campaigning and community engagement. He was part of the Yale World Fellows Programme, which takes on people who have shown their potential to be world leaders by excelling in their personal and professional lives. Rees also founded the City Leadership Programme in 2012, taking talented young people from working-class backgrounds and preparing them for national and international leadership.

Sadiq Khan

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Lauren Hurley/PA

Khan is the mayor of London. Despite being on the receiving end of a nasty campaign that focused on his Muslim faith, Khan was elected with 1.3m votes, securing the biggest personal mandate of any politician in British history. He is the first BAME mayor of London.

State-school-educated Khan was a human rights lawyer and local councillor before being elected to his Tooting seat in 2005, which he gave up for the mayoralty.

Hardyal Singh Dhindsa

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Matthew Jones Photography/PR handout

Hardyal Singh Dhindsa is the police and crime commissioner for Derbyshire - the first and only PCC from a BAME background.

He has been a local politician since 1993 having held a number of council cabinet posts - including education and social care, planning and highways, and leisure. He is a qualified probation officer, with more than 30 years' experience.
Valerie Amos

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

Lady Amos is the director of Soas University of London. She is both the first female and first non-white person to take the role at the university, where students kicked up a storm earlier this year over the university's overly white reading list.

Before her position at Soas, Amos was the undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN, served as UK high commissioner to Australia, and was appointed a Labour life peer under the 1997 Blair government.

Her career has been dotted with firsts for the UK: the first black woman to sit in the cabinet, the first black leader of the House of Commons and the first black woman to lead a university.

Max Lu

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Jason Alden/University of Surrey

Prof Max Lu is president and vice-chancellor of the University of Surrey. A member of the prime minister's Council for Science and Technology, he is also on the boards of the National Physical Laboratory, Universities UK, and the leadership council of the National Centre for Universities and Business. Locally, he also serves as deputy lieutenant of Surrey and a patron of the charity Transforming Housing.

Before his appointment at Surrey, he enjoyed a long stint in academic and leadership positions at the University of Queensland.

Lu was recently awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his services to education and international research and to Australia-China relations. He was named as a Queensland Great in 2013 and one of Australia's 100 most influential engineers in 2014, when he also received the Australia-China Achievement Award for education.

Vaughan Gething

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/Athena Pictures

Gething is the Welsh assembly member for Cardiff South and Penarth. He holds the position of cabinet secretary for health, wellbeing and sport.

Gething was the youngest ever president of the TUC in Wales, and has served as a county councillor and school governor. He was previously chair of the cross-party project Right to Vote, encouraging greater voting participation from BAME communities in Wales. Gething was born in Zambia and brought up in Dorset.

Sharon White

White is the CEO of the media regulator Ofcom. Educated at a state comprehensive in east London, she is the first black woman to sit in the top seat at Ofcom.

Before Ofcom, White held a number of senior posts during a long career in the civil service. She was second permanent secretary at the Treasury, and held board-level positions at the Ministry of Justice and the Department for International Development. A trained economist, she was formerly a senior economist at the World Bank.

Perminder Mann

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Julian Dodd

Mann is the CEO of Bonnier Publishing UK, one of the UK's top publishing firms. She was in the Bookseller's list of the 100 most influential people in the publishing industry in 2015 and 2016 and was named as one of the top 10 most influential people in publishing and writing at the Hospital Club h100 awards.

Mann co-founded Blink Publishing in 2014, the first publisher to collaborate with a vlogger, the bestselling Alfie Deyes.

Daljit Lally

Photograph: Northumberland county council

Lally is the CEO of Northumberland county council and Northumbria Healthcare NHS foundation trust. She was awarded an OBE in 2015 in recognition of her improvements to health and social care services in Northumberland.

Lally set up the Virtual Carers Centre through Carers Northumberland, which won a Local Government Award for innovation. She is a trained nurse with an MBA from Durham University.

Mohammed Khan

Photograph: Blackburn and Darwen council

Khan is the Labour leader of Blackburn with Darwen council. He was awarded an OBE in 2007 for his work in local government. The councillor was born and brought up in Pakistan and came to Blackburn in 1965.

Before leading the council, Khan was mayor of Blackburn with Darwen between 2008 and 2009. A councillor since 1992, Khan has held a number of portfolios including housing and health.

Ranjit Banwait

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Derby city council

Banwait is the Labour leader of Derby city council. He was elected as the first minority ethnic leader of the council in May 2014.

Banwait was elected as the councillor for Boulton Ward in 2006, and is Derby born and bred.

He describes himself as the proud son of Indian immigrants who settled in Derby in the 1960s, tracing his roots back to sugar-cane farmers in the Punjab. He was the first person in his family to go to university.

Sohail Munawar

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Slough borough council

Munawar is the Labour leader of Slough borough council. He was elected to the position in 2014, following the resignation of Rob Anderson alongside a number of his cabinet. Upon becoming leader, Munawar was quoted in the Slough Observer saying: "I might not be a great speaker but I can promise you I love this country and I love this place."

Williams

Photograph: NHS

Owen Williams is the chief executive of Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS foundation trust. He is a trustee of the NHS Confederation, which advocates on behalf of the health and care system.

He was previously chief executive of two councils - Calderdale and Huddersfield, and Rossendale.

Karamjit Singh

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

Singh is the chairman of University Hospitals of Leicester NHS trust. He has set up free medical camps in India, has been a commissioner at the Electoral Commission and a member of the Queen's Counsel selection panel and is a voluntary trustee of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

Singh was awarded a CBE in 1999 for services to the administration of justice.

Pradip Patel

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Photograph: Gareth Davies/Mirrorpix

Pradip Patel is the chairman of Frimley Health NHS foundation trust. He was previously the deputy chairman of Hillingdon hospital foundation trust and director of healthcare strategy at Walgreens Boots Alliance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Who are the 36 BAME people among the UK's 1,000 most powerful?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An analysis conducted by the Guardian and Operation Black Vote has established that of the 1,049 most powerful people in Britain, just 36 are from ethnic minorities - and only seven of those are women. Who are they? Javid is the secretary of state for communities and local government.

# data[].attributes.body
The library is here to support all conversations around diversifying teaching and learning at KBS.

We want to collaborate with you to review our library subject guides, host reading groups and workshops. We can also lead sessions on interrogating bias and identifying fake news  in research.

For more information please contact your KBS Divisional Librarian Holly Callaghan KBSlibrary@kent.ac.uk

# data[].attributes.headline
Article on the systematic challenges that confront business schools around decolonization. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Article on the systematic challenges that confront business schools around decolonization. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In this essay, we call upon our fellow scholars of colour to recognise the ways Business Schools are structured by white supremacy and actively de-value our knowledge and experiences. Alongside this recognition, collective action led by scholars of colour is needed to build intergenerational support systems which will be key to dismantling racialised power structures as they appear locally and transnationally. White scholars are invited to listen and learn from this call.

I wake up to the news that yet another Black person has been killed. Philando Castile, a 32-year-old man, was fatally shot by a police officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota after being pulled over. I feel sick. I arrive at the conference in the morning and present my paper on white supremacy to a small crowd. At the end of my talk, a white male professor whose work I have admired raises his hand and asks, 'Aren't you making too much of race? Does it even really matter in this day and age?'

Introduction

Capitalism is racist ( Bhattacharyya, 2018; Davis, 1971; Lorde, 2017) and the educational institutions that reproduce its ideology require rigorous critique, material challenge and co-ordinated collective action to build a movement for anti-racist scholar-activism. From its inception until today, capitalism in all its forms (colonial, slave, mercantile, financial, market, information) has used racist logic to demarcate superior white humanity from deficient Black non-humans, distributing wealth along a racialised scale of human value ( Mills, 1997). In Business Schools, the racist foundations of capitalism have been largely ignored, while their expansion, in terms of student numbers, student fees, faculty, and international campuses, has led scholars to question the ethics of chiefly serving white groups ( Grimes, 2001; Nkomo, 1992; Nkomo and Al Ariss, 2014; Swan, 2017). In the present mire of climate emergency, hardening national borders and intensifying racial violence, this essay is an urgent call for scholars of colour to collectively act up to radically challenge the white supremacist nature of Business Schools, even as it plays out differently in local contexts.

The notion of white supremacy helps us understand racialised relations and structures within Business Schools. White supremacy is a system of power that maintains a strong positive orientation to white superiority based on arbitrary classifications, reinforcing white power and privilege through everyday and institutional racism ( Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Deitch et al., 2003; Essed, 1991; Feagin, 2013; Hill, 2009; Nkomo and Al Ariss, 2014). Whiteness is thus not understood as a biological essence within white people, nor does it reside in 'unconscious bias' (see Tate and Page, 2018), but is a regime of power that normalises white dominance and subordinates people of colour ( Mills, 1997).

Management and Organisation Studies (MOS) scholars cannot afford to ignore the terrifying resurgence of white supremacist ideology, given our involvement in (re)producing and promoting racist capitalist scholarship. In the Global North/West, this ideology has manifested with the election of Donald Trump in the United States and Brexit in the United Kingdom, precipitating a rise in race-based violence ( Burnett, 2017; Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2017), the entrenchment of governance structures reproducing racialised climate injustice ( Sealey-Huggins, 2018), and a hostile environment for immigration ( Bowling and Westenra, 2018) supported by mainstream and social media ( Ibrahim, 2018). We see these developments as intensified extensions of the historical impoverishment of Black and Brown communities for the benefit of white hegemony and wealth. Yet, critical engagement with the racism of capitalism conflicts with a 'post-race' discourse pervading both business practice and education, wherein the continued salience of race is ignored even by those on the critical left.

Critical race and decolonising scholars have long offered insights into the ways that macroeconomic structures of the past 500 years precipitate racialised contemporary realities. These scholars have theorised the historical formation of race ( HoSang et al., 2012; Omi and Winant, 1994) and expounded the systemic, intractable, ubiquitous and relentless mechanisms of white supremacy ( Anzaldúa, 1987; Bhabha, 1998; Bonilla-Silva, 2006; DuBois, 2005; Hall, 1997; hooks, 1989; Ifekwunigwe, 1998; Mohanty, 2003; Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1983; Moreton-Robinson, 2000). Despite this rich intellectual history, management and organisation studies remain broadly disengaged from these debates ( Nkomo, 1992). In this tradition, we draw attention to the Business School's complicity in perpetuating ignorance. We call for collective anti-racist scholar-activism in the form of knowledge production, theorising and community-building. We call for the amplification and heeding of voices of people of colour who have theorised their oppression to build a foundation from which to take action.

As we write and refine this piece, we recall the problematic history of scholars in the Global North/West universalising their experiences, and our reproduction of this. This history, and its formation in the present, continually erases Global South experiences and knowledge. Yet, the Global North/West is not the arbiter of knowledge. As scholars with lived experiences largely of these geographically dominant contexts, we must be careful not to speak for, or over, people in other locations - we must constantly challenge the tendency to universalise a 'we' beyond our own knowledge and lived experiences. Our engagement with scholars in the Global South must be securely rooted in our work beyond research, where writing about the struggles of those in contexts outside our experience can so often fall to appropriation of the 'native informant'. Instead, we use our privileges as doctoral supervisors, conference convenors, workshop facilitators, and book and journal editors to de-centre white privilege and amplify the voices of our colleagues in the Global South. A transnational practice of solidarity in this era of neocolonialism is to work with Global South scholars as agents and thinkers in their own right. Although we, the authors, write from our own perspectives, we endeavour to hold ourselves accountable to Global South scholars and non-Western knowledge that disrupts hegemonic practices:

I attended a workshop on inclusion in higher education. Each presentation was delivered by a white person. I felt increasingly disturbed and violated by the casual racism underscoring many of these presentations and the blatant exclusion of people of colour from the programme. The last presentation was given by a white woman who stated that 'inner city diverse students' need extra support because 'they don't know how to use intellectual language and have trouble with independent learning'. At that point, I got up and walked out. I could not bear to be part of this complicity where the speaker's violence and deeply racist assumptions were accepted, lauded and normalised by the mostly white audience.

Forgetting in the white academy

Addressing racialised forms of exclusion requires that the white academy stops forgetting and instead engages with its past, and most importantly, its present continuities with violence. Engaging with its past requires white academia to recognise how the university continues to serve as an arm of the state, perpetuating and hardening borders that facilitate access, circulation and value of white knowledge at the expense of non-white people and our knowledge. Business Schools uphold white supremacy by perpetuating a racist logic that protects the idea of White nations at the cost of Black and Brown lives ( Goldberg, 2006). The themes of recent management conferences, for example, have constructed Europe as distinctly open and enlightened, by implication reproducing a colonialist glorification of white knowledge ( Wa Thiong'o, 1992).

Such amnesia manifests in our material working conditions through marginalisation, targeted monitoring, harassment and racialised-gendered inequalities in hiring, pay and promotion of global majority staff and students. Taking the United Kingdom as an example, while 86.9% of all UK academic staff are 'White', and 13.1% are people of colour ( Quereshi, 2019), Black women comprise only 26 of the 19,000 professoriate (at the time of writing); across their roles in UK universities, they earn on average 39% less than white men ( Croxford, 2018; Solanke, 2017). Beyond the institutional level, UK-based scholars of colour more broadly have seen their work excluded from government funded audits on a national scale ( Stern, 2016). Our value to the institution (and therefore our right to remain in academia) is diminished by accounting techniques designed and administered by white groups in ways that favour them. Any pathways to seek material remediation for these conditions are grossly mitigated by university governance structures that fail to recognise such exclusions as racist ( Dar and Rodriguez, 2019). With a cruel irony, many universities in the white-dominated nations of the Global North/West tout equity policies and equality charters, which serve as alibis for the material realities of racism ( Ahmed, 2012) and construct whiteness as moral authority entrusted to correct the unequal representation of 'minorities'.

In the Business School specifically, knowledge production has erased race from business scholarship, resulting in the continued omission of the roles of Indigenous genocide, extractive settler-colonialism and Black chattel slavery in contemporary capital accumulation and wealth disparity ( Cooke, 2003; see also Yusoff, 2018). In 1992, Stella Nkomo published her incisive critique of the business management field (see also Nkomo, 1988). Her analysis reveals the dominance of white male knowledge in organisation studies that inflects the canon with a Eurocentric 'non-inclusive universalization' ( Nkomo, 1992: 489). She extrapolates how white knowledge is presented as the norm, benchmark and condition for 'value-free' research. By this ideological premise, race and difference is attributed to otherness, abnormality, or insignificance. White knowledge, thus, escapes critique because it is universalized, and the relevance of race to organisation studies is restricted to niche areas or sub-fields, such as postcolonial studies. Despite Nkomo's brilliant argument, cited over 750 times, her central demand aimed at the field - to dismantle white male power over knowledge production - has been largely ignored.

Others, too, have attempted to dislodge the racist assumptions within MOS scholarship and the hegemony of Western canonical knowledge ( Alcadipani et al., 2012; Banerjee, 2003; Banerjee and Linstead, 2004; Cooke, 2003; Dar, 2018a; Faria et al., 2010; Gantman et al., 2015; Grier et al., 2019; Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Liu, 2017; Liu and Baker, 2016; Mandiola, 2010; Mir and Mir, 2013; Nkomo, 2011 Prasad, 2003, 2015). These contributions provide alternative narratives and, in some cases, clear liberatory demands, but due to the persistent reproduction of white patriarchal capitalist knowledge regimes ( Jones et al., 2018), they remain marginal or forgotten. Without these interventions, the amnestic proselytising of management scholarship perpetuates a racist political economy couched in the myth of meritocratic societies, comprised of abstract economic and entrepreneurial actors, for whom the pursuit of Western-style 'development' is a singular, unproblematic aim. This forms the basis of a militarised neo-colonial free-market business pedagogy, resulting in teaching curricula and research agendas that perpetuate the destabilisation of communities of colour and relationships of aid, debt and dependency on the Global North/West ( Harvey, 2007; Klein, 2007; Lander, 1996).

We exist in societies that obscure the facts of white violence. People of colour are trying to survive in educational environments that treat our knowledge as not worth knowing (cf. Collins, 2000). Our curricula almost exclusively teach the opinions of white American and European men ( Bhambra et al., 2018; Nkomo, 1992) and we learn to mimic their voices - the historical price of recognition as fully human, a perverse echo of the charming natives who adopt the masters' ways. When we migrate, we learn to become fluent in the language of the powerful to 'demonstrate' our ability to speak. Likewise, we learn to become fluent in the language of white philosophers, citing Bourdieu, Giddens, Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, Butler, to prove our ability to think. When we take seriously the philosophy of scholars of colour, our writings seemingly become illegible for many editors and reviewers. Articles citing hooks, Davis, Collins, Hartman, Hall and Moreton-Robinson are frequently read as 'atheoretical'. The systematic exclusion of voices of colour produces solipsistic knowledge where white lives, interests and identities have come to define what is considered normal, legitimate and valuable social science ( Nkomo, 1992).

The near wholesale omission of our knowledge from business management curricula reinforces to our students of colour that they, and their critique of the field, have no real place in the Business School. It also reproduces racist dichotomies between the supposedly knowing, well-governed North and the ignorant, corrupt South. Lionised in our research and curricula are white philosophers whose silences on race are palpable, and whose kernels of radicality have been whitewashed. This perpetuates a devaluation of the intellectualism, critique and epistemes of intergenerational communities of colour ( Alimahomed, 2010; Baca Zinn, 2012; Collins, 1986; Faifua, 2010). We cannot afford to wait and wish that this will somehow dramatically change; yet we cannot dismantle white supremacy as long as capitalism structures higher education. Given these stark parameters, we now explore the possibilities for collective action to resist assimilation into white structures:

A student comes seeking dissertation advice; she's thinking of studying for a PhD. We start a search on the department website for potential supervisors to approach and meanwhile she spots 'anti-racism' on a poster in my office. 'Racism', she says. 'That's so interesting. I didn't know that we could study this in business and management'. She tells me how she and other students from China on her course had quickly become alienated among their peers in the first weeks of term - having been tasked with working in teams, they found little patience among classmates to listen to their preferences on how to organise work, and when and where to meet, much less given space to articulate their ideas. 'They say that we are lazy and rude'.

Navigating the borderlands of scholar-activism

The slivers of our experiences shared throughout this piece illustrate the subtle and slippery ways racism saturates our lives and workplaces. We attempt to remember and resist them, despite the challenges of doing so from within ( Suzuki and Mayorga, 2014). The ubiquitous racist structures cannot be fully seen nor addressed alone, so we navigate the borderlands in search of each other. Following Gloria Anzaldúa's (1987) theorising of the borderlands, we recognise our own positionalities between multiple, sometimes conflicting, worlds: as migrants, children of migrants, non-Black women of colour, scholars and activists. In our institutions, where it is always risky to speak out against white supremacy, we hold roles of varying precarity; we, therefore, continuously negotiate our locations within whiteness and the ways that our knowledge production and working conditions are shaped by it. Existing and struggling in these 'in-between' and shifting spaces are how we develop knowledge about the fault lines of power.

We found our starting point in the cracks and fissures of white supremacy by working in activist spaces in the margins of universities. If these spaces did not exist, we built them through a deep involvement with anti-racist philosophy and by working with student communities of colour. We asked ourselves: What do we want to see? How do we want to feel? These questions are premised on a desire to relate differently to each other as we work with a politics of refusal, in which we reject the preordained academic narrative of competition, individualistic careerism and the automaton-like compulsion to produce outputs at any cost. We continually challenge this careerist narrative through the process of collectivising and becoming accountable to each other in ways that are inconceivable to white academia.

Anti-racist practice operates in ways that embrace extra-capitalist, non-white, anti-casteist pursuits. We reclaim forms of knowledge marginalised in and by the academy, sparking change from the de-centred non-white. Anti-racist scholar-activists use materials capable of overturning racial logics centring whiteness - critical theory, political dialogue, visual, musical, poetic and performed art, Indigenous feminist medicine, ancestral non-European knowledge. This endeavour is locally contextualised, and as we write and organise from the Global North/West, we do so in dialogue with colleagues in the Global South/East who confront different conditions of racism, racialisation and the hegemony of white supremacy ( da Conceição and Spink, 2013; Mandiola, 2013).

Because navigating the marginal spaces of the borderlands offers opportunities for both engagements and refusals of traditional scholarly practices, here we would like to acknowledge the inherent contradiction of producing this Acting Up piece. Academic publications can so easily become the sole purpose and outcome of individual careerism masquerading as scholar-activism. Admittedly, we benefit professionally and materially from publishing this article when we remain employed in white institutions that will more likely recognise our interventions as legitimate when they are couched within high-ranking journal articles. The benefits we might enjoy from engaging in traditional scholarly practices, such as writing this essay together, are often fleeting when we must return to white academia that subordinates, excludes and marginalises women of colour. The return prompts a harsh affective shift that reminds us that our bodies are out of place ( Hurston, 2000; Puwar, 2004) and our interventions, rather than being welcomed into white spaces, are often marked as potentially dangerous:

To combat a so-called epidemic of plagiarism, our university purchased software to compare writing samples and produce an estimation of the likelihood that the samples were written by the same author. An incoming policy will require academics to collect writing samples from students under the guise of formative assessment, and use them to monitor for academic misconduct. Hundreds of students, predominantly from China, will undergo this surveillance so misconduct cases 'do not devalue the degree'. The 'yellow peril' theme underlying this response, and the exorbitant fees that will continue to be accepted from students who are not ready to study in English but are admitted to the university, are left unaddressed.

Our bodies are on the line

Within the white academy, our bodies are rendered vulnerable and contested. As space invaders ( Puwar, 2004), our bodies come into conflict with its structures in ways that take a toll on our mental and physical health. The harm on our bodies is felt in the nauseating anxiety as we gather up the courage to tell our manager that they are exploiting colleagues of colour in precarious contracts, the hours of overtime put in to develop repeated applications for promotion, with little hope of them being accepted, and the reading and rereading of our email to the Dean asking why yet another candidate of colour was passed over for recruitment. The pain is in the crossed arms and frowns of a conference audience and the influential professor who whispers 'troublemaker' to those around him, and in the venomous review, we receive from an anonymous peer whose mind snapped shut at our first use of the phrase 'racism'. It is in the shuns we receive from colleagues, who stop inviting us for lunch when we have spoken up for students of colour too often at department meetings, in the silence when it is always only our voices speaking out, and in the emotional labour of absorbing the anger and deflections of defensiveness, or soothing tears of awakening. Yet, we return to put our bodies on the line with the intention of resisting white structures, while knowing that the potential for co-optation or retaliation against us is possible. Experiences of safety and wholeness at work are found in spaces of our own making, and tentatively introduced into environments where their welcome is uncertain.

The racialised non-white body is potently valuable and desirable to whiteness, while our knowledge is not ( Johnson and Joseph-Salisbury, 2018). Our bodies, our scholarship and our activism are not separable, but they are (en)forced apart in white patriarchal capitalist academia. Our visibility presents opportunities for white institutions to make claims about their progressive, inclusive values. We see our bodies extracted for value in university prospectuses, promotional posters, and advertising campaigns. Our strategic appointments to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) committees lend legitimacy to charter marks, accreditations and targets. Such EDI efforts produce value for white supremacy. They were never intended to deconstruct white power, and thus cannot ensure safety for people of colour nor sustain our activism.

Anti-racist scholar-activists seek to reformulate existing templates for what is possible in theory and practice, through a continuous, everyday reflexivity ( Johnson et al., 2019) that compels us both to bring our racialised bodies into our scholarship, and use our scholarship to ground our activism. When our bodies, scholarship and activism coalesce, we can act against the grain of Eurocentric non-inclusive universalisation. Fundamental to reflexive anti-racist practice is vigilance about the ways whiteness may ambush anti-racist intentions and interventions. Self- and collective-accountability in our communities make resistance to white supremacy possible. Commitments are made to one another to be radically vulnerable, to learn, to take risks with trusted allies, to explicitly recognise and deal with our anti-Blackness, to stop working when costs are too great, to be with and in alterity, constructing spaces where scholarship and activism can become one and the same:

'But we're trying, we can't be scared to say anything at all', says my white colleague during a discussion about 'intercultural communication' in which I have shared my own experience of microaggressions. I respond, more gently and generously than the rebuff deserves, that yes, we need to do and try because that is all we have to enact change; but we also need to be prepared to be told we got it wrong and to learn to do better next time. She is solemn and mournful and isn't listening.

Becoming good elders

We find ourselves looking ahead to a bleak future in which climate catastrophe decimates communities of colour ( Sealey-Huggins, 2018) and global far-right alliances leverage the digital to consolidate political influence and white wealth. This is the future in which the next generation of scholars will emerge and in which we will become elders. Connecting the past, present and future, we therefore aim to build intergenerational support systems that can ensure our survival. This can only be accomplished by cultivating anti-racist communities of colour in the Business School and the broader white academe, and practicing the radical act of simply living our truths and centring our knowledge ( Pow, 2018).

There is no more time for polite debate, niceties and engagement with white governance structures - we need agile activism that agitates for transformation. In this call to our community, we wish to open a dialogue with fellow scholars of colour on what it means for us to take action and the principles on which our actions need to be based. This dialogue should lead to differentiated action on the basis of positionality, and local and regional histories, with people in positions of privilege relative to whiteness working to listen, centre and amplify the experiences and critiques of more marginalised people. Layla Saad (2018) offers the concept of a 'good ancestor . . . to help create change, facilitate healing, and seed new possibilities for those who will come after I am gone' (p. 14). We extend this with the idea of becoming good elders, those with a commitment to build and model transformative spaces that, at least temporarily, level power dynamics among students, administrative staff and academics to create and cherish collective methodologies for survival. We do this for ourselves as well as for those who come with us, and those who come after us.

With the guidance of our own anti-racist elders who offer advice both directly and through their writing, we work towards becoming good elders ourselves. We see the students of colour in our discipline, who in the United Kingdom make up the highest proportion only after medicine and law ( Dar, 2018b; UUK, 2015b), struggle as their experiences are erased or denied ( BreakThrough!, 2018; see also Ahmed et al., 2019). We try to bring them up with us into the academic pipeline and to lend our armour to them when they inevitably face the racist forces of the Business School. The good elder helps to make racism thinkable and speakable on campus, empowers our students with intellectual frameworks to understand it, to advocate for students of colour, to hear them and to validate their experiences as real. Our students seek and generate this knowledge outside of the academy in other communities, including social media. Good elders need to engage with these spaces and to value them as part of a wider activist network that can work against capitalist economies (see Sobande et al., 2020).

Being good elders also requires that we become custodians of our communities in ways that exercise ongoing reflexive accountability with one another. Within our own communities of colour, anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity mean non-Black and non-Indigenous people of colour gain from white structures. This privilege needs to be considered, rejected, and/or leveraged as necessary in solidarity with Black and Indigenous people. We must all engage in continuous collective self-reflection on our differentiated racial, class, gender, cis-heteronormative and able-bodied privileges, and deferment of our own defensiveness and self-promotion. Centring accountability and reflexivity will strengthen the anti-racist community against efforts that attempt to erase or assimilate us. We need to work to challenge and change discourses that serve to 'fix' people of colour so that we may shape the depth and direction of our own narratives. Being a good elder is to fight together for the very possibility of transformation, for creative spaces, new imaginaries and hope. It is to ensure the next generation of business scholars of colour will not merely survive, but live, learn and work in environments that sustain their knowledge and desire their truth.

References

Caldwell, K., Muse, W., Paschel, T. S., et al. (2018) 'On the Imperative of Transnational Solidarity: A US Black Feminist Statement on the Assassination of Marielle Franco', The Black Scholar (blog), 23 March. Retrieved July 29, 2019, from https://www.theblackscholar.org/on-the-imperative-of-transnational-solidarity-a-u-s-black-feminist-statement-on-the-assassination-of-marielle-franco/.
Google Scholar

Dar, S., Rodriguez, J. K. (2019) 'White Governance and Whitely Governmentalities: Organizing White Power in UK Universities', paper presented at the European Group for Organisation Studies Conference, Edinburgh, .
Google Scholar

Lorde, A. (2017) 'Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference', in Scott, B. K., Cayleff, S. E., Donadey, A., et al. (eds), Women in Culture: An Intersectional Anthology for Gender and Women's Studies, 2nd ed, pp. 16-22. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.
Google Scholar

Solanke, I. (2017) 'Black Female Professors in the UK', Runnymede Trust, March. Retrieved October 14, 2019, from https://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/BlackFemaleProfessorsMarch2017.pdf
Google Scholar

Stern, N. (2016) 'Research Excellence Framework (REF) Review: Building on Success and Learning from Experience' (IND/16/9). Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. Retrieved October 14, 2019, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/541338/ind-16-9-ref-stern-review.pdf
Google Scholar

Yusoff, K. (2018) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Google Scholar

Author biographies

The authors are members of Building the Anti-Racist Classroom collective. BARC is an international collective of women of colour scholar activists who came together in 2017. We aim to build anti-racist pedagogic communities of students and university workers through sustained collective organizing, collaboration and radical thinking. Our practice is led by our commitments to critical feminist theory, critical race studies and decolonizing frameworks. We are part of the Decolonizing Alliance initiative that seeks to invigorate activism across universities around the world. Please visit us at https://barcworkshop.org/.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The business school is racist: Act up! - Sadhvi Dar, Helena Liu, Angela Martinez Dy, Deborah N Brewis, 2021

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this essay, we call upon our fellow scholars of colour to recognise the ways Business Schools are structured by white supremacy and actively de-value our knowledge and experiences. Alongside this recognition, collective action led by scholars of colour is needed to build intergenerational support systems which will be key to dismantling racialised power structures as they appear locally and transnationally.

# data[].attributes.headline
Starting today: decolonizing the business school and implications for PRME

# data[].attributes.subject
Starting today: decolonizing the business school and implications for PRME

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efM_ybw7Dhc

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6snreYE6UGU

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
The Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME)

# data[].attributes.headline
The emperor has no clothes: Re-writing race in organisations

# data[].attributes.subject
The emperor has no clothes: Re-writing race in organisations

# data[].attributes.body
The Emperor Has No Clothes: Rewriting “Race in Organizations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
discrimination in employment -- research

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Emperor Has No Clothes: Rewriting "Race in Organizations"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This article analyzes how race has been studied in organization scholarship and demonstrates how our approaches to the study at race reflect and reify particular historical and social meanings of race. It is argued that the production of knowledge about race must be understood within a racial ideology embedded in a Eurocentric view of the world.

# data[].attributes.headline
CSR as gendered neocoloniality in the Global South

# data[].attributes.subject
CSR as gendered neocoloniality in the Global South

# data[].attributes.body
https://librarysearch.kent.ac.uk/client/en_GB/kent/search/detailnonmodal/eds:$002f$002f-239347381$002f0$002fbsu$007c$007c140313702/ada/a0e4282f-276b-4346-80dd-7294573c2536.EfTRJ4oiJ42chOJu6DlrvQ$003d$003d

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
CSR as Gendered Neocoloniality in the Global South.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has generally been recognized as corporate pro-social behavior aimed at remediating social issues external to organizations, while political CSR has acknowledged the political nature of such activity beyond social aims. Despite the growth of this literature, the…

# data[].attributes.headline
Article on the broader context of decolonizing the business school

# data[].attributes.subject
Article on the broader context of decolonizing the business school

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We are currently facing a set of overlapping crises in North America, including climate crises, crises of racial and social injustice and of course the COVID-19 pandemic.

Those of us in the world's richer countries bear much responsibility for this moment, having for too long consumed more than our share of resources, produced more than our share of waste and created and perpetuated social systems rooted in inequality and injustice.

Until now, we have failed to heed the many warnings that our status quo is unsustainable. If there is a silver lining to our current challenges, it's that we now have an opportunity to reflect on our mistakes and create a better future.

Business schools and the scholars within them also have fingerprints on many of these crises. They're both a tool for, and a product of, shareholder-centric, profit-maximizing and extractionist economics.

What kind of society?

As we contemplate the future of the business school, we must decide what kind of society we want our students to create and what reforms are needed to enable them to do so.

A recent example comes from one of the world's leading business educational institutions, the City, University of London's Business School. The school's leadership decided to change its name from the Cass Business School to remove the connection to Sir John Cass, who was a major figure in the 17th-century Atlantic slave trade.

Name changes like this can be symbolic but crucial.

It's true a name change is only an early step in the long journey towards decolonization. As Adam Gaudry, associate professor in the faculty of native studies at the University of Alberta, and Danielle Lorenz, PhD candidate in the department of educational policy studies at the University of Alberta noted in 2018, these efforts must not only involve including more Indigenous people in existing structures. They must also lead to the institution being "fundamentally transformed by deep engagement with Indigenous peoples, Indigenous intellectuals and Indigenous knowledge systems for all who attend."

Nevertheless, symbolism has always been an important tool to catalyze social action and institutional reform. Name changes provoke opposition, whether for prosaic reasons such as loss of hard-earned brand equity, ideological disagreement or general conservatism.

The example of the former Cass Business School is no exception, with some alumni demanding tuition refunds because of the name change.

'Cultures of racism'

Today, many business school students intuitively feel cultures of racism in day-to-day conversations and implicit expectations of behaviour and conduct in the classroom, as highlighted in a recent Globe and Mail report.

Institutional legacies and classroom cultures are deeply interconnected, but what makes it particularly toxic for some students is how institutionalized racism isolates marginalized and silenced people over the course of their studies. As ethical and influential educators, we tell our students and our peers what's important to us. Through signalling and symbolism, we tell the public what we believe in and how value is measured. With our public statements and actions, we define who we are.

Yet symbolic actions also raise awareness beyond special interest groups and launch meaningful conversations into the mainstream.

Drawing parallels with the recent toppling of statues honouring discredited historical figures - whether Canadian prime ministers, Confederate generals in the United States or slave traders in the United Kingdom. In each case, opponents argued that removing the monuments represented an attempt to rewrite or erase history.

However, for those seeking their removal, the statues spoke more to the values of the society that created them than the history that they stood for, which raises the question: Why publicly honour people who represent ethics of extraction and exploitation?

Removing statues or changing names signals a shift in societal ethics and gestures to more inclusive futures that we can all aspire to.

Call to action

We call for business schools to re-evaluate the symbols we are promoting. Who are we elevating? Which ideologies? Specifically, we ask that business schools do the work to not just Indigenize (add to), but decolonize (unlearn). That means having a serious look at the legacies we uphold.

Many other disciplines have begun that work, while business schools seem unsure about the merits of decolonizing. Even the business schools that have begun this journey seem to be fumbling in the dark, unaware that there is a lighted path ahead of us. We must learn from colleagues in other faculties nationally and globally such as law, native studies, education, social work and health sciences, to name a few.

What does this mean for business schools and society at large? The template has been created, and we recognize that naming and renaming represents an important opportunity to reframe our collective identities.

It also requires us as scholars to climb down from our ivory towers to truly understand the implications of longstanding legacies of inequality experienced on our very doorstep - in our classrooms, hallways and day-to-day operations. There are many statues inside business schools that are long overdue to be toppled.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A call to decolonize business schools, including our own

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We are currently facing a set of overlapping crises in North America, including climate crises, crises of racial and social injustice and of course the COVID-19 pandemic. Those of us in the world's richer countries bear much responsibility for this moment, having for too long consumed more than our share of resources, produced more than our share of waste and created and perpetuated social systems rooted in inequality and injustice.