Race-Conscious Caring for Antiracist Leadership: A Narrative Ethics for Cultivating Communal Responsibility

• In Event: Creating Greater Justice in Schools: Considering New Paths Forward

Abstract

In this conceptual paper, the authors develop an ethics of caring that is race-conscious and consistent with anti-racist educational leadership. The authors argue that predispositions toward caring among teachers and school leaders are insufficient for the project of anti-racist education, because of uncritical assumptions of sameness, misplaced empathy, and the evasion of race and racism. Particularly among educators from white and middle-class backgrounds, the result is impersonal caring, which reproduces racist power relations and reinforces standardized and competitive notions of responsibility for children. The authors explore the possibilities of deepening leaders’ engagement in caring through narrative ethics, especially through engaging with Black womanist theory and traditions of African-American struggle for equity and justice, to cultivate communal responsibility.

Authors

• Michael G. Gunzenhauser, University of Pittsburgh

• Osly J. Flores, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Michael Quigley, Robert Morris University