Dark educational leadership trajectories: unpacking the invisible and weightless knapsack of manufactured ‘white privilege’

ABSTRACT

The issue of social justice has become increasingly more important to the field of educational leadership. Recently, arising from the broad field of social justice and ‘anti-racism’ is the new paradigm of ‘white privilege’ which has fundamentally, and contentiously, challenged traditional assumptions and understandings of racial discrimination and oppression. This new and radical paradigm has been incorporated into educational leadership, management, and pedagogy without serious critique or question irrespective of its utility, validity, or even veracity. In this paper, it will be argued that this new direction in educational leadership constitutes dark leadership and undermines the credibility of the field by fundamentally endorsing the very discriminatory principles it claims to oppose: through the normalization of racism.

The purpose of this article is to critique Peggy McIntosh’s (1989) influential construct of white privilege and to expose its inherently racist and white supremacist suppositions. It will be argued that McIntosh’s paradigm of white privilege, and its subsequent incorporation into the field of educational leadership, undermines the credibility of the anti-racism movement by endorsing racist principles. Peggy McIntosh’s white privilege construction will be analysed followed by an argument which exposes its racist suppositions and false claims. Finally, a discussion of the harmful effects of the white privilege paradigm as a form of dark educational leadership will be put forward. This article has value because it offers a unique criticism of white privilege and outlines the harmful effects of McIntosh’s work on educational leadership and the anti-racism movement.

The promotion of social justice and the incorporation of anti-racism perspectives is important to educational and school leaders (Lynch et al., 2017). Peggy McIntosh’s (1989) construct of white privilege has been influential in educational research such as Whiteness studies (McWhorter, 2005) and teaching practice such as white privilege pedagogy (Levine-Rasky, 2000). The white skin color privilege paradigm and accompanying ideologically driven narratives have also emerged within the field of educational leadership with calls for mandating it in educational leadership training (e.g. Allen & Liou, 2018; Gooden & Dantley, 2012).

I suggest that the seminal inspiration for the construct known as ‘white privilege’ (McIntosh, 1989) contributes to systemic racism. This is not a polemic on anti-racism but an examination of a flawed epistemology that disrupts the anti-racism movement. I argue that the construct of white privilege is based on racist presuppositions, negative racial stereotypes, obscurantism, and weak academic scholarship and rigor precipitating the rise of dark (toxic) leadership within the field of education. I conclude with a discussion of the harmful outcomes in the field of educational leadership that have arisen from McIntosh’s unchallenged contentions.

The white privilege paradigm

White privilege as a concept has its beginnings in the anti-racism movement which became prominent in the 1960s along with the women’s movement and gay rights activism (Bonnett, 2000). From the women’s movement in the 1970s emerged the field of women’s studies which were based on the idea of patriarchal oppression and male privilege. Women's studies scholars define privilege as ‘automatic unearned benefits bestowed upon perceived members of dominant groups based on social identity’ (Case et al., 2014, p. 723). Hence, anti-racism and anti-sexism studies contributed to the conceptual development of the white privilege paradigm by Peggy McIntosh in 1989. This anti-racism white privilege paradigm has become dominant in the social sciences and in the field of education and posits that even in the absence of overt racial discrimination, Western progressive white majority multicultural societies are fundamentally structurally racist, reproducing systems of white supremacy through the allocation of hidden and unseen benefits and privileges to white skinned people to the detriment and oppression of people of color.

Building on this prior work in gender studies on male privilege, McIntosh (1989) developed her personal experiences and anecdotes into a seminal paper called ‘White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack’. This paper has had an enormous impact in social science and educational studies. As Solomona et al. (2005) note ‘theorizing white privilege has emerged as a significant field of study within academia in recent years’ (p.148).

McIntosh’s work is predicated on a construct which is vaguely, and at times, incoherently defined by 46 ‘unearned privileges’ which benefit people of white skin color at the expense of people of color. In 1990, McIntosh revised this list and reduced it to 25 privileges (McIntosh, 1990) and to 20 privileges in 1993 (McIntosh, 1993). However, I will refer to McIntosh’s seminal paper with the complete original list of 46 items. This list of ‘privileges’ is described in the manner of a zero-sum game, that is, any privilege or benefit attributed to white skinned people results in oppression to people of color. These privileges are considered by scholars as ‘evidence’ for ‘systems and structures of racial oppression’ which are embedded in all white majority multi-cultural Western societies (Murdoch & McAloney-Kocaman, 2019). McIntosh’s ‘privileges’ and ‘unearned benefits’ attributed to having white skin color have largely gone unexamined and are not critiqued in the literature (Church, 2020; Lensmire et al., 2013). Howard (2004) states ‘too often, the declaration of antiracist intent and other good intentions have been received in such a manner as to move the work of the white (antiracist) worker beyond appropriate scrutiny’ (p. 64).

Questioning the validity of McIntosh’s narrative is often met, not with scholarly counter argument, but by ad hominem attacks, such as accusations of defense of white supremacy and ‘white fragility’ (Church, 2020; DeAngelo, 2018). It is important to acknowledge that the white privilege paradigm is based solely on the personal experiences of one person which, incredibly, has been generalized as representative of white skinned peoples as a monolithic homogenous collective spanning multiple Western countries with diverse cultures and histories of race-relations.

McIntosh herself has warned against generalizing her list and has stated that her work on white privilege is ‘about my experience, not about the experiences of all white people in all times and places and circumstances’ (SEED: The national SEED project, 2021). Despite this, McIntosh’s white privilege paradigm has been generalized to whites in a number of countries like Australia (Bennett, 2015), New Zealand (Addy, 2008), UK (Harman, 2010; Hubbard, 2005; Murdoch & McAloney-Kocaman, 2019), Canada (Solomona et al., 2005), and even in Taiwan (e.g. Lan, 2011).

I am struck by the fact that many of the scenarios on McIntosh’s list of white skin color ‘privileges’ and ‘unearned benefits’ are not ‘privileges’ at all and, perhaps more concerningly, have little to do with skin color or race. First, the terms ‘privilege’ and ‘unearned benefits’ do not make semantic sense in the context of their use. For example, consider the following ‘privileges’ –

I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.

I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.

Being treated with courtesy and dignity and not being harassed are neither privileges nor unearned benefits. They should be universal human rights. McIntosh has standardized discourteous treatment and harassment as a societal norm and depicts avoidance of such treatment as a special privilege. That is, to not receive discourteous treatment and harassment is a special privilege enjoyed by whites but not people of color. In the broader society, McIntosh delineates the ‘normal’ (i.e. to receive discourteous treatment and harassment) from the ‘privileged’ (i.e. to avoid discourteous treatment and harassment). By affirming discourteous treatment and harassment as the default normative position in society as deeply rooted, systemic/structural problems within society, such problems are presented as more than random acts of racial prejudice by racist white individuals. Hence, the privileged white group’s avoidance of such normative poor treatment can only indicate complicity in systemic racial privilege at a broader societal level. This constitutes a substantial inversion of reality in order to construct a white supremacist societal model.

Through setting racist behavior and abusive treatment as societal norms and the absence of such behaviors as racial privilege, McIntosh has reduced all of society into a simplistic dichotomous structure of oppressor (white privileged group) versus the oppressed (under-privileged people of color group). Based solely on skin color as the univariate determinant, McIntosh makes a priori assumptions and attributes personality traits and behaviors to each racial group as though they were homogenous monolithic cultures. McIntosh’s extreme essentialism accords no consideration to the intersections of class, ethnic/cultural background, socio-economic background and status, educational background, or social/cultural capital of either group. As a consequence of such an essentialist interpretation of complex society, McIntosh relies on crude racial stereotypes of both people of color and whites to forward her narrative.

Concordant with McIntosh’s racial stereotyping and racialized simplistic deductions of personality attributes and behaviors are underlying white supremacist presuppositions. For example, for many of her posited scenarios to be true or valid (in a systemic or structural sense) one must hold a priori views which make fundamental assumptions about both people of color and whites and their respective associated traits and behaviors. That is, in order for the scenarios to be true or valid there must be agreed upon pre-conditions which also happen to be true. These pre-conditions are not explicitly stated but share an implicit and direct causal relationship with McIntosh’s statements. For example, consider the statements –

I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my color.

I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty or the illiteracy of my race.

In order for the above scenarios to have any truth, one must have a priori beliefs that people of color habitually engage in such negative traits and behaviors. It is important to emphasize that McIntosh argues strongly that her list of white privileges is evidence of systemic and structural racism within society. Therefore, her claim is not that such incidents in her scenarios are one-off or random acts by racist individuals, but rather consist of collective racist behaviors that manifest on a daily basis in the lives of people of color. This means that the likelihood of these scenarios being played out is highly probabilistic. For such a probabilistic argument of systemic racism and discrimination to occur, a priori assumptions must be satisfied. If these a priori assumptions are not satisfied, then such scenarios may still occur but could be explained as the racist behaviors of specific individuals acting in isolation and at random. If this a priori assumption is not acknowledged, then, consequently, the theoretical underpinnings posited as white privilege cannot be held to be true.

For example, from McIntosh’s above privileges, the a priori presuppositions are that people of color are vulgar, have poor table manners, are foul mouthed, poorly dressed, impolite, and ignorant. In her scenarios, McIntosh has normalized negative and white supremacist stereotypes of people of color traits and behavior. That is, people of color commonly display these negative traits and behaviors in their daily interactions. From this structure, the idea of ‘privilege’ arises when whites imitate these people of color behaviors but escape racial consequences.

Conversely, if these negative opinions and racial stereotypes on people of color are rejected and it is believed that people of color are generally polite, civil, well-dressed, and courteous, then McIntosh’s contentions are false, lack validity, and importantly, the ‘privileges’ and ‘benefits’ cease to exist. For McIntosh’s argument to have validity, it is necessary to accept the belief that people of color collectively and consistently exhibit negative character traits and engage in negative racial stereotypical behavior and that such behavior is widespread and systemic. Hence, the privileging of whites who imitate this behavior and escape racial derision must also be considered systemic. Therefore, if one rejects these offensive and racist stereotypes of people of color, then the idea of ‘white privileges’ too must be rejected. Only through adopting an a priori deeply racist interpretation of people of color can these privileges have any currency.

McIntosh’s somewhat racist interpretation of people of color can be understood through a phenomenon known as ‘aversive racism’ (Dovidio & Gaertner, 2004, p. 3). Aversive racism is a form of unconscious racism common to well-educated, liberal white Americans who ‘… sympathize with victims of past injustice, support the principle of racial equality, and regard themselves as nonprejudiced, but, at the same time, possess negative feelings and beliefs about blacks, which may be unconscious’ (Dovido & Gaertner, 2004, p. 3). Such aversive racism is manifest in McIntosh’s a priori assumptions of white privilege as the imitation of the negative and vulgar behaviors of people of color by whites.

That McIntosh’s statements are posited as conditionals, in that they include the possibility of whites also possessing and expressing such traits and behaviors, does not diminish the underlying assumptions that these traits are commonly perceived to be normalized people of color traits. McIntosh has framed her list as ‘daily effects of white privilege’ (McIntosh, 1989, p. 2). Hence, these traits and behaviors are commonly manifested and experienced. Hence, according to McIntosh, it is a common experience for people of color to display and engage in such negative traits and behaviors and also to be called out on them as exemplars of their racial grouping. McIntosh’s heuristic is such that, on the one hand, she accords such negative traits and behaviors to people of color, while simultaneously condemning the attribution of such negative traits and behaviors to their race by whites. There are many instances of this logical fallacy in her list. Additionally, it is conceivable that white skin colored people who display such appalling traits and behavior would be ascribed the racist slur of ‘white trash’, which forms yet another layer undermining McIntosh’s contentions.

McIntosh is conjuring a type of ‘racecraft’ (Fields & Fields, 2012) in that her use of ‘race’ is actually disguised ‘racism’. McIntosh describes people of color as a race by their ‘collective social practice as inborn individual traits’ (Fields & Fields, 2012, p. 261). In the case of people of color, the collective social practice is negative and appalling. When whites identify such appalling behaviors as race-related to people of color, then they are exhibiting racist behavior because such characteristics and behaviors are negative and appalling. McIntosh does not associate such appalling behavior as normalized white behavior, yet she equates recognition of such as white privilege. When whites act abnormally and exhibit such negative and appalling behaviors, this is never associated as race-related because McIntosh believes that this is not normal white behavior. Hence, McIntosh’s performance of racecraft is passed off as white privilege.

McIntosh’s associations of people of color with such negative personality traits and behaviors further a white supremacist narrative through the back door and conjure early Relativist perspectives that ‘European values and habits are the yardstick that the world can and must be measured against’ (Bonnett, 2000, p. 18). Moreover, McIntosh’s ‘othering’ of people of color mimics the post-colonial narrative discourse of Edward Said’s orientalism (Said, 1978). That is, the interpretation of the person of color as the ‘other’ exhibiting abnormal and strange behaviors in contrast with white habits of good manners and common decency.

McIntosh’s scenarios represent the daily effects of white privilege, that is, what commonly occurs in the lives of people of color and whites simultaneously. Within this framework, the scenarios in McIntosh’s list are deeply rooted in negative racial stereotypes of people of color which degrade and dehumanize while simultaneously being accorded the ideological protection of being a major ‘anti-racist’ text, a doctrine considered sacrosanct and untouchable by its most fanatical proponents.

McIntosh also makes a number of presuppositions on whites and their behaviors, attitudes, and attributes, many of which are based on crude racial stereotyping and are patently false. For example, consider:

If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.

For this scenario to be true is to claim that there are no homeless whites, there are no whites living in undesirable and impoverished neighborhoods, and that all whites are financially capable of living anywhere they choose. The magnitude of such a false claim is extraordinary. More bizarrely, some of McIntosh’s claims seem to imply that there is a Caucasian conspiracy of corporations, business owners, and entrepreneurs operating together to intentionally deprive products and services to people of color. Consider the following –

I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair.

I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.

I can choose blemish cover or bandages in ‘flesh’ color and have them more or less match my skin.

The underlying theoretical assumptions and presuppositions here are that supermarket chains, manufacturers, music production companies and distributors, publishing houses, toy manufacturers, those working in hair styling and the beauty industry and even manufacturers of health products such as bandages are united in their goals to promote white supremacy through either the exclusion of products and services for people of color or failure to adequately tailor the products so that they are appropriate for people of color consumption.

Interestingly, Klein (2020) reports on the Johnson and Johnson corporation’s (manufacturer of band-aids in the US) attempt to rectify this white privilege by reissuing Band-Aid products for darker skin tones. These Band-Aids for darker skin tones were issued in 2005, but the line was discontinued due to poor sales (Klein, 2020). Clearly, the color of Band-Aids was less significant to people of color than McIntosh had anticipated. After all, common sense dictates that the sole purpose of a Band-Aid or a bandage is to protect an open wound or stop it from hemorrhaging. A bandage or Band-Aid is neither a fashion accessory nor a symbol of racial inequality. Moreover, as the Johnson and Johnson company clearly indicates, far from a racist-driven agenda, the decision to discontinue the people of color skin tone band aids was an economic decision, not one based on race. This clearly demonstrates the fundamental flaws in many of McIntosh’s arguments: the tendency to conflate, interpret and reduce all behaviors and situations to racism, without any form of critical analysis or evidence to support such sweeping generalizations and contentions.

If white majority multi-cultural Western societies are systemically racist and having white skin color provides tangible benefits and privileges to the detriment and simultaneous oppression of people of color, then the onus is on scholars making such claims to articulate these privileges and benefits in a clear and concise manner, and to provide evidence of such contentions in a rigorous and scholarly way. That is, to provide metrics beyond the misleading cherry picking of univariate cause and effect and circular reasoning, and importantly, to ensure that metrics have been controlled for all possible confounds (e.g. wealth, social class, ethnicity, cultural and social capital, etc.). For example, the wealth disparity between Black and White Americans is frequently used as evidence of white privilege (e.g. Campos, 2017).

However, Harinam and Henderson (2019) clearly show in their analysis using 2018 census data from the U.S.A. that the wealth disparity between whites and people of color is not as clear cut as argued by white privilege advocates. For example, if one simply compares the median household income of whites ($63 293) with blacks ($41, 899) the whites clearly earn more. However, if one specifically compares by ethnic groups and racial backgrounds (e.g. Indian, Pakistani, Filipinos, Taiwanese, Lebanese, Sri Lankan, Chinese, and Iranian), many nonwhite and people of color groups enjoy higher median household income than whites (all > $72, 733) (Harinam & Henderson, 2019, para. 13). Moreover, Harinam and Henderson (2019) found that Asian Americans (nonwhite skinned ethnicities) had significantly better outcomes than white Americans in their analysis of the metrics of privilege (e.g. economics, education, crime and health). Harinam and Henderson (2019, para.18) state that ‘… reporting this data would undermine, if not devastate, the conclusions made by the proponents of white privilege’.

If the construct of white privilege exists, it needs validation through an accurate definition of what it is precisely, its properties, and the provision of empirical evidence of its existence. If the construct actually exists, this should be relatively easy to demonstrate, and such evidence would do much to counter the arguments of ‘fragile’ white privilege paradigm deniers. However, no attempts seem to have been made in this direction, which delegitimizes the white privilege paradigm and accompanying claims and shows the entire paradigm to be a type of pseudoscience consisting of largely unfalsifiable claims and harmful, ideologically driven racial stereotyping. Without this type of methodical examination and verification, the continued reification of McIntosh’s abstract personal opinions will continue to dominate the fields of social science and education as pseudoscience, consequently bringing forth all the accompanying harm that pseudoscience can inflict on any reputable field of study (see Hines, 1988). A case in point is the field of educational leadership.

Dark leadership and the white privilege paradigm

The white privilege paradigm is a relatively new one and one which is gaining prominence in the field of educational leadership (e.g. Allen & Liou, 2018; Gooden & Dantley, 2012). Teaching about white privilege is considered critical in anti-racism school training (Boatright-Horowitz et al., 2013; Martinez, 2015). I argue that instead of advancing the anti-racism movement as an important part of social justice education, the white privilege paradigm fractures and disrupts the traditional antiracist movement by admitting dark leadership practices that promote pseudoscientific belief and indoctrination, white supremacist ideology, racial stereotyping, and collective skin color shaming. Racism is defined as ‘any attitude, action, or institutional arrangement that results in the subordination of another group based ostensibly upon group-linked physical characteristics’ (Jones, 2002, p. 30). The white privilege paradigm and ideology is, in effect, inculcating educational leadership discourse with an inherently racist narrative, the very antithesis of anti-racism. An explicitly stated outcome of educational leaders in the teaching of the white privilege paradigm (specifically to white students) is to make students self-reflect and examine their own racial privilege and prejudice as members of the oppressor group (Endres & Gould, 2009; Martinez, 2015; Morrison, 2010; Warren & Hytten, 2004; Young et al., 2006). In order to achieve this, white privilege pedagogy involves the strong encouragement of white students to acknowledge their racial privilege and prejudice and to ‘confess’ their complicity in a systemically white supremacist society which persecutes an oppressed racial group people of color (Boatright-Horowitz et al., 2013).

For example, consider the school-level pedagogy based on McIntosh’s initial white privilege construct, such as, the ‘White Privilege Walk’ (WPW). This pedagogical technique is commonly practiced in schools (Crowley & Smith, 2020). A good example of this pedagogy was recently aired on Australian TV by the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) which was a remake of a British TV program – ‘The School that Tried to End Racism’ (Behrendt & Karabelas, 2021). This TV series is self-described as ‘ground-breaking’ anti-racist education and is set in an Australian primary school. In the show, the school children are ordered to line up for a running race. However, their starting position is mediated by responses to arbitrary ‘white privilege’ influenced questions such as ‘if you have blue or green eyes take three steps forward, if your parents speak English take a step forward, if most Australians on TV look like you take three steps forward etc.’. Hence, the white skinned children are placed close to the finish line, while the dark-skinned children are right at the back. Not surprisingly, white skinned children win the race. At the end of the race, a Vietnamese boy who came in last starts crying, distraught by the unfairness of the situation. The TV host then sums up the running race as analogous to the unfairness of a racially oppressive society and states:

The idea that we all learned there was something called white privilege … that society in Australia gives preferential treatment to people with whiter skin or a certain cultural background and it really doesn’t have much to do with anything they’ve done … it’s purely your cultural background and the colour of your skin means where you start in life is often really different to those with a different cultural background … (Behrendt & Karabelas, 2021)

The camera then pans around the group of children who all seem very upset and disturbed, the white children with their heads down in shame and the darker-skinned children seemingly angry. This pedagogy is divisive and clearly unethical to all but the most fanatical antiracist.

Concerningly, the discomfort and upset felt by white students generated from white privilege pedagogy is intentional (not an undesirable side effect). For example, consider Morrison (2010), a US anti-racism pedagogue’s comments on how she teaches the white privilege paradigm to her school students -

… Still, the main objective is to cause a certain amount of discomfort in the students … .Unless they are made to feel uncomfortable about this idea of white privilege and the possibility that they have benefitted from it (and perhaps even unwittingly perpetuated it), they will not work to resolve the issue cognitively. (Morrison, 2010, p. 32)

By the pedagogue’s own admission when teaching about white privilege, her ‘main objective’ is to target a specific group of students solely on the basis of their skin color (biology) and to purposefully make them experience discomfort on the basis of something they have no control over (i.e. genetics and past historic injustices). For such pedagogues, race shaming children would be considered egregious and an act of racial abuse given a different skin pigmentation group.

For example, consider a group of young brown-skinned Turkish students. Turkey, as a country, has had a long history of slavery under the Ottoman Empire, taking millions of white-skinned Europeans and black-skinned Africans over the centuries ending only after the first world war in the twentieth century (Toledano, 2012). The Ottoman Empire was militarily expansionist and colonized many countries and oppressed many Indigenous white-skinned and black-skinned peoples. Moreover, there was a genocide of 1.5 million minority Christian Armenians in 1915 by the Muslim Ottomans, one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century (Kieser, 2018). Now one could easily conjure 25 or 30 brown-skin privileges in the spirit of McIntosh’s list looking at contemporary Turkish society from the perspective of the minority white- and black-skinned native Turks. This could be used as evidence of ‘brown supremacy’ and systemic racial oppression from which could emerge brown-skin privilege pedagogy with a main objective of making the young primary school aged students feel discomfort because of their brown skin. They could be made to feel ashamed of their individual role in the oppression of their white- and black-skinned classmates through pedagogies such as the ‘Brown Privilege Walk’. There is no doubt that any school leader who endorsed or engaged directly in such brown-skin privilege pedagogy would be instantly accused of racially abusing students and his/her employment would be quickly terminated (and rightly so). There is an immediate and crucial need for school leaders such as Morrison (2010) to acknowledge their cognitive dissonance on white privilege pedagogy and remove this from their anti-racism curriculum.

Fundamentally, the crux of McIntosh-influenced white privilege pedagogy is the revelation to learners of a simplistic, patently false, and pernicious world view which is subsequently applied to the students. That is, the division of students into two categorizations: the ‘bad’ white skinned oppressor group and the ‘good’ people of color oppressed group. The basis for this sinner-versus-saint dichotomy and the accompanying attribution of all the stereotypical traits and behaviors allocated to each group by McIntosh is determined solely on the basis of skin color. The message being that one’s skin color determines one’s moral character, the most patently racist of racist ideas.

Attributing collective guilt to students based solely on the arbitrary color of their skin and blaming them for receiving patently fabricated privileges and benefits, many of which simply reproduce and perpetuate harmful racist stereotypes of people of color, cannot by any standard, be described as anything other than dark leadership practice and pedagogy. That is, school leaders, such as teachers who engage in white privilege pedagogy and school principals who advocate for such harmful anti-racist training and have awareness of the racism directed at white students (as well as students of color), are exhibiting the personality traits of subclinical psychopathy and narcissism. Subclinical psychopathy and narcissism are two of the three personality traits associated with of the dark triad of leadership, along with Machiavellianism (see Paulhus & Williams, 2002). Essentially, allowing harmful racist teachings and engaging in such, is unethical behavior, that is, a conscious awareness of actions generating harm and allowing their continuation. This is a clear expression of subclinical psychopathy personality traits such as amorality, callousness, and also a lack of remorse or feelings of guilt (Grosz et al., 2020) expressed by such pedagogues and educational leaders.

In addition to these subclinical psychopathy type personality traits, the white privilege paradigm school leadership can be viewed as somewhat narcissistic leadership behavior as well. For example, narcissistic personality traits defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, 2013 (DSM-V) (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) are prevalent in leaders who lack empathy and have a sense of entitlement. Clearly, if one’s main intention as a pedagogue is to make students of a specific skin color feel shame and discomfort this is a demonstration of a decided lack of empathy. Moreover, there is a sense of entitlement from such pedagogues in that they believe that they should receive admiration or kudos for their allyship and progressive ‘groundbreaking’ anti-racism training.

Of course, such school leaders may not be aware of their subclinical psychopathic and narcissistic behaviors due to cognitive dissonance. For example, Kunda (1990) argues that a strong motivation (i.e. directional goals) can override reasoning ability and account for any respective cognitive dissonance arising therein. This may explain school leaders’ cognitive dissonance on the white privilege paradigm. The strong desire and goal to be an ally of people of color and strong advocate for anti-racism training results in selected evidence gathering and hypothesis testing in that particular direction only. This would consequently provide confirmation that their school leadership and pedagogy are progressive and productive and not unethical in any way. This would function similar to a type of confirmation bias, that is, school leaders recall only positive information and knowledge about the white privilege paradigm and pedagogy and consciously ignore the evidence of the harmful racist elements. Hence, ‘motivated reasoning’ (Kunda, 1990, p. 495) may be the cognitive force behind why such clearly unethical school leadership and pedagogy is permitted and so prevalent in education.

The white privilege paradigm will not advance the antiracism movement within social justice education. It will rupture and regress antiracism pedagogy/leadership and will have the unintended consequences of deterring students from participation in any form of antiracism activism. Wherever racism manifests, there will be antiracism resistance. There is already research which shows this to be the case. For example, many students who receive white privilege training see it as an attempt to diminish, alienate, or denigrate those who are white-skinned (Etchells et al., 2017). Moreover, white privilege pedagogy and its elicitation of feelings of upset, discomfort, and distress in white students have been found to engender resistance and rejection of diversity education in some (e.g. Johnson, 2000; Reason et al., 2005; Todd et al., 2010).

Conclusion and reflections

Fundamental to antiracism is the moral imperative of situating racism as ‘morally reprehensible, inhuman, oppressive, and toxic’ (Solomon, 2002, p. 176). One cannot make exceptions to this position regardless of how well-intentioned or seemingly justifiable the cause may be. The ends do not justify the means. It is a critical duty of school leaders to reject dark leadership practice by dispensing with the white privilege paradigm and ensuring that schools and universities must be inclusive and safe places of learning where all are accepted (and grow self-acceptance) for who they are. The universalist anti-racism paradigm of equality and the dignity of all people must be restored, and educational leaders must have the courage to promote true antiracist training and dispense with the pernicious and divisive identity politics of the white privilege paradigm.

This paper has contributed to educational leadership and the schooling process in two main ways. First, through the deconstruction of Peggy McIntosh’s white privilege concept and the revelation of its inherently racist assumptions and ideology. Second, the paper presents a warning to educational leaders that the incorporation of the white privilege paradigm into educational leadership and pedagogy is an expression of dark leadership and, ultimately, is detrimental to both students in their care and antiracism training per se.

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John Ehrich

John Ehrich earned his PhD from the Psychology and Counseling Department at Queensland University of Technology in June 2008. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Education at Macquarie University. His varied research interests are in the fields of assessment, measurement and scale development, reading processes, and dark leadership.