Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
LACE JACKSON
Constructive dissent for me in Black leadership in relation to what came out of the research was that it was a way of global majority leaders finding emancipatory ways to exercise and practise leadership. So for me, it’s how do they find ways to be the first in role. How do they find ways to collaborate? How do they find ways to support each other to be able to exercise their leadership even though there are so many obstacles in the way?
So for me, that’s a form of constructive dissent. What was really interesting from my research was how faith played a big part in a number of global majority leadership practice. So even if it wasn’t as explicit and they didn’t necessarily make it known, it was a counter-narrative that ran throughout the leadership practices of the majority of the participants. And, therefore, I would say that is a constructive dissent from the leadership on offer.
So destructive consent in Black leadership can take a number of forms. Mainly, what I’ve found throughout my research was about intercultural and intercultural betrayals. And that led to disconnection from communities. It would mean that other in-groups within the global majority leadership could judge each other more harshly.
We hear the term coconut that you’re Black on the outside but white on the inside. Those are the types of things that come through in destructive consent. So you’re consenting to the patriarchal norms of the organisations in which they operate, which then excludes other groups.
The example of constructive dissent that I could give you was shared with me by a research participant who was a senior police officer. They had witnessed, which was known in terms of public media or social media that there was a death in police custody of somebody who’d been assaulted whilst receiving treatment in the hospital became aggressive and was then arrested. But they ended up dying in police custody. They made representations of that, asking questions as to why did this happen.
But being a senior police officer, they knew that would limit their career. If I gave an example in light of destructive consent, it would be that they would be in that similar role and not say anything about how that situation should not have occurred. I guess what I wanted to really illustrate was the cost of that to Black leaders in that it did limit that person’s career by having that constructive dissent.