Fenella Trevillion ✉
In May 2020, global attention was on George Floyd’s murder. As a white person coaching people of colour, my response to this systemic racism was to draw attention to racism and coaching and bring my practice and values around race equity into greater alignment. Through internal reflection and action and, disrupting my whiteness, my worldview changed. By using the methodology of autoethnography and themed categorisation of my pivot points of change, it emerged that transformation came through critical reflection and recursive movement. This research tracks that development and illustrates my new perspective on race equity in coaching and supervision.
Coaching, whiteness, autoethnography, mindfulness, supervision
Accepted for publication: 03 January 2025 Published online: 03 February 2025
© the Author(s) Published by Oxford Brookes University
In the last five years my work as a coach and supervisor has significantly changed. In 2019, I was actively coaching and involved in the climate coaching movement; the word race was barely in my lexicon; in contrast, it is now central. Becoming race conscious and adopting a coaching and supervision practice towards race equity has been intentional. I was curious about what my critical points of change were and how they have impacted on my practice. By documenting this self-inquiry and revealing my learnings I hope to provide some waymarkers for coaches who identify as white and for all coaches and supervisors who intend to develop a race conscious practice.
The global context of 2020-2023 was challenging. Whilst the world was struggling with the Covid-19 pandemic and gaining new perspectives on resilience and vulnerabilities across society, news of George Floyd’s murder on 25 May 2020, created a significant global response. This was an ‘epiphany’ moment for me, building on my unease around some elements of the “Brexit debate” in the UK. Systemic racism and the variance of world view between people of the global majority and people of the global minority (Campbell-Stephens, 2021) became much more visible.
Even though some saw this time as merely a temporary spotlight on endemic racism, others viewed it as a time of major revival of the discourse in race relations; notably, in the world of therapeutic practices, change was evident. For instance, the Urban Mindfulness Foundation (2023) adopted a specific ‘anti-oppressive lens’ to increase inclusivity, and the British Psychological Society (BPS) worked on reshaping its organisation in line with the call to action for an anti-racist stance (BPS, 2023).
The coaching world however, appeared silent. At the end of the summer of 2020, I looked at five coaching membership organisations, noting the race make up of their boards of directors and how many had their own written statements and policies on inclusion and diversity as required by the Global Code of Ethics for Coaches, Mentors and Supervisors (EMCC, 2024), which has been in place since 2016. Only two had policies and though the racial make-up of the boards was not declared, one had no board member pictures and of the others, I only saw one person of colour on each board. This resonated with my growing concern about the invisibility of people of colour and the visibility of systemic racism within the coaching industry. At this time, I became viscerally aware of the disconnect between my internal values and my practice/actions in the world, something which I could no longer ignore, it became an urgent issue for me to address. Whether to challenge the membership organisations on systemic racism and take account of race and racism in my coaching and supervision practice was no longer a question: how to do it, became the issue.
Coupled with this was my discomfort about my own capability as a coach who identified as white working with coachees who identified as Black or Brown, particularly when listening to them speaking of the racism they experienced. To me there was an inner logic of it being advantageous for Black or Brown coaches to do this work, mainly because of their shared lived experience of being marginalised (Carter et al., 2022). I noted that Passmore (2021) showed 86.6% of coaches from 79 countries identified as white. It followed therefore, that most Black and Brown people would be offered white coaches who wouldn’t have experienced racism. I wondered if I, a white coach, was fit for this practice. During the four years following George Floyd’s murder, I have actively sought to increase my race consciousness, ‘do the work’ and change my practice by bringing a race equity perspective to it. This article documents the process of self-inquiry I have undertaken.
My aim is to examine the process of disrupting my whiteness and identify the ways in which my coaching practice has shifted towards a race equity perspective. My purpose is to explore the cultural issue of race, understand its history and relationship with critical race theory, whiteness, and coloniality, and to reflect on my process of change as a person racialised as white. Through exploring that process my intention is to identify how I disrupted my whiteness and simultaneously expose what I have unlearned and learned in my journey towards inhabiting a race equity perspective in my practice. By investigating this, I attempt to answer the questions: Through reflectively exploring race, how was my whiteness disrupted? What have I unlearned and learned in working towards inhabiting a race equity coaching perspective?
I begin with a description of my personal narrative to provide the context for my positionality as the researcher and follow by defining the terms I use during this reflective exploration. The section on the theoretical framework of race provided through the literature is part of one of the themes of my methodology; this is followed by an overview of the research method used and the other themes identified in the research. The findings, described as learnings, and the changes to my coaching perspective are identified, followed by the discussion and conclusion.
My context is one of being a woman racialised as white, who grew up in apartheid South Africa and of the sixth generation of a white family living there. School holidays were spent at my grandparent’s farm. Whilst not an activist and described as a ‘local liberal’ (Bozzoli, 1991, p. 260), my grandmother took anti-apartheid stands which had a profound influence on my beliefs and values. My father, a mining engineer was not politically active; my mother, who described herself as a housewife, was intermittently involved in the Black Sash (Spink, 1991), a women-only activist movement. Our family was middle class with ancestral connections to influential figures such as the British diplomat Alfred Milner and Cecil John Rhodes the British imperialist, a common occurrence with the small number of privileged white families at that time. The family culture foregrounded the primacy of science with liberal values of social justice. I was raised to be curious about the news, treat all people with respect, and notice unfairness. I saw many disturbing incidents of racism and was very aware of the endemic racial oppression in the country. I immigrated to the UK aged 18.
My interest in politics and race remained throughout my career as a nurse, social worker, and various management and leadership roles. I intermittently took anti-racist stands but making connections between racist incidents and systemic racism seemed perplexing and drawing attention to the issue, particularly as a leader in mental health services, was rarely encouraged by my employers.
In 2014, when undertaking a master’s degree in coaching and behavioural change I learned the mantra: treat all people equally with respect and “unconditional positive regard” (Rogers, 2004, p. 47), yet there was no reference to racial bias or racism. Whilst internally this felt uncomfortable, it gave me some relief and permission to avoid the uneasiness of tackling it. Indeed, when describing my coaching practice before 2018, I made no mention of my values; instead, I used phrases such as ‘enabling people to be more effective’, ‘enhancing performance’ and reaching ‘goal achievements’ and ‘outcomes’. As the importance of values increased, that year, I added the phrase ‘seeing diversity as enriching’ to my coaching website, my in-depth awareness and making of connections between my privilege, my race, and my whiteness only really began in 2020. By 2023, I had changed my self-narrative and publicly acknowledged my racism, my coloniser and extractor ancestry, and worked with the discomfort of my origins. In 2024, on my coaching website, I describe my perspective on the world and identify the value of seeing people through a “lens of social and racial justice and equity” (Trevillion, 2024). Additionally, I mention being committed to taking a stance against systemic processes of power (particularly racism). My awareness of and willingness to take a stance on intersectional privilege and oppression, albeit with particular attention on race as it was historically so figural for me, has definitely increased. The journey of this change is the focus of my inquiry.
For the inquiry, I combine a sociological and psychological perspective. I am simultaneously interested in the ontology of being, how we see ourselves, our beliefs and our identity, and how the patterns of power dynamics play out as we interact within that.
Regarding terms I use for racialised groups, I have adopted the best practice in coaching approach which is to request the coachee to say how they self-identify; my experience is they usually identify as either white, Black or Brown, those of dual heritage often identify as Brown or, use the terms mixed race or biracial. In line with this, I use the terms white for people who racialise as white and for people who racialise as Black or Brown I use these terms. Where I quote other authors, terms used have been retained. Finally, for ease, I will use the term coaching to cover the whole process including supervision. Table 1 outlines the panoply of terms used in the domain of race.
Examining the literature on race and its theoretical framework created a cardinally important backdrop to my inquiry. Critical race theory (CRT) provided a significant scaffold for the discourse on race since 1980 although it was originally developed in the 1970s by America legal professors attempting to explain how racism can exist in law. Delgado and Stefancic (2007) noted that CRT highlighted that “racism is ordinary and not exceptional” (p. 136) and that there was little motivation to eliminate it given that it privileged white people over other races. CRT shifted the debate from individual to systemic racism and the unequal distribution of power and capital. In addition, it introduced the complexities of intersecting oppressions such as race, class, gender and sexual preference (Crenshaw, 1989), known as intersectionality.
As capitalism expanded in the 1990s, the ascendent political ideology known as neoliberalism also affected the public discourse on race. This was a period of the explosion of mass media, global communication, and global markets that shifted the focus to “the totalising effect of valuing human life purely in economic terms” (Karelse, 2023, p. 51), one that “promotes individualism, encouraging competition and inequality” (Karelse, 2023, p. 51). DiAngelo (2010) noted that this discourse of individualism was a barrier to white people understanding racism because it “posits race as irrelevant” and “obscures how social positioning impacts opportunity” (p. 4).
McIntosh (1989) described a key aspect of whiteness — white privilege — “as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious” (p. 1).
Taking the concept further, Saad (2020) drew attention to the systemic, intra- and interpersonal behaviours and beliefs of whiteness, kept in place through institutions, interpersonal microaggressive behaviours and white privilege.
Frantz Fanon a Black psychiatrist, identified in 1952 that whiteness is an ideology adopted by black people too. He noted:
The black man possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks and the other with the Whites. A black man behaves differently with a white man than he does with another black man. There is no doubt whatsoever that this fissiparousness is a direct consequence of the colonial undertaking (Fanon, 1952, p. 1).
He observed that the more a Black man integrates into the white colonial culture the ‘whiter’ his concept of himself becomes. With that drive to become white, Black and Brown people simultaneously feel “excluded and shamed” giving them a sense of “other” or non-belonging that adversely impacts their identities (Faire & Trevillion, 2022). Hunter and van der Westhuisen (2022) introduced the issue of whiteness and control. They note that whiteness relies on “the dualism of white saviour/ traumatised victim, because what white subjects can ‘save’, they can contain and control” (p. 3).
A third strand in the race discourse is coloniality, a term increasingly seen in the coaching literature. Maldonado-Torres (2007) noted “Coloniality, (…) refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism…” (p. 243).
Major pillars of colonialism, an enterprise of domination underpinned by capitalism, were the 300 years of the transatlantic slave trade and the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent. These structures, embedded in history, have become key cultural reference point for Black and Brown people today. Simultaneously, coloniality, visible through the imprint of patterns of power and behaviours, has become core to the current discourse on race.
Until recently research in the field of coaching and race was scarce. However, work by Bernstein (2019) queried the skill sets used by executive coaches when working with a diverse workforce, and Le Sueur and Tapela (2018) found a key condition of coaching Black coaches was to provide a “safe and trusted space and ease to express racial issues and experiences” (p. 8). Both studies highlighted the importance of understanding blackness and the effect of the pressures that Black people experience. An important ability for coaches in this context, therefore, is to be skilled in having difficult conversations. Roche and Passmore’s (2022) research has significantly added to the race discourse through reporting on useful themes highlighting the experiences of BIPOC (Black and indigenous people of colour) coaches and identifying “what needs to change for the world of coaching to take an anti-racist approach?” (p. 3)
Roche (2022) also challenges current dominant euro-centric methods of reflective practice and emphasises the importance of approaches that “do not minimise or dismiss the reality of oppression” (p. 31). By encouraging an approach of criticality — the practice of reflecting on behaviour and action through a lens of power dynamics and equity — it reveals hidden patterns of behaviour negatively impacting those it affects, namely the hidden systemic effect of whiteness. Bringing criticality into my endeavour to disrupt my whiteness has become part of my methodology in this exploration.
This qualitive research enquiry started with gathering data retrospectively, choosing the appropriate methodology for its interrogation, and then using a themed approach to categorise the findings. Details of this process follows.
The primary sources of data are my personal stories and reflections on recent disruptive experiences that have brought significant changes to my stance of whiteness in my coaching and supervision practice. Data has been collected from diaries, workbooks, presentations, my authored or co-authored articles, and by drawing on my memory. Using data retrospectively does however preclude gaining permission from people I cite, therefore the details in the narratives have been adjusted to render them non-recognisable. The methodology used is autoethnography: “a research method that uses personal experience (“auto”) to describe and interpret (“graphy”) cultural texts, experiences, beliefs, and practices (“ethno”) (Adams et al., 2017 p. 1). I explore the data within the context of the cultural issues of race and the ideology of whiteness.
Following initial examination of the data, it was coded and categorised in themes. It emerged that some events were key moments of change in how I perceived the world. In the literature on autoethnography these are known as epiphanies and are defined as “key turning-point moments” (Denzin, 2014. p.12): “These moments leave permanent marks” (ibid). These epiphanies I term pivot points. Some pivot points where there has been a major turning in perspective and consciousness or a life change, I call primary pivot points; others are secondary pivot points; namely, where there has been an increased awareness and consciousness about my whiteness or race. The period covered by the data was the four years between 25th May 2020 and 25th May 2024.
After the identification of primary and secondary pivot points, I examined the internal reflective work and different ways of seeing that changed my self-narrative. I became aware that this was and continues to be a dynamic process of critical reflection and recursive movement: “a process of ongoing learning, relearning and learning through social engagement and praxis” (Roche, 2024). Roche used this concept in her description of Freire’s notion of conscientization. However, for me, it captured my experience of events that left behind indelible memories to which I kept returning and, on each return, gained another level of unlearning or learning. In the final step of this process, I coded and categorised data into themes and including some more detailed learnings and unlearnings. The themed categorisation is a heuristic device which clustered events that comprised several processes that sometimes overlapped. In the next section, I describe the themes that emerged during this autoethnographic study and provide a summary overview of the process of unlearning and learning that unfolded.
A primary pivotal point was the public murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white American policeman on 25th May 2020. Fifteen days later, two days after the pulling down of the Bristol statue of Colston, the slave trader, I joined the Rhodes Must Fall protest in Oxford. Our communal mood was one of incredulity, shock and anger. I felt reactive and avidly followed the news and extensive posts on social media; I listened to discussions and talked to colleagues, trying to make sense of it all. I noticed the connection between violent systemic racism seen that day, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, and the systemic violence I witnessed in South Africa; all further entangled by my family’s historical connection with Rhodes. I realised the disconnect between my social and racial justice values and how I was spending my time being only peripherally involved. I decided this had to change.
I read extensively with two books particularly shifting me, both I identify as secondary pivots; these were DiAngelo’s (2018) “White Fragility” and Eddo-Lodge’s (2017) “Why I am No Longer Talking to White People About Race”. In my proverbial mirror I saw someone who often displayed white fragility and regularly asked Black or Brown people about what to do about ending racism; simultaneously, I heard Eddo-Lodge saying, “White people, you need to talk to other white people about race” (Eddo-Lodge, 2018, p. 215) and froze. I reflected on where to start and how might I learn more about what mattered to Black and Brown people. Through awakening my awareness, I realised that information was all round me in popular culture, on screens, in books, and on podcasts. I focused on finding personal stories written by Black and Brown people and avidly searched for insights into what mattered to them (e.g., Daly (2018) and Hirsh (2018)), and what their change moments were.
A further primary pivot emerged through attending the virtual book launch of “The Race Conversation” (Ellis, 2021). Here I noticed my initial excitement; the audience was mostly Black people, and I joined everyone standing up and dancing to reggae music. Suddenly there was silence and a Black woman with locs dominated the screen leading a mindfulness meditation. I recognised the modality and words, all perfect, yet I found it slightly jarring, my internal voice saying, “they do this too”. This revealed my othering behaviour and sense of superiority, a primary pivotal moment.
I continued to immerse myself in alternative narratives and histories as seen by Black and Brown people. As my work was in the NHS, my search included the King’s Fund report (2020) which shared stories of ethnic minority NHS staff. This illustrated a felt sense of domination experienced by NHS Black and Brown employees, one noting “We have staff that call it the plantation coming to work” (ibid.). For them, it appears to have evoked strong ancestral feelings, a place where challenging relationships of coloniality were present. When I considered the coachees I worked with and how this might relate to them I realised that the majority were people who identified as Brown, and I began to reflect on the difference in the experiences of Black and Brown people, and to learn more about the concept of coloniality. This constituted a secondary pivot moment as my world view widened to include global British colonialism and particular the impact of Empire on modern British society (Sanghera, 2021).
This secondary pivot echoed in coaching, when I saw a possible issue of coloniality in a situation described by a doctor, who self-identified as Brown, I will call Priya. She worked in a discordant, predominately white, team of doctors. Much of the conflict centred on the rota where tension was created by the competing requirement to cover particular shifts and simultaneously compete for those which enabled the doctors to gain appropriate experience to further their careers. Priya felt bemused and disempowered by the high level of systemic tension about something over which she had little influence. Through my naming it and using Bourdieu’s (1990) model of power and access to power within different fields of relationships (e.g., class and skin colour), she gained insights and techniques that increased her sense of agency within the team. My taking the risk and naming the differential power relationships only happened after many months of my own work to increase my race consciousness.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder there was a collective drawing-in of breath by the almost exclusively white coaching community, possibly a freeze response. With my rapid shift in race consciousness and newfound energy for action I used the opportunity to start naming the silence on race and invisibility of Black and Brown people in the industry. My principal method was through contacting prominent coaching leaders with whom I already had climate coaching connections. I asked about actions we could take to bring the issue of systemic racism into the spotlight and increase the visibility of Black and Brown coaches in the field. Speaking truth to power was a secondary pivotal moment as my internal silence lifted and my fear of exposure receded.
Soon I was invited to take part in podcasts and webinars about race. Likewise, I was asked to author and published the article “Take a Look in the Mirror” (Trevillion, 2021) revealing my own journey of understanding my whiteness and racism. As I embarked on a recursive process to consider my coaching effectiveness and the primacy of awareness and openness about who is showing up in the coaching room, a recurring question became how might I find ways to bring the issue of race and difference into the discussion? In Faire and Trevillion (2022) we highlighted the importance of being brave and recognising that, as white coaches working with Black and Brown people, we need to bring out our mostly visible racialised and cultural identity as it is part of who we are; in so doing we will make mistakes and take missteps, yet we will still have generative conversations. Through further critical reflection I was reminded of the enhanced importance of recognising the power differential in the room and considered how in working in partnership with the coachee, I might have open positive conversations about that too. I overcame my fear and took this step and introduced it in the initial stage of contracting and found that this supported an environment of ease and increased trust in the work.
In parallel, I used every opportunity to attend learning events where race featured. They were all virtual and included a panel discussion about the impact of death and bereavement on Black and Brown people during the pandemic, presentations on systemic racism in health care systems, a three-day conference by the African Executive Coaching Council, the launch of a book on decoloniality in Cape Town, and a course on coaching in racial justice. During these immersive events I witnessed mostly Black and Brown people presenting, this was accompanied by an air of confidence and success. There were coaches in Kenya and South Africa speaking about changes they had enabled, and others who spoke of their personal experiences of systemic racism. Through this and in generative conversations with people holding the same values and racialised differently from me, I began to make deeper connections. I became aware of relating across space and context, the personal and the political, and the world seemed to become smaller and feel more welcoming. These aggregated pivot points served as a socialisation process. I realised I was part of the global minority alongside the global majority, being active, sharing, taking risks, and experiencing the positive energy.
Joining experiential mixed racial workshops had a similar socialising impact; in those where we were invited to explore our inner worlds, this work felt even deeper. One example was at a global, virtual workshop led by two people who would have been historically racially coded as “coloured” in South Africa. This was a secondary pivotal moment as I was drawn back to the different primary racial attachments of my childhood; one was with a Black carer, with whom I spent most of my time and the second, with my white mother. Participation in this workshop revealed this significant childhood connection and sparked a sense of belonging; like other disruptions of my whiteness, it provoked a critical reflection about that context and the power dynamics of oppression within it.
In my endeavour to speak out about race and raise the profile about George Floyd’s murder in the coaching community, I presented at a workshop entitled “Black Lives Matter. How does this matter for us as coaches and in our coaching?”. It was followed by more writing and co-facilitation of courses for coaches and supervisors on difference and exploring race. The preparation for all these required further literature interrogations to deepen my understanding of the history of systemic racism and the ideology of whiteness and coloniality; in so doing, my understanding of the connection between individual racism and systemic power intensified.
As my understanding of the entanglements between race, whiteness, climate and capitalism widened and my networks grew, I was invited to co-facilitate a workshop with a Black coach leader as part of a Coaching Climate Alliance Global Conversation. During the preparation we discussed Salmón’s (2000) concept of kincentric ecology, namely how “indigenous people view themselves and nature as part of an extended ecological family that shares ancestry and origins […] which enhanced and preserved the ecosystem” (Salmón, 2000, p. 1327); it deeply resonated for me as I realised the importance of my relationship with the land. While sharing our own sense of belonging to it and of our different origins there was a primary pivotal moment and I realised my father was not a preserver but an extractor, just like the other colonisers in my ancestry.
Two prominent scholars of anti-racism, DiAngelo and Menakem (2021) tell us “White people need to do their own work first”. The exploration into my racism started by following Saad’s (2020) invitation to be guided “on a journey to help you explore and unpack your relationship with white supremacy” (p. 3). As it brought attention to my own behaviours particularly when I was a manager, for instance, tone policing and white silence, I found it was challenging and sought a dialogic approach to the material. In preparation, I drew on previous experiences when talking about race and remembering the emotional charge as people became vulnerable and fearful, it seemed natural to look towards mindfulness to aid my thinking and approach.
Mindfulness (the ancient practice predominantly drawn from Buddhism) for me, is a life stance, a way of being. Alvear et al.’s (2022) research identified it as being attention to the present, a non-judgemental curious attitude, a strategy to regulate emotions or attention and connection with oneself. As I became curious about Buddhist teaching on compassion and empathy, I noted that Singer and Klimechi (2014) defined empathy as ‘feeling with’ and compassion ‘feeling for’. Halifax (2018) spoke of “near enemies”, the “unhelpful qualities that masquerade helpful ones”. For example, pity is a near enemy of compassion, because it “involves a sense of regret, plus deceptive concern for those who are suffering” (ibid., p. 229). On absorbing this, I heard the echo of Hunter and van der Westhuisen’s (2022) caution of whiteness being about saving, rescuing and controlling; I witnessed another secondary pivot point as I realised the ease with which I, as a white coach working with Black or Brown people, moved into rescue mode. Recognising this and other aspects of whiteness in our work warranted more generative discussions.
My next step was to co-facilitate a group of white people, predominantly coaches, to investigate our racism and whiteness, using a mindfulness approach as a structure to hold the space. The rationale for holding a white affinity group was twofold; firstly, as the intention was to self-explore and challenge our whiteness a white people’s group would avoid the risk of us to deferring to the Black people in the group (in the guise of them being experts by experience) to do the work. Secondly, Black and Brown people report that they often do not feel listened to by white people as their content is either too difficult to hear (Eddo-Lodge, 2017) or is filtered “to prioritise white feelings” (ibid., p. x).
An added motivation was to avoid having the opportunity to ask Black and Brown people about their experiences of racism as this can invite a reliving of the violence of their racial trauma. Frankenberg (1993) noted “Whiteness, as a set of normative cultural practices, is visible most clearly to those it excludes and those to whom it does violence” (p. 228).
My commitment to mindfulness, however, was tempered by Karelse’s analysis of white mindfulness (Karelse, 2023) who drew attention to its western commodification rooted in coloniality. Bachkirova and Borrington (2020) likewise criticised it and the “tendency to sell the idea of mindfulness as an almost-universal panacea” (p. 20) noting it individualises problems and encourages acceptance of environments that should be challenged. With all this in mind, we used the approach with care to create an environment for this challenging work.
Another critically reflective space was supervision. The Global Code of Ethics (EMCC, 2024) requires coaches to attend supervision by a qualified supervisor and Bussey (2022) highlighted the importance of a supervisor who has done their own examination of anti-racism. Group supervision in a like-minded racially mixed group led by a Black supervisor and a scholar of decoloniality, aided the disruption of my whiteness. It gave space to stand back with others in a racially mixed group and critically reflect on the contour of western, Eurocentric coaching embedded in our practice.
The work of disrupting my whiteness over the last four years, required support to maintain the momentum of critical reflection and recursive movement. With that intention I participated in various global coaching communities with members from the global majority world and the global minority world. Working with shared purpose and values of equity and justice we cultivated common ground (Dabiri, 2021) and carved out new ways to lead and organise in a world currently dominated by actual and culture wars and divisions. With it has come the emergence of another primary pivot point and paradigm shift through the realisation that I am now a part of the movement within coaching that is shifting its purpose from supporting large corporate organisations to retain their part in capitalism to being more emancipatory (Shoukry, 2016) and creating social change (Gannon, 2021). Active participation in coaching communities away from the mainstream has been energising, challenging, creative, and liberatory; it has been the place where I have unlearned many embedded habits including those of victimhood, saviourism and whiteness; it has facilitated the change of my narrative and taking on a new world view from a race equity perspective.
Ahmed (2007) observed that whiteness “is an orientation that puts things within reach” (p. 154) and “holds its place […] through habits” (p. 156). From the work described in the above themes and identification of my behaviours of whiteness, awareness of my orientation has increased, enabling the disruption of my patterns of whiteness. As I critically reflected on how assumptions and behaviours have changed, I found these lay in three key areas of practice: 1. intrapersonal critical reflection, 2. commitment and follow through to action and 3. reshaping my narrative and world view. These practices took place dynamically, either in parallel or sequentially through recursive movement. Within each one and from the overall experience, there has been unlearning, learning and relearning.
Firstly, my intrapersonal reflections noted above as themes and pivot point moments, revealed the assumptions and preoccupying thoughts I had which were typical of my whiteness orientation. My learning has been to recognise these at a metalevel and to make connections between them, and systemic whiteness. Through this self-revealing and realisation of the inaccuracies of my assumptive world, I continuously worked to unlearn them and gradually their place in my life erodes and fades.
Secondly, commitment and follow through to action took the form of taking risks in my practice, challenging oppression in other spaces, and through stepping outside my white dominated world into one closer to the margins. Here I shared common ground with others and was able to connect over the discomfort about difference. I was more at ease with taking missteps and being open about my imperfections. Learning to do this on an everyday basis has enabled me to feel more authentic and align my aspirational and lived values. My experience and learning from this reflected Audre Lorde’s statement made in 1979 “difference must not be merely tolerated but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic” (Lorde, 2017, p. 90).
The third practice has been changing my narrative and world view. As I stepped outside my habitual life and well followed patterns, I used the approach of criticality and explored non-western narratives and ways of being. Through this process, living differently and through on-going sense making, a new and different narrative dropped in to view and my world view shifted to one of race consciousness and race equity that now threads throughout my life and my coaching practice.
To illustrate what I have learned and illustrate my change in practice through disrupting my whiteness, I have used Jackson and Bachkirova’s (2019) PPP framework (philosophy, purpose and process). In Table 2, using this framework, the shift from a Eurocentric western coaching perspective to a race equity coaching perspective and world view is demonstrated.
In summary the nature of my coaching and supervisory philosophy, purpose and process has change immeasurably. It is less urgent, there is transparency about my perspective, biases and motivations. I work in partnership with awareness of systemic processes and through connection with the client; together we are more able to see the unrevealed and hear the unsaid, enabling them to make choices or just remain in presence with what they find.
This inquiry started by setting out the context of 2020-2024, one of significant global change, and a period during which my own coaching practice shifted towards a race equality perspective. To examine how this shift came about, I explored the questions: Through reflectively exploring race, how was my whiteness disrupted? What have I unlearned and learned in working towards inhabiting a race equity coaching perspective? I then set out the aims, purpose and structure of the inquiry. To contextualise the research and my positionality as the researcher, I described my background and history as a white person from South Africa. Having defined the terms, I used and the literature and theoretical framework for the research, I described the research method of autoethnography and the rationale for using it. The main body of this report covers the themed categories I identified that disrupted my whiteness, noted through pivot points of change. I follow this with a high-level description of how my assumptions and behaviours changed using three key areas of practice: intrapersonal critical reflection, actively taking action and reshaping my narrative and world view. The inquiry ends with a table that illustrates my change in coaching and supervisory perspective and practice.
So far, I have not read an account by a white coach or supervisor of their personal and reflective work regarding their whiteness. It is intended that this work furthers the discourse on race through including a white person’s perspective. For me it has been through the process of authoring this paper and its many iterations that I have learned about my inner private stories and habits of whiteness. These have been exposed with some trepidation knowing that it has only been through inhabiting these uncomfortable places that I have learned more about my habits of whiteness and their impact on my coaching practice. Through facing those habits fully and bringing them into my narrative, I have changed. In these times when the evidence of the violence of whiteness (e.g., George Floyd’s murder) and coloniality is emerging, it is imperative that the coaching and supervision communities, and their educator communities, mainstream research in this area and change the paradigm towards equity of race and all other marginalised groups.
Fenella Trevillion MSc, BSc, CQSW coaches, supervises, trains and writes. Her practice is in public services where she had a previous career spending 20 years in leadership roles. Her coaching is informed by Gestalt, NLP, and mindfulness and her perspective is one of social, racial, and climate justice.