Strategic (De)racing: Middle‐Class Women Entrepreneurs Negotiating Visibility in the Business of Beauty in Canada

This paper investigates how middle‐class women beauty entrepreneurs negotiate belonging at the intersection of gender, race, and class. Building on in‐depth qualitative interviews with women owners of Canadian beauty brands as well as analysis of social media content created by these local stores, I highlight racial and political structures that shape the ways entrepreneurs negotiate belonging in a white‐dominant high‐end sector of the beauty market. Drawing upon the intersectional approach to the complexities of identity formation and entrepreneurship among racially marginalized communities, the findings illuminate how middle‐class women engage in strategic (de)racing. They engage in racing practices by sharing their racial and gendered experiences of exclusion on their public platforms and developing business practices that challenge the racist foundations of the beauty industry. However, they engage in de‐racing by adopting multicultural discourses and making class salient in order to compete in the market. The study shows how these entrepreneurs' practices and understandings of their businesses are shaped as a part of their alignment with the racial‐ and class‐based logic of market and multicultural ideologies and, simultaneously, as a reaction to inequalities. The policy implications of these findings underscore the need for a deeper examination of the systemic inequalities faced by marginalized communities when designing policies and initiatives aimed at advancing equity in the entrepreneurial domain.