Leaders within Each Group
It is essential that each group be able to put forward its own leaders. Women can have excellent male allies, but women must lead women. Whites cannot be the leaders of Blacks, although they can be excellent allies to them. To develop enough leadership to preserve the world safely will require developing leaders in every group of the oppressed.
This will not always be easy. The heavier the oppression, the more layers of oppression any one individual has suffered from and internalized, the more these patterns will interfere with the person’s confidence to take leadership and the harder it will be for her or him to respond to the challenge.
If one is counseling someone who has endured multi-layered oppression, for example, one must furnish a great deal of confidence and expectation that the person will become a leader, as well as furnish the other contradictions [to distress] that will allow the person to discharge the fears and discouragements.
(In the past, some individuals have spontaneously decided to lead, in spite of the heaviest oppression, and have done so. We have much to learn from this of the power of decision. Yet, in three thousand years of such spontaneous process, China produced one Mao Tse-Tung. With the use of our counseling knowledge and skills we should be able to produce thousands of such capable leaders.)
From page 25 of The Enjoyment of Leadership