World Yearbook of Education 2023

World Yearbook of Education 2023
The World Yearbook of Education 2023 centers on the intersection of racialization,

inequality, and education. It critically examines how racial formation and its
associated logics about citizenship, belonging, justice, equality, and humanity
manifest in early childhood education, primary, secondary, and higher education,
as well as non-formal, community-based education settings. The chapters
offer multisited perspectives into how racialization has and continues to shape
educational inequality, with an eye toward the agency and resistance of youth and
communities in contesting such forms of domination and marginalization.
Across three sections, the book examines how forces of imperialism, white
supremacy, and colonization have shaped racialization in distinct locations and
how education was historically utilized as a site for both the creation and/or
reification of difference. It reveals the lingering effects of processes of racialization
in distinct locations globally and their intersections with educational policies,
ideologies, systems, and realities.
Inviting readers to learn, reflect, and engage with the layered and complex
realities of racialization and inequality in education across the globe, World
Yearbook of Education 2023 is a timely and important contribution to discussions
of racialization and provides the field with a robust foundation for future critical
inquiry and engagement with the themes of race, racialization, inequality, and
education.
Janelle Scott is a Professor and the Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational

Disparities at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a Fellow of the
American Educational Research Association, a Member of the National Academy
of Education, and a Trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching. She is the editor of School Choice and Diversity: What the Evidence Says
(Teachers College Press), and with Horsford & Anderson, author of The Politics of
Education in an Era of Inequality: Possibilities for Democratic Schooling (Routledge).
Monisha Bajaj is professor of international and multicultural education at the

University of San Francisco as well as a visiting professor at Nelson Mandela
University in South Africa.
World Yearbook of Education Series
Series editors:
Julie Allan
University of Birmingham, UK.
Antoni Verger
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.
Examining a different topical subject each year, these fascinating books put
forward a wide range of perspectives and dialogue from all over the world. With
the best and most pivotal work of leading educational thinkers and writers from
1965 to the present day, these essential reference titles provide a complete h
istory
of the development of education around the globe. Available individually or
in library-ready sets, this is the indispensable atlas of education, mapping ever
changing aspects of theory, policy, teaching and learning.
Titles in the series:

Comparative Methodology in the Era of Big Data and Global Networks
Edited by Radhika Gorur, Sam Sellar and Gita Steiner-Khamsi

Schooling, Governance and Inequalities
Edited by Julie Allan, Valerie Harwood and Clara Rübner Jørgensen

Accountability and Datafication in the Governance of Education
Edited by Sotiria Grek, Christian Maroy and Antoni Verger

Education, Schooling and the Global Universalization of Nationalism
Edited By Daniel Tröhler, Nelli Piattoeva and William F. Pinar

Racialization and Educational Inequality in Global Perspective
Edited by Janelle Scott and Monisha Bajaj
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/World-

Yearbook-of-Education/book-series/WYBE
World Yearbook of
Education 2023
Racialization and Educational Inequality
in Global Perspective
Edited by Janelle Scott and

Monisha Bajaj
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Janelle Scott and Monisha Bajaj;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Janelle Scott and Monisha Bajaj to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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without intent to infringe.
ISBN: 978-1-032-14843-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-14844-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-24139-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393
Typeset in Goudy
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of Contributorsviii
Acknowledgmentsxiv
Introduction: Racialization and Educational Inequality

in Transnational Perspective 1
JANELLE SCOTT AND MONISHA BAJAJ
SECTION 1
Racialization: Theories, Discourse, and Globalization15
1 Erasures of Racism in Education and International

Development 17
ARATHI SRIPRAKASH, LEON TIKLY, AND SHARON WALKER
2 Racialization, Whiteness, and Education 35

ZEUS LEONARDO IN CONVERSATION WITH JANELLE SCOTT AND
MONISHA BAJAJ
3 Critical Race Theory Beyond Borders: Educational

Marronage and Transnational Critical Race Theory 50
STEVEN L. NELSON
4 Global Cadences of Islamophobia: Comparative Reflections

on the Racialization and Education of Muslim Youth 66
ROOZBEH SHIRAZI
vi Contents
5 Rejecting Abyssal Thinking in the Language and Education
of Racialized Bilinguals 81
OFELIA GARCÍA, NELSON FLORES, KATE SELTZER, LI WEI,
RICARDO OTHEGUY, AND JONATHAN ROSA
SECTION 2
Coloniality, Development, and Racialization in Education101
6 Education for Subordination: Youth and the Afterlives

of Coloniality and Racialization in Africa 103
KRYSTAL STRONG, REHANA ODENDAAL, AND
CHRISTIANA KALLON KELLY
7 Tomorrow’s Australia: Race and Racialization

in Australian Education 119
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE AND REMY LOW
8 Latinx (Im)migrant Racialization, Anti-Blackness, and

the Social and Educational Landscape of the U.S. South 139
SOPHIA RODRIGUEZ, REBECA GAMEZ, AND TIMOTHY MONREAL
9 Race and Racialization in Canadian Education: Schools

and Universities 158
FRANCES HENRY AND CARL E. JAMES
10 The Racialization of Caste: Internal Colonization and

Education in South Asia 170
GAURAV J. PATHANIA AND NINA ASHER
SECTION 3
Social Movements, Anti-Racist Pedagogies, and
Reparative Futures187
11 Racialization and Resistance in South African Education 189

SALIM VALLY
12 Affirmative Action and Racialization in the United States

and Brazil 204
JEANA E. MORRISON, MIKE HOA NGUYEN, AND OIYAN POON
Contents vii
13 Racialization, Social Movements and Political Engagement
in Brazil: The Brazilian Black Movement and Education 218
RENATO EMERSON DOS SANTOS
14 Racial Justice in “South-South” Internationalization

of Higher Education 232
SUSANNE RESS, MIRIAM THANGARAJ, UPENYU MAJEE, AND
TERESA SPECIALE
15 The Black Lives Matter at School Movement: Demanding

Educational and Racial Justice 246
MONISHA BAJAJ AND JANELLE SCOTT, WITH DENISHA JONES,
SAM CARWYN, LISA COVINGTON, AND CHANEL HURT
Conclusion 257
MONISHA BAJAJ AND JANELLE SCOTT
Index262
Contributors
Nina Asher (EdD, 1999, Teachers College, Columbia University) is a professor in

the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota–
Twin Cities. Her scholarship engages postcolonialism, decolonization, globali-
zation, and feminism in relation to identity, culture, and education.
Monisha Bajaj is professor of international and multicultural education at the
University of San Francisco, as well as a visiting professor at N
elson Mandela
University in South Africa. She is the editor and author of eight books and
numerous articles on issues of peace, human rights, migration, racial justice,
and education. In 2015, she received the Ella Baker/Septima Clark Human
Rights Award (2015) from Division B of the American Educational Research
Association (AERA).
Sam Carwyn supports youth, families, reproductive rights, and individuals who
have experienced violence. She focuses on the most marginalized. She taught
in middle school, high school, community college, and university settings.
She is devoted to creating accessible, inclusive, and uplifting environments.
Grounded in her faith, she works to advance justice and equity. She is a steering
committee member of Black Lives Matter at School.
Lisa Covington is a cultural worker, curriculum developer, and youth devel-
opment consultant for non-profit organizations, educators, and filmmakers
across seven states. She is a recipient of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. Award from the Iowa Department of Human Rights. Lisa is the director
of the Ethnic Studies Leadership Academy in Iowa City, Iowa, member of
the national steering committee for Black Lives Matter at School and past
vice president of the National Black Graduate Student Association. Lisa is an
Inaugural Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Arizona where
she studies the sociology of Black girlhood in media and digital humanities.
She provides her expertise at The Global Institute for Black Girls in Film &
Media as Scholar in Residence and Lead Cultural Consultant at ArtCenter
College of Design.
Renato Emerson dos Santos holds a PhD in geography and is a professor at the
Urban and Regional Planning Research Institute (IPPUR/UFRJ) at the Federal
Contributors ix
University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He has published books in Brazil includ-
ing Diversity, Space and Ethnic/Race Relations: Blacks in Brazilian Geography
(2007); Social Movements and Geography: The Spatialities of Action (2011); and
Racism and Urban Questions (2012). He also served as president of the Brazilian
Geographers Association (2012–2014).
Nelson Flores is an associate professor in the Educational Linguistics Division
at the University of Pennsylvania. His research examines the intersection of
language, race, and the political economy in shaping U.S. educational policies
and practices. He analyzes the historical origins of raciolinguistic ideologies
that have framed the language practices of racialized communities as inher-
ently deficient and in need of remediation.
Rebeca Gamez is an assistant professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt Univer-
sity, Tennessee. Her research interests include relational and comparative race
and ethnicity, space and place, immigration, and educational inequality. She
draws on critical ethnographic methods to understand how youth racialized as
Black and Latinx navigate their schooling, learning, and ethnoracial identities.
Her research also critically interrogates the construct of Latinidad across space
and place. She was an American Educational Research Association (AERA)
Minority Dissertation Fellow.
Ofelia García is professor emerita in the Ph.D. programs of urban education and
of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino cultures at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York. She has been professor of bilingual education
at Columbia University’s Teachers College, dean of the School of Education at
the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University, and professor of education at
The City College of New York.
Frances Henry is professor emerita at York University in Toronto, Canada, and
is considered to be one of Canada’s leading experts in the study of racism and
anti-racism. Her most recent book, co-authored with colleagues, is The Equity
Myth (UBC Press), which reports the results of a four-year national study of
race, racialization, and Indigeneity at Canadian universities. Henry has been a
member of the prestigious Royal Society of Canada since 1989 and has been the
Canadian delegate to the Inter-American Network of Academies of Science’s
Women for Science committee.
Chanel Hurt is an educator and artist, and currently serves as a member of the
Black Lives Matter at School steering committee.
Carl E. James holds the Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community, and Diaspora
in the Faculty of Education at York University, Toronto, Canada, and is the Sen-
ior Advisor on Equity and Representation in the Office of the Vice President of
Equity, People, and Culture. His research interests include e xamination of the
educational experiences, opportunities, and achievements of racialized youth.
James’ most recent book is “Colour Matters”: Essays on the Experiences, Education
and Pursuits of Black Youth (2021, University of Toronto Press).
x Contributors
Denisha Jones is the Director of the Art of Teaching Program at Sarah Lawrence
College, New York. She is a former kindergarten teacher and preschool d irector
who spent the past 16 years in teacher education. Denisha is an education
justice advocate, and activist. She serves as the Co-Director for Defending the
Early Years, Inc, and is the Assistant Executive Director for the Badass T
eachers
Association. Since 2017, she has served on the national Black Lives Matter at
School Week steering committee. In 2020 she joined the organizing committee
for Uniting to Save Our Schools. Her first co-edited book, Black Lives Matter
at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice, was published in December 2020
(Haymarket Books).
Christiana Kallon Kelly is a PhD candidate in the Division of Literacy, Culture,
and International Education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research
interests include education, youth, gender, and critical studies of development
and public policy in Africa with focus on Sierra Leone.
Zeus Leonardo is Professor of Education in the School of Education at the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley. Leonardo’s current research interests involve
the study of ideologies and discourses in education with respect to structural
relations of power. His most recent book for Routledge’s Key Ideas Book Series
is entitled Edward Said and Education (2020). Leonardo is also an affiliated
faculty member of the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis at University of
California, Berkeley.
Remy Low is a senior lecturer in the Sydney School of Education and Social
Work, University of Sydney, Australia. He is committed to cultivating cultur-
ally responsive teachers who can work in diverse contexts, which informs his
research in the history and philosophy of education. He is the author of The
Mind and Teachers in the Classroom: Exploring Definitions of Mindfulness (2021,
Palgrave).
Upenyu Majee is project manager of the Ubuntu Dialogues and faculty lead
for the Reeves Scholars program at Michigan State University. His research
focuses on internationalization and institutional decolonization in South
African higher education. He critically examines north–south partnerships,
development education endeavors, and knowledge generation and dissemina-
tion about/on Africa.
Timothy Monreal is an assistant professor in the Department of Learning and
Instruction at the University at Buffalo, New York. His research explores the
intersection of space, place, and Latinx teacher identity and subjectivity with
a focus on the U.S. south. Monreal’s work has appeared in journals such as
Latino Studies, Educational Policy, Education Studies, Urban Review, and Journal
of Latinos and Education. He was a National Academy of Education/Spencer
Dissertation Fellow and a Southern Regional Education Board Doctoral Fellow.
Jeana E. Morrison is assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at Albion College,
Michigan, and director of Academic Innovation at The Philadelphia Center,
Contributors xi
Pennsylvania. She uses critically informed ethnographic methods to investi-
gate Black student experiences in higher education from a global perspective.
Her work demonstrates how diasporic complexities influence postsecondary
spaces.
Steven L. Nelson is associate professor of education policy and leadership at the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research agenda interrogates the intersec-
tion of race, education policy, the politics of education, and education law as
these topics impact Black peoples in urban settings. His research has been pub-
lished in various media including law reviews, education journals, and edited
books. He also served as the first education advocate at the Southern Poverty
Law Center’s School-to-Prison Pipeline Project in New Orleans, Louisiana,
where he worked on charter school law and policy, special education access
and equity, and juvenile justice issues.
Mike Hoa Nguyen is assistant professor of education at New York University.
His research and teaching critically examine the benefits and consequences
of racialized public policy instruments in expanding and/or constraining edu-
cational systems, with a specific focus on how these dynamics shape access,
learning, opportunity, and success within and beyond schools for students of
color.
Rehana Odendaal is a joint PhD student between the University of Pennsylva-
nia’s Education, Culture, and Society and Sociology programs. Her research
interests, which focus on South Africa, include community activism and youth
civic engagement and the role of educational institutions in shaping public
discourse and attitudes.
Ricardo Otheguy is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Graduate Center of
the City University of New York. His work has appeared in the leading inter-
national journals and major imprints. His interests in theoretical linguistics are
in functional-cognitive and semiotic approaches to grammar; in quantitative-
variationist sociolinguistics and the sociology of language; and in communica-
tive and conceptual approaches to language continuity and change in situations
of contact. In applied linguistics, his publications are in the areas of Spanish for
native speakers and the education of Latinos in the United States.
Gaurav J. Pathania is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Peacebuilding at the
Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, USA. His ethnographic study The
University as a Site of Resistance: Identity and Student Politics (Oxford University
Press, 2018) examines India’s contemporary youth politics. Gaurav is an anti-
caste scholar, poet, and assistant editor for South Asia Research journal.
OiYan Poon is a program officer at the Spencer Foundation and an associate
professor affiliate in the School of Education at Colorado State University.
Her research focuses on the racial politics of college admissions policies and
practices, affirmative action, and Asian Americans.
xii Contributors
Susanne Ress is a postdoctoral scholar and international master’s degree pro-
gram coordinator at the Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg, Germany. Her
book titled Internationalization of Higher Education: Blackness and Postcolonial
Solidarity in Africa-Brazil Relations examines educational policy as technology
of power and representation. She similarly explores policies of sustainability
education.
Sophia Rodriguez is an assistant professor or urban education and education
policy in the College of Education at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Her research examines immigration policy and its effect on undocumented
youth in K–12 settings, and how school-based personnel such as educators and
school social workers promote equity for undocumented students. Her schol-
arly work appears in Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Children & Youth
Services Review, Teachers College Record, and Urban Education.
Jonathan Rosa is Associate Professor of Education, Comparative Race and Ethnic
Studies, and, by courtesy, Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Litera-
ture at Stanford University, California. His publications include Looking Like
a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of
Latinidad, and Language and Social Justice in Practice.
Janelle Scott is a professor and the Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational
Disparities at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a fellow of the
American Educational Research Association and a member of the National
Academy of Education. She is the editor of School Choice and Diversity: What the
Evidence Says (Teachers College Press) and, with Horsford & Anderson, author
of The Politics of Education in an Era of Inequality: Possibilities for D
emocratic
Schooling (Routledge).
Kate Seltzer is an assistant professor of bilingual and English as a Second L
anguage
education at Rowan University, New Jersey, where she currently teaches pre-
service teachers of bilingual students. Kate is co-author of the book, The Trans-
languaging Classroom: Leveraging Student Bilingualism for Learning as well as a
number of publications on translanguaging, English education, and teacher
preparation.
Roozbeh Shirazi is an associate professor in the Department of Organizational
Leadership, Policy, and Development at the University of Minnesota. His
scholarship – characterized by close collaboration with educators and minor-
itized, transnational, refugee and diasporic youth – utilizes ethnography, partici-
patory visual methods, and critical narrative analysis to explore more expansive
possibilities of youth political membership and belonging within educational
settings.
Tim Soutphommasane is Professor of Practice (Sociology and Political Theory)
and Director of Culture Strategy at the University of Sydney. He was Aus-
tralia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner from 2013 to 2018.
Contributors xiii
Teresa Speciale has over 12 years of experience teaching and conducting research
in comparative and international education. Her areas of expertise include
language and education policy, English-language learners, Islamic education,
global education, and qualitative research design. She holds a PhD in Educa-
tional Policy Studies from University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Arathi Sriprakash is a sociologist of education whose work examines the politics
of education reform as well as the global governance of childhood and the fam-
ily. Her current research looks at the relationship between epistemic justice
and racial justice, including in relation to the enduring coloniality of the field
of international education.
Krystal Strong is an assistant professor of Black Studies in Education at Rutgers
University-New Brunswick. Her research and teaching focus on student and
community activism, the cultural and political power of youth, and the role of
education as a site of political struggle in Africa and the Diaspora.
Miriam Thangaraj is an anthropologist of educational policy. She studies the
cultural/political economy of schooling, apprenticeships, and children’s rights
and labor in the context of development in India. She currently works with
rural youth as part of a Spencer-funded project on public secondary education
in Colombia, India, and Malawi.
Leon Tikly is UNESCO Chair in Inclusive Good Quality Education at the Uni-
versity of Bristol, United Kingdom. He has studied issues of race, ethnicity, and
education in South Africa and in the United Kingdom. His work is informed by
postcolonial and decolonial scholarship and is underpinned by a commitment
to social, environmental, and epistemic justice.
Salim Vally is the director of the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation,
the National Research Foundation’s Chair in Community, Adult and Workers’
Education, a professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg,
and a visiting professor at the Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. His
most recent book, co-edited with Aziz Choudry, is The University and Social
Justice: Struggles Across the Globe (Pluto, 2020).
Sharon Walker is a sociologist of education with particular interest in how educa-
tion systems are shaped by racial thinking, processes of racialization, and racism.
Her current research looks at the racialized discourse of the United Kingdom’s
widening participation policy agenda. She also works with school leaders to
support their understanding and implementation of anti-racist education.
Li Wei is director and dean of the UCL Institute of Education, at University Col-
lege London, United Kingdom, where he also holds a chair in applied linguistics.
He is a fellow of the British Academy, Academia Europaea, Academy of Social
Sciences (United Kingdom), and the Royal Society of Arts (United Kingdom).
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the World Yearbook of Education series editors Toni Verger
and Julie Allan as well as Sarah Hyde, Zoe Thomson, and Akshara Dafre from
Routledge for their support and input in the creation and production of this World
Yearbook volume. We are also grateful to our doctoral students, Darius Gordon
at University of California, Berkeley, and Jazzmin Gota at the University of San
Francisco, for their excellent assistance with various aspects of editing, compiling,
and formatting the book.
Janelle Scott: I thank Monisha Bajaj, co-editor extraordinaire, for undertak-
ing this project with me. I am also grateful for my sabbatical from University of
California, Berkeley, which allowed the time to work on this volume. I thank
Thomas Philip, Tina Trujillo, Elizabeth DeBray, Kara Finnigan, Jennifer Holme,
Christopher Lubienski, Gary Anderson, Sonya Horsford, Erica Frankenberg,
Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Kathryn McDermott, Amy Stuart Wells, Vanessa Sid-
dle Walker, and Vivian Tseng for the years of conversations that have helped to
sharpen my understanding of race, policy, and education. I also thank my family,
including my husband Matthew and our children Julia and Miles for the sweet-
ness and love that offsets the challenges in life. I thank my parents, Renette and
Wallace, believers in the transformative power of education and the possibility
of racial progress. Finally, I owe much to the mentorship and friendship of the
late Mike Rose, whose insistence that we center possibility is never far from my
mind.
Monisha Bajaj: It was a pleasure to work with Janelle on this book and extend
our collaborations into the conceptualization and editing of this volume. I express
gratitude to members of my writing group and colleagues at the University of San
Francisco School of Education for their support, especially Geneveive Negrón-
Gonzales, Rosa Jiménez, Colette Cann, Emma Fuentes, Shabnam Koirala-Azad,
Susan Katz, Melissa Canlas, David Donahue, Sedique Popal, and Amy Argenal.
Faculty Development Funds and the annual Faculty of Color Writing Retreat at
the University of San Francisco also greatly facilitated this project. Thank you to
my family members (especially Bikku Kuruvila and our little one Kabir; Carolyn
Sattin-Bajaj, Rajeev Bajaj, Dinesh Bajaj, Asha Bajaj, and the now late Ishwari
Sachdev) for their support, encouragement, nourishment, and welcome distrac-
tions in this process.
Introduction
Racialization and Educational
Inequality in Transnational Perspective
Janelle Scott and Monisha Bajaj
On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Police Officer Derek Chauvin, having

stopped a 46-year-old Black man named George Floyd on suspicion of using a
counterfeit $20 bill, kneeled on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes until he killed him.
As the video of this police murder spread across the news and on social media,
global protests about police violence, and against racism more broadly, caught like
wildfire around the world; by some estimates, protests were held in 60 countries.
These global actions erupted, not only in support of the U.S.-based Black Lives
Matter movement, but also in efforts to articulate particular racial justice struggles
within transnational contexts with similar patterns of colonization, Indigenous dis-
possession, anti-Black racism, economic stratification, and racialized hierarchies.
For example, Minnesota, where George Floyd and other unarmed Black people
have been killed by police in recent years, is the ancestral land of the Dakhóta
(Dakota) and the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe) people; was settled by French, German,
English, and Swedish colonizers; and as a British and French territory, it also
figures into the notorious Dred Scott v. Sanford (60 U.S. 393) decision of 1857
in which the Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott’s claim to freedom from
enslavement because he had lived with his enslaver in a “free state” where slavery
was illegal. The court ruled in a decision authored by Chief Justice Taney that
enslaved people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to
be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim
none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures
to citizens of the United States.”
The denial of citizenship to enslaved African peoples operated in tandem with
the ongoing racialization and dispossession of Indigenous Native Americans across
what would become the United States and Canada, through forced removal,
residential schools, and ongoing settler violence. Dispossession included efforts to
rob Indigenous nations not only of land, but also language, culture, and historical
knowledge. Racialization has been deeply entwined with racial capitalism, where
whiteness and proximity to whiteness carry material and symbolic rewards, such as
access to robust and equal education (Robinson, 1999).
As school systems developed in the United States and around the world, they
were built on exclusion of Black people, Indigenous peoples, Asian American, and
Latinx peoples, and those whose religious identities also resulted in racialization,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-1
2 Janelle Scott and Monisha Bajaj
such as Muslims. Civil rights movements and subsequent legislative interventions
have greatly expanded educational access, and yet those who would see to reduce
the role of the state in providing such access have fought for neoliberal policies
that embrace the individual empowerment desires articulated in racialized com-
munities and yoked these desires to market-based interventions such as vouchers
in Chile or other choice forms (Scott, 2013; Scott & Holme, 2016). In 1991,
Minnesota became the first U.S. state to enact a charter school law, which allowed
non-governmental organizations to operate schools, unfettered by most state and
local regulations. Today, the Minneapolis–St. Paul region’s schools are segregated
and unequal, despite the embrace of this market-oriented educational policy, and
policy makers and advocates rationalize racial, linguistic, and economic segrega-
tion as reflecting parental preferences afforded through school choice policies
(Scott, 2018).
These patterns, and the vestiges of settler colonialism, caste, Indigenous dispos-
session, African enslavement, and state-sponsored violence manifest in separate
and unequal education and social opportunities transnationally (Singh, 2004). In
the United States, early democratic formations, and ultimately, the formation of
public schools, were inscribed with white supremacist ideals emanating from slav-
ery that had material consequences for equal access to education and opportunity.
W.E.B. Du Bois described this alignment of racialized interest, writing in 1935:
Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the
economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the
deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community,
and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as
much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news
that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in
crime and ridicule.
(pp. 700–701)
Colonization and colonial logics include a racialized articulation of whiteness as

a racial category and white supremacy as a rationale for the subjugation of colo-
nized others. Colonial logics and practices persist in old and newer forms into the
twenty-first century as well, even after colonial powers were either overthrown
or withdrew from the subjugated nations, leaving in their wake systems of caste,
racial classification, and educational systems imbued with white supremacy, even
as white people abdicated formal state roles.
Whiteness is a transnational ideology that stems from colonial dispossession.
Social class, gender, heteronormativity, and patriarchy intersect to create sys-
tems in which white people and those people proximal to whiteness achieve elite
status and institutionalize racialized hierarchies that continue to mark societies.
Educational systems around the world are connected to histories of colonization
and empire that employed “scientific” notions of race to justify economic, politi-
cal, and cultural domination. Although scientists have established race has no
biological basis (Morning, 2014), it is also a fact that race remains a powerful
Introduction 3
social scientific predictor of multiple determinants of well-being, including access
to housing, health, economic supports, safe air and water, and social mobility
(Vasquez et al., 2019).
Racialization and Education Under Neoliberal Governance

and Racial Capitalism: Resistance and Entrenchment
In this volume, we focus on racialization and its relationship to primary, secondary
and tertiary education. We do so as a needed intervention on the scholarship that
simply examines educational inputs and outcomes based on bounded racial cat-
egories. “Race” per se is not a category of analysis in this volume; the processes of
“racialization” are of interest here insofar as they have created hierarchies, rationale
for forms of domination, and unequal social and educational opportunities across
the globe. Racialization is a political project connected to policing, economy, citi-
zenship, and education. Racialization is imposed, resisted, and remade within and
across national and local contexts in which education is a central site. Although
we started this chapter with a focus on the United States and its relationship to
European settlers, this volume intentionally de-centers that explicit focus.
Our focus is on the process of how people come to live racial categories, and
the social, material, and educational consequences of these processes given power
asymmetries, political economy, and global neoliberal logics that are entwined with
processes of racial formation and re-formation (Omi & Winant, 2014). Within
this racialization framework, we are able to better understand that these processes
occur in multiple domains: they are imposed by states, they are reimagined by local
communities, and they are resisted and remade through social movements, migra-
tion, transnationalism, and social change.
We draw from insights about the applicability of critical race theory (CRT) in edu-
cational research, first advanced by Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995). They called
for researchers to use CRT, which centers analyses of racism and power, to inter-
rogate and disrupt the persistent and predictable racial inequalities in schooling –
particularly around the schooling experiences of Black children, who are often
relegated to the bottom of racial hierarchies and caste systems (Bell, 1995). Trans-
national CRT theories have emerged with analyses within particular legal, social,
and national contexts, often with a focus on the intersectional ways laws, policies,
and pedagogies serve to disenfranchise those who are multiply minoritized (Nel-
son, 2000; Crenshaw, 1989). Beginning in 2021, conservatives have orchestrated
a backlash to CRT that has mischaracterized it to pass legislation that forbids the
teaching of accurate history about race and racism, prohibits the full inclusion
of LGBTQIA+ students in educational spaces, encourages the surveillance and
targeting of teachers, and advocates for an expansion of neoliberal forms of school
choice to allow families to select schools aligned with their values, and to protect
white children specifically from experiencing discomfort (Pollack et al., 2022). As
European countries experience global migration, neoliberal and neoconservative
policymakers and advocates have sought similar restrictions on inclusion through
bans on the wearing of hijabs, for example.
Neoliberalism, whose ideals include the reimagining of governments to expand
and allow for the flow of private capital, and private markets, has destabilized the
economic infrastructures and contributed to racialized poverty within and across
nations (Beaman, 2020; Bledsoe & Wright, 2019; Bajaj, 2010) Neoliberal educa-
tional policies emanating from such thinkers as Milton Friedman have migrated
around the world, and in many ways, they have challenged the ability to deliver
equitable education systems that disrupt racialization hierarchies. Alternative
teaching models, marketization of state schooling, school closures, and privati-
zation of core aspects of schooling have become increasingly common (Offutt-
Chaney, 2022; Horsford et al., 2018; La Londe et al., 2015; Lipman, 2011; Aggarwal
et al., 2012). These policies, though often nominally advocated for on the basis of
seemingly democratic ideals of freedom and liberty, are also informed by racialized
notions of deservingness and by transnational anti-Blackness (Bashi, 2004).
Resistance and reclamation are also critical themes in the study of racialization,
particularly in response to the embrace of neoliberalism. Too often, the logics and
actions of resistance to the imposition of racial caste and dispossession have been
decentered in the study of international and comparative education. Revealed
in this research is the early and consistent opposition to the dehumanization
that came with, for example, the French occupation of Haiti and the revolution
that overturned it (Trouillot, 1995). Revolution and resistance movements have
focused on rewriting national constitutions (Brazil), acknowledging and repair-
ing past harm (Canada and Australia), forming cross- and multiracial alliances
(United States), and reimagining colonial educational systems (Nigeria, Ghana,
and South Africa).
Education has been utilized in diverse ways at distinct moments to include,
exclude, indoctrinate, and transform societies (Freire, 1970). Despite its founda-
tional role in educational development, race, and more specifically the process of
racialization, has been largely invisible and under-utilized as a category of analysis
in studies of international and comparative education (Sriprakash et al., 2020).
This omission is particularly concerning given how the processes of race, racializa-
tion, and white supremacy result in remarkably similar patterns of stratification
and exclusion, despite deep variances in national politics, governance, and histo-
ries of colonialization (Hall, 1980; Jean-Pierre, 2013; Smith, 2016). Abolitionist
pedagogy that is informed by an understanding of transnational white supremacy
in which the implicit racial contract assumes a natural racial hierarchy (Mills,
1997; Leonardo, 2002) helps to move beyond what Melamed (2006) terms mul-
ticultural neoliberalism, in which racial diversity of policy actors gives cover to
neoliberal policies that reify inequality and limit or restrict state interventions to
disrupt it. The chapters in this volume build on current understandings of raciali-
zation and education and offer analytic, conceptual, and empirical possibilities for
those working to realize more just futures.
Organization and Description of the Volume

Section One entitled “Racialization: Theories, Discourse, and Globalization” dis-
cusses how the foundations of the racialization process – or the making of race
Introduction 5
central in differentiation – have circulated across national borders historically and
in contemporary times. Through a comparative perspective – whether comparing
global discourse as mapped onto local realities or comparatively across different
national contexts – the five chapters in this section engage with definitional and
conceptual perspectives from macro, meso, and micro levels. Here, across care-
fully argued and substantiated analyses, we come to see both the simultaneous
erasures of racism from international education discourses in efforts to advance
global education (see Chapter 1) as well as the hyper-visibility of certain groups
whose complexity is flattened into singular tropes through, for example, the racial-
ization of Muslims post-9/11 (see Chapter 4) and the racialization of bilingual
students in the global north (see Chapter 5). Authors in Section One also suggest
forms of resistance, such as through educational marronage (Chapter 3) and youth
agency (see Chapter 4), as well as through disrupting the hegemonic ways that
white supremacy and whiteness are globalized (see Chapter 2).
Rooted in colonial paradigms, the development project and its advancement
of education requires attention to the silences and erasures of race and racializa-
tion from its discursive practice, as Arathi Sriprakash, Leon Tikly, and Sharon
Walker illustrate in Chapter 1. Drawing from what Charles Mills (1997) calls an
“epistemology of ignorance,” the authors examine how silences about racism are
produced in the field of international educational development and how these
erasures exacerbate inequalities and perpetuate colonial era racial projects in
education. By interrogating notions of the “global learning crisis” before, during,
and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sriprakash, Tikly, and Walker
offer insightful analyses as well as suggestions for how the field might challenge its
“entanglements in systems of racial domination” and advance anti-racist efforts in
and beyond education globally.
From Zeus Leonardo, we see in Chapter 2 that whiteness is a global ideology
that determines elite status, access to symbolic and material resources, and ulti-
mately shapes the structure and dynamics of schooling, including curriculum poli-
cies. Despite the global reach of whiteness, the history and role of racism in its
dominance can often be under-theorized. Revisiting his 2002 article “The souls
of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse”
that argued that “critical pedagogy benefits from an intersectional understanding
of whiteness studies and globalization discourse” (p. 29), Leonardo offers analy-
ses about the shifting terrain of white supremacy as it manifests and circulates
globally in this conversation with the volume’s co-editors. Discussing the rise of
ethnonationalism and authoritarianism in the United States and elsewhere, and
how whiteness and race operate as separate global phenomena in distinct national
and local contexts, Leonardo calls for both global studies of whiteness as well as
comparative whiteness studies across contexts that attend to history, geography,
power asymmetries, and ideology.
In Chapter 3, Steven L. Nelson explores how CRT can operate transnation-
ally as a form of resistance to racialized oppression or what he terms educational
marronage that can offer new analytic tools for understanding the experiences of
Black students and their communities across the world, in Africa and the African
diaspora. As the author details, marronage, a form of resistance dating back to the
times of enslavement, espouses possibilities for critical consciousness, agency, and
a restructuring of social relations, and offers a sharp “rebuke to whiteness and
white supremacy.” Drawing from Roberts’ (2015) work, Nelson details four essen-
tial components of educational marronage – distance, movement, property, and
purpose – and highlights how each contribute to Black students’ resistance to and
refusal of unequal conditions within educational institutions.
From Roozbeh Shirazi, we learn in Chapter 4 that religious groups, in this case,
Muslims, experience racialization across the world, even when, in fact, Muslims
are multiracial, multilingual, and make up nearly a quarter of the globe’s popula-
tion. Drawing from Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, the author examines
how Muslim youth are racialized and navigate Islamophobia at different levels
(within foreign policy and aid, education policy, and interactions in school sites)
and in three national settings: the United States, Jordan, and France. Through
research projects across these contexts, Shirazi examines the contours of religious
racialization in the two decades after the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, and
why such racialization matters for education. The author also discusses student
agency in resisting the racialized gaze, such as through participatory digital story-
telling carried out by youth to craft their own narratives.
In Chapter 5, scholars Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, Kate Seltzer, Li Wei,
Ricardo Otheguy, and Jonathan Rosa demonstrate how education in distinct
global settings, particularly in the global north, racializes minoritized students
through the educational process due to deficit narratives about language. Drawing
from Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the authors “reject the type of ‘abyssal think-
ing’ that erases the existence of counterhegemonic knowledges and lifeways” of
racialized bilingual students. The authors advocate for a translanguaging perspec-
tive and chart a decolonial approach that centers students’ cultural and linguistic
practices that stem from their own knowledge systems and historical repertoires.
Such an approach rejects colonial logics that position racialized bilingual students
as “fundamentally deficient” as compared to dominant monolingual students, and
places questions of equity “at the center of the analysis.”
Education, these chapters teach us, is central in the ongoing processes of
racialization. Within this frame, we see education – its institutions, underlying
ideologies, its discursive practices, and the ongoing coloniality of Western forms
of schooling – as reifying empire across the globe. Taken together, the chapters in
Section One offer us a global purview of the theories and discourses of distinct
local and transnational forms of racialization in education, and their spatial and
temporal dimensions.
Section Two, entitled “Coloniality, Development, and Racialization in Educa-
tion,” builds on the conceptual foundations of Section One, with fine-grained
national and regional investigations into differential racialization (see Chapter 8),
colonization and its schooling legacies (see Chapter 6), the internal coloniza-
tion of caste (see Chapter 10), and essential issues of indigeneity (see Chapters 7
and 9). Together, these chapters further demonstrate that while there are impor-
tant distinctions and contours to processes of racialization in education, they
manifest in schooling. It is only through careful engagement and understanding
Introduction 7
of racialization and its unequal opportunities and outcomes that interventions
might be made. As such, this section is composed of five chapters and engages the
construct of racialization comparatively as a process with national distinctions and
global parallels.
In Chapter 6, Krystal Strong, Rehana Odendaal, and Christiana Kallon Kelly
examine three African nations that were colonized by Britain (Sierra Leone,
Nigeria, and South Africa), offering a comparative regional discussion of the
“afterlives” of education that have been shaped by racialization and colonial-
ism. The authors illustrate how educational development in each of the three
contexts (albeit differentially) “produced forms of social difference and uneven
development related to race, class, ethnicity, gender, and region” and that cur-
rent education systems must address these enduring legacies in order to dismantle
structural inequalities in the three distinct nations. The authors offer examples
of youth struggles against such inequalities, such as the Rhodes Must Fall and
Fees Must Fall student movements in South Africa and student resistance to state
repression in Nigeria.
In Chapter 7, Tim Soutphommasane (who in addition to being a scholar, was the
former Race Discrimination Commissioner on Australia’s Human Rights Commis-
sion) along with education scholar Remy Low provide an essential examination
of the themes of racialization, education, and inequality in Australia. The authors
examine how issues of race and racism have been included in the Australian cur-
riculum as well as the “lingering discomfort that sections of Australian society
have about shifting power generated by multicultural diversity and demands for
the recognition of First Peoples.” Soutphommasane and Low offer a nuanced his-
tory of educational development and contemporary debates in Australia, detailing
efforts to both exclude and include the voices, histories, and participation of immi-
grants of color and First Peoples (also referred to as Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Island peoples in Australia) in different time periods.
In Chapter 8, Sophia Rodriguez, Rebecca Gamez, and Timothy Monreal take
up the processes of racialization in the context of Latinx migrants to the southern
states of the United States, a region historically analyzed through a Black-white
binary. The authors extend the field’s understanding of how this population, with
all of its national, racial, and ethnic diversity, comes to be identified as a mono-
racial group, invisibilizing the identities and experiences of Latinx who are Black
(Afro-Latinx) and/or Indigenous. The authors examine across three different
studies how youth navigate racialization, documentation status, anti-Blackness,
and educational inequalities, and find that “Latinx racialization occurs through
systematic racism where oppression, at interpersonal and institutional levels,
intersects with cultural ideologies of superiority and inferiority.”
In Chapter 9, Frances Henry and Carl E. James offer an examination of race,
racialization, and indigeneity in Canada. The authors analyze how a country
founded on settler colonialism and dispossession of Indigenous land reconciles
with its history of forced residential schools for Indigenous students, and with its
history of being a freedom destination for formerly enslaved African Americans
along with being a site of multiracial immigration from Asia, the Caribbean, and
elsewhere. Henry and James find that Canada’s “settler-colonial dynamic set the
context for the other racialized people who would later immigrate” to the country.
The authors draw on their own research and the work of other scholars to illustrate
how racialization impacts student experiences in kindergarten through Grade 12
settings, as well as in higher education across different regions of Canada.
In Chapter 10, Gaurav J. Pathania and Nina Asher take up the issue of caste
stratification and the racialization of caste in South Asia. Many scholars have
turned to this topic, but Pathania and Asher help to advance the field’s thinking
in terms of understanding racialization and caste as forms of internal colonization
that has deeply troubling effects on the educational and social opportunities of
students in India primarily, and with resonances to other parts of the South Asian
subcontinent and its global diaspora. Examining issues of language, curriculum,
and higher education, the authors discuss the parallels of “race-caste-color” both
within South Asia and as a comparative analytical tool to understand commonal-
ties and differences in experiences of oppression across contexts.
The five chapters in Section Two invite us to think comparatively about how
dominant processes of racialization have been formed historically and are sus-
tained contemporaneously in distinct national and regional settings. With rising
nationalism in many parts of the globe, attention to the role of the nation-state,
as rooted in “lingering colonialities” particularly in the global south (Williams,
2016), can offer important analyses for understanding how and where libera-
tory forms of education – formal, non-formal, or informal – may fit into efforts to
advance equity and justice.
Section Three, entitled “Social Movements, Anti-Racist Pedagogies, and
Reparative Futures” highlights transformative agency, strategic resistance, and
social movements whether within or outside formal educational settings. Raciali-
zation processes too often subjugate and stratify those at the lower rungs of social
hierarchies, such as through state violence, state disinvestment in public educa-
tion through privatization, and state sponsored segregation and apartheid (see
Chapter 11). Yet we know that to be subjugated does not render people as pas-
sive subjects. Their voices, their forms of resistance and other actions, and their
social movements are essential ways that racialization processes get transformed
and remade. Affirmative action programs in various nations have served as com-
pensatory measures demanded by social movements to address past and ongoing
inequalities (see Chapter 12); for example, in Brazil, such demands have been
fought for by Black Brazilian movements and organizations (see Chapter 13).
This final section takes up this important and essential area of inquiry of resist-
ance, decolonial efforts, and the ways that intersectional forms of solidarity (see
Chapter 15) and cooperation across borders (see Chapter 14) shape education
and orient it toward its transformative potential, especially for marginalized stu-
dents and their communities. The “freedom dreaming” (Kelley, 2003) and envi-
sioning and contested enactment of “reparative futures” (Sriprakash et al., 2020)
that seek to address injustice, violence, and their legacies are important areas of
focus in these chapters.
Introduction 9
In Chapter 11, Salim Vally provides an overview of the genesis and history of
racialization in South African education, analyzing present-day forms of racial and
class inequalities that permeate the educational system. The author highlights the
history of educational development in South Africa and the creation of apartheid
systems of exclusion and violence enacted through all state institutions, includ-
ing formal education. Tracing anti-apartheid movements and, later, post-apartheid
policies, Vally discusses how in the dismantling of segregationist and racist poli-
cies, class inequalities have been inadequately addressed. He further details resist-
ance through recent protest and social movements, such as the “Fees Must Fall”
campaign and the ongoing “class apartheid” in the nation.
In Chapter 12, Jeana E. Morrison, Mike Hoa Nguyen and OiYan Poon join
together Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation theory and Charles Mills’ Racial
Contract theory to situate affirmative action policies over time in the United
States and Brazil as racial projects. The authors examine how policies meant
to remedy past and current state-sponsored discrimination can shape racializa-
tion categories and determine who has access to opportunities and why, and how
such policies are understood and contested in each national context in which
they operate. Noting that more than “40 countries have some form of affirmative
action to address inequality higher education systems,” the authors situate the
emergence of such policies in the United States and Brazil, offering comparative
lenses that illuminate layered notions of identity, forms of activism, and processes
of racialization over time.
Chapter 13 by Renato Emerson dos Santos elaborates the history, emergence,
and organizational strategies of the Black Brazilian Movement vis-à-vis educa-
tion and, like Chapter 12, discusses the contestation and public debate around
advances such as affirmative action as well the recent inclusion of Black Brazilian
history into the school curriculum. As one of the last countries to abolish slavery
(in 1888) and the country in the Western Hemisphere to which the largest num-
bers of enslaved Africans arrived during the transatlantic slave trade, the author
details the history of education for Black students and communities in Brazil amid
a national discourse of “racial democracy” that denies the existence of racism. The
author highlights resistance and anti-racist struggles that date back to the praxis
of quilombo (maroon) communities during the time of chattel slavery in Brazil to
the present-day.
In Chapter 14, Susanne Ress, Miriam Thangaraj, Upenyu Majee, and Teresa
Speciale argue that anti-racist struggles and justice demand both redistribution
and recognition, and examine international “south–south” cooperation in higher
education in South Africa and Brazil, across these countries’ distinct colonial and
postcolonial histories. Detailing historical collaborations in education and soli-
darities across nations in the global south, the authors discuss the complex ways
that such efforts are understood locally, such as through the recruitment of non-
South African Black students to universities in South Africa, and contested soli-
darities among African students and Afro-Brazilian university students in Brazil.
Analyzing such forms of “solidarity cooperation” that rely on the essentializing of
experiences of racialization and colonization, the authors interrogate the fragmen-
tation of “Southern collectivities” in insightful ways.
In Chapter 15, Black Lives Matter (BLM) at School, which first emerged as
a national movement in the United States in 2017, is discussed by the volume’s
co-editors Monisha Bajaj and Janelle Scott, along with BLM at School steering
committee members Denisha Jones, Sam Carwyn, Lisa Covington, and Chanel
Hurt. The authors trace the history of this movement, detail the annual “Week of
Action” and “Year of Purpose,” as well as the guiding principles and core demands
of the movement. These demands include to end “zero-tolerance” school policies
that disproportionately criminalize Black students, to hire more Black teachers,
to mandate Black history in schools, and to fund more counselors, not police,
in schools. Where possible, educators and organizers work within schools, and
where not possible, BLM at School works in community spaces with youth
after school and on the weekends. The movement’s core principle of globalism
necessitates transnational analyses that situate Black students, teachers, and
communities in the United States as part of the larger African diaspora in distinct
parts of the globe.
Ultimately, the chapters in Section Three challenge us to consider the racial
and identity formations that can happen within social movements, discursive
spaces, and policy struggles over compensatory and reparative strategies in which
education is central.
Conclusion
Since the annual World Yearbook of Education began in the 1960s, it has been a
widely read resource for the educational research community globally; the 2023
volume is the first in the yearbook’s nearly seven decades dedicated entirely to
issues of race and racialization internationally. In addition, the contributors them-
selves represent the vital racial, ethnic, disciplinary, conceptual, and methodologi-
cal diversity needed to engage this topic critically and comprehensively.
We aimed to be as expansive as possible, but we proceed with the knowledge
that this volume is necessarily incomplete, given the universe of topics and regions
where racialization and education are deeply salient. We hope that it will not be
the last World Yearbook that explores this theme. There is much being written,
for example, with regard to how European societies are changing and experiencing
conflict as a result of growing immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East,
thereby troubling notions of what it means to be non-white citizens in countries
unaccustomed to thinking and acting inclusively (Lamont et al., 2002; Miller-
Idriss, 2009). Another important theme that is inextricably linked to racialization
and education and that needs much further exploration is indigeneity. Finally, the
ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to have disproportionate
impacts on those living in poverty, and those who lack access to health care, hous-
ing security, and vaccines. We need much further exploration of the intersection
of racialization, education, COVID-19, and the over 5 million children who have
become orphans due to the pandemic.1
Introduction 11
This 2023 World Yearbook of Education centers on the intersection of racializa-
tion and education. It examines how racial formation and its associated logics
about citizenship, language, belonging, justice, equality, and humanity manifest
in early childhood education, primary schooling, secondary schooling, higher
education, and non-formal, community-based education settings. Together, the
chapters consider how forces of imperialism, white supremacy, and colonization
have shaped racialization in distinct locations and how education was historically
utilized as a site for the creation and/or reification of difference. The lingering
effects of processes of racialization in distinct locations globally and their inter-
sections with educational policies, systems, and realities are at the core of this
volume.
The 15 chapters across three sections together offer multi-sited perspectives
into how racialization has and continues to shape educational inequality, with
an eye toward the agency and resistance of youth and communities in contesting
such forms of domination and marginalization. In this volume, we invite readers
to learn, reflect, and engage with the layered and complex realities of racializa-
tion and inequality in education across the globe. Whether in policy, discourse, or
on-the-ground practice, the analyses provided in the pages that follow offer new
understandings and perspectives toward crafting more equitable and just futures
through education in local, national, and transnational settings.
Note
1 Children: The Hidden Pandemic. (2021). https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/
downloads/community/orphanhood-report.pdf
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Section 1
Racialization
Theories, Discourse, and Globalization
1 Erasures of Racism in Education
and International Development
Arathi Sriprakash, Leon Tikly, and Sharon Walker
Introduction
The United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in setting out a
vision for economic, social, and environmental sustainability, emphasizes the
need to address inequalities not only between countries but also within them. In
underlining the “interlinkages” and “integrated nature” of its vision to shift the
“world onto a sustainable and resilient path,”1 the agenda offers an opportunity
to recognize more fully how multiple regimes of inequality are interconnected
across the globe (Walby, 2009). One such abiding and globally interconnected
regime of inequality is racism; its division, classification, and control of people
and their social, political, economic, land, and epistemic rights. While there
exists significant scholarship on how modern world history has been shaped by
projects of racial domination (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Wolfe, 2016; Lake &
Reynolds, 2008; Robinson, 2000), there has been a noticeable silence about
the conditions of racism and its production of inequality within contempo-
rary development studies (Pailey, 2020; White, 2002; Kothari, 2006; Wilson,
2012) and within the field from which we write: education and international
development.
Silence is often thought about as an absence, and specifically as an absence
that is passive. However, we see silence as active and dynamic; it is an act of
erasure and misrepresentation. We draw here on the ideas of political philoso-
pher Charles Mills (1997), who argues that racism is at the core of the social
contract: it is not an exception or anomaly to an otherwise just political sys-
tem. Silence or ignorance about racism, then, is produced and required by the
economic, political, and social systems that make up the social contract. The
silence or ignorance of racism in our field, far from being a passive absence or
simply referring to “not knowing,” has an epistemology that produces and normal-
izes racism as a political system. This is what Mills (2015) calls an “epistemology
of ignorance.”
We first started to explore these epistemologies of ignorance in the field of edu-
cation and international development (EID) some four years ago, in the context
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-3
18 Arathi Sriprakash et al.
of global uprisings and student-led activism for racial justice, such as Rhodes Must
Fall, Why is my curriculum white?, and Black Lives Matter. We wondered how and
why the silence about racism persisted in the field against these clear calls for
change as well as against a much longer history of anti-colonial, anti-racist, and
Indigenous activism. In the intervening years, we have seen growing acknowl-
edgement of the field’s complicity in global systems of racial domination, largely
within media commentary and by individuals and groups seeking institutional
reform.2 Today, however, despite deepening educational inequalities caused by
school closures in the global pandemic, we note that issues of structural racism
remain absent within policy and planning for post-pandemic “recovery” in educa-
tion (Walker, 2021).
In this chapter, we reflect on the implications of such racial erasures in EID
and offer some theoretical and methodological resources with which to inspect
the field’s continued entanglements in systems of racial dominance. The chapter
begins by considering the historical orientations to racism in EID since the Second
World War. We then turn to the notion of “racial formation” (Omi & Winant,
2015) to discuss how it can train our attention to the ways in which racism is
produced through social, cultural, economic, and political forces across tempo-
ral and spatial scales. In the second part of the chapter, we use these theoretical
reflections to interrogate dominant development discourses of the “global learn-
ing crisis.” Through an analysis of the 2018 World Bank report Learning to Realize
Education’s Promise, we show how the moral panic of the “crisis” has been used to
narrowly define problems and solutions in education – none of which attend to
the articulations of racism in the production of educational inequalities. We argue
that through persisting racial erasure, technoscientific approaches to educational
interventions are seen as the rational option for “development,” while systems of
domination are able to remain uninterrogated and are thus kept in place. In the
concluding section, we turn to reflect on how the field can address its epistemolo-
gies of ignorance.
Racism and Global Development

There has been an ongoing struggle over the significance of racism in the formation
of global development agendas. Notions of race and racism have been, in fact,
central to the postwar development project, despite being overlooked within dis-
courses of policy and practice. The founding rationale for the United Nations and
its agencies after the Second World War was to develop a “new” global human-
ism to guard against a return to the horrors of Nazism and its biological racism
(Myers et al., 2021). The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization’s (UNESCO) Statements on Race in 1950, 1951, 1964, and 1967
signified a transition in scientific “race thinking” – from race being determined by
biology to it being informed by culture (Lerner, 1981). In 1960 UNESCO adopted
the Convention against Discrimination in Education that acknowledged the crucial
role of education in ensuring equality of opportunity for members of all racial,
Erasures of Racism 19
national, or religious groups. UNESCO recognized apartheid as a crime against
humanity in 1966, and its Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice in 1978 set out
expectations for media, law, international economic relations, and education to
address racial prejudice and inequalities. It was only in 2007 that the UN Declara-
tion on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted, after 25 years of formulation
and sustained Indigenous activism, and despite the initial exclusion of Indigenous
representatives from the drafting process (Melamed, 2011).3
On education, the Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice makes clear the
responsibility of states and “the entire teaching profession” to see that the “educa-
tional resources of all countries are used to combat racism” (Article 5.2, UNESCO,
1978). At the programmatic level, UNESCO and its national commissions have
initiated numerous educational campaigns and cultural activities to address issues
of racial discrimination and xenophobia, particularly through the lens of “inter-
cultural dialogue.”4 UNESCO has, for example, sought to implement peace and
human rights education and global citizenship education globally and has pro-
duced an array of curriculum resources and educational programs to facilitate
teaching about slavery, the holocaust, and other racial violences.5 But an approach
largely premised on liberal interculturalism, or what Melamed (2011, p. xiv) calls
“the benevolent rationalising of liberal orders,” has meant that such interventions
often fail to materially address the enduring effects of colonialism and the struc-
tural conditions of racism.
As historical work has shown, racial hierarchies of empire have been adapted
into rather than abandoned by the UN’s vision of cosmopolitan internationalism
(Sluga, 2010; Brattain, 2007). Amrit and Sluga (2008) argue that the “egalitarian
language” of the UN had “no way of acknowledging and dealing with the very
real inequalities – political, economic, racial – that persisted and deepened in the
post–World War II period” (p. 260). On UNESCO’s Statements on Race, scholars
have traced how such internationally coordinated work did not mark an end to
race as a scientific concept or to racism within science (Selcer, 2012). Such his-
torical analyses of the shifting discourses of race illuminate how “permissible nar-
ratives of difference” condition what appears and what is erased within past and
present understanding of “development” (Melamed, 2011, p. 14). Indeed, as our
discussions show, the presumed neutrality of “science” continues to be enrolled
into global race-making projects of contemporary development as part of the cur-
rent “silence.”
Debates about the global significance of racism have taken place through
the World Conferences Against Racism convened by UNESCO in 1978, 1983,
2001, and 2009 – and the heated political controversies of these meetings (for
example, contestations about reparations for slavery, the right to self-deter-
mination, and casteism as racism) reveal the ongoing struggle over defining
and tackling racism at a global level (Baber, 2010). What role should global
institutions play in addressing racism? On the one hand, racial inequality is
contextually specific – often enacted at national and subnational scales. On
the other hand, racism is a global formation, shaped profoundly by European
colonization’s production of a “global colour line” (Lake & Reynolds, 2008) and
the racial contract of white supremacy that extends beyond national borders
(Mills, 1997).
Within nation-states, one can point to different educational strategies aiming
to promote intercultural dialogue, multiculturalism, and peace, and improving
learning outcomes for disadvantaged groups of learners. But research on these
issues often says little about how the nation-state – much like empire – relies on
the maintenance of Indigenous territorial dispossession and the management of
racialized Others. That is, the concept of race is imbricated in projects of national
development as much as it has been in global development. Such “multi-scalar”
productions of racism are seen in the recent expressions of hard-edged ethnona-
tionalism across the globe, for example, through the rise of Islamophobia, anti-
Semitism, and communal violence that is being variously legitimized through
nationalist politics across the global north and south.
We argue for a revitalized, explicit, and central analysis of racism within global
development. This does not mean that racism is monolithic or immutable, but
that there needs to be a globally connected commitment to tackling contextually
specific formations of racism. The “leave no-one behind” discourse of the current
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework registers the possibility for a
global anti-discrimination agenda, but its operation through neoliberal develop-
mentalism obfuscates systems of racial domination (Weber, 2017). For example,
within education, SDG4 on inclusive and equitable quality education has led
to greater focus on “teacher quality” and “learning outcomes,” but work under
this banner by and large continues to overlook – and thus fails to address – the
complex, interconnected politics of racism upon which both “quality” and “out-
comes” might be contingent. Similarly, the discourse of “building back better” that
has emerged since the COVID-19 pandemic might invoke a redressal of exist-
ing structural inequalities in education, but its proponents underline technocratic
approaches such as investing in distance learning and digital “content” instead
of offering a vision for radical structural transformation (see, for example, Vu &
Savonitto, 2020).
This perhaps should not come as a surprise. As scholars have argued,
contemporary EID agendas are constituted through the “new imperialism” of
global capitalism (Tikly, 2004; see also Harvey, 2003). Formerly colonized nations
have been rendered as part of a “global periphery,” to be enrolled in the project
of “development” by the interests of the global elite (Tikly, 2004, p. 176). Educa-
tional research and policy agendas are shaped by the political and military strate-
gies of states, as well as by transnational flows of economic power. Educational
practice is increasingly, and especially since the pandemic, mediated through
the technologies and interests of capitalist industries (Teräs et al., 2020). As Jodi
Melamed (2015, p. 77) explains, drawing on Cedric Robinson (2000), racism
enshrines the “unequal differentiation of human value” that capitalist processes
of expropriation and accumulation require. Put simply, “capitalism is racial capital-
ism” (Melamed, 2015, p. 77), and arguably, mass education plays a major role in
differentiating human value given its role in filtering and sifting both knowledge
and people.
There is a clear need for the international development community to speak
out about how our own research and practice is implicated in political systems of
racism. The boards of multilateral organizations and the constitution of various
“epistemic communities” that shape and legitimize global development research
and policy, for example, are themselves not insulated from the politics of race
(Haas, 1989; see Sukarieh & Tannock, 2019, for a discussion of the geopolitics of
academic research partnerships; see also analyses of racism in peacekeeping and
humanitarian intervention in Razack, 2004; Ali, 2010). Appeals for the field to
be more “inclusive” and “diverse” – especially in our own epistemic communities
(such as our teaching and research) – are often problematic as they celebrate the
kindness and generosity of dominant groups toward the Other while maintaining
the very relations that produce domination.6 Here we suggest it is important to
consider both the epistemic and material violence of “inclusion” in our work (not
least because inclusion is often framed as benevolence). The discourse of “inclu-
sion” has been used, for example, to incorporate Indigenous peoples into domi-
nant education systems and social institutions more broadly, which has had violent
consequences. It has been used both historically and presently to deny Indigenous
knowledge and ways of life, and it has normalized the continued territorial occu-
pation of settler colonies (see Wolfe, 2016). Within the field of EID, discourses of
inclusion and diversity arguably co-opt a more radical politics of reconstruction: a
politics in which “development” is framed around principles of redistribution and
reparation rather than through principles of incorporation and assimilation.
Against the pervasive silence, we argue that policy and research interventions
in EID cannot be unhooked from political systems of racism or be seen in neutral
“colorblind” terms. After all, past and present racisms – along with other regimes
of inequality such as heteropatriarchy, classism, and ableism – underlie the une-
qual allocations of educational resources and opportunities. The United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF) recently estimated, for example, that approximately
25 million children are out of school in conflict-affected areas from South Sudan
to Afghanistan to Palestine (UNICEF, 2017a, 2017b). The roots of these con-
flicts are complex and multifaceted, but much analytic work in EID does not trace
these systematically in terms of racism and ethnonationalism in which colonial
violence, dispossession, and “divide and rule” logics have an active legacy (see, for
example, Prunier, 1998). As commentators have pointed out, schools have been
Janus-faced in relation to ethnic conflict, both complicit in its perpetuation and
seen as a key means for conflict resolution and peace building (Bush & Salterelli,
2000; Novelli, 2010).
Indeed, this tension of education – how it simultaneously holds the capacity
for progress and violence – needs to be an always-present aspect of EID research
and policy, specifically in relation to systems of racial domination (Rudolph et al.,
2018). For example, migration and forced displacement are calling for new edu-
cational responses, and the inclusion of minoritized populations in mass schooling
systems illuminates how education can operate as a “border regime” (Dyer, 2018).
Having fled war and persecution, refugees can face discrimination in the education
systems of countries of transit or settlement, including inadequate resourcing, hos-
tile environments, and a failure to recognize the status and value of their cultures,
languages, and identities (Roy & Roxas, 2011; Sidhu & Naidoo, 2018; Uptin et al.,
2012). Racism is also sustained through the epistemic logics of formal education
systems globally (Rudolph et al., 2018). This takes many forms from a failure to
recognize Indigenous knowledge systems, to a persistent Eurocentric bias in formal
curricula, and language of instruction policies that favor “global” (read colonial)
languages (see, for example, Brock-Utne, 2007; Desai, 2016; Trudell, 2007).
The discrimination, exclusion, and violence that young people and communi-
ties experience due to racialized markers of ethnicity, religion, linguistic identity,
nationality, and caste are significant but are rarely captured by the discourse of
measurement that dominates current global development research and practice.
Moreover, we need to be attentive to how metrics of educational inequality cat-
egorize and classify groups in ways that can produce and reify racialized differ-
ence. For example, scientific racism is arguably being remade through genetically
infused research in education (Martschenko et al., 2018; Gillborn, 2016). We also
note the long shadow of scientific racism and eugenics that continues to influence
thinking around population control (see, for example, Wilson, 2012). Notions of
“culture” also continue to be used in essentialized ways to racialize groups and
naturalize differences in educational performance (Gillborn, 1995; Malik, 1996).
That is, “culture” can be a tool with which development researchers explain
the “under-development” or deficiencies of specific groups, as if culture itself is
untethered from histories of domination (Narayan, 1998).
The presence of racism is so pervasive that the silencing of it within the field of
EID begins to sound deafening.
Theorizing Racism in Education and International

Development
There are numerous theoretical resources that the field of EID can think with to
address its erasures of racism. Here we reflect on the now classic contributions of
sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2015) and their concept of “racial
formation.” They demonstrate that while there is no biological basis to “race,” the
idea of “race” is constantly produced and filled with meaning through social pro-
cesses. As Omi and Winant explain, race has no fixed meaning, rather it is “con-
structed and transformed socio-historically through the cumulative convergence
and conflict of racial projects that reciprocally structure and signify race” (2015,
p. 128). They offer the concept of “racial formation” – the “sociohistorical pro-
cess by which racial identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed”
(2015, p. 109) – to consider how racial dynamics are formed and sustained, and
with what effects. These processes take place at the point, or “crossroads,” where
racial significations meet with ever shifting social structures and institutions
(2015, p. 124).
For Omi and Winant, the ideological and practical “work” of articulating this
connection is achieved through “racial projects,” which are, to some degree,
present in every identity, institution, and social practice. Racial projects simul-
taneously interpret, represent, or explain racial identities and meanings within
particular discursive and ideological practices while organizing and distributing
resources (economic, political, and cultural) along racial lines. These projects are
dynamic in that they can conflict, converge, and are contested across scales – from
global policymaking to the actions of nation-states and the practices of institu-
tions and civic-based movements and actors. Also, they do not operate discretely
but instead reciprocally interact with other racial projects to reproduce or sub-
vert current systems. Subversion suggests that not all racial projects are racist,
for example, the struggles over racial significations within Indigenous rights, civil
rights, and anti-colonial movements. Rather, a racial project can be defined as
being racist if it “creates or reproduces structures of domination based on racial
significations and identities” (2015, p. 128). This brings us to ask: what have been
the racial projects involved in efforts to create and govern subjects, and reorganize
and distribute resources, in the name of “development”? What racial projects in
our field uphold or produce structures of domination?
An analysis of racial projects and racial formations in the field of EID allows
for a deeper ontological understanding of racism as a set of social relationships
embedded across the different domains, institutions, and sites of our work. Racial
formations can be conceived as occurring through the social relationships between
groups of actors engaged in different racial projects. Thus, when we consider the
extension of racial meaning across social relationships, it is possible to talk about
a racialized division of labor within the economy as well as a racialized polity and
civil society, for example. Put simply, racial projects can operate and interact
across scales: within our classrooms, our policy briefs, our field sites and within our
hiring practices, our research partnerships, our allocations of resources. Such an
analysis stands in contrast to approaches that see racism as simply a consequence
of dynamics within the cultural domain (as in the “clash of civilizations” thesis) or
as the isolated hate crimes of individuals.
The idea of racial formations also offers a counter to reductive uses of “race”
or its proxies within social research and policy. This is particularly important in
our field, given that metric-based developmentalism renders “target” social groups
as empirical categories: essentialized entities of gender, socio-economic status,
ethnicity, and so on (Unterhalter, 2017; Languille, 2014). While the category of
“race” is rarely used directly within education research, racial categories frequently
appear via ethnicity, nationality, caste, linguistic background, religion, culture,
and other classifications of “group difference” within analyses of educational
inequalities. Given “the ‘work’ essentialism does for domination, and the ‘need’
domination displays to essentialize the subordinated” (Omi & Winant, 2000,
p. 206), there is a need to consider more critically the production of racial catego-
ries within metric-oriented development research. Categories of race may become
more visible through the desire to measure learning inequalities, but racism – its
social, political, and economic conditions – can continue to be erased.
Indeed, while much has been written on the implications of neoliberal devel-
opmentalism in education (see, for example, Robertson et al. (2007) for a review
of this literature), it has been less common to see sustained inquiry into the ways
these politics contain and produce racial projects. Neoliberalism, usually under-
stood as a class project in education, is also a racial project. This has been dem-
onstrated, for example, in Omi and Winant’s (2015) analysis of racial formations
in the United States in which both neoliberalism and neoconservatism operated
together politically and economically.7 Melamed (2011) explains the economic
requirements for racism:
The emergence of a global order through a world-embracing system of capi-

talism, nation-states, colonies, and imperial rule was able to constitute itself
as a global social structure only to the extent that is was racialized. (p. 7)
She goes on to suggest, “the primary function of racialization has been to make
structural inequality appear to fair” (p. 13). Understanding, then, the dynamics
of educational exclusion and inequality in contexts of neoliberal marketization,
as much critical work in the field attempts to do, also requires attending the ways
in which neoliberalism works as part of global and national racial projects (for
example, states’ legitimization and maintenance of settler occupation; ethnona-

tionalist projects of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim violence; and, as we discuss in

this chapter, erasures of racism by powerful global actors in development).
We suggest, then, that the idea of racial formation can be a methodological ori-
entation for the field to think with, in order to “unlock the power relations inscribed
within it, that operate through race but are by no means contained by it” (White,
2006, p. 58). This does not imply a fixed or universal schema of racism. Indeed,
Omi and Winant’s work emerged from the specific histories of racial formations
in the United States, and as Mara Loveman (1999) warns, “asserting the unique
ontological status of ‘race’ may actually undermine attempts to improve the under-
standing of the operation and consequences of ‘race’, ‘racism’ and ‘racial domina-
tion’ in different times and places” (p. 895). The task for our field is to connect
the ways in which racial domination is formed and contested both in the specific
temporal and geopolitical contexts of our research, and through the broader archi-
tectures of global governance that make such research on “development” legible.
Indeed, it remains a matter for empirical inquiry to understand the detailed
workings of racial formations in specific contexts.8 Wacquant (2010) reminds us
of the need to embrace thick sociological accounts of the social relations, catego-
ries, and power structures instituted by the “outworking” of neoliberal ideologies
and technologies of exploitation. But we can begin to see how the articulations
of racism are far from being “side” concerns of the field. On the contrary, the
imaginary of race is at the core of the sector and its sites of practice, constituting
its narrative and playing out in material ways through the priorities, allocations,
and governance of international development (White, 2006). We demonstrate
this with respect to the “global learning crisis,” tracing how its erasure of racism is,
itself, a racial project.
The “Global Learning Crisis”
In 2013, in the lead up to the SDGs, UNESCO published a report called The
Global Learning Crisis. In it, a “crisis” in education is named: “despite increased
enrolments, an estimated 250 million children cannot read, write or count well,
whether they have been to school or not” (UNESCO, 2013, p. 2). The issue
of improving the quality of education, not just access to it, had been debated
for decades, acknowledged not least through the 2005 Education For All Global
Monitoring Report The Quality Imperative (UNESCO, 2004). But the language
of crisis offered a new sense of urgency, and legitimacy, with which development
actors and institutions were able to chart their courses of intervention. The 2013–
2014 Global Monitoring Report Teaching and Learning: Achieving Quality for All
(UNESCO, 2014) dedicated significant discussion to the “learning crisis,” includ-
ing the substantial economic implications of low rates of return, and an emphasis
on supporting “quality teachers” to “solve the crisis.” Learning goals and indicators
have now been introduced into the 2030 framework for Sustainable Development.
As SDG 4.1 states, “By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equita-
ble and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective
learning outcomes.” In the midst of school closures and deepening educational
inequalities as a result of the global pandemic, the “learning crisis” discourse has
an even more urgent calling within development policy.
The discourse of “crisis” can present itself as uncontestable: of course, one
cannot argue against wanting to improve learning in schools. However, the dis-
course obfuscates its own politics – how the “crisis” came to be and what sorts of
concepts of and responses to learning it renders intelligible and possible. Indeed,
the “global learning crisis” has been accompanied by a proliferation of learning
metrics tools, assessment programs, and an industry of research and consultancy
(for example, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s
PISA for Development; The Global Alliance to Monitor Learning; the Brook-
ings Institute’s Assessment for Learning program; and the partnership of the
Economic and Social Research Council and the Department for International
Development that committed £20 million to commission research on “raising
learning outcomes”). The World Bank has expressed interest in developing a
“global learning metric,” with the argument that “the learning crisis is often hid-
den – but measurement makes it visible” (WB, 2018, p. 91). There appears to be
an almost feverish response to generate more data, more metrics, and more sci-
ence on “learning” in order to solve the “crisis.” We are told, in a statement that
all but dismisses the expertise of educators at the chalk-face: “to take learning
seriously, start by measuring it” (WB, 2018, pg. 57). Indeed, profiting from the so-
called learning loss of the pandemic, there has been a proliferation of assessment
and testing industries (Bello, 2021).
Despite the bustling and costly production of data on education – by elite actors
in powerful development industries, often in the global north – we note the pro-
duction of silence (or, as Mills puts it, ignorance) that denies racism as a matter
of relevance to the “global learning crisis.” We go as far as to suggest that this
production of silence is indicative that the “crisis” operates as a racial project,
since by eliding race, racism is normalized. As White (2006) argues, the constitu-
tive fiction of development “turns on its own erasure” (p. 65). In other words, the
production of, and response to, the “global learning crisis” is able to legitimately
work through colorblind and technocratic approaches that erase histories of racial
domination. An uncomfortable and thereby important question to ask, then, is
why is this so?
Consensus and Erasure

In what is regarded a founding study on the theory of “moral panic,” Stuart Hall
and his colleagues (1978) identify the consensual quality of “crisis” discourse; its
appearance “to talk ‘with one voice’ of rates, diagnoses, prognoses and solutions”
(Hall et al., 1978, p. 16) in order to shore up specific renderings of “problems”
and justify methods of containment. To unpack the contemporary discourse of
the “global learning crisis,” which is shaping a consensus around the research and
policy priorities of education and international development, we analyze how the
concept of crisis has been mobilized by the World Bank in its 2018 World Develop-
ment Report.
Called Learning to Realize Education’s Promise, the World Bank’s report con-
structs the “learning crisis” through what seems to be an impressively forensic
account of education systems and their economic returns, globally. It was the first
time that education was taken as the principal focus in the report’s 40-year his-
tory of annual publication. The publication calls for immediate action to “escape
low learning traps,” through evidence-based approaches and innovations. Signifi-
cantly, it emphasizes “alignment” as a goal for development: “learning outcomes
won’t change unless education systems take learning seriously and use learning as
a guide and metric” (p. 16). It even suggests a mantra for this process of incorpo-
ration and consensus-building – all for learning – and three strategies for develop-
ment research, policy, and practice to achieve it: assess learning, act on evidence,
and align actors.
It is particularly significant to note that the World Bank has positioned the crisis
of learning as both a moral and economic problem. As Jim Yong Kim, President of
the World Bank Group, reflects in the forward of the report:
This is a moral and economic crisis that must be addressed immediately. This
year’s Report provides a path to address this economic and moral failure.
(WB, 2018, p. xi)
Despite the “failure” of postwar international development, to which Jim Yong

Kim alludes in his opening remarks, the crisis discourse enables the World Bank
to defend system-wide alignment to its visions of learning as the natural “path.”
Within the report, there is neither systematic recognition of how racism is articu-
lated within the “learning crisis,” nor single mention of the field’s imbrications
with colonialism, and yet solutions to the “learning crisis” are constructed as both
morally and economically irrefutable. Indeed, as Salim Vally (see also Chapter 11
in this book) comments on the report:
For those of us in Africa, some acknowledgement at the very least, of the

World Bank’s historical complicity through the devastation wrought by struc-
tural adjustment, the support for user fees, large class sizes, the discourage-
ment of higher education, and caps on the salaries of teachers would show not
just mere contrition but would signal an openness to learn from the mistakes
of the past. (Ginsburg et al., 2018, p. 283)
Examining the World Bank’s “learning crisis” discourse for what it renders visible
and invisible reveals how it erases racism and other relations of social domination
in its understanding of educational inequalities. The report defines the learning
crisis as having four “proximate determinants”: learner preparation, teacher skills
and motivation, the availability of relevant inputs, and school management and
governance (WB, 2018, p. 78). These “immediate” determinants – or “those most
directly linked to learning outcomes” – are then rationalized as key sites for inter-
vention (p. 78). While this framework recognizes that proximate determinants
“are themselves the result of deeper determinants,” the “crisis” is not able to sys-
tematically name or address these “deeper” issues. As such, structures of social
domination, of which racism is one articulating force, are erased from both the
conception of, and solution to, the “global learning crisis.”
Reflecting current interests in “systems thinking” in education and international
development (cf. Pritchett, 2015), the report acknowledges that there are “techni-
cal and political factors” that make educational systems ineffective. These include
competing interests of actors in the system, patronage, and rent-seeking behav-
iors, and other so-called “unhealthy politics” (p. 189). Absent here is a theory of
power that can address the relationality of these social processes across scales, as so
usefully offered by theories of “racial formation.” Tucked away in a discussion on
“vested interests” is the acknowledgement that “education systems can be used by
dominant ethnic groups – especially in multilingual or multireligious societies –
to promote their positions while suppressing minorities” (p. 190). What remains
unclear is how the World Bank’s emphasis on “alignment” of interests, or for that
matter, its focus on measuring “learning outcomes,” would address this significant
issue, and indeed one that applies as much to the global north as it does to the
global south. As Silova (2018) argues, the Report “portrays ‘developing’ countries
as trapped in an endless loop of poverty, corruption and backwardness, while posi-
tioning Western countries as examples to emulate.” Without a relational analysis,
the “vested interests” of white curricula in the global north, as just one example,
are not made visible as “problems” within the global learning crisis framework
(cf. Bain, 2018). The production of racism in and through schooling is able to be
erased from issues of “learning.” This fails to recognize the racial formations that
education is enmeshed in globally.
Indeed, a telling example of the absence of relational thinking within the report,
despite its language of “systems,” is that structural inequalities are separated
out from the “proximate determinants” of the learning crisis in a textbox called
“Education can’t do it alone” (p. 44). It is the only place within the report that
discrimination is mentioned explicitly. But this is in reference to the reduction
of educational “returns” for specific groups in the labor market, rather than an
analysis of discrimination within educational processes themselves. Thus, while
the report insists “educational systems do not function in a vacuum,” its concept
of “learning” appears to do just that. Indeed, despite long-standing arguments by
educationists that learning and pedagogy need to be understood as social processes
(Alexander, 2015; Barrett, 2007; Sriprakash, 2011), the “learning crisis” discourse
has entrenched functionalist rationalities in its concept of learning outcomes, and
appealed to the “neutrality” of scientific frameworks to understand how learning
happens. How the market or science can interrogate, rather than service, complex
systems of social domination is side-stepped through the “crisis” discourse.
Indeed, the contradiction of the learning crisis discourse is that it recognizes
that “poverty, gender, ethnicity, disability and location explain most remaining
schooling disparities” (p. 60), yet moves its focus away from social, economic, and
political forces that produce such inequalities. The “learning crisis” in the World
Bank report centers approaches that depoliticize both educational processes and
the production of educational inequalities. For example, alongside the techno-
rationalities of global measures of “learning outcomes,” the report shows interest
in cognitive neuroscience and the “biology of learning” for addressing learning and
skills formation (p. 68). Such appeals to technoscientific solutions might appear
to be neutral, or even “colorblind,” but as critical race scholars and others have
shown, technoscientific practices have normative and political dimensions that
can coproduce racial classifications (Benjamin, 2016; White, 2006). Gilles et al.
(2016, p. 221) argue, “social science instruments and techniques are constitutive,
bringing the object of study into view, categorizing and shaping how it is thought
about and known.” There is an urgent need, we suggest, to reflect on the racial
projects involved in knowing the “global learning crisis” in the context of the rising
influence of neuroscience and biology.
Conclusion
Operating through the logics of neoliberal developmentalism, racial erasure in
the “global learning crisis” enables research, policy, and practice in EID to do a
number of things. It enables the field to ignore the colonial present or treat it
as background “context” rather than as constitutive analysis; the active legacies
of violent theft and control of lands, bodies, labor, and resources through Euro-
pean colonialism that produce educational “crises” often disappear in our analytic
work. Racial erasure in the learning crisis discourse also enables the field to natu-
ralize the global south as a site of “crisis” and thus intervention, while simultane-
ously de-linking the global north from the production of learning inequalities,
including racial formations of white supremacy. The “colorblind” market logics of
neoliberalism enable the racial projects of (ethno-nationalistic) states to remain
unaddressed by the development field. And, it enables the field to eliminate or
deem irrelevant the epistemic resources that challenge its forms of knowledge or
its desire for normative “alignment.” For example, analyses of racial formations
and the articulations of racism within education systems are simply bracketed off
from the “problems” of global development. As such, the World Bank’s discourse
of the “learning crisis” operates through an epistemology of ignorance. The irrefu-
tability of the “crisis” and its solutions in data, metrics, and science – propped up
by academic research industries – permits such racial erasures.
Thus, we have attempted to point to the ways in which the discourse of “the
global learning crisis,” as circulated by a powerful and dominant entity the devel-
opment sector, operates as a racial project. This project works through a silencing
of, and unhooking from, the racial formations of its own production: the historical
and social struggles of, for example, colonial exploitation, racialized exclusions,
and ethnic violence, which produce educational “crises.” This is a silence that is
neither passive nor benign. Instead, it is active and dynamic as it erases the politi-
cal systems of racism from the discourse, policy, and practice of “development.” In
fact, we suggest that the silence is deeply lodged in, and required by, hegemonic
industries of development to depoliticize and ultimately sustain our work.
The “global learning crisis” has arguably become the dominant frame through
which research and policy in education and international development is now per-
ceived, but our analysis hopes to inspire interrogation of the other ways in which
our field achieves its “work” of racial erasure. What makes development projects,
such as the discourses surrounding the global learning crisis, go unnoticed as racial
projects? We urge critical reflection on how research, policy, and practice in EID
come to function, relatively unimpeded, through colorblind and technoscientific
approaches. We challenge “commonsense” responses to development “problems”
and “crises” that are narrowly defined, devoid of sociohistorical context, and oper-
ating as if separate from political systems of racism.
After all, such racial erasures keep systems of domination in place, and often
under the guise of progressive intent. We find it deeply troubling, for example,
that critical race theories and historical inquiry more broadly are all but absent in
the curriculum of EID university courses. Reflecting on our own experiences of
masters-level programs in elite institutions in the United Kingdom, the next gen-
eration of development policy actors and researchers are often being trained with
little understanding of the various racial formations that have shaped both the field
and the specific development contexts being studied. Arguably, this lack of histori-
cal reflexivity and knowledge of ongoing anti-racist, anti-colonial struggle is how
the field reproduces itself. The ascendancy of economics within such programs,
for example, creates a narrow lens through which education and development is
understood, and this bolsters powerful research and policy industries (such as those
linked to the measurement of learning outcomes as part of the “global learning cri-
sis”), where the careers of elites can be advanced. The exclusion of people of color –
often students and noticeably professors – in EID programs in the global north is
yet another articulation of racism that too often remains unspoken in the field. We
have a duty to engage critically and openly with the damaging nature and effects of
racism in all its forms. This is not a question of capacity but of will.
We contend, then, that the sector can no longer side-step the systematic ways
in which racism is articulated through its practices, whether in the name of pro-
gressive politics (“inclusive education”) or by invoking efficiency or neutrality
(“what works,” “evidence-based practice”). Arguably, the first challenge lies in
acknowledging the racial projects through which the field operates, rather than
perpetuating the absence of historical reflexivity and its colorblind myths, or rel-
egating matters of racism to “specialist” inquiry that are bracketed off from the
“core activities” of the field. This is to acknowledge the ways in which racial for-
mations have profoundly shaped the educational contexts in which we work. We
also call for rigorous debate about the ways in which the theories, measures, tools,
and approaches that we use to understand educational inequality enable us to see
or not see racism. This is to identify the epistemological means of racial erasure.
The material conditions of our field require constant scrutiny too; who does what
work, where, and under what conditions, and how do these arrangements permit
a notion of global development that is blind to systems of racial domination?
The question remains whether an anti-racist politics can be built within a field
whose own history cannot be separated from the histories of European colonial-
ism, new imperialism, and racial capitalism (Takayama et al., 2017). Given the
co-option and even marketization of radical politics by institutions as a strategy of
silencing and control (see, for example, Sisters of Resistance, 2018), and the use
of “anti-racism” as a means to secure geopolitical interests rather than as an end in
itself (see Melamed, 2011), we must learn from anti-racist struggles that operate
outside the domain of development, as post-development theorists have asked us
to imagine. Writing from within the field, and presumably to many readers who
are similarly located, we invest hope in our collective responsibility to come to
know and challenge our own “epistemologies of ignorance.” Challenging these
racial erasures demand us to turn toward the field’s complicity in systems of racial
domination so they can no longer be ignored. This is our learning crisis.
Notes
1 Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform. (n.d.). https://sustainabledevelopment.
un.org/post2015/transformingourworld
2 See, for example, https://odi.org/en/insights/how-to-confront-race-and-racism-in-inter
national-development/; www.bond.org.uk/news/2020/06/time-to-dismantle-racism-
in-international-development; www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/aug/31/
racism-doesnt-just-exist-within-aid-its-the-structure-the-sector-is-built-on
3 It is not insignificant that four settler colonies – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the
United States – initially voted against this UN Declaration. The Declaration’s emphasis
on the land rights of Indigenous peoples was seen to pose a threat to white territorial
occupation (see Melamed, 2011).
4 See, for example, https://en.unesco.org/themes/intercultural-dialogue
5 See for example: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000265488; https://en.unesco.
org/themes/holocaust-genocide-education/resources
6 Relatedly, we note that methodological literature on researching the Other often
re-center white experience and reproduce tropes of white “vulnerability” despite condi-
tions of white domination (see, for example, Muller & Trahar, 2016).
7 Omi and Winant argue that neoliberalism in the United States emerged under Reagan
from a conservative backlash to the gains of the civil rights movement (under Thatcher
it was associated with a critique of the gains of the anti-racist movement in England).
Neoconservatism in the United States since the 1980s, they go on to explain, has been
supportive of neoliberal economic policies on the grounds that it put a brake on the
“undeserving poor” (read, Black populations) from receiving state welfare support.
8 Goodnight (2017) offers a rare analysis of the “translations” of critical race theories
within comparative and international education research, examining the methodologi-
cal affordances of critical race theory for understanding casteism (and its intersections
with other regimes of inequality) in Indian education.
Acknowledgments
This chapter is an updated version of the following journal article: Arathi Sriprakash
et al. (2020), The erasures of racism in education and international development:
Re-reading the “global learning crisis,” Compare: A Journal of C omparative and
International Education, 50:5, 676–692. We are grateful to Taylor & Francis (www.
tandfonline.com) for permission to reuse our analysis.
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2 Racialization, Whiteness, and
Education
Zeus Leonardo in Conversation with Janelle Scott
and Monisha Bajaj
Zeus Leonardo published, “The souls of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness
studies, and globalization discourse” in 2002. On the 20th anniversary of this pub-
lication, we spoke about this work, how the ideas within it have evolved, and what
current and future directions he sees racialization theories progressing toward.
This chapter, edited for content and length, reflects these ideas. This chapter is
dedicated to the memory of Dr. Hoang Tran, late friend, and colleague, and to the
continuing memories with his family.
“The souls of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization
discourse” was a 2002 publication I wrote at the turn of the century. It was my
intervention on what was then a bifurcated tendency to discuss race in isolation
from economic analyses of globalization. And few theorists were connecting race,
globalization, and education. In this article, I centered the role of education with
an emphasis on neo-abolitionist pedagogy:
Neo-abolitionist pedagogy suggests that teachers and students work together

to name, reflect on, and dismantle discourses of whiteness. This does not
mean dismantling white people, as McLaren (1995) has pointed out. But it
does mean disrupting white discourses and unsettling their codes. The com-
plementary goal is to dismantle race without suggesting to students of color
that their racial experiences are not valid or ‘real.’ However, it necessitates a
problematization of race at the conceptual level because there is a difference
between suggesting that race, as a concept, is not real and affirming students’
racialized and lived experiences as ‘real.’ Students of color benefit from an
education that analyzes the implications of whiteness because they have to
understand the daily vicissitudes of white discourses and be able to deal with
them. That is, in order to confront whiteness, they have to be familiar with it.
In the process, they also realize that their ‘colorness’ is relational to whiteness’s
claims of color-blindness and both are burst asunder in the process. Thus, the
goal is for students of color to engage whiteness while simultaneously working
to dismantle it. White students benefit from neo-abolitionism because they
come to terms with the daily fears associated with the upkeep of whiteness. In
so far as whiteness is a performance (Giroux, 1997), white students possess a
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-4
36 Zeus Leonardo et al.
vulnerable persona always an inch away from being exposed as bogus. Their
daily white performance is dependent on the assertion of a false world built on
rickety premises. (Leonardo, 2002, p. 31)
In essence, then, racialization processes are inextricably tied to global economic

domination, and ultimately, schooling is a site where these processes are made,
remade, and potentially, disrupted.
Past and Present Whiteness Studies

At the turn of the previous century, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that history hence-
forth was going to be the history of the color line. As a graduate student in 1998,
I worked with Peter McLaren, a prominent Marxist in education. I had always
thought of myself as somebody who went into graduate school to study race. As
I wrote in the Introduction to Race, Whiteness, and Education (2009), I went to
graduate school to get a foundation in racial analysis. Instead, I got a Marxist
analysis, but I remained committed to joining those analytic categories. At the end
of the 1990s and early 2000s, researchers were talking about globalization, and
this conversation was about the globalization of class relations. Globalization was
always framed in economic terms, but because of my commitment to race analysis,
I was trying to think of globalization differently, with fidelity to a Marxist analysis or
the Marxist conceptual apparatus. In 2010, I started colliding race and class, and
I joined them as one word, “raceclass.” Interestingly, I originally collapsed race and
class into raceclass when Pierre Orelus interviewed me in 2010 for his collection of
interviews, Rethinking Race, Class, Language, and Gender. I patterned the insight on
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity when he leveraged the revolutionary
concept of spacetime, whereby space and time became two inseparable fabrics of
the universe that are bent by matter. But as luck would have it, Orelus’ publisher
converted race and class back to “race-class” for the book’s 2011 print version,
likely assuming that raceclass was an error. So raceclass had to wait another year
when I published “The Race for Class: Reflections on a Critical Raceclass Theory
of Education” in 2012, based on the R. Freeman Butts Lecture that I delivered for
the American Educational Studies Association in November 2011. All this is to
say that Du Bois’ work had global implications such that the color line is the global
color line, as I argue in the Souls of White Folk (2002), which references his ideas,
not only the Souls of Black Folk (1935, 1989) but also in a less well-known essay
called The Souls of White Folk (1910).
My 2002 article centered whiteness, or what I called, “late whiteness,” after
Jameson’s (1991) notion of late capitalism. I looked at three concepts then that
were popular in economic analysis: (1) multinationalism, (2) fragmentation, and
(3) flexible accumulation, or simply flexibility. These three concepts came out of
a Marxist analysis of the globalization of capital. But it was also important to talk
about whiteness. Many scholars locate the beginning of modern whiteness stud-
ies with Peggy McIntosh (1992), with white privilege conceptualized as unearned
freedoms possessed in an invisible knapsack carried by white people. Whiteness
Racialization, Whiteness, and Education 37
studies also developed with The Wages of Whiteness from Roediger (1991), which
itself draws insights from Du Bois (1935). Also essential in this whiteness studies
tradition is Ruth Frankenberg’s White Women, Race Matters (1993).
The 1990s was an exciting intellectual time for me and for the field. Whiteness
studies was taking off, globalization studies was taking off, and critical pedagogy,
the cousin of critical theory, was in full swing. By then Pedagogy of the Oppressed
had sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and its popularity has only grown since
then. This time also included work from Michael Apple, Henry Giroux, Peter
McLaren, and more. I wrote The Souls of White Folk to put all that rich theory in
conversation: my training in Marxism, my fidelity to critical theory and critical
pedagogy, and my deep investment and commitment to race analysis. I published
the article in Race, Ethnicity, and Education, which was then still an early journal,
edited by David Gillborn. I was trying to leverage the terms we had inherited from
Marxism. I looked at multinational whiteness, because it was more popular to
study the globalization of capital, and still is.
Whiteness as Ideology
Du Bois’ early 1900s argument asks what nook and cranny of the globe white-
ness has not touched, which is a global argument. We associate him with a kind
of attention to the Black experience in the United States. His book, The Souls of
Black Folk, is an argument about how to be both Black and American when full
humanity and citizenship were denied to Black people. That’s the twoness he talks
about. Because of this specificity, it was often more popular to understand Du Bois
as studying only the U.S. national race context. I argued that the modus operandi
of whiteness is to fragment our total understanding of the effects of racial power, at
the top of which is whiteness, invoking my debt to Marxist ideology critique, this
time demystifying the distortion that whiteness encourages.
Ideology is a central concept that I inherited from Marxism, and I still am enam-
ored with studies of ideology today. Regarding flexibility, the strength of whiteness
is not its rigidity. Indeed, whiteness is the opposite to rigidity. For example, it is
distinct from the Soviet experiment with socialism, whose rigidity led to its down-
fall. What leads to the relative “success” of whiteness over the centuries is its
flexibility, its ability to adapt just like capitalism, to be flexible, to welcome into
its fold new groups into whiteness that weren’t white before. An example of this
fluidity is How the Irish Became White by Ignatiev (1995), and how Italians have
become white, how Arabs became white over time, how Jews became white, and
so on. Flexible whiteness is precisely what makes whites and whiteness a rather
successful hegemonic power.
It is centrally important to distinguish between white people and whiteness, and
I never tire of making the distinction. It really boils down to Roediger’s famous
statement, in The Abolition of Whiteness (1994), the follow-up to Wages of White-
ness (1991), that says, “Whiteness is not just false and oppressive, it is nothing but
false and oppressive” (p. 13; italics in original). I’ve been thinking about that state-
ment for a very long time. In philosophy, philosophers have been thinking about
the Cartesian statement of, “I think, therefore I am” and what that means. In a
piece with Leonardo and Alicia Broderick (2011), I borrow from that sort of Car-
tesian logic applied to Roediger’s thoughtful insight about whiteness. Whiteness
studies is in a sense dominantly populated by white authors, if by that we trace its
beginning with Peggy McIntosh’s popular knapsack argument. Now, periodization
is always a difficult thing as Jameson once said because there have been very cred-
ible arguments that whiteness studies began before that, such as Du Bois’ work.
The Souls of White Folk essay I wrote in 2002 admits to this longer intellectual
lineage, which is that Du Bois was already studying whiteness, James Baldwin was
studying whiteness, and so many others were as well. Baldwin, Du Bois, and other
great authors are included in Roediger’s collection called Black on White (2010),
that is, Black authors on whiteness. However, although Du Bois wrote about the
public and psychological wages of whiteness, and Baldwin talked about the price of
the ticket of becoming white, I understand their work as studying that as a second
concern. The primary concern is about Black life, the souls of Black folk, the lives
of Black folk, and secondarily speaking, they were concerned about how those lives
are influenced, distorted, and encircled ideologically and materially by whiteness.
The taking up of whiteness and whiteness studies over the last 30 years is a very
different uptake than from these early twentieth-century Black authors. Ques-
tions and theories about what white life was like, or the other side of the color
line, was a topic that we had difficulties talking about because studying race was
for many decades, if not centuries, primarily a study about people of color. By con-
trast, whiteness studies turns the gaze upon whiteness itself. But if we understand
whiteness as provoked by Roediger’s “it is nothing but false and oppressive,” and if
I’m correct that whiteness studies is dominantly populated by white scholars and
activists and intellectuals, then there’s an obvious paradox. If whiteness studies is
only about whites and only by whites, then Roediger would have to say that white-
ness studies is nothing but false and oppressive, that Ruth Frankenberg (1997)
and Peggy McIntosh and Richard Dyer are nothing but false and oppressive. But
I think he made it a point to say that whiteness, not whites, is nothing but false and
oppressive, and that gives us important intellectual and analytic possibilities.
The concept of whiteness is different from white people because whiteness is
an ideological and material structure that is preponderantly deployed by white
people and hails or interpellates whites. But if we conclude that racism has been
only about white people, then that elides difficult conversations about internalized
racism, and internalized oppression from non-white people, who can perpetuate
whiteness, even when there are no white people present. This helps us to see that
non-whites are involved in whiteness and are implicated in whiteness. Whiteness
is an ideology, but not in the orthodox sense of ideology as only ideational, ideol-
ogy as only expressed as an idea. I understand ideology in the more contemporary
sense from Althusser (1971) and onward, that it is many things, including hav-
ing a material existence, which is not the same as claiming that ideology is itself
material.
To say that ideology has a material existence is an improvement. Ideology exists
in material forms within institutions, including schools, government, and the
state. Therefore, whiteness as an idea is at least 500 years old, depending on where
you begin. I argue that while whiteness is a complex set of ideologies expressed in
structures and institutions, it is also a discourse and a way of thinking about the
world. It is a way of deciding on how to act on the world that not only white people
participate in.
There are different consequences when people of color participate in white-
ness. In a sense, it has some ironies that it doesn’t have for white people. White is
an identity. So, if whiteness is different from white, it is that white is an identity.
It is an identity that shifts over time, and it is imposed and assumed. Who was
white in the late 1800s may look differently than who is white now or who is
becoming white or who is becoming unwhite. The attacks in the United States on
September 11, 2001 (9/11), were very important in questioning Arab whiteness.
In my sardonic moments, I sometimes argue that Arabs are being kicked out of
the “white house,” since 9/11 or even dating before that because there was already
tension with Arab whiteness as opposed to Anglo whiteness or European white-
ness. Whiteness is an ideology expressed in structures and that white is an identity,
not individually owned, but group identities that change over time. I’m interested
in who is counted as white, but that’s fundamentally not what drives my work.
What drives my work is, because who is white changes over time, my question is:
What is whiteness and what is it doing?
White Supremacy Studies as a Necessary Intervention

In my 2002 article, The Souls of White Folk, I critiqued the tendency to decouple
globalization from whiteness studies, referring to these two domains as the “Twin
Towers.” With a sense of melancholia, I used that metaphor before the aftermath
of the attacks of 9/11. Andrea Smith calls these constructs pillars (2012): of white
supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism. In education research, comfort with these
terms has been recent. For example, with the recent Trump presidency, more and
more scholars, and non-scholars for that matter – school people, teachers, educa-
tors, and even young students – more people are now comfortable saying white
supremacy. It was more common in sociology through Bonilla-Silva’s work, in
Fredrickson’s comparative white supremacy framework, and in Charles Mills, The
Racial Contract (1997) and philosophy, although philosophy as a discipline is not
comfortable with the phrase “white supremacy.”
Education research was slower to embrace a focus on whiteness and white
supremacy. Ladson-Billings, who introduced critical race theory (CRT) to educa-
tional research with Tate in the 1995 Teachers College Record article that launched
a thousand careers, later half joked by asking the question, “What is Critical Race
Theory doing in a nice place like education?” We’re a nice place. We’re a nice dis-
cipline, and white supremacy is not a nice phrase, and it’s not supposed to describe
something nice. We’ve gone from a focus on the means of production to serious
study about the production of meanness where the means of production signals
capital and the production of meanness signals whiteness and white supremacy.
So, if you just count the number of articles by title let alone by content, I think
the phrase “white supremacy” in race studies, or whiteness studies in education
particularly, is now more popular.
In 2002, and as David Gillborn once commented, uttering the term “white
supremacy” in scholarship almost signaled “madness.” He relates a story about
a colleague who heard him discuss white supremacy and responded, “Are you
insane?” So, even by the early 2000s, the phrase “white supremacy” as a way of
describing, labeling, explaining, and analyzing what was going on was unpopular.
Racism was a much more common term. Yet I think “white supremacy” as a phrase
has several advantages, and I’ve argued that in a follow up to The Souls of White
Folk called The Color of Supremacy (2004a) that one may have some legs on which
to stand and use racism to describe non-white racism, or attitudinal racism that is
multidirectional. So, one can talk about Asian racism toward Black people. One
can talk about Black racism toward Indigeneity, and so forth.
I’m not saying those are necessarily correct things to say. I’m saying you hear
that, but white supremacy is more specific than that. There is no Black suprem-
acy, there is no red supremacy, there is no yellow supremacy, there is no brown
supremacy. There is white supremacy, and it names the problem in a more struc-
tural way because it’s limited to reduce white supremacy to an attitudinal problem.
It’s harder, but there are lots of attempts to reduce racism as an attitudinal adjust-
ment. So, I think that has changed, which is a welcome change in race studies,
where foundational pieces on CRT and law, Whiteness as Property by Cheryl Harris,
have led to some changes in educational theorizing about whiteness and education.
As these conceptual interventions emerged, in educational research, we also
tend to adhere to ideas that are past their usefulness – that can create intellec-
tual stasis or a clinging to connections that simply do not work, like the idea
that we can separate class or economic analyses from racial ones. Marxism and
race critiques are an area of such concern. I wrote The Unhappy Marriage Between
Marxism and Race Critique (2004b), a riff off Heidi Hartman’s Unhappy Marriage
Between Marxism and Feminism (1993). I have been trying to marry the two frame-
works because in some sense as much as I sometimes felt like a race scholar in exile
inside Marxism, I since have really valued that exile. This is a nod to Edward Said.
Exile of a race scholar inside Marxism helps to denaturalize some of my assump-
tions about race that were not informed by capital and Marxism. I have been
trying to work to marry them. I’m fully committed to, at least, a happier union
between analysis of capital and its co-implication with white supremacy. Du Bois’
work and life activism were really tied to understanding the implications between
racism and capital. He emphasized more and more a kind of workers’ experience
at the end of his life before he exiled to Ghana and died there. Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. became most dangerous to white supremacy when he tried to marry race
and workers’ movements, and that may have hastened his assassination. Obvi-
ously, Malcolm X did this work as well before he was also assassinated.
In the academic work, you have Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Under-
developed Black America (1983), Melamed and racial capitalism (2015), and bell
hooks’ great triptych, of white capitalist patriarchy (2014). That is the triad, the
holy triumvirate of race, class, and gender. So, I’m happy about the attention to
racial capitalism that has developed more strongly over the decades, and I think
that critique is important inside race scholarship and Marxist scholarship. And
finally, a great example is the coloniality of power argument from Anibal Quijano
(2000), which was really in some ways a reaction to Wallerstein’s World Systems
Theory (2004), which we know is an economic analysis of the globalization of
capital. Quijano elegantly reacted to that kind of economism with the coloniality
of power, arguing that the colonial difference that Mignolo talks about must figure
into the analysis of the modern world system that Wallerstein talked about. And
finally, Maria Lugones (2007) argues that Quijano really underplays gender in
World Systems Theory. So, these are exciting developments, reflecting important
debates and divergences in the field.
The Persistence of White Privilege in Whiteness Studies

Whiteness studies is becoming more and more comfortable and more unavoidable.
It’s becoming more and more unavoidable to have to talk about the structure of
white supremacy. I signaled earlier that some things haven’t changed, however.
There is still a profound commitment to studies of white privilege in whiteness
studies, and I think there’s good reasons for that. I mean there is white privilege on
an individual and institutional level. White privilege is real, but I wrote the essay
The Color of Supremacy (2004) because I was uncomfortable with the overfocus
on white privilege, which was often psychologized and existential-ized and formu-
laic. As a result, educational analysis ignored investments in whiteness, and how
whiteness exists and is perpetuated within institutions, state apparatuses, and as
I have argued, globally.
That individualization of white privilege persists in the literature, which may
be evidence of white privilege within whiteness studies. Many white scholars who
are in other senses insurgent and who critique and question their own white privi-
lege are doing so within whiteness studies, which itself is articulated with white
privilege. So, there is a privilege even in saying, “Let me tell you about my white
privilege.” There is still some of that going on, what I call “white confessionals.”
And last, I have been thinking about what a Black whiteness studies might look
like, how it might expose whiteness, white development, white supremacy, and
white structures by using a Black, rather than white, analytic. Some scholars, such
as Cheryl Mattias, have picked up this line of inquiry. It’s still a question of from
whose analytics we will do that work. That’s my recent work (Leonardo, 2013),
which is, “What would a non-white Whiteness Studies look like, a Black White-
ness Studies?” And that is not the only one. There could be an Indigenous white-
ness studies, an Asian whiteness studies, and so forth. I’m interested in that, and
that doesn’t mean that only non-whites can do that work because we’re talking
about an ideological position. So white scholars can do that work too, but they’d
have to do it from a non-white analytic.
Intersectionality and Authoritarianism in Global Contexts

As the field has grown in its ability to disentangle white supremacy, heteronor-
mativity, and global capital, we have seen the embrace of authoritarianism with
the election of “strong men” leaders like Trump in the United States, Bolson-
aro in Brazil, and Duterte in the Philippines, for example. That’s an important
phenomenon. Kimberly Crenshaw’s intersectional work helps to explain this
because she argues that there is really no way to talk about white supremacy
without talking about gender. Other Black and Latinx feminist theorists also help
to explain this phenomenon, including bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre
Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldua. These theorists show us that there is no clean way
to separate white supremacy from heteronormativity, from patriarchy, and from
capital. A more complete uptake of the globalization of white supremacy is the
globalization of other social relations by gender and sexuality. So, the examples
of Putin, of Trump, of Duterte who hails from my own birthplace, Bolsonaro from
Brazil, really do require intersectional analysis. And by that I don’t mean that their
identity is intersectional. For example, Duterte is from, depending on where you
stand, a Third World or developing world context, depending on where you put
the Philippines in that. And he’s also a cis man or male identified. And he’s from
the South of the Philippines, which is Mindanao. I don’t mean intersectional as in
his multifaceted identity.
I mean it in the way that Crenshaw (1989, 1991) meant it in the late 1980s
to early 1990s articles about multiple structures intersecting to doubly jeopardize
Black women, and in her examples of the law and how it relegates and limits
Black women’s place and position in laws about violence and sexual violence.
It has become popular, particularly in education, to talk about intersectionality
as something about identity. Now having said that, obviously, identity is part of
structures and so forth, but that’s not how I emphasize intersectionality. These
toxic masculinities that we have seen on display are not just from white men but
also from men of color. This brings us back to Roediger’s argument that white-
ness is nothing but false and oppressive, and I extend it to gender: an appropriate
analogy might be that masculinity is also nothing but false and oppressive, and
capital is nothing but false and oppressive. That latter provocation has solid foot-
ing from Marxists, but is masculinity also quite problematic, warranting us to ask if
it is nothing but false and oppressive? I don’t think we’ve gone in that theoretical
direction sufficiently. We have gone more in the queering of masculinity direction,
with the awareness that there’s a spectrum of masculinity that people then find
themselves on.
Post-Colorblind Racial Discourse

I also recently wrote about academic freedom and free speech (2020a), in a
volume on Trumpism (Obasogie, 2020). The recent developments of white

nationalism, white neofascism, and other terms we might leverage suggest an alli-
ance between white people and some non-white people. There have been non-
white people in white nationalism, which suggests some level of organization and
awakening on the far right, the far white right. White supremacy did not disappear
as racial diversity grew more common. Studies of hegemony reveal that white
supremacist movements always persisted, but because of the successes of the civil
rights movement, for a time, it became publicly unacceptable even to white peo-
ple, to hear or utter racist comments against Black people, Mexicans, and Asians.
But that sort of public vitriol made a comeback during the Trump administration
with his exhortations about building a border wall between the United States and
Mexico, and the adoption of a Muslim ban from predominantly non-white coun-
tries. These are not colorblind terms or actions. In some ways, Trump-era racism
was expressed differently toward Black people. It was colorblind for Black people
with critiques about Colin Kaepernick taking a knee against racist police violence.
It was a little more subtle. The Muslim ban and Mexican wall were very overt,
but when it came to anti-Blackness, it was less explicit and relied on colorblind
discourse.
The police beatings and shootings of unarmed Black people became an oppor-
tunity for Trump to defend the police for preserving law and order. Taking the
knee was deemed unpatriotic. So, there were two kinds of racisms going on, one
that was more overt and then another one that was colorblind that was still fol-
lowing the recipe for how we talk about Black people in coded ways in public. This
recent phenomenon shifted away from the popular way of talking about color-
blindness. Bonilla-Silva’s work (2021), for example, is probably the best example
we have in the scholarship. But we have something that’s developing in what I call
post-colorblind race discourse. With respect to the Muslim ban, Mexican wall, or
the “Chinese virus,” that’s not very colorblind. I call it post-colorblindness and ask
if public race discourse is changing again as it did from Jim Crow to colorblindness?
An important conceptual point is that this moment is distinct from the Jim
Crow era of state-sanctioned segregation. Under Jim Crow, it was clear that white-
ness was special, that whiteness deserved to be superior, and it needed to be rein-
forced through the law, through public behavior, and that everybody including
Black people and other non-white people were to understand this as a fact. In
post-colorblind race discourse, or post-colorblind whiteness, there is a tendency
for some white people to argue that white people are not special, but rather that
they just want to be left alone to create their communities just like communities of
color have. The recent Trump era was not just asserting white superiority, although
it includes white supremacist ideals. Many Trump white supporters wanted to be
sovereign, to determine their own communities’ desires and needs, to have their
own, let’s call it private Idaho. There’s something different about that than the
Jim Crow era because it asserts the averageness of whiteness, whereas Jim Crow
asserted the superiority of whiteness. But the recent uptick in rural whiteness and
working-class whiteness in the United States and other countries as an identity, is
informed by the decades of diversity and multicultural education that abolitionist
pedagogy efforts fought so hard for. In this vision of whiteness, they want to enter
that rainbow and use that discourse of diversity and argue for the ability to exist as
segregated racialized communities like others have before them.
White people are arguing about an average whiteness, a kind of daily whiteness
as a racialized identity in fact. So, what I’m sensing is that whiteness is coming out
of the “human cave” into the light of racial identity. That’s a reference to Plato,
I suppose, so that they’re now asserting themselves as white, and that’s new to
me. I repeat, that’s new. In fact, the modus operandi of whiteness for so long was
to avoid naming it as such. It says something about the development of whiteness
even in the last ten years, that they have come out and asserted whiteness as a
racial identity and not only in the sense of superiority, but in a kind of rainbow
U.S. tradition.
Let me just add, it’s also a sign of desperation. I call it desperate white suprem-
acy because in a study of hegemony, whites and whiteness are more and more
willing to make compromises to preserve their rule. One compromise is to come
out as a racial identity. I see this development not just in the torch-bearing white
protesters who attacked Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, but also in the efforts
across America to question teaching CRT in K–12 education and universities.
I think it’s a sign of desperation. I think it’s a sign that what in 2002 I called “late
whiteness” is now manifesting in a kind of last stand of whiteness. It’s dangerous,
as any desperate person or group can, and usually does, become violent. One of
the most desperate things we talk about is that a cornered group or person is a
very dangerous being who will not only harm others but also themselves. Wendy
Brown (2018) suggested that if whiteness can’t rule the earth, then the earth shall
not exist. There is an apocalyptic expression in those clinging to whiteness, who
are willing to deny and fail to act on climate change as the most literal example.
Whiteness and Education

There are multiple trends and forces pulling at whiteness, and that has always
been the case. These pulls and forces show not only what I called earlier the
flexibility of whiteness but also the flimsiness of whiteness, which on some level
exhibits its points of fracture, a fracturing that is increasingly desperate. The pull
now is to reverse the direction of what the United States and other countries have
been doing for the last couple of decades with multiculturalism and diversifying
teachers and the curriculum. In common parlance, it’s white resentment. It’s what
Nietzsche would have called ressentiment (see Wendy Brown, 2018). I think there
are opportunities for people to expose these contradictions, as in the studies of
neoliberalism in education (Bajaj, 2010; Scott, 2009, 2011). Neoliberalism and
neoconservatism work together but also at odds. As my colleague Linda Symcox
from California State Long Beach once said, neoconservatism is a very nationalist
move (personal communication). It aims to nationalize curriculum, to conserve
national identity, including the complaints against taking the knee during the
playing of the national anthem, whereas neoliberalism goes outward as Symcox
once pointed out to me. So, one goes inward, whereas the other goes outward.
Neoliberalism’s goal is to create markets, including global capital markets. In some
sense, it doesn’t have as profound a commitment to the nation as neoconservatism
does. So, if you think of it that way, there’s a kind of neoliberal whiteness and a
neoconservative whiteness co-existing uncomfortably, if you will. Those things are
pulling at whites and whiteness in a way that really exposes contradictions, and
when we can expose contradictions, we can then build some strategies around
them, build coalitions of them across race, across class, across genders, across
borders.
The attempt to ban CRT is in over 40 U.S. states now. Over 40 states have
legislation and/or local policies against teachings of race, particularly against the
boogie man called CRT. This is preposterous, because these efforts seek to ban
teachers from teaching about race when arguably educators are not teaching
about it enough. There is little evidence that teachers have been using CRT in
K–12 settings. It’s preposterous and counterfactual. But illogic aside, these efforts
are really about emotion, about a tie to whiteness that is emotional. These events
help us to think differently and are critical teaching moments.
Whiteness is not only about white teachers and white families. These efforts
reflect a more overt assertion of white superiority and white rightness, yet an
entitlement that is committed to the averageness and righteousness of whiteness.
At the same time, it reflects the desperation of white supremacy. It’s exposing
its illogic and irrationality, its contradictions. And as my previous training with
Marxism tells me, attention to contradictions tells us something about the state
of affairs. I think we’ve been very good at talking about the reassertion of white
power, but I also want to devote some attention to how this doesn’t just show the
strength of whiteness, rather its weakness, its fragility as Robin DiAngelo (2018)
might call it. But it’s not fragility in just the common sense of it as a form of weak-
ness. It’s the weaponizing of fragility. It’s the weaponizing of a weakness of a thin
skinned-ness toward race discourse and confronting racism. That’s what I mean
by fragility. I think it’s a weaponizing of white supremacy as the otherwise weak-
est student in the room when it comes to race understanding, which no respect-
able educator would promote. We’re always talking about excellence, but when it
concerns race understanding and race discourse, we pattern it on the student or
person or community most behind conceptually. In other words, we aim for excel-
lence, except in race understanding. The movements to oppose whiteness and
white supremacy give us an opening to achieve this through education.
Conclusion: The Power of Resistance and Abolitionist

Movements
There are vital, vibrant resistances to global white supremacy. I think we’ve estab-
lished clearly that race and whiteness are global phenomena. They align as well
with other social relations. An encouraging development in whiteness studies is
more global studies of whiteness. Just as Fredrickson’s work (1982) was about com-
parative racisms around the world, with transnational work we are on the cusp of
a fourth wave of comparative whiteness studies.
In 2008, Twine and Gallagher argued that we were then in a third wave of
whiteness. I argue that the emergent fourth wave is comparative whiteness stud-
ies. It’s a cousin to global whiteness studies, but slightly different. In this fourth
wave, other questions become possible. For example, how do we compare U.S.
whiteness with whiteness in Japan? How do we compare whiteness in Brazil that
functions from la raza cosmica or racial democracy, with Dutch whiteness in the
Netherlands as some of the work by Goldberg and others has done? How does
whiteness itself mutate and adapt, and how might our gaze be enhanced beyond
the typical countries we look at when we talk about race and whiteness, such as
the United States, Brazil, and South Africa?
Of course, those countries are the three great multiracial experiments, and they
differ from each other in fundamental ways, Apartheid in one, enslavement and
racial segregation in the United States, and a contested racial democracy in Bra-
zil. So, how do we compare these iterations of whiteness in a comparative sense?
The specificities of national development and history are important considera-
tions, as are their commonalities, which is that despite racial democracy, or the
la raza cosmica in South America, at the end of the day, if you look at leader-
ship and ownership of property and capital, it’s in the hands of white-looking
South A mericans, white-looking Cubans, and so often, white-looking Africans.
So, while the comparative whiteness studies may look at the specific iterations and
why they differ considering the history of those nations, we also need to grapple
with the consistent ways that whiteness dominates despite movements to top-
ple it. In comparative studies, we must interrogate what resistance to whiteness
looks like, and how education comes into play. Is resistance to whiteness in Brazil
also articulated with la raza cosmica? Are social movements in these countries’
multiracial coalitions?
The fact is that within and across countries, there exist very different racial for-
mation processes that still assume that races are clear boxes, identities, and experi-
ences. So, the examples of resistance in the Arab world, for example, to whiteness,
which sometimes goes by the name of Westernism, as I wrote in my recent book,
Edward Said and Education (2020), provide a way of understanding whiteness in
the Orient. I use the term “Orient” to signal Said’s use in the literature of locat-
ing the Middle East and Near East, of how this region exists in relationship to the
West, its betweenness across the West and the East. “Arab Spring” movements
might be better understood as a resistance to a continuing Westernization of the
Middle East, and the ongoing dilemmas concerning Palestine and Israel, where
many Arabs see Israel as an extension of the West. So how do those expressions
of resistance differ from Brazil, South Africa, and the United States, for example,
and how can we have a mutual understanding that resistance movements are in a
sense about whiteness, whether we may call it that?
I think the resistance coming from transgender folks and communities in the
context of transphobia that’s sweeping across the United States that has embold-
ened the far right, is another good example. I don’t even think it’s fringe anymore,
as it has emboldened, in some mainstream way, populations in our country. The
resistance to that is tied in a contra-hegemonic way to the anti-CRT move, police
brutality, and so on. If you watched the 2022 NFL Super Bowl, the end zone is
marked. I think it said something like “End Racism Now” or something like that.
So, the NFL is apparently onboard, but at the same time the NFL is being sued
by a Black coach for discrimination. I think the coordination of these resistances
is not easy, such that, on the face of it, they don’t have anything to do with each
other. What does anti-transphobia have to do with anti-white supremacy have to
do with anti-capitalism have to do with anti-Islamophobia? What does that have
to do with anti-Chicanisma? I think it’s a very important moment for us, which
means that no resistance can have it all.
Communities of resistance must think about what it is they are willing to do and
what they must give up to win, because a counterhegemony requires that nobody’s
going to get all their demands. So, if I’ve learned anything about resistance, in the
simplest terms and in the grandest terms, it’s that no one is going to have all their
cake and eat it too, but that if they all get together, more of the cake can belong to
them. That’s a continuing struggle. There’s no end in sight, and that’s the Stuart
Hall in me, I suppose. It’s a politics with no guarantees. So, the resistance to white
supremacy is the resistance to transphobia is the resistance to Islamophobia is the
resistance to anti-Chicano and Chicana is the resistance to the continuing land
takeover. Even if we think that giving back land is not going to happen soon, the
progressive participation in that movement is what is required of us. We are not
limited by the impossible here. “The souls of white folk,” and the field of educa-
tion, have changed a lot. Critical pedagogy was at its height in the 1990s. In the
beginning of the 2020s, and I say this as a critical pedagogist, it’s beginning to
sound outdated. I ask myself, “So what is a critical pedagogist to do?” I suppose
it means to keep moving. I suppose it means to keep moving while not abandon-
ing certain deeply held principles to be updated and sexy, so to speak. A lot has
changed in 20 years since I published “The Souls of White Folk.”
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3 Critical Race Theory Beyond
Borders
Educational Marronage and
Transnational Critical Race Theory
Steven L. Nelson
This chapter argues that a transnational conceptualization of critical race theory

(CRT) makes a needed insertion into theory building, and specifically enables
scholars to examine race and racialization processes within and across world bor-
ders. It yokes CRT to theories of educational marronage, thereby building the case
for a transnational CRT in education research. Specifically, this chapter argues
that a transnational CRT – by way of educational marronage – makes a needed
intervention into an under- or undeveloped theoretical understanding of how
Blackness and Black people endure the threats and terrors of racism while also
resisting, coping with, and surviving these same threats and terrors.
The primary focus in putting forth a theory of educational marronage is three-
fold. First, extant theories often offer disjointed explanations and discontinuity
between Black peoples’ current resistance to captivity, bondage, coercion, and
compulsion to a historical resistance to physical, mental, and psychological
enslavement. I argue that Black peoples’ current-day acts of resistance, refusals,
and rejection to educational malpractice are coupled with a history of rebellion
and revolt against enslavement: a history associated with marronage. Second,
most existing frameworks fail to take stock of the intentionality of Black peoples’
resistance to different types of enslavement. Black peoples’ resistance to, rebellion
against, and refusal of educational misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance are
inherently connected to a deeper and longer history of purposeful and intentional
pushback against institutionalized oppression. Finally, existing theories too often
overlook how the everyday, contemporary actions of Black peoples are move-
ments, acts of self-determination, self-direction, and self-possession, that fly in
the face of white supremacist cultures’ efforts to institutionalize and weaponize
anti-Blackness. Following from this, I argue that Black peoples’ agentic actions in
education – whatever they may be – are and should be framed as a continuation
of a historical battle to be free.
I use CRT as my launching point for this argument. Critical race theorists have
developed a large sphere of influence in the scholarship on race and racialization.
Scholars have adapted CRT to a variety of theoretical foci, including LatCrit,
TribalCrit, AsianCrit, Critical Race Feminism, Intersectionality, Critical White-
ness Studies, Disability Critical Race Theory, Queer CRT, and South Asian CRT.
CRT has also crossed national borders. For instance, Meghji (2020) applied CRT
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-5
Critical Race Theory Beyond Borders 51
in the British context and came relatively close to calling for a transnational CRT.
This call builds on Gillborn’s (2009) use of CRT; however, his introduction of CRT
to the international audience provided much debate and consternation among
CRT’s detractors. This consternation originated mostly among those who would
be ClassCrits, suggesting that the race line was less important and a sidebar to
the more pressing issue of class discrimination and oppression. However, these
discussions were largely centered on the appropriateness of CRT in the European
context. More recently, scholars, though, have applied CRT as an analytical tool
in the Chinese context (Zhu et al., 2019). Likewise, scholars also have used CRT
to examine the racial implications and racial origins of immigration (Pulitano,
2013; Romero, 2008).
Blackness Beyond Geographic Borders

Li (2021) argues that Black Americans comprise a global south population within
the global north. By considering Black Americans as a displaced, if not misplaced,
population of the global south, Li (2021) argues for a paradigm shift, disrupting
the artificial distinctions between national borders. The United States is a key
example of this racialized displacement. U.S. education policy disempowers Black
people through policies and curricula and assigns to them characteristics associ-
ated with Third World citizenship, which is a formal and informal (mis)treatment
stemming from hegemonic power(s) rather than geography. Black Americans’
acceptance that they are of the Third World means accepting and proclaiming that
Third World citizenship allows Black Americans as well as other Black peoples in
the United States and abroad to stand in struggle together, radically reimagining
the world and how it might exist (Nelson, 2019). The Black embrace of Third
World citizenship further establishes the connection between CRT and Third
World approaches to international law (TWAIL), and educational policy that
leads to a transnational CRT (Nelson, 2019). This transnational CRT can better
understand, analyze, and critique transnational systems of what anti-Blackness
in education policy as global phenomena emanating from whiteness and white
supremacy (Dumas & ross, 2016), and extends the existing literature on CRT,
international law, BlackCrit, diaspora, health, and decolonial thought (Andrews,
2000; Lewis, 2000; Epperson, 2004; Meghji, 2020; Sirleaf, 2021).
CRT and TWAIL: Different Yet Similar Approaches

to Addressing Domination
Both CRT and TWAIL scholarship explain how Black people around the world
are subjects for domination and subjugation (Achiume & Carbado, 2021). This
domination and subjugation are consequences of transnational anti-Blackness
(Lewis, 2000). Materialist CRT and TWAIL scholars have extended this emphasis
with examinations of the histories and contexts of anti-Black oppression through
abstractly liberal laws, purporting to provide liberation and equity while serving
to entrench and reify technologies and practices of oppression, domination, and
52 Steven L. Nelson
subjugation that are concomitant with assignment to receive Third World treat-
ment (Achiume & Carbado, 2021).
Robertson’s (2021) focus on a transnational anti-Black oppressive experience
in the contexts of South Africa and the United States considers and demonstrates
CRT’s analytic power to better understand, analyze, critique, and resist transna-
tional anti-Black oppression, even as it points to the need for greater interrogation
of national histories of racial dispossession and freedom struggles. CRT, for its
part, focuses on the rejection of arguments and histories that linearly place racial
progress after the end of official state-sponsored racial violence, such as that of
the Jim Crow era in the United States. TWAIL, for its part, rejects the suggestion
that international law overcame or displaced colonialism and imperialism (Gatthi,
2021). Together, CRT and TWAIL address and contextualize racial regimes.
Robinson’s (1983) work on racial capitalism highlights the interconnec-
tion between coloniality and racialization. Given this insight, TWAIL needs an
intervention from CRT to support its anti-colonial mission (Gatthi, 2021). While
conceptually distinct, both CRT and TWAIL scholarship challenge race-evasive
legal liberalism, exemplified in international law (Gatthi, 2021). Despite its pur-
ported disposition toward international harmony, international law is the hench-
man of the First World, operating to oppress the Third World and peoples who are
assigned to receive Third World treatment (Berman, 2000). TWAIL suggests that
international law should require the reversion of power, land, and capital back to
local African communities and other racialized colonial subjects. In turn, CRT
analyses focused on national contexts can be more useful when they interrogate
domestic law and insist that domestic law result in local community rule.
Gatthi (2021) argues for a transnational approach to understanding the roles
of race and identity and their individual and collective impacts on anti-colonial
resistance in the international and domestic contexts, especially regarding educa-
tion and curriculum policies (see, Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). Interna-
tional law as an approach to equity, justice, and restoration is unlikely to resolve
transnational anti-Blackness, as the original sin of chattel slavery, the result of
colonialism, was and is a global sin (not defined by artificial national borders)
rather than a state-based wrong (Li, 2021). Critical race scholarship in the interna-
tional setting often tends to over-particularize and under-historicize the origin(s)
and role(s) of racial discrimination, and it under-theorizes acts of resistance and
assertion of personhood through alternative community and institution building
(Gevers, 2021). This shortcoming mirrors the shortcoming of other international
scholarship and theorization, which is too often grounded in postcolonial thought
that can often inadvertently center the colonial logics.
Positioning Educational Marronage as Transnational CRT

In past work, I called for the development and implementation of critical race
Third World approaches to education policy, or a transnational version of CRT. In
that work, I suggested that such a theory operate as both an analytical and meth-
odological tool (Nelson, 2019). I provided examples of how a transnational critical
race theory could be used in the context of studying education. In this chapter,
I extend this work with a theoretical framing for how a transnational critical race
theory might be more concretely applied to education, with a particular emphasis
on interrogating anti-Blackness. I draw from the concept of educational marronage
as a form of transnational critical race theory.
This concept of marronage ties Black Americans directly to the African conti-
nent and, therefore, to the global resistance of the colonial project, both historical
and contemporary colonialism. In the sections that follow, I first recount who
the maroons were and what marronage entailed. Next, I discuss the connection
between marronage and freedom. Finally, I outline how educational marronage
and its tenets can be employed in educational research. Specifically, I outline how
educational marronage can and does explain the many actions that Black peoples
take to pursue, access, and ensure freedom from oppressive educational practices,
conditions, spaces, and places.
This emphasis requires a focus on Black Americans within the African diaspora
while also allowing for a deeper analysis of the lived experiences of Black people in
transnational contexts, particularly in Europe, the Americas, and South America.
Moreover, studying Black Americans as the outcome of the colonial project and
as a force in anti-colonial movement provides for an understanding of how anti-
Blackness – a global phenomenon – affects all Black people, who are racialized
through the ongoing project of coloniality and resistance to such domination,
although those similar oppressions produce varied and various manifestations of
resistance that differ by context, place, and space. Ultimately, I set forth on a jour-
ney to position Black Americans’ resistance to racial and racialized oppressions as
a form of marronage (and in schools, educational marronage).
Maroons and Marronage Within Western Enslavement

Sayers (2006) suggests that peoples who are disallowed opportunities for self-
reliance and self-possession resort to resistance and defiance. Marooning was
and is one of the most audacious forms of resistance and defiance. The maroons
are formerly enslaved Black people who escaped and lived independently (Weik,
1997). Maroons often left behind families and communal ties. Such actions were
a requirement for maroons to pass themselves off as free people, which required
giving up one’s previous identity (Gomes, 2010). Despite their efforts to avoid
captivity, maroons existed with the threat of being re-enslaved while they lived
in fugitivity (Carroll, 1977; Lockley & Doddington, 2012). Maroons, there-
fore, accepted that life and more freedom were contradictory and ambiguous
(Kaplan, 2016).
Maroons and maroon communities developed specific traditions of solidarity
and cohesion (Lockley & Doddington, 2012). Maroons sought and developed
places and spaces for liberation and freedom (Roberts, 2017). More pointedly,
maroons dedicated their existence to finding and maintaining ideals of free-
dom and liberation. For instance, some maroons would starve themselves to
death as a method of refusing captivity, preferring starvation to enslavement
54 Steven L. Nelson
(Rashid, 2000). Freedom and liberation seekers from the slavocracy went
beyond rebellion and fugitivity to become maroons (Ciccariello, 2017; Geggus,
1992). They established community and identity with critical consciousness,
self-reflection, and understanding of the economic impacts of self-extrication
(Sayers, 2014).
Maroons took varied paths to freedom, and those paths humiliated white slave-
holders. Lynch (2011/2012) explains, “successful maroons proved that Black
people were not natural slaves and that they could be free if they fought for it”
(p. 15). Some maroons fled immediately upon landing in bondage on the shores of
the Western world (Gomes, 2010). Maroons disrupted the racialized logics of the
slavocracy by depriving slaveholders of themselves as property. Maroon societies
existed as a philosophical rejection and refusal of the slavocracy while simultane-
ously rejecting and resisting the everyday anti-Blackness of gratuitous violence
against Black bodies (Bledsoe, 2017). To these ends, maroons were a direct threat
to slaveholders and more broadly, the white supremacist slavocracy because
maroon societies proved that Black peoples could survive without the approval,
assistance, or supervision of white people. Thus, maroons and maroon societies
created a fear – real or imagined – that their existence could and would encour-
age others under bondage to reject, resist, and refuse the slavocracy (Lockley &
Doddington, 2012). More tangible than these real or imagined threats, slavehold-
ers feared that maroons would harass slaveholders and their properties and that
maroons were the quintessential example of what freedom could look like outside
of the slavocracy and how one could pursue that freedom (Lynch, 2011/2012).
Aptheker (1939) describes how maroons significantly impacted the lived experi-
ences of Africans who remained enslaved under the slavocracy. For instance, he
provides an account of one group of townspeople who were frustrated and anxious
because their enslaved Africans “go and come and when and where they please”
(p. 178). These already resistant and non-compliant Africans were maroons in the
making (Aptheker, 1939).
In other words, that Black peoples witnessed the maroons’ defections provided an
explicit example of how unfree the lives of enslaved Africans were (Millett, 2007).
Marronage could not bring the slavocracy to a halt; however, the act of marooning
frequently resulted in better treatment for those Africans who remained enslaved
since slaveholders made concessions to prevent future attempts at flight (Hooker,
2017). Even when better treatment did not follow marronage, enslaved Africans
had their own response. Black peoples who remained under the purported author-
ity of slaveholders during times of marooning maintained an agenda of resistance,
rejection, and refusal of the slavocracy in both an individual and collective capac-
ity (Carroll, 1977). Many maroons left the slavocracy on their own; on the other
hand, some maroons fled bondage because of threat from other maroons or theft
from countries at war with the United States (Millett, 2007). When maroons left
on their own, they often left the slavocracy and gained employment as relatively
low-wage workers, yet the threat of recapture was ever present (Pressley, 2018).
For example, sometimes those in bondage would help capture those who had pre-
viously marooned (Lockley & Doddington, 2012).
Marronage as Past and Present
In the antebellum context, marronage is a concept referring to the conscien-
tious act of resisting, rebelling against, and rejecting the purported authority of
whiteness and white supremacy. It encapsulates contemporary Black peoples’
consciousness and agency against racialization within white frames (Price, 1992).
Marronage as a concept reimagines the long-term, continuous critical conscious-
ness that was born from the lived, everyday experiences and ontological existences
and positionalities of Black peoples who suffered bondage as the result of chattel
slavery and continued marginalization through laws, policies, and education prac-
tices (Sayers, 2012). Marronage, in all its forms, was the individual and collective
denial of enslavement and bondage and building and sustaining more liberated
spaces (Geggus, 1992; Weik, 1997; Johnson, 2012; Sayers, 2014).
To participate in marronage is to seek freedom via the conscious alteration and
restructuring of state institutions and to a larger extent, society at large through
the actions of revolution and revolt (Roberts, 2017). Thus, some forms of mar-
ronage require complete structural shifts in governmental, cultural, and societal
norms, while other forms of marronage seek complete and utter flight from systems
built on and sustaining whiteness. Marronage is the flight from dehumanization,
social death, and anti-Blackness (Ortiz, 2019). Given the consistent, persistent,
and pandemic nature of anti-Blackness, complete marronage may only be a pos-
sibility in the imagination, leaving it as only psychological escape from oppressions
steeped in whiteness, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness (Dilts, 2017). Flight
need not be literal flight from a physical space or place (Wright, 2019; Ciccariello,
2017). Flight can be figurative, fleeing from a condition, even a mental or
psychological position (Gordon, 2017).
In the most literal sense, marooning, by definition, was challenging enslave-
ment, but it also represented the redefinition of lived experiences – both mental
and physical – of Black peoples who escaped or sought to escape bondage (Gomes,
2010). Thus, marronage is the antithesis of enslavement and bondage as well as a
rebuke to whiteness and white supremacy, and a primary, early articulation of the
contemporary assertion that Black lives matter (Price, 1992).
Marronage also describes the contemporary flight from anti-Black oppressions
and flight to liberatory spaces and places that reject whiteness and white suprem-
acy and passive white benevolence (Weik, 1997; Rashid, 2000; Gordon, 2017;
Mills, 2017; Roberts, 2017; Ortiz, 2019).
Modern Marronage
Maroon communities still exist, with new-age maroon communities existing
alongside traditional maroon communities. Many observers refer to these high-
poverty Black communities derogatorily (Sayers, 2012). Western thought has hid-
den the concept of marronage from the broader discussion of political thought
(Mills, 2017). Yet marronage reveals itself in the daily lives of contemporary Black
peoples (Ortiz, 2019).
56 Steven L. Nelson
A key site for fugitive acts is within oppressive schooling structures (Patel, 2016).
For instance, scholars have theorized Black students’ struggle to get through the
anti-Blackness of law school as forms of educational marronage (Jones, 2017).
Likewise, Johnson (2012) has conceived the development and incorporation of
Afrocentric curricula in Afrocentric schools as marronage. Modern-day maroons
continue the act of fleeing toward hope and liberation (Rolle, 2018). Marronage,
however, recognizes that Blackness is dynamic; thus, marronage allows contem-
porary Black people to pursue freedom regardless of position or positionality in an
anti-Black world (Kaplan, 2016).
The process of being racialized as some type of other – something subhuman –
directly impacts the ontological existence of a person (Ortiz, 2019). Parents and stu-
dents who seek out Black spaces with Black humanizing ideologies are modern-day
maroons (Johnson, 2012; Patel, 2016). Sayers (2012) explains that “The words used
to label, describe, and signify phenomena have direct connections with the way in
which phenomena are conceived” (p. 141). Black peoples’ testimonies indicate the
agency of marginalized, disenfranchised, dispossessed, and contained peoples.
Marronage as a Form of Resistance and Freedom in the

Context of Education
Marronage is a process; it is a state of being that involves flight from a physical
place or a metacognitive condition. Marronage, by definition, includes “active
refusals, resistances, and rejections” (Dilts, 2017, p. 210). Black peoples’ indi-
vidual and collective experiences with and in an anti-Black world as well as
their flight from this anti-Black world mold definitions of freedom. According to
Roberts (2017), “Freedom encompasses moments that are episodic, durable, and
overlapping” (p. 219). Expounding upon this argument, Hooker (2017) writes:
If freedom has been a central concept in Western political thought, slavery

has long been the dominant metaphor for unfreedom, and since the advent of
popular sovereignty the denial of representation has been framed as a condi-
tion akin to enslavement. (p. 188)
Marronage theory, as opposed to other theoretical frameworks, affords scholars

opportunities to make real our reflections on the ways that Black freedoms are
dynamic (Dilts, 2017). According to Ciccariello (2017), marronage is an exten-
sion of diasporic movement in that marronage is not simply to move but to leave
the existing world for some vastly or maybe entirely different world. This makes
marronage “the best source of radical reconceptualization of what it means to be
free” (Ciccariello, 2017, p. 193).
Despite the utility of marronage in terms of understanding the lived, Black
experience, the concept has its limitations. Specifically, marronage is unable to
comprehend how narrow extant definitions of freedom are and have been in
relation to human inhabitation on earth (Mills, 2017). Scholars, therefore, are
considering how to best extend, build upon, and better employ the concept of
marronage as an act of freedom-seeking (Dilts, 2017). In this framework, edu-
cational marronage, I advocate for the expansion of the concept of marronage,
leveraging Roberts’ four pillars of marronage to theorize and explain the liberatory
and agentic acts that Black peoples employ as resistance to bondage. Educational
marronage helps to explain the transnational Black experience in school settings
that are steeped in white supremacist cultures, policies, pedagogies, and practices.
Roberts’ Four Pillars and Educational Marronage

Here, I do not attempt to define all types of research, praxis, and practice that may
be or should be properly titled as acts of educational marronage. Nevertheless,
I assert, relying on Neil Roberts’ (2015) work, there are four essential considera-
tions for educational marronage. Roberts identifies the four elements of marron-
age to be distance, movement, property, and purpose. I expand on these elements
by offering researcher dispositions and considerations for operationalizing Roberts’
four elements of marronage.
Distance: Lockley and Doddington (2012) suggest that maroons often cre-
ated physical distance between themselves and the slavocracy, sites of anti-Black
oppression. Thus, researchers should conduct and analyze research from perspec-
tives that reveal how Black peoples’ physical placement – or distancing – from
places of schooling are oftentimes indicative of efforts to avoid places of physical,
mental, and psychological warfare and oppression, especially warfare founded in
anti-Blackness. Working from this revised definition of distance allows research-
ers to better understand the (in)actions of Black students, teachers, families, and
communities in relation to schooling. In other words, a reworked definition of dis-
tance allows for a radical reshaping and enhancing of our collective understanding
of various educational phenomena, such as absenteeism, dropout/pushout, and so
on. In these cases, educational marronage allows us to make better sense of Black
peoples’ active self-removals from places of physical, mental, and psychological
abuse, labeling such action as self-defense, self-preservation, and radical self-care.
Movement: Following from our reshaped definition of distance, a revised under-
standing of movement forces us to reassess how Black peoples’ everyday flight from
anti-Blackness – be it physical or cognitive – creates an urgency to move beyond
extant understandings of Black peoples’ relationship to schools and schooling. To
be clear, the difference between distance and movement is that movement repre-
sents the very steps that Black peoples take to create distance from sites of warfare.
In explaining this, Weik (1997) and Carroll (1977) suggest that maroons were in
constant flight in an effort to avoid detainment and bondage. The maroons’ use
of flight produced their ability to live outside of the boundaries and bondages of
the slavocracy and with a greater sense of self-possession (Sayers, 2014; Lockley &
Doddington, 2012; Sayers, 2006). Researchers, therefore, should interrogate
how Black peoples’ actions, specifically the actions related to moving away from
schools and schooling, reflect efforts to maintain self-control and self-possession
and to have self-determination as far as self-determination is the unfettered ability
to be free of the bondage of anti-Black oppressions. Researchers could and should
58 Steven L. Nelson
construe movement to be both literal and figurative flight from bondage. In other
words, educational researchers may refuse and exceed the general understanding
of acts of truancy, time off task, literal flight from school, and so on, as problems
that need solutions. To the contrary, educational researchers should choose to
question how truancy and time off task are ways that Black peoples cope with and
resist an educational system and program that are built on settler colonialism and
have an intent to inflict as much anti-Black oppression as is possible.
Property: Third, employing an educational marronage framework requires a
new understanding of Black peoples’ relationship with and to property and wealth
accumulation. This understanding must recognize the contradictory nature of
and need for Black peoples’ embrace of capitalism. While many enslaved Black
peoples could not own property, archaeological evidence suggests that maroons
owned (through plunder or creation) property (Sayers, 2012; Lynch, 2011, 2012;
Sayers, 2006). Therefore, researchers should investigate the multilayered,
dynamic, and complicated relationship that Black peoples have with property,
and more specifically, capitalism. One on hand, Black peoples’ engagement with
capitalism flies in the face of the cruel history of racial capitalism. Yet, research-
ers should and must also find ways to better understand how Black peoples’ goals
of wealth accumulation, which are part-and-parcel of capitalism, originate from
both individual and collective goals to resist, refuse, and reject economic enslave-
ment. Finally, researchers should employ strategies to explain how Black peoples’
resistances, refusals, and rejections of captivity frustrate white attempts to employ
anti-Blackness as a weapon of subjugation and captivity. To that end, educa-
tional researchers might conceptualize Black students’ efforts to take possession
of, destroy, disassemble, and deface school property as Black peoples’ rejection,
refusal, and resistance of racial capitalism, while also Black peoples’ acceptance of
the inescapable, anti-Black nature of racial capitalism and oppression.
Purpose: Fourth and finally, engaging educational marronage as a theoretical
framework allows for and demands that Black peoples be positioned as having
and expressing agency in everyday actions, even when such conduct seems self-
defeating or is otherwise inexplicable. Marronage was and is an intentional act.
Maroons willfully engaged in marooning, and other maroons took extraordinary
steps to convert enslaved Black peoples into active maroons (Pressley, 2018;
Gomes, 2010; Aptheker, 1939). Therefore, researchers should consider research
strategies and activities that reveal how Black peoples’ actions are intentional,
provocative, and agentic acts of resistance, refusal, and rejection. Most impor-
tantly, researchers should avoid research agendas and research strategies that view
Black peoples’ efforts as simply reactive to individualized oppression. It should be
noted that every action that a Black person takes is an effort to cope with or resist
anti-Black oppressions. Thus, conceiving Black peoples’ resistance through drop-
ping out, acting out, or otherwise rejecting schools and schooling should lead to a
broader and deeper understanding of the intentionality of purposefulness of activi-
ties that are bound and bred through a historical lineage of revolt against captivity,
an effort to slow or thwart the progression and functioning of systems founded in
whiteness, white supremacy, and anti-Black oppressions. Here, I reiterate Dumas
and ross’ (2016) work that asserts that Black peoples take pleasure in decommis-
sioning, disrupting, and causing malfunction in the various and interconnected
systems that give rise to and reproduce anti-Black oppressions and terrors.
Toward a Transnational CRT: Educational Marronage

The connections between a combined CRT and TWAIL and educational marron-
age are joined within transnational CRT. TWAIL, which argues for a new world
order, is directly related to and aligns with marronage in that both theoretical
perspectives call for and evaluate the progress to a new world, a different – even
if not vastly different – governance structure. Additionally, both TWAIL and
marronage seek a new world for the sake of social justice and against subjuga-
tion and subjection. Finally, both marronage and TWAIL suggest that the current
world order is neither interested nor capable of delivering a more just world for
peoples assigned to receive -Third World treatment. Likewise, CRT aligns with
and supports marronage. For instance, CRT (and TWAIL) works toward a more
socially just world. Marronage, just like CRT, argues, in part, that the racism is
both endemic and permanent in our current world order. To that end, both mar-
ronage and CRT critique the many ways that white people associate race with
property (both whiteness and Blackness, to be clear). Space limits the number of
other cross-theory comparisons that I can make here, but suffice it to say that CRT
and TWAIL support each other (as written elsewhere) and support the concept of
marronage (as written here).
CRT is a collection of theories. More specifically, CRT is most useful to race
scholars if CRT represents the grand scheme of critical approaches to theoriz-
ing racial and racialized interactions between Black peoples, Blackness, and insti-
tutional oppressions and terrors that are founded in anti-Blackness. Marronage
(and by extension, educational marronage) is a key critical approach to racial
analysis (Handler, 1997). First, marronage represents a transnational perspective
on how Black peoples have experienced the world, especially how Black peoples
have resisted, refused, and rejected captivity and bondage. Moreover, marronage
is an analytical tool for understanding how Black peoples interact with an anti-
Black world, especially when that anti-Blackness manifests itself as institutional
oppression and violence against Black peoples. In fact, marronage fulfills a key call
of CRT – the call to understand how racial analysis includes movements toward
social justice. In essence, marronage explains how Black peoples’ everyday actions
are to the end of imagining a radically different, more liberated world. There is no
more a social justice perspective than conceptualizing how one’s individual and
collective actions lead to a more liberated and freer world.
Notable critical race theorists have encouraged – if not demanded – a transna-
tional approach to critical race theory, but this chapter suggests that there might
already be a viable version of a transnational CRT (although marronage is but
one version of a transnational CRT). Ultimately, I extended marronage to the
context of education in this chapter. In doing so, I have argued that educational
marronage is, in fact, a form of transnational CRT. Educational marronage seeks
60 Steven L. Nelson
to understand how Black peoples’ actions in school and regarding school are
directly related to freedom and liberation. Several scholars have gone into much
deeper detail to explain how schools and schooling are anti-Black in nature. How-
ever, many of these same scholars stop short of helping us understand how Black
peoples cope with and resist this very same anti-Blackness. Here, I argue that edu-
cational marronage addresses how schools are anti-Black, how Black peoples resist
this anti-Blackness, and how both issues are transnational in nature.
Applying CRT-TWAIL and Education Policy

The combination of CRT and TWAIL to create a transnational CRT is a neces-
sary intervention into the study of racialization and education in global perspec-
tive, especially concepts associated with schooling that breach, exceed, and defy
geographic boundaries. Indeed, the development of a transnational CRT affords
scholars the opportunity to explore, assess, and articulate how the Black experi-
ence in schools leads to racialized and racial oppression. To be clear, the United
States helps set the international order, and much of education policy in the
United States transgresses this international order. For instance, the International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, to which
the United States is a party, contemplates and requires that all manifestations,
maliciously intended or based on disparate impact, be eliminated (Nelson, 2019).
Elsewhere, I (and the International Committee on the Elimination of Racial Dis-
crimination) have argued that the United States’ consistent and persistent retreat
from affirmative action and its rejection of quota systems violate the convention’s
requirement to eliminate the vestiges, legacies, and manifestations of racial dis-
crimination. Likewise, I have argued that the unilateral reconstitution of pre-
dominantly Black public schools and school districts and the replacement of their
governing boards of these public schools and school districts with disproportion-
ately (or exclusively) white policymakers who are appointed and not politically
accountable is a violation of the convention’s requirement to afford all peoples
access to the electoral franchise. Additionally, I have asserted that disparate dis-
ciplinary outcomes and removals from instructional time violate the convention’s
provision of equal, impediment-free access to education.
The development of educational marronage as a transnational CRT provides
a backdrop for better interrogating, understanding, and explaining how Black
peoples in schools and schooling processes resist, cope with, and develop their
own ways of being in these anti-Black environments. For instance, an educational
marronage-based analysis of the continued disproportionately low number of
Black students and graduates in some subfields might very well reveal how and
why Black students and graduates employ strategies to choose degree fields; make
decisions to enroll, disenroll, or never enroll in postsecondary studies; or simply
drop out of public schools in the first place. Moreover, an educational marronage-
based analysis of the overthrow and dethroning of predominantly Black school
boards might unveil how and why Black students, families, and communities
disengage from their schools and schooling processes. Similarly, an educational
marronage-based analysis of this same concept might reveal how such political
sabotage has led to downstream political impacts (i.e., in other elected positions).
Finally, an educational marronage-based analysis of disparate disciplinary out-
comes might be instructive in understanding how and why Black children and
adults seek to escape places of physical, psychological, and mental warfare. To
that end, educational marronage is a worthy, if not necessary, intervention into
transnational CRT.
While the preceding paragraphs have discussed different educational contexts
within the United States, nothing limits a transnational CRT (nor educational mar-
ronage) to the domestic. In fact, many countries that seek to cement contempo-
rary education reform strategies and policies into their educational practices and
praxes may very well find themselves in direct violation of international human
rights. This is particularly the case provided the histories associated with neolib-
eral education reform strategies and policies. The histories reveal a focus on mon-
etizing the schooling process, limiting access to the educational process (capital),
and outfoxing and otherwise evading human rights conventions and treaties that
require unfettered access to schools and schooling. This is particularly the case
in places like Chile. In Chile, school reform (more broadly) and school choice
(more specifically) have not led to increased student gains or to more equitable
outcomes. To that end, an educational marronage-based study in such a context
might contribute knowledge to the many ways that Afro-Chilean populations
employ school choice in ways that strike a balance – even if not a perfect balance –
between culture and schooling to (re)imagine a more promising future. In this way,
educational marronage as a form of transnational CRT supports analyses in an inter-
national context. These analyses are then useful in comparing how Blackness and
Black peoples are in relation to each other across and within geographic boundaries.
Educational Marronage as a Form of Black Thought

The concepts of marronage and educational marronage and explorations into the
lived experiences of contemporary maroons are part-and-parcel of the greater line-
age of Black thought. Specifically, marronage, educational marronage, and explora-
tions into the lived experiences of contemporary maroons are in alignment with
and arise from the scholastic conversation pertaining to the Black radical tradition,
which in and of itself is shaped by a liberatory imagination (see Kelley, 2003; see
also Taylor, 2012). Additionally, the concept of fugitivity – especially flight from and
within schools – is critical to an understanding of educational marronage, marron-
age in general, and the liberatory exploration of the lived experiences of contempo-
rary maroons as fugitivity shapes and facilitates maroon behavior and is a required
activity for those who are maroons. Likewise, concepts associated with marron-
age and educational marronage support and add to the tradition of Black radical
thought in that they address Black peoples’ everyday reactions to anti-Blackness,
especially as that anti-Blackness stems from the continued social death that is
commensurate with anti-Blackness (Patterson, 1982) and the afterlife of slavery, in
which Black people continue to live, resist, and survive (Hartman, 2006).
62 Steven L. Nelson
To that end, marronage and educational marronage and explorations into the
lived experiences of contemporary maroons continue to support and are sustained
by the Black liberatory undertones (and overtones) of Afrofuturism. Whether
scholars discuss Afrofuturism from the perspective of Du Bois and Garvey or
the perspective of Taylor’s assessment of Black Lives Matter (2016), marronage
(broadly), educational marronage (specifically), and active explorations into the
lived experiences of contemporary maroons fit within the broader scholastic con-
versation touching and concerning Black liberatory thought (Gagne, 2006). To
that end, I proffer that any consideration of Black, liberatory though – which is by
virtue radical – is incomplete without a deliberate assessment of the maroon-like
behaviors of Black peoples.
Conclusion
I wrote about the need for a transnational CRT that includes (among other theo-
retical perspectives) marronage earlier in this chapter. Any inclusion of marronage
in a transnational CRT must include a focus on education since CRT itself has
extended from law into the field of education (Mutua, 2000). Therein lies my
key argument for educational marronage as a component of a transnational CRT.
Certainly, there are additional iterations of transnational CRT; yet it is impor-
tant to build a transnational CRT with a theoretical understanding that any CRT
that transcends artificial geographic boundaries must incorporate the perspectives
and lived experiences of the entire African diaspora. Employing educational mar-
ronage will assist in connecting Black Americans to the global African diaspora,
and in doing so, employing educational marronage encourages – if not requires –
scholars to interrogate the many ways in which anti-Blackness in schools and
schooling systems thrives in, is reproduced in, and is upheld in formal schooling
structures and systems throughout the world. Given the vast amount of literature
on anti-Blackness, broadly construed, across the world, it is both impossible and
unwise to forgo opportunities to broaden the academic conversation in a way that
affords scholars the opportunity to investigate the global nature of anti-Blackness
and most importantly the commonalities of the global nature of resistance, rejec-
tion, and rebellion against anti-Blackness.
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4 Global Cadences of
Islamophobia
Comparative Reflections on the
Racialization and Education
of Muslim Youth
Roozbeh Shirazi
Introduction
Recurring forms of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism across Europe and
North America – such as the harassment of women wearing hijab, or targeting by
law enforcement of young immigrant men from Muslim-majority countries who
are thought to be inherently dangerous – have drawn growing attention to the
racialization of Muslims and those thought to be “Muslim.” Islamophobia and
anti-Muslim racism are at once topics gaining greater (and deserved) visibility
in educational studies, as well as long-standing sociopolitical phenomena across
Europe and North America. Though the attacks of September 11, 2001, in the
United States represent a central origin story for the racializing frames commonly
deployed against Muslim immigrant communities – postcolonial scholars, notably
Edward Said (1979, 1997) and Mahmood Mamdani (2005), have long challenged
the durable assumptions of difference and dominant ways of seeing that consoli-
date ethnically and racially diverse, multilingual, multisectarian transnational
communities into the binary monoliths of the “West” and the “Muslim World.”
This chapter aims to interrupt such reductive binaries. I review some
foundational ideas and concepts – such as Orientalism and Islamophobia – that
are necessary for historicizing and understanding the racializing frames that are
deployed against transnational immigrant and diasporic communities with ori-
gins in Muslim-majority states. I then examine how these ideas have selectively
animated recent U.S. and European engagements within Muslim-majority states,
notably those in Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA). I highlight a g rowing
literature of critical educational studies focusing on the racialization of immigrant
and postcolonial-origin Muslim youth, before exploring recurring racializing logics
operating across Jordan, the United States, and France – geographically and politi-
cally distinct settings in my own research. By comparing the racializing logics and
assumptions of civilizational difference across these settings, I argue in conclusion
that anti-racist educators and scholars must not only be critically aware of the role
schooling can play as a site for the production and legitimization of Orientalist and
Islamophobic knowledge but must also be prepared to interrupt and reframe it.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-6
Global Cadences of Islamophobia 67
Conceptual Foundations: Constructing the “Orient,”
Fearing Islam
The events of September 11, 2001, inaugurated a U.S.-led “War on Terror,” and
with that campaign, new forms of surveillance, migration controls, detention,
and education reform were deployed across a number of Muslim-majority states
(Shirazi, 2017). For these reasons, September 11 is often seen as the genesis for
anti-Muslim racism in the United States and across Europe. Yet this characteri-
zation is inaccurate because Western hostility toward Islam and Muslims has a
long and varied history – stretching from the medieval Crusades to the Spanish
Reconquista of Al-Andalus, to Ottoman expansion into southeastern Europe, to
Europe’s maritime colonial expansions across Asia and Africa, and to contempo-
rary military and counterterrorist operations carried out in the name of defending
“freedom.”
Perhaps more than any other recent scholar, Edward Said has done more to
draw attention to and forcefully critique the dominant epistemic frames and dis-
torting representational techniques deployed by Western (here, European and
North American) observers and writers in their treatments and assessments of
the “Orient.”1 Said, a displaced Palestinian scholar who grew up in exile, traces
these discursive practices back to Classical Greece and Athenian representations
of Persia as despotic, luxurious, and unwarlike in the wake of the Persian Wars
of the fifth century BCE. One of the key facets of Said’s argument is that West-
ern observers have long invented and carelessly resorted to stereotypes about
the Orient that validate their own preconceptions while denying the complex
realities of the people and places they were supposedly describing. In this respect,
the representations of Islam, of Muslims, and the states across SWANA that are
commonly encountered in the media (Said, 1997; Shaheen; Al-Sultany; Fayyaz &
Shirazi, 2013) and in curriculum (Hantzopoulos et al., 2015; Odebiyi, 2018) are
more reflective of an ideologically motivated way of seeing, rather than that of an
authoritative sociocultural, historical, or political truth. Indeed, Said argues that
closer examination reveals the concepts of the West and the Orient are easily
manipulated for political gain and less stable than the ways in which they are used
to establish civilizational difference.
Recent U.S. foreign policy history supports Said’s observation on how West-
ern representations of Islam and Islamist political actors are politically moti-
vated. Consider U.S. engagements in Iran and Afghanistan – two neighboring
countries – in the 1980s. As Deepa Kumar (2012) has argued, U.S. military and
logistic support to Islamist militias during the Soviet-Afghan War depicted the
Afghan mujahedeen as “freedom fighters” nobly battling Communists, while the
clerical government established in Iran by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was
seen as inherently anti-Western and religiously fanatical. Osama bin Laden, a key
architect of the September 11 attacks, was also part of the mujahid resistance in
Afghanistan, which was armed, supported, and funded by the Saudi, Pakistani, and
U.S. governments. The situational characterization of Islamist political forces as
68 Roozbeh Shirazi
either friendly or dangerous to the United States suggests that American registers
of Islamophobia are neither fixed nor consistent. Rather, they are contingent and
malleable – held in abeyance when mobilized in the service of larger U.S. foreign
policy interests, such as arming proxy forces against an ideological rival in the case
of the Soviet-Afghan War, or deployed as an extremist foil for military operations
launched in the name of defending Western liberal notions of liberty and freedom.
In Orientalist accounts, popular liberation movements and revolutions across the
SWANA region have been emptied of the histories of oppression, inequality, and
Western imperialism and exploitative relationships that gave rise to them in the
first place. Instead, popular narratives of religious fanaticism and irrational hatred
of Western “freedoms” become the explanatory factors in government and media
accounts of these movements, rendering popular anti-colonial and anti-imperial
political aspirations illegible to Western audiences, while reinforcing the idea that
Western societies are inherently rational, modern, and consequently, capable and
self-assured.2
Islamophobia, a term that has grown in recent usage and prominence, is closely
linked to the concept of Orientalism. Islamophobia literally refers to “fear of
Islam,” a fear usually held by non-Muslim observers and actors, which operates to
constrain the social and political agency of those deemed Muslim (Sayyid, 2010).
In the post-9/11 context, the term “Muslim” has become an increasingly stigma-
tized racialized status in the United States that operates distinctly on Muslims,
non-Muslims from Muslim-majority countries (e.g., SWANA states), and those
perceived to be Muslim (Bayoumi, 2006). This fear, and the racialized politics that
it mobilizes, is seemingly justified by Orientalist frames ascribed to the Muslim
Other. Like Classical Athenian characterizations of the (then pre-Muslim) Per-
sians, Muslims are regarded as threatening, despotic, irrational, patriarchal,
simultaneously oppressive and oppressed, emasculated and sexually threatening,
along with a vast number of other negative characterizations. By equating these
characteristics as timeless civilizational attributes, Islamophobic representations
of Muslims and their social institutions draw contrast with the presumed rational
modernity of the West and erase the robust and enduring existence of these attrib-
utes within Western societies and political systems.
What these characterizations also do, following Mbembe (2003), is secure a
necropolitical regime in which the state’s sovereignty and security needs allow
it to distinguish which subjects are worthy of life from those that are worthy of
killing. In other words, Islamophobia – an irrational racist fear sanctioned by Ori-
entalist ways of knowing – licenses the wholesale suspicion, discrimination, and
dehumanization of those who identify or who are identified as “Muslim,” mak-
ing everyday life for these communities more precarious. Consider how, in the
wake of the 9/11 attacks, tens of thousands of noncitizen male residents in the
United States from 25 primarily Muslim-majority countries were forced to register
for the National Entry-Exit Registration System, a federal surveillance appara-
tus brought into existence by the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. Or how
capriciously individuals with similar seemingly “Muslim” names were included on
federal algorithmic no-fly lists without proper due process.3 Or further, how by
being categorized as “extremists” or “potential threats,” individuals outside of the
United States were targeted for extrajudicial killings, extraordinary rendition, and
indefinite confinement in U.S.-controlled carceral facilities beyond U.S. borders –
such as the one in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – practices that were deemed to violate
the Geneva Conventions on conflict and prisoners of war (Khalili, 2013). The
U.S. government circumvented these charges by creating new legal categories of
personhood (e.g., “enemy combatants”) categories of existence that defied the
very notions of international human rights the United States and its allies claim to
protect, but were nevertheless justified as exceptions to the law so as to not imperil
the legitimacy of the existing political order.
Islamophobia also – and perhaps more visibly – operates in everyday social
relations. Muslim women who wear the hijab are often physically assailed and
verbally harassed, as seen in the 2017 Portland, Oregon, train attack, in which a
white assailant attacked and killed two men for intervening in his verbal assault
of two girls, one who was a Somali Muslim, and the other who was Black and
non-Muslim.4 Islamophobia also operates within and upon public institutions like
schools. The case of Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old student of Sudanese origins,
is a notable example. Mohamed was arrested in 2015 for bringing a homemade
digital clock to his classroom in Irving, Texas. Rather than to be lauded by his
teacher as a STEM genius or youth inventor, Mohamed was instead sent to the
principal’s office, where the police were called, and he was summarily arrested and
detained for intentionally causing a bomb scare. In 2007 in New York City, plans
to open the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a public Arabic dual-language
school, were protested by right-wing anti-Muslim organizers who deemed a school
where Arabic would be taught would need to be under special scrutiny for “Islamist
and Arabist overtones and demands.”5 Debbie Almontaser, the Yemeni-American
founding principal of the school, was forced to resign from her position on spurious
grounds, a move that was ruled as discriminatory by the U.S. Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission.6 These and other examples highlight how the racial-
ized fear of Muslims – or of greater sociopolitical standing for anything or anyone
deemed “Muslim” – habitually overrides other possibilities of social meaning or
intent. Following Said (1979), the assumed criminality of an inventive teenaged
boy, and the racist dismissal of an Arabic dual-language school and its curriculum
as wholly suspect, are moves that reinforce hegemonic racialized stereotypes above
all else. For anti-racist educators, the everyday operations of these preconceptions
raise critical questions – notably, what possibilities of living, learning, and relation-
ships are possible for members of communities that are racialized as Muslim in
such constrained forms of visibility and understanding?
Educational Research on Muslim Youth

In education, there is a growing literature on the sociopolitical experiences of
Muslim youth and those racialized as Muslim in North America and Europe (see,
for example, Zine, 2001; Sirin & Fine, 2008; Abu El-Haj, 2010; Ghaffar-Kucher,
2012; Ali, 2014; Shirazi, 2014; Bajaj et al., 2016; Jaffe-Walter, 2016; Maghbouleh,
70 Roozbeh Shirazi
2017). Notably, ethnographic studies of transnational Muslim youth in educa-
tional settings from these scholars demonstrate how shifting frames of racializa-
tion across North American and European settings have contributed to Muslim
youths’ self-identification and exclusions, and to the coalitions and solidarities
they enact with other racialized groups.
It is important to note that North American and European settings, while criti-
cal with respect to the production and circulation of racist discourses of differ-
ence, are not the only geographies in which Orientalist representations operate.
Educational development and reform efforts in the SWANA region have been an
attending – and oft-overlooked – theater of action in the U.S. “War on Terror” in
which Orientalist depictions of Islam are commonplace, and faith in the power of
neoliberal educational reforms to promote “tolerance” is unquestioned. Simulta-
neously, histories of U.S. intervention in SWANA and its support for the region’s
autocratic regimes were downplayed in education sector reports, when mentioned
at all. For example, the 9/11 Commission Report, drafted by a nonpartisan inde-
pendent commission created in 2002 by U.S. congressional legislation, notes that
“education that teaches tolerance, the dignity and value of each individual, and
respect for different beliefs is a key element in any global strategy to eliminate
Islamist terrorism.” In Afghanistan, international development actors and agen-
cies – including the U.S. Agency for International Development – often referred
to a two-decade interruption in schooling for Afghan children due to the preva-
lence of armed conflict. Such narratives work not only to justify the presence and
interventions of international educational actors, but also to obscure the history
of U.S. support for armed mujahid groups during the Soviet-Afghan War, which
included the development of taxpayer-funded educational materials that valorized
a militaristic depiction of Islam in the curriculum. These educational materials
remained in use long after the conclusion of the Soviet-Afghan conflict and could
be found in the country after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (Shirazi, 2008).
Similarly, U.S.-supported educational reform efforts across the Middle East
have often referenced a youth “time bomb” to advance educational reform pro-
jects aiming at bolstering employment and greater economic activity in the pri-
vate sector (Shirazi, 2010). In Jordan, the World Bank provided $380 million to
promote a massive educational reform initiative entitled Education Reform for the
Knowledge Economy from 2004 to 2009, which centered on resolving the perceived
“skills mismatch” between workplace needs and workforce readiness. A closely
related educational goal in Jordan that has been supported by private sector actors
and international aid agencies is to promote moderation and civic participation
through the updating and improvement of formal education (Shirazi, 2010). Said
differently, there is an entire industry that has blossomed around the surveillance,
critique, and modification of educational practices and materials in Muslim-
majority states, notably in the Middle East and North Africa region, that are pur-
portedly “anti-Western,” while there has been comparably little critical analysis
and excavation of distorted and dehumanizing content in European and North
American materials.
Taken together, this literature compellingly highlights how educational institu-
tions and processes have been utilized as sites for the creation and/or reification of
racialized difference. In the remainder of this chapter, I examine how Orientalist
and Islamophobic assumptions operate across the different contexts I have worked
in. At first glance, my engagements in Jordan, the United States, and France may
appear to be distinct endeavors in settings that are marked by stark political, lin-
guistic, cultural, and economic differences. However, when considered against the
backdrop of governance practices that depict education and educational develop-
ment as modes of both national security and individual well-being, these cases
become enlaced by different movements – movements of educational policy and
rhetoric, movements of racialized representational forms, as well as movements
(and non-movements) of people. These movements allow us to identify new con-
ceptual horizons for comparative educational inquiry – such as racialization and
securitization processes as they intersect with youth lives.
Jordan: Defusing the “Youth Time Bomb,” Educating

for Moderation and Civic Participation
In 2007, when I initially began my ethnographic research in two boys’ high schools
in Jordan, the larger political backdrop of my study could be summarized by several
interrelated processes that have had profound implications for what being edu-
cated meant: the emergence of a transnational counterterrorism regime, in which
education was seen as necessary for maintaining national security; the deepening
of privatization and neoliberal economic reform; and superficial commitments to
democratization and deepening youth civic engagement.
First among these was the broader U.S.-led “War on Terror,” which was driven
by large-scale military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as covert mili-
tary operations spanning the globe. U.S. counterterrorism campaigns were not
confined to the battlefield, however; speaking before the UN General Assembly in
2005, George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq as a campaign for the “hearts
and minds” to spur political transformations across the SWANA region.7 The
so-called battle for hea/rts and minds extended into U.S. support for large-scale
educational reforms, which rested upon Orientalist conceptions of culture and
the tenets of human capital theory. Together, these frames mobilized education as
an antidote to youth radicalization efforts driven by unnamed religious extremists
(Shirazi, 2010).
Second, the growing interconnection of national economies spurred by neolib-
eral globalization was transforming youth employment opportunities away from
national and subnational public sector labor markets toward a private sector–led
global “knowledge economy.” Beginning in the early 2000s, the government of
Jordan began partnering with international development aid agencies and private
sector actors to upgrade its education sector and emphasize information and com-
munications technology and skills across its curriculum (Bhanji, 2012). These
reforms were driven by concerns about high levels of youth unemployment, as
72 Roozbeh Shirazi
well as the assumed economic security that accompanies successful participa-
tion in the global knowledge economy. These concerns were captured in Jordan’s
Queen Rania’s 2008 observations that youth unemployment is a “ticking time-
bomb” across the SWANA region – warranting massive educational reforms
to produce a more capable and competitive workforce.8 Such characterizations
were also mobilized in educational sector reports and analyses from international
development actors. One such report from the Rand Corporation characterizes
“Middle Eastern” youth as needing guidance to avoid the trap of radicalization.9
The Orientalist frames of this analysis can be seen in how culture (along with
geography, religion, and society) is reified as an a priori “trap” that has to be over-
come through education reform.
Last, during the 2000s, the Jordanian government unveiled several high-profile
youth campaigns, emphasizing youth engagement and participation in civic life.
These campaigns, however, rested on narrow conceptions of political engage-
ment in Jordan, in ways that signal “reform” without threatening the integrity of
the ruling order (Baylouny, 2005; Schwedler, 2022). Moreover, they emphasized
sanctioned state venues and programs as a locus of youths’ political activity, in
contrast to the transnational fields of political action characteristic of discourses
of Pan-Arab solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. This
is a particularly salient issue in Jordan, given that much of Jordan’s population is
composed of Palestinians (and their descendants) displaced from their homeland
by the founding of Israel and the continuing illegal Israeli occupation of Palestin-
ian lands. In these campaigns, schools and universities are central sites of building
this new conception of national identity (Shirazi, 2012).
Across all these efforts, the education of youth loomed large in realizing larger
economic, political, and social goals. In practice, however, these processes were
largely divorced from the everyday realities of schooling. In my encounters and
conversations with Jordanian boys and their teachers discussing these initiatives,
I was repeatedly told that youth campaigns and reform efforts were superficial
and meant to present a favorable image of Jordan abroad, rather than to make
meaningful change in the lives of Jordanians per se. Students I spoke with strongly
rejected Western media and educational policy characterizations that depicted
them as vulnerable to radicalization, overly religious, or as potential threats to
democratic reform. Ali, a student of Palestinian origin at one of the high schools
I was working in, turned these Orientalist characterizations around in one such
conversation:
What can we do except follow God? We can do nothing against the Israelis,
the Iraqis can do nothing against the Americans. Muslims have done nothing
about the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, Peace be Upon Him.
We are the ones who are insulted, killed, and occupied – and they [western-
ers] fear us?
In connecting these imbalances of power, Ali’s remarks showed the compara-

tive nature of his political awareness. He drew clear attention to the narrative
imbalance that characterized how Jordanian (as well as other Arab and Muslim)
youth understood the constraints of their own lives, and how they were repre-
sented within Western discourses of difference. In a broader stroke, his understand-
ing of how he and his peers were represented in Western accounts underscores
the degree to which Orientalist and Islamophobic views are infused into political
agendas, educational policies, and development assistance programs ostensibly
meant to improve their lives. Meaning that depictions of threat and the vulner-
ability of disaffected and underemployed Jordanian youth – that of a ticking time
bomb – are representative of a larger repertoire of racialized and civilizational dif-
ference that recur and work across national borders and sociopolitical contexts. By
depicting these youth in crisis, or in need of external intervention, these accounts
work to advance new possibilities of youth belonging and membership in relation
to the states in which they reside. Tellingly, Ali’s understanding of Western depic-
tions of the threat posed by Muslim youth resonated with those of his peers in my
later work carried out in the context of the United States.
United States: Transnational Muslim Youth Threatening

Political Norms
My interest in the questions of what it meant to be a national subject in Jor-
dan against the larger backdrop of the U.S. counterterrorist efforts, and how
educational processes were implicated in producing new formations of citizenship
and relations of membership, persisted long after my fieldwork there ended. In
a sense, I realized that versions of these same questions not only could be – but
needed to be – critically explored in educational settings in the United States, a
critical site for the production of knowledge that shores up racialized Orientalist
accounts of Muslim (and additional forms of) Otherness. After examining the cul-
tural politics of schooling and citizenship in Jordan, I wanted to understand how
discursive notions of Americanness and sociopolitical membership were being
constructed, reinforced, and contested in classroom conversations. My interest
was in examining these processes from the vantage point of minoritized transna-
tional youth whose everyday lives, cultural forms, and social practices – like many
of the youth of Palestinian origin in my work in Jordan – entailed more expansive
notions of belonging and did not readily fit into narrow conceptions of national
membership. Relatedly, I wanted to learn about how everyday educational interac-
tions created the possibilities of recognition of these youth as “American” against
a political backdrop that was marked by growing xenophobia and liberal celebra-
tions of diversity.
The experiences of Muslim American youth within the two midwestern schools
I worked in during the 2013–2014 academic year provided rich insights into how
conditional and racialized the possibilities of membership and citizenship for
Othered/non-normative students. At one of these schools, the Muslim Student
Association (MSA), a student affinity group for students who identified as Muslim,
became a flashpoint for administrative practices of the racialized policing of differ-
ence. Over the course of my classroom observations and discussions with students,
74 Roozbeh Shirazi
I came to understand that the existence and popularity of the MSA as an affinity
space was reflective of minoritized Muslim youths’ larger experiences of exclusion
and racialized surveillance at Light Falls High School (LFHS).10 Said differently, the
MSA was a vital counterspace for these students where they could build commu-
nity and relate to one another in a momentary escape from a normative white gaze.
The conflict over the MSA began when the principal of LFHS decided to
reclassify the MSA as an afterschool student club, thereby stripping its status as
an affinity group, which allowed for the possibility of students to have excused
absences from class to attend affinity group meetings. The basis of her decision was
that having a “religious” affinity group violated federal law, and therefore neces-
sitated a reclassification and the withdrawal of material support in the form of a
small stipend paid to a faculty sponsor to supervise the group. When student mem-
bers of the MSA met with the principal to discuss and appeal her decision, she
repeatedly told them that “in America, we have separation of church and state.”
Later, the MSA students recounted how they tried to explain to her that the MSA
was not a religious group per se, it was a space in which they could collectively pro-
cess and discuss their experiences as minoritized Muslim students. The principal
did not engage with these points and again reiterated that they could not keep the
MSA as an affinity group because of the need to protect the separation of church
and state in public schools. The principal’s refusals to consider alternate possibili-
ties led many of the MSA students to express concern about her bias toward their
affinity group. Ultimately, the MSA students appealed to the district superinten-
dent, who decided that the MSA could continue to meet as an affinity group.
While students were able to organize to secure their desired outcome, it is
important to underscore that the principal’s decision to reclassify the group and
refusal to entertain other possibilities of meaning and significance that the MSA
held for students reflects an Orientalist logic in which the epistemic authority and
assumptions of the Western (here ‘white’) observer unequivocally supersede the
meanings and attachments of the youth participants. In my conversations with her
at the end of the school year, the principal explained that the primary challenge
with advancing diversity and equity initiatives was making sure that they did not
result in unequal advantages being conferred to one group over other [unnamed]
student populations. Without referring directly to the MSA incident, she claimed
that she had to be careful not to extend “special privileges” to students from dif-
ferent cultures, because then “they would want more, and more, and more.” In
her mind, the availability of a space for students to process shared experiences
and momentarily escape being visible as Muslim Others was a privilege, not a
right. Students’ efforts to protect that space – through dialogue and deliberative
processes – represented an encroachment on democratic and political ideals that
she attributed to “America.”
Newcomer Muslim Youth in France: Conditional Guests

My projects in Jordan and the United States set the stage for work beginning
in 2018 with minoritized newcomer youth in French secondary schools against
a backdrop of growing Islamophobia. In 2015, more than one million migrants
arrived in Europe from land and sea routes, inaugurating talk of a widespread
“migration crisis.” Many of the arriving migrants were from Syria, where the Assad
government’s violent repression of political dissenters and indiscriminate military
strikes on armed groups operating in civilian settings had led to the death of an
estimated 465,000–593,000 Syrian people and the displacement of 12 million
more.11,12 However, migrants were also coming to Europe seeking refuge from dis-
placement, violent conflict, and conditions of economic precarity from Afghani-
stan, Iraq, Libya, and other states. In the face of such unprecedented levels of
displacement, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy, came to accom-
modate 75% of refugees and asylum seekers in Europe.13 The influx of asylum seek-
ers in the EU was accompanied by a rapid rise in anti-immigrant populist rhetoric
and political campaigns, seen in the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, as
well as in the growing support for the far-right Rassemblement National party led by
Marine Le Pen in France.
In this climate of hardened borders and racialized nationalism, “integration”
(or lack thereof) has become a highly combustible political subject. Critical
studies of integration regimes in Western European states argue that the horizon
of integration – a shifting and broadly defined threshold for meaningful political
membership – is rendered an individual pursuit, and an individual’s “failure” to
integrate carries negative repercussions for the broader ethnic (or religious) groups
to which they belong (Schinkel, 2018). Migrants are represented as a threat to the
stability of European societies – which are self-depicted in their own integration
regimes as inclusive and largely free of social problems – so long as migration is
controlled, and immigrants successfully integrate (Schinkel, 2018). Moreover, the
process of integration is seemingly open-ended and intergenerational, as children
of immigrants themselves remain conditional national subjects, even if they have
spent their entire lives in Europe (Beaman, 2017; Boersma & Schinkel, 2018).
The congratulatory self-regard of EU states, along with the reductive identities
they ascribe to minoritized immigrants, reinforce Said’s (1979) arguments that
Orientalist frames work to produce and reinforce hierarchical preconceptions of
the Western self and the non-Western (non-white) Other.
In the case of France, these representations of cultural and “civilizational”
difference flourish alongside of a parallel denial of the structural racialized inequi-
ties that characterize everyday life, as well as the complex realities of the people
they attempt to describe. Anxieties about migration in France have been accom-
panied by vocal dissatisfaction by segments of the population (exemplified by
the recent gilet jaune/yellow vest movement) who feel that the social contract
in France is threatened by growing wealth disparities and economic restructur-
ing. Against such a backdrop, migration is being framed (again) as a cause for
larger economic woes and has become politically charged in debates on belonging,
citizenship, and cultural identity playing out in French electoral politics, social
media, and public institutions.
Of these institutions, schools are among the most formative sites of encounter
between migrant youth and official discourses of membership. Indeed, the role
76 Roozbeh Shirazi
of schooling in France has long been oriented toward forging a common iden-
tity among many disparate ethnicities and dialects. As evidenced by the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), French citizen-
ship is premised on the universality of individual rights. However, the assertion
that French citizenship is best understood as the expression of the relationship
between the individual and the state – rather than one’s relation to ethnic, racial,
or religious groups – has made critical engagement with issues of systemic dis-
crimination difficult in France (Beaman, 2017; Ben Jelloun, 1999; Guénif, 2006).
Muslim women who wear hijab in France are frequently targeted by the state and
its institutions in efforts to defend laicite (the principle of secularism), and as a
result, they are increasingly restricted by where they may wear hijab in the name
of defending French “republican values.”14 Relatedly, in the educational sector,
anti-racist professional development workshops of the teachers’ union, SUD 93,
became the object of political scrutiny and debate. Members of SUD 93 developed
workshops for their members to address the social effects of state racism and per-
sistent inequalities between white and non-white citizens. These workshops were
criticized by the French Minister of Education as being “unconstitutional” in part
because they convened educators in affinity groups and explicitly identified “state
racism” as a phenomenon (Durupt, 2017). In revealing tensions around how rac-
ism and discrimination can be taught, and how their effects can be discussed in
France, these examples reveal how religious identities and racialized differences
inflect what it means to be a citizen of France.
I was particularly interested to explore these issues in France from the vantage
point of minoritized Muslim newcomer youth, who are at once depicted as evi-
dence of French hospitality and generosity toward “refugees” as well as subjects
in need of supervision and guidance into French culture, norms, and republican
values. In a participatory digital storytelling project developed with 12 newcomer
youth and their French language acquisition teachers in two government second-
ary schools in the suburbs of Paris, we set out to collectively explore questions of
social visibility, belonging, and migration. Our larger aim was to produce youth
counternarratives meant to complicate the reductive representations of their lives,
beliefs, and aspirations by French society. Certainly, the narratives that emerged
from this project were complex and varied, as they reflected different migration
histories and experiences of Othering. Simultaneously, many of these youth ges-
tured unequivocally to the reductive gaze that they were subjected to in everyday
and institutional spaces in France.
Anisa, a 16-year-old girl who had moved to France with her mother from
Morocco in 2016, produced a short film about her early days of life in France. The
film recounted the story of her mother, who did not speak any French, attempt-
ing to dispose of her trash within their apartment complex. Unfamiliar with the
building’s bin designations, she placed her trash bag in one of the larger trash
bins. Anisa narrated how a white French man, who was observing her mother,
soon rushed to the scene to confront her and berate her for disregarding building
rules and French social norms. Anisa came to help her mother, who was not able
to communicate with the neighbor, who promptly turned his rage toward Anisa,
accusing her and her mother of making the building ugly and “ruining the neigh-
borhood.” This experience frightened Anisa, who for a time questioned why her
mother decided to leave Morocco so that she could have a better life and oppor-
tunities in France.
Yousef, a 17-year-old Syrian boy from Damascus, explored similar themes in his
short film and photography produced for the project. During our project workshops,
Yousef spoke about his negative encounters with various French people in stores,
government offices, and his school. Yousef was explaining his uncertainty about
feeling welcomed, and how the hostility of these encounters may be anchored in
racism. Part of his short film revisited a school lunchroom experience from his first
weeks in his French high school, where he decided, despite his hesitations, to sit
at a lunch table occupied by French students. Yousef, who had a basic level of pro-
ficiency in French before moving to France in 2016, understood that the students
soon began mocking him as stupid and as unable to do anything other than to smile
at their taunts. Together, the examples from Yousef and Anisa underscore that they –
and potentially other minoritized Muslim youth in France – are often viewed with
suspicion and hostility, without the grace of non-judgment or the benefit of curi-
osity. The digital storytelling project we collectively undertook represented one
technique to destabilize the reductive racialized gaze they are subject to.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have drawn on examples from Jordan, the United States, and
France to trace how Orientalist and Islamophobic assumptions operate through
educational reform agendas, youth development initiatives, and everyday school
administrative practices. What emerges from these cases suggests a larger grammar
of hegemonic representation, cultural deficit, and racialized anxiety that materi-
alizes in educational settings and initiatives across borders. In Jordan, for exam-
ple, the educational agendas and initiatives presented here reflect anxieties about
youth radicalization and youth vulnerability to extremist viewpoints – anxieties
that attribute potential sociopolitical unrest to flat and Orientalist notions of “cul-
ture,” rather than to durable structural and material constraints. In the United
States, while there are similar programs that target transnational Muslim com-
munities and reify them as potentially threatening – such as the FBI’s Countering
Violent Extremism initiative – we also see how everyday practices of schooling
may reproduce Orientalist logics of Muslim exceptionalism and Otherness, seen in
the example of the MSA at LFHS. In France, the counternarratives of minoritized
Muslim newcomer youth push back against nationalist narratives that mytholo-
gize universal rights and deny systemic racism, while simultaneously reducing their
lives, struggles, and aspirations as threats to French society. Together, these exam-
ples highlight the extent to which Orientalism and Islamophobia are enmeshed
in educational settings and inform the educational experiences and sociopoliti-
cal meaning-making of Muslim youth. The youth narratives and collective action
78 Roozbeh Shirazi
highlighted across these cases also point to the need for educators, school leaders,
and policymakers to confront and unravel the master narratives that consolidate
and legitimize hierarchies of racialized and civilizational difference.
Notes
1 Though in Orientalism Said (1979) writes primarily about European encounters and
engagements in the “Near East” (a term that commonly refers to the Arab states of the
eastern Mediterranean), the term “Orientalism” equally refers to Western depictions of
the “Middle East” and “Far East” as well. It is important to note that terms like Near
East, Middle East, and Far East all reproduce European colonial and imperial spatial
logics, where the degree and direction are assigned in relation to Europe, and specifi-
cally Western Europe, as the organizing geographical reference point. The decoloniz-
ing of these denominations is an ongoing discussion among scholars across different
fields, who have alternately utilized terminology like West Asia, and Southwest Asia
and North Africa (SWANA) to refer to what is commonly known as the “Middle East.”
2 This rhetorical framing is concisely captured in a 1990 essay titled “Roots of Mus-
lim Rage” by the noted Orientalist scholar Bernard Lewis. See www.theatlantic.com/
magazine/archive/1990/09/the-roots-of-muslim-rage/304643/
3 See “Problems with No-Fly List Show Problems with Capps II Airline Profiling System.” www.
aclu.org/other/problems-no-fly-list-show-problems-capps-ii-airline-profiling-system
4 See “Teen on Portland train: ‘They lost their lives because of me and my friend.’ ” www.
cnn.com/2017/05/29/us/portland-train-teenager-stabbing/
5 See “On New York’s “Khalil Gibran International Academy.” www.danielpipes.org/
blog/2007/03/on-new-yorks-khalil-gibran-international
6 See “Federal panel finds bias in ouster of principal.” www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/
nyregion/13principal.html
7 See “A bright shining slogan.” https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/08/22/a-bright-shining-
slogan/
8 See “Youth unemployment: Mideast ‘ticking time bomb.’ ” www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/
meast/03/12/bahrain.youth.unemployment/index.html
9 See “A future for the young: Options for helping Middle Eastern youth escape the trap
of radicalization.” www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR354.html
10 All names of individuals and places have been changed to protect confidentiality.
11 See “Syria’s civil war explained from the beginning.” www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/05/
syria-civil-war-explained-160505084119966.html
12 See “On International Human Rights Day: Millions of Syrians robbed of ‘rights’ and
593 thousand killed in a decade.” www.syriahr.com/en/195385/
13 See “France opposes introduction of migrant quotas.” www.gouvernement.fr/en/
france-opposes-introduction-of-migrant-quotas
14 Numerous articles and studies have addressed this phenomenon. For a recent example,
see “French lawmakers have proposed a hijab ban in competitive sports. The impact on
women could be devastating.” www.cnn.com/2022/02/01/sport/france-hijab-ban-intl-
spt/index.html
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5 Rejecting Abyssal Thinking
in the Language and Education
of Racialized Bilinguals
Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, Kate Seltzer,
Li Wei, Ricardo Otheguy, and Jonathan Rosa
We are a group of scholars who have worked in language education for years.
We are situated within two of the most powerful and interconnected English-
language empires – the United States and Great Britain. The lenses we have used
for our work have been different, but the objective of our work has been the same:
to center the experiences and knowledges of racialized bilinguals, their language,
and their education. By racialized bilinguals we mean people who, as a result
of long processes of domination and colonization, have been positioned as infe-
rior in racial and linguistic terms. We hold that much of the scholarship on lan-
guage education has been tainted by what the Portuguese decolonial philosopher
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007) has called “abyssal thinking.” This hegem-
onic thinking creates a line establishing that which is considered “civil society”
and declares as nonexistent those colonized knowledges and lifeways positioned
on the other side of the line, thus relegating them to an existential abyss. Our
critique of abyssal thinking aims to unsettle European colonialism’s division of
populations into superior “civilized” races and inferior “uncivilized” ones1; it also
aims to challenge the insidious legacies of these colonial logics in the contem-
porary world (Quijano, 1991, 1993, 2000). We point to how the colonial logics
stemming from abyssal thinking have been so well established that they are not
readily apparent.
The task, then, is to challenge what Quijano (1991, 2000) has called ongoing
coloniality, the imagined line in which some language practices and ways of life are
understood as more academic, standard, or legitimate. By rejecting abyssal think-
ing and focusing on the vast linguistic complexity and heterogeneity of people and
language, we challenge the line itself, rather than simply try to help people live
with or overcome it. Influenced by this decolonial perspective that challenges the
universal logic and matrix of power produced by colonialism,2 we approach lan-
guage, in Santos’ terms, “from the inside out” (Santos, 2007, p. 54). We put at the
center of our work the racialized bilingual students themselves as well as their lan-
guaging – that is, their everyday language interactions through which they make
sense of their world (Maturana & Varela, 1984) – rather than their “language” as
defined, taught, and assessed in schools.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-7
82 Ofelia García et al.
In this chapter, we bring together our perspectives to articulate how approach-
ing language education from the inside out challenges traditional understand-
ing of language, bilingualism, and education. We begin by situating our positions
in our experiences. We then share our understanding of two key terms that
define our fields –“language” and “education.” With respect to the first term, we
clarify our understanding of language and our rejection of bilingualism as simply
additive, as well as our rejection of descriptions of the language use of bilinguals in
terms such as cross-linguistic transfer and code-switching. With respect to the sec-
ond term, we explain how some of the policies and practices that are common in
the education of racialized bilinguals are inadequate, and then provide some of the
principles that guide our understanding of other practices that would be of much
greater benefit to them. We end this chapter by reflecting on the enduring mis-
match between, on the one hand, the theory and practice of much of traditional
language education, and on the other hand, the actual experiences of racialized
bilinguals. We show that the persistent refusal of many to perceive this mismatch
stems from abyssal thinking and raciolinguistic ideologies.
Situating Our Work

Our understanding of language and education has been constructed from our
collective experience over time and in collaboration with many scholars who have
called attention to the lack of justice in the education of racialized students (see,
among many others, Bartolomé, 1998; López, 2017; Paris & Alim, 2014; Valdés,
1996). Our work has also been inspired by many language scholars who have
defended the rights of minoritized communities as a matter of justice (see, for
example, Corson, 1993; Fishman, 1977; Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 1995).
However, rather than perceive minoritized languages as autonomous entities that
are entitled to rights, our work focuses on the rights of racialized people to be
educated on their own terms and on the basis of their own language practices.
For these rights to be enacted, it is almost certain that political changes outside
the educational arena will be necessary. But regardless of the broader structural
changes that the future may or may not bring, the decolonial perspective that we
adopt makes us take note that a different world is already here – a world made by
racialized bilinguals themselves as they engage with their own knowledge systems
and cultural and linguistic practices (Martínez & Mejía, 2019). This allows us to
reject abyssal thinking and point to already existing possibilities with what decolo-
nial scholar Walter Mignolo (2000) calls “thinking otherwise.”
Most of the authors of this chapter are members of racialized bilingual groups.
Living our lives as racialized bilinguals has enabled us to witness and partake of
knowledge systems that are not always accepted as modern, valid, or scientific,
and yet hold much importance and value for our communities. As students, some
of us have experienced what our bilingual practices got us – a remedial education
that focused on perfecting our English rather than pushing us to think critically.
We have felt what it means to be stuck and misunderstood in classrooms that
Rejecting Abyssal Thinking 83
did not challenge us, that did not engage our entire beings, our imaginations,
philosophies, and aesthetics. We have experienced how it feels to be derided as
(im)migrants or delinquent citizens, to be told that English is not our language,
that we speak incorrectly, or even – literally in our experiences – that we are stupid
because we do not speak English.
As teachers, we have witnessed the absurdity of trying to teach only in
English according to a curriculum formulated for the most part in narrow, white-
Eurocentric terms, when in fact our bilingual students were much more developed
linguistically, but also historically, philosophically, geographically, politically, and
scientifically. We have often witnessed students excited to share a poem or piece
of literature from outside the dominant Anglo-American tradition, only to be told
to stick to what was in the book and the curriculum. As teacher-educators, we
have also been challenged with the lack of attention to racialized bilingual stu-
dents, whom teachers evaluate only through what they can do in English. And we
have witnessed the stigmatizing effects of language policies in schools that work
against the students’ bilingualism, policies that are found even in bilingual and
heritage language education programs. Our experience in the United States and
the United Kingdom has been to engage educators and their students in critical
decolonial thinking about language and education, enlisting them in the effort to
combat raciolinguistic ideologies.
Our position on language education for racialized bilinguals has thus emerged
from years of hands-on labor alongside teachers, children, and youth in class-
rooms. We have witnessed the perverse consequences that many traditional the-
ories and practices in education have had for racialized bilingual children and
youth. We speak about theory/practice because we know that they are mutually
constitutive and that neither one has priority. We root our work in rich empirical
and experiential sources that focus on the consequences of the different kinds of
theory/practice that can prevail in the education of racialized bilinguals.
Our Understanding of Language

Our work is centered on language education. We have affirmed unequivocally
that languages do exist, and that they are socially constructed realities (Li, 2018;
Otheguy et al., 2015, 2019). The socially constructed nature of named languages
can be illustrated by the fact that, to take just two simple points, linguists cannot,
through sole reliance on lexical and structural tools, tell you how many languages
there are in the world or determine what counts as two languages as opposed to two
varieties of the same language. Linguists, for example, cannot resolve, based solely
on lexical and structural criteria, whether Catalan and Valencian or Hokkien and
Teochew are the same or different languages. The distinction between them can
only be drawn, if it is to be drawn, by taking into account cultural, historical, and
political considerations (Otheguy et al., 2015). The process of socially engineer-
ing named languages is well known (Fishman, 2000; Kloss, 1967). The unavoid-
ably situated character of named languages is readily acknowledged by a website
such as Ethnologue, a reference for languages of the world driven by Christian
missionary colonizing work. Ethnologue gives a count of languages based on chang-
ing sociopolitical considerations, because the number cannot be based on purely
lexical and structural characteristics.
Psycholinguistic research describes persistent simultaneous activation of what
are regarded a priori as the two separate languages of bilinguals (Costa, 2005;
Kroll & Bialystok, 2013). We question the framing of these findings in terms of
socially constructed notions of separate languages and see instead a lack of dis-
crete correspondence in the mental representation of bilinguals between their
two presumably separate named languages (Otheguy et al., 2015). We use this
perspective as a point of entry for stressing that the sociopolitically imposed con-
cept of a named language has little to do with how racialized bilinguals language
or, for that matter, how any bilingual languages (García, 2009; García & Li, 2014).
This ignorance of the languaging of bilinguals often leads to the marginalization of
the linguistic practices of racialized bilinguals. That is, we maintain that bilingual
people language with a unitary, not dual, repertoire from which they draw features
that are useful for the communicative act in which they are engaged (Otheguy
et al., 2015, 2019). We refer to this conceptualization of language and bilingualism
as translanguaging (García, 2009; García & Li, 2014; Li, 2011, 2018). Translan-
guaging rejects abyssal thinking; it is a way to understand the vast complexity and
heterogeneity of language practices, avoiding their conception as problems and
their evaluation in the negative terms of the colonial imaginary line that values
only those socially situated as being above and making invisible those assigned to
being below. Translanguaging also leads us to include in the study of language the
role of meaning-making resources long considered outside of language – as simply
para-linguistic or pragmatic. How bilinguals deploy the sights, sounds, objects, and
instruments at their disposal is important in our conception of language (Li, 2018;
Li & Lin, 2019; Zhu et al., 2019).
Named languages do not simply exist as neutral objects but rather are brought
into existence through sociopolitical forces that are part of the broader (re)configu-
ration of the world that serves dominant interests (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007).
This difference between existing and being brought into existence is not simply
a terminological one. On the contrary, the abyssal thinking that produces strict
boundaries around named languages co-articulates with raciolinguistic ideologies
that perpetually stigmatize the language practices of racialized bilingual students
(Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa, 2019; Rosa & Flores, 2017).
We argue that raciolinguistic ideologies undergird the notion that racialized
bilinguals lack a construct known in schools as “academic language.” Efforts to
purportedly teach racialized students to use academic language are fundamentally
flawed. These efforts emerge from abyssal thinking claiming that there is an induc-
tively established set of features that defines academic language that distinguishes
it from non-academic language. But all we have, in fact, is the a priori category
of academic language – assumed, not discovered – deductively supported by a
meager number of defining shibboleths.
Because of the impossibility of clearly dividing language into academic and non-
academic, attempts to identify detectable linguistic characteristics of academic
language tend to stem from idealized representations of texts produced mostly
by white monolingual English users occupying a socially dominant position. This
does not take into account myriad language traditions, or even ostensibly aca-
demic traditions that encompass the humanities and some social sciences – poetry,
spoken word, narratives, novels, essays (García & Solorza, 2021). In addition,
these efforts erase the inherent heterogeneity and defiance of boundaries found
in all language practices, including as a matter of fact those deemed academic
and standardized (Flores, 2020; Guerra, 2016; Martínez & Mejía, 2019). As a
result, even when racialized and/or bilingual writers have attained recognition by
having their work included in the school curriculum, the language practices of
the authors are tagged as exceptional and unique. This means that their works
are never placed at the core of the curriculum but are presented as written in, for
example, African American “dialect,” or as exceptionally including English and
another language. In other words, these works, even when room is made for them
in academic spaces, are defined as in opposition to those works whose language is
regarded as normative and standard.
This relegates racialized bilinguals’ languaging to a place outside the school
norm, resulting in their subjection to remedial educational approaches. These
approaches are guided by the notion that the so-called achievement gap is the
result of racialized students’ purported failure to master so-called academic lan-
guage (Flores, 2020; García & Otheguy, 2018). For example, in the United States,
the assessment of five-year-old children entering kindergarten consists, for the
most part, of having them orally describe pictures. One of us once observed the
case of Margarita, a Mexican American girl born in the United States who was
asked to describe a picture of a mother making cookies from dough. In this assess-
ment, the word dough was assigned more points than the word cookie because it
was considered academic language. Margarita was very familiar with her mother
making tortillas with masa, but she had never made cookies with her mother or
used the word dough. So even though she could describe the picture of the mother
making cookies, she could not come up with the word dough. As a result of numer-
ous examples of this kind, she was put in an English as a Second Language (ESL)
program and kept out of the school’s dual-language bilingual program, which was
reserved for those students who tested as “gifted and talented,” and thus inap-
propriate for a child considered to have limited vocabulary. In the ESL program,
Margarita was not challenged because the focus was simply on having her add
more presumably academic vocabulary to her lexicon. Our question has always
been: What would have happened to Margarita if she had been challenged by
teachers and classmates who believed in what she could do with language? What
if she had been engaged in funny, imaginative, and challenging work that built on
her existing linguistic and cultural knowledge?
This marginalization of racialized language practices connects to broader
colonial histories that have questioned the linguistic competence of racialized
communities as part of their dehumanization (Rosa, 2016). Indeed, in the direct
genealogy of the concept of academic language is the concept of semilingualism,
which suggested that racialized bilingual students failed to develop native-like pro-
ficiency in any language (Cummins, 1979; Skutnabb- Kangas & Toukomaa, 1976).
Combining our linguistic analysis of the elusiveness of an inductively identifiable
academic language with our analysis of this racialized history, we have connected
the ideological construction of semilingualism and the subsequent emergence of
discussions of academic language to what Flores and Rosa (2015) have called
the “white listening subject.” Of course, a white listening subject is not always
just listening, nor is it only white. The term refers to those who inhabit positions
of institutionalized power that are produced and maintained, on the one hand,
through structures of white supremacy, and on the other hand, through modes
of perceiving and apprehending language, including but not limited to listening.
Through the conceptualization of the white listening subject, Flores and Rosa
make explicit the effect that the construction of a subjectivity based on claimed,
ascribed, and socialized racial superiority has had in deeming the language prac-
tices of racialized bilinguals as inferior and non-academic. Flores and Rosa have
shown that this assessment of inferiority persists in many instances independently
of the actual structural features underlying linguistic practices.
In short, our contention is that academic language is not a set of empirically
derived linguistic features but rather a category that emerges as part of broader
raciolinguistic ideologies that overdetermine racialized communities as linguisti-
cally deficient and unacademic, even as the concept of academic language itself
remains impossible to define objectively. That is, racialized populations are often
perceived by the white listening subject as using non-academic language that
needs to be corrected even when engaging in ostensibly the same linguistic prac-
tices that are unmarked for white subjects.
We need to critically examine how narrow sociopolitical definitions of lan-
guage imposed by nation-states and schools have little to do with the languaging
of racialized bilinguals. We resist evaluating the language practices of racialized
bilingual students based on norms that overdetermine them as linguistically
lacking. And we seek to bring attention to the fact that these communities are
already engaging in the types of meaning-making processes that schools demand
(Martínez, 2018; Martínez & Mejía, 2019). Our position regarding the spurious
nature of named and academic language does not constitute a barrier to the crea-
tion of high standards. On the contrary, we make these claims to open up the
possibilities for pedagogical approaches that reject the abyssal thinking that has
produced dichotomous framings of language. We favor a focus on language archi-
tecture (Flores, 2020) that supports racialized bilingual students by recognizing
that they already have the linguistic knowledge that is required for school-related
tasks. Our position is that their existing cultural and linguistic knowledge is nei-
ther a barrier nor a bridge to academic language, but rather legitimate on its own
terms, and a necessary component in ensuring these students’ success on school-
related tasks (Flores, 2020). We maintain that our efforts have to be directed at
challenging the colonial line that has been produced through abyssal thinking,
and not directed to helping students accept the line and its pernicious strictures.
Rather than approaching education for racialized bilingual students in relation
to a perpetually deferred future in which they will eventually acquire linguistic
legitimacy, it is crucial to center the linguistic knowledge and broader skills these
students possess in the present, which have been distorted and erased through
abyssal thinking. The constructs of named languages and academic language have
for too long been barriers to a meaningful education in the present for too many
racialized bilinguals. We are not suggesting that the solution is to reframe racial-
ized bilingual students’ existing language architecture as academic. Instead, we are
indicating that the attempt to sort language practices into those deemed academic
and those deemed non-academic is fundamentally flawed, both as a project of
linguistics, and as a project of promoting racial equity, with the two always going
hand in hand in our activism and scholarship.
Our Understanding of Bilingualism

Scholarship on the bilingualism of groups and on bilingual education grew in
the mid-twentieth century, spurred by research in Québec that then impacted
the United States and Europe. At that time, Canada and the United States were
dealing with different sources of political unrest. In Canada, the struggle in the
1960s was between two white settler linguistic communities – Anglophones and
Francophones – ignoring Indigenous and other racialized communities (Haque,
2012). In contrast, the struggle in the United States was in terms of the civil
rights of racialized bilingual communities, especially Mexican Americans, Native
Americans, and Puerto Ricans. In the Canadian case, language was foregrounded
in the struggle for political power between the two white communities, culminat-
ing in Francophones gaining political power in Québec, a region in which they
were the numerical majority. Immersion bilingual programs designed by scholars
at McGill University (see, for example, Lambert & Tucker, 1972) responded to
the needs of socially and economically powerful Anglophone communities that
wanted their children to become bilingual. That is, the focus was on developing
what was labeled additive bilingualism, with French added to English. In the U.S.
case, however, language was one of many factors in the struggle over civil rights for
racialized people facing marginalization and exclusion. For Mexican Americans,
Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans who were involved in the early civil rights
movement, education for their children was not solely about language but about
their rights to fair housing, jobs, income, as well as their right to educate their own
children (Flores, 2016, 2017; Flores & García, 2017). For Mexican Americans
and Puerto Ricans, the intent was never simply to add English, but to ensure that
Latinx children, as colonized people, were able to use their bilingualism to exer-
cise their rightful participation in society and in education (Otheguy, 1982). It is
true that the bilingual education that was institutionalized in the United States as
the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 was meant to advance the shift to English of
Latinx people (García, 2009), promoting what was termed by Canadian scholars
as subtractive bilingualism (Lambert, 1974). On the ground, however, bilingual
education efforts of Latinx communities were not focused on bilingualism in isola-
tion, whether additive or subtractive, but rather were meant to advance the com-
munity’s overall well-being (Flores & García, 2017; García & Sung, 2018).
The notion of additive bilingualism took root in bilingual education programs
all over the world, bolstering the colonial lines that had been established between
dominant and non-dominant people and their languages and histories, as well as
between native and non-native students. To combat the form of abyssal thinking
that continually stigmatizes colonized populations’ language practices as deficient
based on a static notion of linguistic legitimacy, we conceptualize bilingualism as
“dynamic” (García, 2009). Dynamic bilingualism does not start from monolingual
end points from which languages are added or subtracted. It starts from racialized
bilingual students’ own languaging and broader knowledge systems that exist
in what Anzaldúa (1987) has called the entre mundos/borderlands. This space
between worlds is where our racialized bilingual students live fully, and where
our educational practice is centered. The continued focus on additive bilingual-
ism, as opposed to additive schooling (Bartlett & García, 2011), fails to account
for how, without broader structural transformations, the bilingualism of racialized
bilingual students will be perceived as deficient by those positioned as white listen-
ing subjects.
Furthermore, when bilingualism is described as simply additive, bilingual
speech is often framed in relation to two discrete language systems. Jim Cummins,
one of the most long-standing and prominent bilingual education scholars, first
introduced the notion of cross-linguistic transfer (Cummins, 1979; Cummins &
California State Department of Education, 1981), that is, the idea that linguistic
skills in one language transfer to another language. Cummins’ theory rests on the
concept that there is an interdependence, or a common underlying proficiency,
between named languages. The two named languages are entities with linguistic
features that are viewed as separate, even though language proficiency is common
to both languages. But we believe that the notion of cross-linguistic transfer, when
both languages are conceived as separate and autonomous entities, has proven
harmful to the education of racialized bilinguals.
Our position has emerged from work in classrooms. We have often heard teach-
ers ask: When and how does transfer occur? How can I accelerate transfer? Teach-
ers who think this way take up what is said to be the bilingual child’s first language
(L1) simply as a scaffold to develop what they conceive of as their second lan-
guage (L2). The focus of the teachers thus remains on the teaching of one or two
named languages, and not on the process of teaching racialized bilingual children;
in other words, the teachers are concerned more with language than with chil-
dren. The result of this pattern of teacher interest continues to be that racialized
bilingual students are often rendered as inadequate in one language or another,
or even in both, with some teachers insisting that students have not reached the
appropriate threshold in their L1 to be able to transfer knowledge to their L2. In
our different proposal, the language acts of racialized bilinguals always leverage
their translanguaging because students are acting not with one language system
or another, but with a unitary network of meanings. Nothing is being transferred;
everything is being accessed.
In line with the code-centered view of cross-linguistic transfer that we reject is
a code-centered view of what is seen as the simultaneous use of multiple named
languages that has typically been referred to in the literature as code-switching.
Gumperz (1982) defined code-switching as “the juxtaposition within the same
speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical
systems or subsystems” (p. 59). In justifying this language use, many scholars of
bilingualism have long insisted – benignly in their eyes – that this behavior is
ruled-governed (MacSwan, 2017; Poplack, 1980). However, very early on, racial-
ized bilingual scholars argued that the proposed orderliness and constraints on
code-switching, well-meaning as they were, did not correspond to their observa-
tions of practices in the community. For example, the Language Policy Task Force
of the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños under the leadership of Pedro Pedraza
et al. (1980) argued that in the East Harlem Puerto Rican community they stud-
ied, they did not find such constraints. We ourselves have examined, for exam-
ple, the code-switching constraints offered by MacSwan (2017) and found that
in our own homes and lives these constraints did not always hold (Otheguy et al.,
2019). Consequently, we have argued that MacSwan’s claim that the repertoire
of a bilingual person must also contain what he calls language-specific internal
differentiation, that is, that there must be two lexico-grammatical systems, does
not hold up when confronted with the bilingual practices that we experience in
many of our communities and homes. Our concern is that the insistence on the
difference between “grammatical” and “ungrammatical” code-switching is yet
another mechanism for marginalizing the language practices of racialized bilingual
students, many of whose daily language practices would be considered, from such
a perspective, ungrammatical.
Our account of the languaging of bilinguals, what we have called their trans-
languaging (García & Li, 2014; Li, 2018), thus goes beyond the notion of cross-
linguistic transfer (see, for example, Figure 1.1 in García & Li, 2014), as well as
beyond the notion of code-switching (Otheguy et al., 2015, 2019). Both notions
clash with our proposal that bilinguals do language with a unitary linguistic system.
Our proposal advocates effacing the line of cognitive demarcation purportedly
separating the languages of the bilingual, a line that, born of abyssal thinking, is
sustained by hegemonic sociocultural structures and ideologies but not by psycho-
linguistic reality. Because of the unitary nature of bilingual repertoires, assessment
in one named language or another, or even in both separately, can never tell us the
full picture of what bilingual children know and are able to do.
Since the emergence of translanguaging scholarship, some have taken up the
term in ways that we regard as unfortunate, since they hold on to the classificatory
distinction between named languages that reproduces abyssal thinking. This is the
case, for example, of MacSwan’s (2017) call for multilingual translanguaging. This is
also the case of Cummins’ cross-linguistic translanguaging theory (CTT) (Cummins,
2021a, 2021b) which distinguishes his position from the way he refers to ours
as unitary translanguaging theory. CTT follows Cummins’ (2017) proposal of the
term “active bilingualism,” which emphasizes the agency of bilinguals while hold-
ing on to the concept of additive bilingualism and cross-linguistic transfer. These
approaches reify the presumption of discrete languages that arose from colonialism
and nation-building efforts, as well as give credence to the imaginary line imposed
by colonial logics, enabling the continued identification of racialized bilinguals’
language practices as fundamentally deficient when compared to those of domi-
nant monolingual language users.
For us, the unitary repertoire of bilinguals, that is, their translanguaging, serves
as a point of entry for identifying the inherent heterogeneity in all language prac-
tices (Guerra, 2016). That is, by beginning from the perspective that bi-/multilin-
gualism is the norm, the translingual orientation is able to show that all language
users leverage their repertoire in ways that are not compartmentalized into dif-
ferent grammars and modes. We frame this approach as a strategy for challenging
abyssal thinking and raciolinguistic ideologies, enabling us to place our views in
a broader social justice frame that not only gives racialized bilinguals the same
opportunities to communicate and learn as their white monolingual peers, but also
centers racialized bilingual students’ repertoires and lifeways rather than attempt-
ing to remediate them.
Our Understanding of Education for Racialized Bilinguals

Normative approaches to language and education continue to generate absences
and failures. For years, we have witnessed how the much-discussed principle of
one-language-at-a-time in language classrooms and bilingual education is hardly
ever applied. This has been documented not only in the United States (Martinez
et al., 2015; Tian & Link, 2019) and the United Kingdom (Creese & Blackledge,
2010; Li, 2014), but also in Hong Kong (Lin & He, 2017), Puerto Rico (Mazak &
Herbas-Donoso, 2014), South Africa (Makalela, 2017; McKinney & Tyler, 2019;
Prinsloo & Krause, 2019), Malaysia (Rajendram, 2021), Nepal (Phyak, 2018), and
many other places around the world. The question for us has been why, despite all
the evidence of translanguaging as a productive frame for the actual behavioral
norm in schools and communities throughout the world, does applied linguistic
scholarship continue to insist on language separation as the most important char-
acteristic of a language classroom? In an attempt to challenge this tendency in the
field, our thinking around pedagogical practices has attempted to move beyond
what in school is called one language or another as if these were bounded enti-
ties (García et al., 2017; García & Li, 2014; Li, 2011, 2018). To help teachers
think beyond languages, we have found it useful to provide space for them to criti-
cally reflect on the pedagogical implications of shifting their understanding from
a focus on cross-linguistic transfer to leveraging the emergent network of mean-
ings of racialized bilingual children. Of course, racialized bilingual children may,
on certain occasions, have to produce texts in one named language or the other,
depending on the teaching context. But the teachers with whom we have worked
understand that when allowed to act on texts as thinkers, listeners, speakers,
readers, and writers, racialized bilinguals bring their whole emergent network of
meaning into the texts (García, 2020; García & Kleifgen, 2019; Seltzer, 2019a).
Pedagogical practices informed by this shift in perspective build on a long tra-
dition of work that has critiqued the strict separation of languages, especially in
the teaching of colonized populations (for sources and examples, see García & Li,
2014, pp. 56–60). Indeed, it is important to point out that the original use of the
term translanguaging, trawsieithu in Welsh, referred to a “bilingual instructional
approach” for Welsh/English bilingual students where they would use one lan-
guage for input and another for output (Baker, 2001; Lewis et al., 2012a, 2012b;
Williams, 1996). Danling Fu (2003) proposed what she called “a bilingual process
approach” to teach writing to Chinese emergent bilingual students. And Cummins
(2007) recommended “bilingual instructional strategies,” proposing, for example,
the creation of “dual language books.”
Our shift from a focus on separate bilingual practices to unitary emergent net-
works of meaning moves pedagogical practices beyond simply the “dual.” As stated
earlier, we recognize that named languages are sociopolitical categorizations that
shape the very fabric of modern society; but we also understand that these named
languages do not correspond to discrete dual linguistic systems. With this in mind,
a translanguaging pedagogical design does not require bilingual students to hold
their named languages as separate cognitive linguistic entities or to use one of
them for the purpose of learning the other. Educators, then, are free to encourage
bilingual students to leverage their entire semiotic repertoire and to select from
it the features and modes that are most appropriate to building their worlds and
understanding.
Li (2011) has called for the opening up of translanguaging spaces to confront
the mono and dual logic operating in classrooms. Many other scholars around
the world have extended the theory/practice of translanguaging (Blackledge &
Creese, 2014; Busch, 2014; Canagarajah, 2011; Cenoz & Gorter, 2015; Fu
et al., 2019; Makalela, 2017; Paulsrud et al., 2017; Pennycook, 2017; Scibetta &
Carbonara, 2020). We reject language exclusion and separation in the education
of racialized bilinguals in order to bring down barriers that prevent these students
from making legitimate use of their full meaning-making resources. We take criti-
cal note of the fact that students from dominant white groups are permitted to
use their full linguistic repertoire to participate in foreign- or second-language
activities, in content and language integrated learning (CLIL), and in bilingual
education programs, whereas, in contrast, racialized bilinguals are discouraged or
even prohibited from making use of their full repertoire.
Our specific focus on the experiences of racialized bilinguals also affords us a
point of reference for the concept of translanguaging that differs from the con-
cept of plurilingualism that has been popularized in the European context. Like
translanguaging, plurilingualism has challenged idealized notions of bounded lan-
guages and of their strict separation, focusing instead on the learner’s ability to
use a repertoire of several named languages to varying degrees as part of what is
understood as intercultural action (see, for example, Coste, 2000). Yet, because
plurilingual policies in education evolved from a need by the European Union to
have a common European citizen who could communicate across languages to
trade, sell, and enlarge markets (Hélot & Cavalli, 2017), these European educa-
tional policies are rooted in sociopolitical dynamics that differ greatly from those
that inform our decolonial perspective (García & Otheguy, 2019). Plurilingualism
and translanguaging have emerged from what Mignolo (2000) has called differ-
ent loci of enunciation, with plurilingualism responding to global economies, and
translanguaging offering a way to delink from the logics derived from colonialism
and global capitalism.
We are aware that any depoliticized approach to multilingualism lacking an
explicit social justice perspective (no matter whether named plurilingualism or
even if called translanguaging) will contribute to the production of neoliberal
subjects in ways that exacerbate existing global racial and class inequities (Flores,
2013). In contrast, translanguaging for us issued from our locus of enunciation,
and informed by decolonial thinking, places questions of equity for racialized
bilinguals and broader societal inequities at the center of the analysis. Our equity-
inspired, translanguaging approach also allows us to bring attention to the impact
of racial and socioeconomic segregation on the quality of bilingual education pro-
grams (Flores & McAuliffe, 2022).
Our Understanding of Pedagogical Practices

We conceptualize pedagogy as more than a series of “strategies,” seeing it instead
as a way to create in-school spaces that leverage the language and knowledge
systems of racialized bilingual students. To repeat, we recognize that named lan-
guages are sociopolitical categorizations that have shaped societies, and, as such,
must be acknowledged and made part of teaching in schools. However, as we have
also mentioned, we recognize – and work with teachers and schools to recognize –
that these named languages do not neatly correspond to the mental represen-
tations nor the language practices of racialized bilingual speakers (or of any
speakers). Relatedly, we have seen in our work with teachers and students that the
ideologies often accompanying named languages – and that inform such seemingly
commonsense notions as native speaker, standard language, first/second language,
and academic language – can be disrupted through pedagogical approaches that
recognize and support students’ dynamic languaging and ways of knowing.
Teachers’ engagement with translanguaging theory emboldens them to design
instruction by building centrally on the linguistic gifts they know their students
possess. These gifts are often stifled by ideologies that see languages as homogene-
ous entities; that conceive of bilingualism as two sharply separate named languages;
and that formulate language policies that are reproductive of these instances of
monoglossic ideologies. Flores (2020) drew from his ethnographic research in a
majority-Latinx elementary school to describe the framework he calls language
architecture. Instead of organizing curriculum and instruction around remediating
perceived lack of academic language in racialized bilingual students – a perception
rooted in raciolinguistic ideologies that Flores takes pains to critique – teachers
develop, with the support of researchers and teacher-educators, “new listening/
reading subject positions that recognize the complex linguistic knowledge that
their students have developed as part of their lived experience and make this cen-
tral to the work that they are doing in classrooms” (Flores, 2020, p. 24). In taking
up these new positions, teachers can perceive their students as language architects
who already “navigate socially constructed linguistic boundaries on a daily basis”
and, thus, “have unique affordances” (p. 25) for understanding many of the lan-
guage and literacy practices expected of them in schools and on high-stakes exams.
For example, Flores describes a unit of instruction in Ms. Lopez’s second-grade
Spanish-English bilingual classroom centered on the book Abuela by Arthur
Dorros. Flores documents the sophisticated attention to language that students
brought to their close readings of the text, highlighting how this kind of reading –
a skill students are expected to demonstrate on standards- based assessments – was
part of “the language architecture that Latinx children from bilingual communities
engage in on a daily basis [that] is legitimate on its own terms and is already
aligned to [the standards]” (p. 28).
Our school-based research shows that the teachers with whom we collaborate
are eager to take up theories that name and give voice to the work that many
of them already do in the classroom (Flores, 2020; García & Kleyn, 2016; Selt-
zer, 2019a, 2019b). They are also eager to engage with these theories in ways
that extend their practice, help them ask critical questions, and reflect on their
positionalities and pedagogies anew. In our collaborations with teachers, we have
found that as they explore new theories and take them up in their pedagogical
practices, they also make them their own, shaping them in ways that align with
their teaching. It is this reshaping of theory through practice – and through con-
tinuing collaborations with researchers and teacher-educators – that pushes the
theory forward and creates more dynamic, sustaining, and equitable learning envi-
ronments for racialized bilingual students.
Conclusion
Our understandings of language and education are framed from the inside out, and
from our place on the side of the line obscured by hegemonies and ideologies that
render racialized bilingual communities as deviant, deficient, and in need of reme-
diation (Flores et al., 2020). We argue that any meaningful shift in the education
of language-minoritized students must start from valuing the languaging and ways
of knowing that prevail in families, communities, and yes, in many classrooms. By
taking up the lens of translanguaging, the ways of languaging of racialized bilingual
students can be seen, not as deviations from a monoglossic norm, but as those of
full human beings who – like all human beings – make meaning by drawing from
complex, interrelated linguistic-semiotic and multimodal repertoires grounded in
deeply valued cultural-historical roots. This important shift in the perception of
racialized bilinguals can disrupt oppressive raciolinguistic ideologies that thrive on
the dominant side of the abyssal line.
We have purposely come up with new terms. We speak and write about racial-
ized bilinguals, raciolinguistic ideologies, translanguaging, and a critical translingual
approach. As Mignolo (2000) has taught us: “An other tongue is the necessary
condition for ‘an other thinking’ and for the possibility of moving beyond the
defense of national languages and national ideologies – both of which have been
operating in complicity with imperial powers and imperial conflicts” (p. 249). To
be sure, perceptions of the language of racialized bilinguals have been shaped by
ideologies that are not always reducible to nation-state or economic dynamics.
But these perceptions are nevertheless part of broader racial-colonial distinctions
that separate out legitimate from illegitimate ways of being in the world. In this
imperial context, these distinctions permit the exclusion of minoritized popula-
tions from privileges granted to dominant populations, by ideologically construct-
ing the minoritized population as inferior and undeserving of rights and resources.
Racial-colonial distinctions also inform pernicious characterizations of the work
of scholars targeted by racism and white supremacy as incomprehensible, political,
ideological, superficial, trendy, or otherwise lacking in scientific validity or objec-
tive truth.
Our work emerges from heridas3 which we have both observed and experienced
as learners and teachers. The force of these injuries as evidence of the need for
fundamentally different educational approaches is not diminished because some
on the receiving end, as in our case, have now achieved positions of relative com-
fort and local power and influence. We have witnessed the dynamic interplay
among knowledge systems, words, and languages. And through this experience,
we have sought to open up a space of possibility, as we attempt to unsettle the
abyssal line that we have inherited from colonial logics about race, language, and
broader knowledges and lifeways.
Our path has not been linear. We have had to find the spaces, the cracks that
the late Lillian Weber so eloquently spoke about at the City College of New York
in the 1980s, so as to connect our experiencias personales4 with scholarly theory and
educational practice. We know that our work on its own will not lead to the kinds
of social transformations that may be needed for the creation of educational prac-
tices that we have advocated for and illustrated here. Perhaps our work merely
creates ripples that can contribute to broader salutary effects on racialized bilin-
guals and their teachers. As Mignolo and Walsh (2018, p. 8) remind us: “Deco-
loniality . . . does not imply the absence of coloniality, but rather the serpentine
movement toward possibilities of other modes of being, thinking, knowing, sensing
and living, that is, an otherwise in plural.”
Notes
1 We focus in this chapter on the historical processes of white European colonization and
their continued effect on those who now live in the United States and the United King-
dom. We recognize, of course, that the processes of colonization and dominance over
others have not been solely carried out by white Europeans.
2 The decolonial theory and approaches that we take up in this chapter have been
advanced by scholars such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Walter Mignolo, and Aníbal
Quijano, whose work we cite here. They have also been developed by other Latin Ameri-
can scholars, such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Enrique Dussel, Arturo Escobar, Ramón
Grosfoguel, María Lugones, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, among others. In the Asian
context, Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) has been advocating a similar approach that he calls
“deimperialization.”
3 Heridas means wounds or injuries.
4 Experiencias personales means personal experiences.
Acknowledgments
This chapter first appeared as an article: Ofelia García, Nelson Flores, Kate
Seltzer, Li Wei, Ricardo Otheguy, and Jonathan Rosa (2021), Rejecting abyssal
thinking in the language and education of racialized bilinguals: A manifesto, Criti-
cal Inquiry in Language Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/15427587.2021.1935957.
We express our appreciation to Taylor and Francis for permission to reprint a slightly
modified version of this article as a chapter in this World Yearbook of Education.
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Section 2
Coloniality, Development, and

Racialization in Education
6 Education for Subordination
Youth and the Afterlives of Coloniality
and Racialization in Africa
Krystal Strong, Rehana Odendaal, and
Christiana Kallon Kelly
A 2021 report jointly published by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
and the African Union (AU) proposes that the progress of Africa’s children and
youth “is the progress of the world” (UNICEF, 2021, p. 3). This assertion rests
on a daunting reality that has stymied research and policy concerning youth and
development for decades: Africa has both the youngest population and the highest
rates of educational inequality in the world. Nearly 70% of Africa’s population is
under the age of 35 years – the upper age limit of youth recognized by the AU –
and by 2050, it is estimated that Africa will be home to over a billion children
and youth under the age of 18 years. Africa’s overwhelmingly youthful popula-
tion faces the most extreme forms of educational exclusion, even with significant
improvements in access, which increased primary school completion by 50% and
doubled secondary school completion between 1970 and 2010 (Evans & Acosta,
2021). Africa still makes up more than 40% of the global primary and secondary
out-of-school population, and for many of the children and youth who do have
access, recent research characterizes their educational experience as “in school
but not learning” (Porter, 2015).
In the prescriptions of international policymakers and development organiza-
tions like UNICEF and the AU, the global progress promised, or denied, by the
advancement of African children and youth depends on education. In their logic,
it is only with investment in education that Africa’s youth “can be a powerful
source of growth and progress” (UNICEF, 2021, p. 3). While the social benefit of
widening educational opportunities in Africa, and any society, is hardly debatable,
this unquestioned faith in educational development as conceived by international
development actors obscures the central role education has itself played in pro-
ducing the conditions that marginalize African youth.
Across centuries of Western imperialism in Africa, formal education has been
imposed and embraced as a mechanism for economic and social development,
functioning as a pretext for colonial, state, and international development inter-
ventions alike. Beginning in the nineteenth century, European and American mis-
sion and colonial government schools accelerated the conquest of Africa. With
the aim of “civilizing” and establishing social control, education established in
this formative period was designed to prepare African people for dispossession
and inferiority. Newly independent African states of the 1950s and 1960s, which
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-9
104 Krystal Strong et al.
prioritized mass education in their development plans, had to negotiate the dual
challenges of nation building and decolonization on a foundation of colonial,
white supremacist structures. Today, education remains at the center of policies
advanced by African nations, multilateral organizations, and international devel-
opment regimes. However, their policies fail to adequately reckon with the con-
tinued impact of colonialism in African societies or to identify these educational
inequities explicitly as a consequence of centuries of racial domination.
This chapter examines the afterlives of coloniality and racialization in educa-
tion and youth experiences in Africa. We begin by introducing theorizations of
racialization and colonialism in Africa, which reveal the central role of schools
in creating conditions of uneven development and forms of difference that struc-
ture the lives and possibilities of youth. Then, using case studies of former British
colonies, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South Africa, we explore how racialization
and coloniality intersect in educational experiences in contexts shaped by dif-
ferent histories of racialization and colonialism, which produced forms of social
difference and uneven development related to race, class, ethnicity, gender, and
region. We argue that educational development in Africa must contend with these
legacies – and, more importantly, the demands of past and present struggles to
undo these forms of inequality – in order to advance education that is socially
transformative and furthers the interests of African people.
Racialization in Africa
“The idea of Africa” is a racialized construct invented by the West (Mudimbe,
1994, p. xii), which has served as “scaffolding for an entire intellectual tradition
promoting the idea of European and ‘western’ superiority” and African inferiority
(Pierre, 2018, p. 213). Race is what constituted the “defining signifier of differ-
ence” between colonizer and native and, through its rationalization of relations of
domination and subordination, race “reconciled Europe’s ‘civilizing mission’ with
[the] violence of colonialism” (Mahmud, 1999, p. 1224). Yet, race is astonish-
ingly absent from most historic and contemporary analyses of Africa, outside of
“South African exceptionalism” (Mamdani, 1996).1 As Jemima Pierre observes,
“Africa stands in for race but yet, paradoxically, race does not exist in Africa”
(Pierre, 2013, pp. xii–xiii). Against perspectives that suggest that race does not
matter in Africa, or that somehow race only impacted African people in the New
World, the concept of racialization, as defined by Omi and Winant (1994), allows
us to understand race as constituted through a dynamic set of historical, social,
and material processes of racial categorization that produce multiple, shifting, and
even contradictory social, cultural, and political meanings. Thus, a “systematic
approach to studying African phenomenon” must interrogate the interconnected
legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonization of Africa, rec-
ognizing that “the concepts and ideas of race, ethnicity or tribe, nationality, etc.,
are only labels for different aspects of the same broad sociopolitical process” of
empire making (Pierre, 2020, p. S221).
Education for Subordination 105
White supremacist ideas of racial hierarchy and difference were core to the
structures and practices of colonial administration in Africa. The “dual man-
date” philosophy of Frederick Lugard, chief architect of indirect rule in Africa, is
emblematic of this relationship. In proposing a philosophical justification for the
occupation of Africa and strategies for political control of African people, Lugard
notoriously described the intellect of “the typical African of this race-type” to be
“nearer to the animal world than that of the European or Asiatic,” authorizing
racial domination with the logic of racial hierarchy (1922, p. 70). Through colo-
nialism, differences that existed in African societies, such as those related to eth-
nicity, clan, kinship, gender, sexuality, and age, became racialized, codified, and
policed within colonial structures. Mahmood Mamdani (1996) argues that apart-
heid was the “generic form of the colonial state in Africa” (p. 8). In urban contexts
where colonial structures of racial domination were often most overt, “direct des-
potism” (direct rule) differentiated civil freedoms among settlers and indigenes,
reproducing racial identity in citizens and non-citizens. In contexts that remained
under the authority of state-appointed traditional rulers, the control tactics of
“decentralized despotism” (or indirect rule) reproduced ethnicity among colonial
“subjects.” But rather than view the former system as “racialized” and the latter as
“tribalized,” Mamdani persuades us to understand that racial domination in Africa
was also mediated through ethnicity and ethnically organized local power. Under-
standing race and, specifically, racial domination as the foundation and objective
of colonialism in Africa, rather than an exceptional expression, is essential to inter-
preting education as a colonial strategy of racial domination and a structure of the
continued racialization and marginalization of African youth today.
Schools and the Re/production of Difference

Education was a gateway mechanism through which African people were incor-
porated into the colonial system, given the centrality of schools to the “civilizing
mission” and demands for trained natives to occupy intermediary roles in colonial
bureaucracy, industry, and trade. As Ruddell (1982) notes, the impetus for colo-
nial educational policy in Africa was “an entirely racial one” (p. 300). The impe-
rial curriculum channeled “potent, consistent, and systematic negative images of
Africans to Africans” to inculcate “appropriate attitudes of dominance and defer-
ence” (Mangan, 1993, p. 6). Adapted education, the prevailing British educational
approach in Africa up until World War II, exemplifies the more insidious logics of
race and racial subordination in colonial education (Bude, 1983). As the name
implies, adapted education professed to offer learning “adapted to the capabili-
ties and conditions of Africans.” But, in reality, these capabilities justified colonial
administrators in denying the literary education demanded by the nascent colonial-
educated African elite in favor of the industrial education that was deemed more
appropriate for colonized Africans, drawing upon the arguments used to advance
the Hampton-Tuskegee model of industrial education for emancipated Black
people in the U.S. South (West, 1992).2 Emphasizing the seemingly innocuous
“Simples” of “health, home life training, industry (including agriculture) and rec-
reation” (Küster, 2007), adapted education had the agenda of preparing “Africans
for the reality of their station in colonial society” and ensuring that “there would be
no disproportionate African advance” (Ruddell, 1982, p. 300). Adapted education,
thus, makes plain the function of colonial education to be the maintenance of the
racial order established through the plunder of Africa for the purpose of European
development and African under-development (Rodney, 1972).
Education also had the compound effect of institutionalizing socioeconomic
stratification through the imposition of a new class structure upon African
societies. With limited success in evangelizing through traditional rulers, from
the mid-nineteenth century, missionaries turned to youth as sources of conver-
sion, using formal education to entice younger generations to Christianity and,
by extension, colonial power. The (mostly) young men who became converts
anticipated that, with European control of Africa, imperial education would
allow them to circumvent the gerontocratic structures that concentrated power
in elders, enabling them to “earn a good living as well as exert their own influ-
ence” (Bassey, 1991, p. 38). Through the mid-twentieth century, primary-level
educational expansion, vocational training in government secondary schools and
higher colleges, and scholarships for university study in Europe and the United
States helped consolidate this “educated elite,” albeit consigning them to junior
positions within the colonial architecture (Ajayi, 1965). The new occupations
made possible through colonial education “represented one of the few alternative
avenues of social mobility operating independently of traditional modes of status
acquisition,” often allowing young educated men to wield greater influence than
elder officials and chiefs in conquered territories (Bassey, 2009, p. 31). Later, amid
rising nationalist struggles for self-governance of Africa by Africans after World
War II, it was to the educated elite that Europeans transferred power, trusting
that this group, with whom it had collaborated in the exploitation of the “unlet-
tered masses,” would “retain, strengthen and further promote the cultural, eco-
nomic and technological legacies of the colonial era and of the Western world”
(Ayandele, 1974, p. 2). In essence, they anticipated that the educated elite would
protect colonial interests, which had become their own class interests, as benefi-
ciaries of colonial power.
In addition to consolidating a racial capitalist order capable of reproducing
itself, educational development also established deliberate structures of uneven
development. To the extent that education was developed in colonies, it was not
the result of “an altruistic policy to provide expanded educational opportunities
for the African populace” (Bassey, 1991, p. 36). Nor was it principally aimed at
educating African people at all. For missionaries, education was a means to the
end of converting natives. For colonial governments, educational provision was
driven by the objective of social control, enacted by limiting access through the
“the denial of schooling to the majority of the African population” and limiting
provision through “adapted” curricula that had as its goal not attracting Africans
“away from the land into the modern sector of the colonial economy” (Ball, 1983,
pp. 243–245). In this sense, education was never intended to be broadly accessible
or to advance African interests and sovereignty. Educational development and
access followed colonial political strategy and alliances around land, resources,
ethnicity, gender, class, and religion. Across colonial territories, the education of
women “lagged far behind that of men” due to sexist policies that impeded their
advancement beyond primary education (Lamba, 1982). Schools were geographi-
cally concentrated in urban areas where colonial administration and commerce
were located, constraining educational access in contexts where European pres-
ence was limited. With the uneven spread of education across geographic areas
and ethnic groups, colonial schools “enlarged the bases of difference,” engendering
“divisive sentiments of inferiority and superiority” among ethnic groups based on
educational access (Davis & Kalu-Nwiwu, 2001, p. 5). These forms of stratifica-
tion based on uneven development have contributed to social fragmentation and
conflict even after the formal end of colonialism. Thus, in its reproduction of race,
class, and uneven development, education set the stage for forms of inequality
that are still conspicuous today.
Case Studies from British Colonized Africa

We turn now to three case studies of educational development in Africa, which
bring into focus structures of racialization, coloniality, and difference in the edu-
cational experiences of youth. We focus on Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South
Africa, nations of western and southern Africa colonized by Britain. Though by no
means comprehensive of the range of experiences and histories of colonialism that
were shaped by particularities of African social and political organization, land,
resources, and European strategies of conquest, these examples reveal the endur-
ing impact of colonialism on educational access, social mobility, gender equality,
racial and ethnic relations, and national development. We show how education in
Africa today reproduces racialized colonial structures and highlights struggles to
undo these forms of inequality.
Uneven Development in the Athens of West Africa

In constraining access to education and, thus, power along fault lines of difference,
colonial education institutionalized uneven development into the foundation of
the African nation-state. Sierra Leone, once the pinnacle of higher learning in
colonial Africa, now has some of the worst educational outcomes in the world.
Through the history of Sierra Leone’s educational development across the periods
of colonialism, nation building, civil war, and postwar reconstruction, we signal
the pernicious colonial legacies of consolidating forms of difference.
Sierra Leone is a small West African nation of roughly 7.8 million people, whose
racial and ethnic divisions have been key axes of educational development and
power. Though the nation’s two largest ethnic groups are the Themnes (35%)
and the Mendes (31%), economic and social power has disproportionately been
concentrated among two racial and ethnic minority groups. They are the Krio,
descendants of freed Africans from Britain and the Americas who resettled in
the capital of Freetown3 in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
and now make up 2% of the population; and a smaller Lebanese population that
has dominated commerce, including the diamond mining industry, since the early
twentieth century (Banya, 2015; Kaniki, 1973). Despite being minority groups,
the Krios and Lebanese have accumulated power through educational and eco-
nomic opportunities afforded to them in Freetown, the capital administratively
designated as “the colony,” in contrast with scarce opportunities granted to the
majority of Indigenous Sierra Leoneans living in rural areas differentiated as “the
protectorate” (Corby, 1990). This distinction between colony and protectorate
signals the unevenness in development, resources, and socioeconomic power that
would characterize political administration and educational expansion in Sierra
Leone throughout the colonial period.
Sierra Leone is recognized as the birthplace of secondary and tertiary colonial
education in West Africa. It is important to emphasize that formalized education
existed in Africa prior to European colonialism in various forms of Indigenous and
Islamic education, including world-renowned institutions of higher learning at the
University of Timbuktu in Mali (982 CE), University of Al-Karaouine in Morocco
(859 CE), and Al-Azhar University in Egypt (972 CE). However, Fourah Bay College
(FBC) founded in Freetown in 1827 was the first Western-style university to be
established in Africa and the only for nearly 40 years. In 1845, the Sierra Leone
Grammar School for Boys became the first secondary school in West Africa, and in
1849, the Annie Walsh Memorial School became the first girls’ secondary school in
all of Africa. With the demand for access to school growing among the burgeoning
educated elite, Sierra Leone was the center of educational attainment in the region,
becoming known as the Athens of West Africa “due to a strong focus within its cur-
riculum on learning Greek and Latin and the unparalleled success of its graduates
at home and abroad” (Paracka Jr., 2004, p. 5). But, as Banya notes, “The modern
education system in Sierra Leone was imported by alien rulers and was designed
chiefly to serve and support a colonial power and its economy” (1993, p. 165). As a
result, a separate and unequal education system emerged in the colony and the pro-
tectorate. In the capital, FBC catered to privileged Krio families from Freetown and
across West Africa as well as the children of wealthy African families from other
British colonies, who would go on to occupy elite professions as lawyers, medical
doctors, engineers, and teachers (Corby, 1990). By contrast, in the protectorate,
the Bo School was established in 1906 “to produce leaders of the hinterland peo-
ples who would be able to promote better agricultural methods but not educated
enough to encourage or lead opposition against the colonial government” (p. 320).
After political independence in 1961, the colonial legacies of uneven develop-
ment and class, geographic, and gender division proved durable. In the first three
decades, primary and secondary school enrollment increased exponentially, but
this growth was not even among regions, ethnic groups, or education levels. Fol-
lowing the precedent of colonial development, post-independence governments
“exacerbated the bias towards higher education as the urban middle and upper
classes who had benefited from the previous system became the political leaders,”
and universities received 50% of educational funding in the first Five-Year Plan
(Banya, 1993, p. 166). Structural adjustment programs of the 1980s instigated by
the International Monetary Fund and World Bank drastically cut public education
spending at the secondary and tertiary levels and rolled back educational gains,
contributing to “persistent illiteracy” and wide educational disparities between
urban and rural areas, regions, and genders (Banya, 1993). The nation’s children
and youth being “squeezed out of the educational system” by the introduction of
these neoliberal reforms is often cited as a major catalyst for the civil war from
1991 to 2002 (Zack-Williams, 2001, p. 77). The recent 2014 Ebola outbreak and
the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020 led to months of school closures,
further hampering educational equity.
In two decades of postwar reconstruction, state efforts have struggled to bridge
the gender, regional, and epistemic inequalities produced by colonial development
(Shepler & Williams, 2017). Under colonial education policies, only two schools
for girls, the Annie Walsh School and the Harford School, were created to train
the future wives of highly educated men. Disparities in girls’ access continued
during the postcolonial period as reduced government spending on education dis-
proportionately affected girls whose education was most likely to be terminated to
reduce spending in poor households. From 2010 to 2020, the government banned
pregnant girls and teenage mothers from enrolling in school, which exacerbated
barriers to education for girls, 30% of whom are likely to be married or have chil-
dren by the age of 18 years (Kiendrebeogo & Wodon, 2020). While the 2018
Free Quality School Education program has expanded access by covering school
fees, gender disparities in enrollment persist, and there are not enough secondary
schools to accommodate growth, especially in the rural areas. Today, there are
7,020 primary schools compared to only 1,600 junior secondary schools and 658
senior secondary schools across the country (Annual School Census, 2021).
More insidiously, school curricula still reflect colonial policies that restricted the
learning of Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices. However, many schools
today incorporate Indigenous practices like teachers wearing traditional fabrics
such as gara and ankara to school every Friday and students celebrating the Day
of the African Child on June 16. Schools like St. Francis Secondary School for
Boys in Makeni, founded in 1958 under colonialism as the “School of Languages,”
introduced the Indigenous language Themne as a core subject after previously only
teaching English, French, and Latin. Similarly, during a classroom observation of a
history and government lesson at the St. Joseph Secondary School for Girls in the
same region, students were learning about the traditional cloth worn by Mende
warriors during the fight for independence. In a follow-up interview with the
teacher, he observed, “in the area of History, the curriculum is doing well. We learn
about Sierra Leone history and other histories in the West Africa region” (interview
on November 3, 2019). These examples shed light on the official and everyday
ways Sierra Leoneans work to undo the legacy of colonial education by integrating
Indigenous practices and knowledge into formal schooling using “their own cultural
framework to reinterpret the meaning of the new schools and learning philosophies
that the colonial government and missionaries imposed on them” and affirm the
diverse racial, ethnic, and religious identities of students (Bledsoe, 1992, p. 182).
Higher Education and Contestations of Power
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation of nearly 215 million people, has both the
largest number of higher education institutions in Africa, including one-third of all
universities (Statista, 2020), and the widest education disparities, accounting for
20% of the world’s out-of-school population (BBC News, 2017). In Nigeria’s his-
tory of higher education development under colonial rule and post-independence
governments, we observe how higher learning produced this contradiction. On
the one hand, higher education under colonialism produced elite power in the
form of “a new breed of Africans who were at times alienated from their own com-
munities because of the power and authority conferred on them by their new sta-
tus” (Omolewa, 2006, p. 274). On the other hand, it created needed leverage for
this educated class to “challenge white control of the colonial order” (Ogunlade,
1974, pp. 327–329). This tension in higher education’s role in both the reproduc-
tion of colonial power and political self-determination has continued to plague
national integration and regional development in Nigeria through civil war, nearly
30 years of successive military regimes, and troubled civilian governments.
Though Nigeria comprises more than 250 ethnic groups, British rule established
cartographic divisions for administrative purposes along the following ethnic,
religious, and regional lines: the three largest ethnic groups, the Hausa-Fulani,
Yoruba, and Igbo, in the northern, western, and eastern regions, respectively; and
the Muslim and Christian populations, which now make up half the population
each, in the north and the south, respectively. This geography of conquest would
become the foundation of uneven development in Nigeria at all levels, most espe-
cially at the higher education level. Prior to British conquest and amalgamation
of the territory, the northern and western regions encompassed empires, king-
doms, and chiefdoms, while the central and southeastern regions were made of
small chiefdoms and acephalous societies. Each of these regions had their own
educational patterns: in the north where Islam was entrenched from the seventh
century, qur’anic education was well-developed and, in southern areas, ethnic
groups dispensed their own Indigenous educational practices (Imam, 2012). After
centuries of participating centrally in the transatlantic slave trade with multiple
ports along the “Slave Coast,” the focus of British imperialism shifted to territorial
conquest beyond the coastal region. In 1914, the British amalgamated the Lagos
Colony (conquered in 1862) and the Southern and Northern Nigerian Protector-
ates (both formed in 1900) as one administrative territory. However, because of
the strength of Islam in the north and the concentration of European trade and
missionary activity in the south since the fifteenth century, colonial educational
development was extremely uneven between the north and the south. In 1955,
five years prior to independence, the North accounted for only 10% of primary
and 2.5% of secondary school enrollment (Aka Jr., 1994, p. 158).
The power struggle over higher education between British administrators and
the colonial-educated class reveals the centrality of university education to the
maintenance of the racial-colonial order. Though there had been significant
cooperation between the colonial administration and this nascent elite since
the mid-eighteenth century given the socioeconomic status participation in the
colonial structure offered the latter group, their alignment began to break down
with growing demands for higher education. Yaba Higher College, the first techni-
cal higher educational institution, was established after a half century of politi-
cal struggle in 1934, and the first university, University College Ibadan, in 1948.
Before these milestones, the lack of higher educational opportunities locked Nige-
rians out of senior positions and advancement within the colonial administration
and ensured that aspirations for self-governance would remain out of reach.
The public discourse around university education clearly outlines these politi-
cal stakes. Colonial administrators decried the “grave political implications” of
Africans studying at universities overseas in the United States and Europe and
considered the establishment of colonial higher education institutions only
very selectively, to control the growth of nationalist movements (Fajana, 1972,
pp. 328–329). As a senior official of the Colonial Office noted, the decision to
establish university as opposed to technical or clerical education in Nigeria hinged
on whether university education would “make it easier or more difficult to rule
the rising generation” (cited in Ogunlade, 1974, p. 338). The disposition of Brit-
ish officials put them on a collision course with the “irreconcilable” aspirations of
Nigerian nationalists, whose demands for education were “a means to their own
emancipation” (Ajayi, 1975, p. 420). In a Sierra Leone Guardian article that was
typical of African nationalist perspectives of this era, the writer emphasized that
the political aim guiding the dream of the African university was self-government
and self-reliance, to “train Africans to exercise an ‘independence of mind and
thought’ rather than make them ‘a perfect mimicry’ and ‘parasite’ of white men”
(cited in Ogunlade, 1974, pp. 336–337).
Indeed, with the establishment of higher education and the nationalist strug-
gle it energized, political independence became inevitable and, in 1960, Nigeria
became a nation. As Ajayi notes, the concession of self-governance to nationalist
leaders shifted their ambitions from “emancipation as such towards the search
for national identity and regional balance” (1975, p. 421). However, nationalism
and the regional competition introduced through colonial administration “contra-
dicted each other to the point of almost self-destruction” (p. 421). “Ethnocentric
tendencies” and “regional chauvinism” in the early years of nation building led
to corruption, rivalries, and the Biafran Civil War, which affected all spheres of
national development, including higher education (Aka Jr., 1994, p. 162). With
universities viewed as central to the economic and political power of regions,
regional governments all rushed to establish their own universities. Within two
years, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, was established in the east in 1960 and
Ahmadu Bello University in the north in 1962. But instead of engendering nation-
alist affinities, it propagated “exclusivism” and “divisive sentiments” (Davis &
Kalu-Nwiwu, 2001, p. 5). For instance, in 1965, two years before the war, during a
dispute over who should be selected to head the University of Lagos (established
in 1962 in the western region), a Yoruba student stabbed the Igbo vice chancellor,
and he was replaced by a Yoruba vice chancellor “on the grounds of ethnic group
politics” (p. 7).
As Nigeria politically fragmented from three regions into the 36 states and
a federal capital territory that exist today, university expansion bankrolled by
Nigeria’s oil wealth continued to function as an expression of state power and
ethno-regional competition. Just as the demand for higher education helped drive
the anti-colonial struggle among young, educated nationalists, the fight against
military dictatorship and structural adjustment programs, which threatened

the material conditions of public education and society, catalyzed the Nigerian
Student Movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Described as “the vector of social
change,” the Nigerian Student Movement transformed the university from “cita-
dels of learning to battlegrounds” in the popular struggle for democracy, facing
brutal suppression by military regimes due to the threat it posed to authoritar-
ian rule (Adejumobi, 2000, pp. 204–205). Today, Nigeria has 170 universities,
134 technical institutions, and 304 colleges of various disciplines, which are split
roughly in half between public and private institutions (Federal Ministry of Edu-
cation, 2020; National Board for Technical Education, 2022). These institutions
currently enroll over two million students, who represent only 10% of youth seek-
ing admission (World Education Services, 2017). The current state of Nigerian
higher education reflects “state abandonment of public education” in the form of
poor funding, inadequate infrastructure, rampant closures, privatization, and cor-
ruption, which are radicalizing conditions that continue to foment student resist-
ance despite continued state repression (Nafziger & Strong, 2020).
Apartheid and Its Afterlives

In contemporary South Africa, the continuity of racialization through the struc-
tures of settler colonialism and racial apartheid are visible in educational devel-
opment and inequality across different political regimes. South Africa has one of
the earliest histories of mission education in Africa. After the re-establishment of
Genadendal mission station by German Moravians in 1794, between the 1830s
and 1940s, missions in Lovedale, Kuruman, Adams College, and Zonnebloem
established teaching colleges that were multiracial and gender inclusive, catering
to settlers and serving as the primary pathway to education for Black Africans
under colonial rule (Ross, 2008). The expansion of British and Afrikaner settler
colonialism accelerated the demand for higher learning, as settler-colonial gov-
ernments sought to advance the technical and intellectual capacities of settlers,
manage the burgeoning mining sector, and staff government bureaucracies.
To this end, the South African College School (later University of Cape Town)
was established in 1829 with the University of the Cape of Good Hope (later
the University of South Africa) following in 1873 as the colonies’ first degree-
granting institution. The charters of both the South African College School and
the Transvaal Technical College (later the University of Witwatersrand) included
racial nondiscrimination clauses. However, up until the 1950s, only 5% and
4% (respectively) of students enrolled at these “open” universities were Black
(Murray, 1997). Instead, the University College of Fort Hare, established in 1926,
was the center of Black tertiary education, producing political leaders including
Thabo Mbeki, Chris Hani, Robert Mugabe, and Ellen Kuzwayo.
Education in South Africa underwent three subsequent phases of structural
change in the twentieth century. First, the creation of the Union of South Africa in
1910 centralized the disparate education systems in the Cape, Natal, Transvaal, and
Free State colonies into a unified and rapidly expanding public education system for
white (European descendant) South Africans. As state support for white school-
ing expanded, provincial subsidies that had historically supported mission schools
declined (Chisholm, 2017). Prior to the Union, British-administered colonies per-
mitted limited franchise for educated, land-owning Black Africans. Union education
policy consolidated a “liberal segregationist” philosophy by explicitly using educa-
tion as a tool for exclusion. Second, in the 1948 general elections, white minority
rule was formally established with the victory of the National Party based on the
separate development ideology of apartheid. Missionary schools were brought under
state control and forced to conform to state curricula or close. The Bantu Educa-
tion Act (1953) and the Extension of Universities Act (1958) legally segregated
schools and universities (Murray, 1997). The Bantu Education Act created a com-
plex administrative structure with over ten ethnically designated subsystems that
received unequal investment with white urban schools at the top of the hierarchy.
Through these acts, the apartheid government used its administrative power to dic-
tate school governance and hiring and to eliminate the limited interracial education
at “open” universities of the 1930s and 1940s. Like colonial curricula in other con-
texts, Bantu Education deployed paternalistic and infantilizing narratives of Afri-
can cultural and intellectual capacity, which reinforced the restriction of technical
training and employment opportunities by race and ethnicity. Finally, in 1994, after
decades of local and international pressure, apartheid formally ended, marking the
last and current phase of educational change. After functioning for decades as a
mechanism of racial exclusion, the education system became a key sector for redress
in the interest of establishing “a society based on democratic values, social justice
and fundamental human rights” (Department of Basic Education, 2011).
Still, despite the official integration of schools, a progressive funding structure
for public schools, and various policy reforms since then, education in South
Africa is still fundamentally unequal (see also Chapter 11). Economists argue that
nearly two decades after apartheid, “the life chances of the average South African
child are determined not by their ability or . . . hard-work and determination, but
instead by the colour of their skin, the province of their birth, and the wealth of
their parents” (Spaull, 2019, p. 1). Race, class, and geography are still the major
determinants of educational access and learning outcomes. As one example of this,
3% of high schools, which cater to 48% of white students, produce more academic
distinctions in math than the remaining 97% of schools. In a nation where 81% of
the population is Black African, the racialized nature of this disparity is apparent.
Furthermore, a significant literature finds that apartheid economic regimes have
simply been reformed, rather than dismantled, as white South Africans still consti-
tute two-thirds of the wealthiest 4% of society (Schotte et al., 2018).
Access is not the only way that racialization is perpetuated within the edu-
cation system. Even for historically disadvantaged students who do attend his-
torically white institutions where resources are concentrated, differences in the
sociocultural norms between the school and the home reproduce colonial log-
ics of racial difference often using deracialized rhetoric. Vincent and Hlatshwayo
(2018) outline embodied ways racialization is articulated within the “non-racial,”
“post-apartheid” South African university, including through language, dress,
consumption, and technological markers that differentiate rural, township, non-
English speaking youth. Feldman and Wallace (2021) highlight the hidden social
and mental health burdens that students who are racialized as Black take on and
find that historically disadvantaged students, who attend middle-class or elite
schools, face cultural exclusion both at school and at home. Black middle-class
families, who presumably would be in a better material position to navigate educa-
tional inequality, also struggle with the more insidious aspects of white supremacy.
As Matentjie argues, the strategies Black middle-class parents adopt to negoti-
ate institutionalized racism, such as tracking the performance of their children,
avoiding confrontation with school authorities, or choosing not to teach their
children Indigenous languages, “unintentionally perpetuate racial hegemony”

(2017, p. 136).
The 2015–2016 Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) and Fees Must Fall (FMF) university
student protest movements brought powerfully into focus the afterlives of apart-
heid in contemporary South African students’ experiences as well as increasingly
militant youth demands that racial and economic inequality “must fall” (see also
Chapter 11). In March 2015, Chumani Maxwele, a student at the University of
Cape Town (UCT), hurled excrement at a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the British colo-
nizer who donated dispossessed land to the university. The act, which catalyzed
the RMF movement, propelled a push to dismantle the vestiges of colonialism
and white supremacy enshrined in the curricula, physical space, and institutional
culture of South African campuses. Although the statue was eventually removed
following weeks of protests, the movement took on an economic character. The
following October, when a proposed tuition increase of up to 6% was announced,
thousands of students protested under the mantle of “Fees Must Fall.” Although
students secured the cancellation of this increase for 2016, the struggle was reig-
nited in the following September after new increases for 2017 were announced.
This time, national protests expanded the demands to include free education for
all. Student activists adopted the language of “decolonization” to their calls for
free, quality tertiary education, highlighting how class inequality is intertwined
with racism and coloniality. Fallists challenged not only the spatial relics of colo-
nialism on campuses but also the way colonial power was institutionalized in uni-
versity governance, white supremacist institutional culture, and the exclusion of
African epistemes. The perpetuation of racial and economic apartheid in “post-”
apartheid South Africa illustrates that demographic inclusion is wholly insuffi-
cient in undoing colonial power. As the student-led movements for the decoloni-
zation of the South African university and society writ large powerfully articulate,
it is only through intentional struggle that the structures of inequality established
through colonialism and its afterlives will fall.
Youth and the Unfinished Work of Decolonization

The diverse histories of educational development we presented in this chapter
bring into clear view the sobering reality that the educational structures intro-
duced through colonialism were never designed for African societies to “accumu-
late the human capital that they needed to transform their societies economically,
technologically, socially, politically, and culturally” but rather to participate in
their own subordination (Babalola et al., 2000, p. 158). The enduring impact of
coloniality and racialization in placing limitations upon the educational experi-
ences of youth, not to mention their mobility, economic prospects, and possibili-
ties to realize their aspirations, demands solutions that will not contribute to the
“recolonization of education in Africa” (Federici et al., 2000) but will instead work
to undo these entrenched structures.
We do not have to look far for direction on how to go about this unfinished
work of decolonization. As Ball reminds, “the whole history of colonial schooling
is marked by contestation,” and these forms of resistance within “the struggle for
the school” offer a guide (1983, p. 237). Though colonial education produced
structures of uneven development and difference that persist, it also had the unin-
tended consequence of strengthening anti-colonial movements and Pan-African
solidarity among the educated elite and intelligentsia, which hastened the end
of colonial rule in Africa (Adi, 1993). Today, a new decolonizing generation of
youth is being forged as Africa experiences a resurgence of youth-led educational
activism and popular struggles (Branch & Mampilly, 2015; Strong, 2018). In the
past decade alone, youth have spearheaded movements demanding regime change
in over 25 African countries. In thousands of school protests in the same period,
students have demanded the decolonization of educational institutions and cur-
ricula, free education, improved learning conditions, political freedom, political
and economic reforms, and adequate pay for school workers, joining educational
issues with broader movements for social change (Luescher & Klemenčič, 2016;
Strong & Ataman, 2021). These struggles express a vision for socially transforma-
tive education that should be the foundation of future African development.
Notes
1 South African exceptionalism refers to the notion that “the particular experience of
apartheid endowed South Africa with unique features that propelled it along a ‘special
path’ of sociopolitical development different from the rest of Africa” (Murray et al., 2000,
p. 382). This fallacy suggests that race and racism are a uniquely South African problem.
2 Political struggles around adapted education in British colonized Africa and industrial
education in the U.S. South reveal the transnational dimensions of the racialization
of Black/African people (West, 1992) and the policy borrowing across these systems of
racial domination. In a 1930 column, “The African Must Have Western Education,”
Nigerian student Adeyemo Alakija challenged the sub-standard education offered to
African students, asserting, “Africans are not to be a nation of clerks without a future”
(cited in Omolewa, 2006). In a 1905 speech, Pan-African intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois
makes a strikingly similar argument against industrial education for Black people in the
United States, declaring “we will fight for all time against any proposal to educate black
boys and girls simply as servants and underlings, or simply for the use of other people.”
3 Designated specifically as a site of resettlement for the formerly enslaved, Freetown and
the Creole communities of emancipated Africans throughout West Africa speak to the
entangled histories of slavery and colonialism in Africa, as well as how education, reli-
gion, and culture produced racialized forms of difference among repatriate and Indige-
nous Africans as well as differences in status – which favored repatriates – within colonial
structures.
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7 Tomorrow’s Australia
Race and Racialization in
Australian Education
Tim Soutphommasane and Remy Low
Introduction
The so-called culture war is not confined to the United States, where it origi-
nated. Over the past three decades, many of the tropes of the U.S. culture war –
the supposed corruption of institutions by progressive liberalism, the imagined
grip of political correctness on public debate, the existential challenge to Western
civilization – have migrated across the Pacific to Australia. In many respects, the
language of recent Australian political contests over identity and education would
be familiar to observers of U.S. politics. It is a language that has been strikingly
consistent in its ideological stridency. For example, two decades ago, the then fed-
eral education minister Julie Bishop called for a new national school curriculum by
claiming that left-wing ideologues in Australia’s states had introduced to schools
“trendy educational fads and themes coming ‘straight from Chairman Mao’ ”
(Topsfield & Rood, 2006, p. 1). Some 15 years later, the current federal education
minister Alan Tudge has called for more patriotism within the now established
national curriculum, saying, “I want people to come out having learnt about a
country with a love of it rather than a hatred of it.” According to Tudge, any cur-
ricular focus on race or Indigenous history “should not come at the expense of the
teaching of classical and western civilizations and how Australia came to be a free,
liberal democracy” (Urban, 2021, p. 4).
Debates in Australia about education and race have become key sites in the
culture war that shapes much of contemporary Australian politics. In this chapter,
we examine how they have intensified alongside conflicts over racial discrimina-
tion laws and the limits of free speech – conflicts that have enabled a politiciza-
tion of race and identity. We then consider two manifestations of this conflict
within the educational domain: (1) the critical attention paid to the treatment of
race and racism in the curriculum and classroom, and (2) the social anxiety from
some quarters about race and selective schooling. The heightened scrutiny of race,
to some extent, reflects the normalization of race politics that has characterized
Australian debates in recent times. Equally, it reflects the lingering discomfort that
sections of Australian society have about shifting social power generated by multi-
cultural diversity and demands for the recognition of First Peoples.1 Both present,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-10
120 Tim Soutphommasane and Remy Low
we argue, challenges to an idealized white, Anglo-Celtic image of Australia that
retains a grip over the national psyche.
Race, Culture Wars, and Education

Questions about race have always loomed within the Australian public conversa-
tion. British colonization was built on the presumption that civilized humanity
was achievable only by Europeans. When Australia was brought into being as a
political entity – by the six British colonies federating in 1901 – the organizing
principle was that of racial unity in the form of “White Australia.” It was not until
the 1970s that the White Australia policy of excluding non-European immigration
was finally dismantled. And while Australian society has since grown to become
emphatically multiracial and multicultural, perhaps unsurprisingly race has not
disappeared as a social and cultural force. The legacy of racial nation building
remains. After all, during the colonial era and for the majority of the twentieth
century, White Australia provided an explicit, officially endorsed doctrine for
determining who would be admitted into Australian society and who would not,
supported by a comprehensive political vocabulary and cultural repertoire. By
contrast, the contemporary expression of Australian nationhood lacks the sym-
bolic power of its predecessor (Soutphommasane, 2015, pp. 35–36).
Mass education plays an instrumental role in nation building, and Australia’s
experience has been no exception. Yet it has also had its peculiarities. Unlike
Europe, where state-controlled public schooling reflected attempts by centralized
states to establish control over education against religious and localized resistance
(e.g., Soysal & Strang, 1989), the federal Constitution in Australia left education
as a “residual power” under each state’s jurisdiction. In this respect, it shares some
characteristics with the United States, where mass public schooling also devel-
oped under a “decentralized state” (Green, 2013, pp. 170–174). Also similar to the
United States, Australian public schooling at its inception was marked by a politi-
cal desire to exclude First Peoples and immigrants (specifically Asian immigrants)
from this imagined public. For instance, in the case of New South Wales (NSW),
Australia’s first-established colony, the introduction of the Public Instruction Act
1880 was followed by the passage of a bill aimed at restricting Chinese immigra-
tion (the Influx of Chinese Restriction Act 1881). Legislative activity relating to
schooling went hand in hand with that aimed at racial exclusion.
Such racial exclusion operated with administrative subtlety and discretion. As
explained by the NSW Minister of Public Instruction George Reid (who would
later become the Premier of NSW in 1894, then Prime Minister of the Common-
wealth of Australia in 1904), while as a general principle “no child whatever its
creed or color or circumstances ought to be excluded from a public school,” none-
theless “cases may arise especially among the Aboriginal tribes, where the admis-
sion of a child or children may be prejudicial to the whole school” (in Reynolds,
2009, p. 85). This statement, which would firm up into what was known as the
“Clean, clad and courteous” directive in 1884, allowed for Aboriginal children
to be admitted to NSW public schools on the condition that they are “habitually
Tomorrow’s Australia 121
clean, decently clad, and that they conduct themselves with propriety both in and
out of school” (Office of the Aborigines Protection Board, 1885, p. 2). In practice,
this meant that First Peoples children were excluded at the discretion of local
school authorities if white parents protested – usually not for reasons of hygiene
or behavior (Harris, 1978, p. 28). So, while Australia shared with its European
and North American counterparts a new idealism concerning schools at the dawn
of the twentieth century – that they “could contribute to the making of better
people, a better society and new citizen-subjects for the new Australian nation”
(Campbell & Proctor, 2014, p. 106) – this idealism did not extend to people from
all racial backgrounds.
The Australian experience has also been distinctive with respect to the curricu-
lum. Whereas the curriculum in many nations played an active role in creating or
forming a national identity that would take precedence over local, provincial, or
regional identities, in Australia the advent of a national curriculum was belated. As
noted earlier, it has been the states, not the federal government, that are respon-
sible for schools and education. Various attempts during the twentieth century to
institute a national curriculum failed, reflecting a failure among state governments
to agree. Indeed, it was not until the mid-2000s, and the latter years of the Howard
conservative government (1996–2007), that there was definitive movement toward
the establishment of a national curriculum. Framed as a response to perceived
inadequacies in Australian students’ understanding of national history, the How-
ard government convened a summit in 2006 that recommended that Australian
history be a compulsory requirement in the curriculum in all Australian secondary
schools. This recommendation would be implemented by the Labor government
of Howard’s successor as prime minister, Kevin Rudd. Following the development
of directions for a national curriculum in history, English, science, and mathemat-
ics, a statutory authority, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting
Authority, was established in 2009. Five years later, in 2014, Australian states and
territories commenced their implementation of the national curriculum.
The public debates about the national curriculum – and related issues of education
and schooling – over the past two decades have been deeply implicated in broader
contests over national identity. Often described in terms of a culture war, these
contests were sharply defined during the years of the Howard prime ministership.
From the perspective of his supporters, Howard’s period as prime minister helped
bring the national identity into balance, following the years of the Keating govern-
ment associated with a push for an Australian republic, multiculturalism, engage-
ment with Asia, and reconciliation with Aboriginal peoples (see Soutphommasane,
2009, 2012a). In place of this cultural agenda of national reinvention, Howard’s
politics sought to create what he called a “relaxed and comfortable” nation. In
Howard’s words, “we’ve come back from being too obsessed with diversity to a
point where we are very proud and conscious of those ongoing, distinctive, defining
characteristics of being an Australian, which we tend to identify with what I might
call the old Australia” (in Curran, 2004, p. 241). This reflected a politics that
railed against so-called political correctness and the excesses of “self-appointed
cultural dieticians” (in Curran, 2004, p. 264).
This found expression in several forms, but most notably a more assertive
nationalism toward identity and culture. In contrast to a critical view of Aus-
tralian history, which grappled with the implications of Aboriginal dispossession
and mistreatment, British colonization (if not “invasion”), and racist violence and
exclusion, Howard’s cultural vision was one of national celebration. Howard
and his supporters rejected a “black armband” view of history. They questioned
whether current generations of Australians should have to bear responsibility for
the misdeeds of past generations – one basic reason why Howard refused, point-
edly, to apologize for the past mistreatment of Aboriginal people. They instead
preferred drawing up what historian Geoffrey Blainey called the “balance sheet”
of Australian history: if one weighed the good and bad in the national past, one
would find a positive balance and an Australian tradition of which people could
be unapologetically proud (Blainey, 1993, pp. 11–15).
It is debatable that national self-understanding should involve a simple exercise
in accounting, with heroic and praiseworthy deeds counted in one column and
questionable aspects of national experience counted in another. If citizens do bear
responsibility for the wrongs of the past, this need not involve literal or causal
responsibility. A certain responsibility, rather, comes from inheriting or claim-
ing membership of a certain tradition – particularly when one benefits from the
capital accumulated within that tradition (see Soutphommasane, 2012b). How-
ard’s prime ministerial successor, Rudd, expressed a similar view when in 2008
he provided a formal apology for the Stolen Generations, noting, “as has been
said of settler societies elsewhere, we are the bearers of many blessings from our
ancestors and therefore we must also be the bearer of their burdens as well” (in
Soutphommasane, 2009, p. 51).
That said, the conservative nationalist posture on Australian history and iden-
tity has exerted a strong influence on public understanding of race and diver-
sity. Going back to the time of Howard’s prime ministership, it was associated
with a certain skepticism toward identifying prejudice or discrimination as racism.
When, for example, Pauline Hanson emerged as a national political figure in the
late 1990s espousing strong views directed at Asian immigrants and Aboriginal
peoples – according to Hanson, Australia was being “swamped” by Asians, and
Aboriginal peoples were given unfair advantages – Howard declined to criticize
Hanson’s views as racist, preferring to defend her right to free speech. When racist
violence erupted in the form of the Cronulla riots in 2005, with a 5,000-strong
mob targeting people of Middle Eastern background in a Sydney beach suburb,
Howard refused to condemn the racist elements of the riots: “I do not accept there
is underlying racism in Australian society” (in Soutphommasane, 2012a, p. 41).
In both examples, we see manifestations of a particular cultural view of Australian
nationhood and identity.
In the years since, such postures have continued to drive national political
debate. Within mainstream media and Australia’s political class, there are regular
rhetorical blasts at “political correctness” and the excesses of “woke” diversity,
with race featuring centrally. Few issues captured the imagination of Australian
conservatives as the national campaign to repeal section 18C of the federal Racial
Discrimination Act (which makes it unlawful to engage in acts of racial hatred).
On two occasions in 2014 and 2017, with vocal support of sections of the media,
the conservative Abbott and Turnbull governments sought to weaken racial
hatred laws. Supported by then Attorney General George Brandis’ statement that
Australians had “a right to be bigots,” those agitating for change presented federal
racial hatred laws as an unjustified restriction on the exercise of free speech (see
Soutphommasane, 2019, pp. 70–78).
There have also been outright attempts by some political leaders to stir racial
fears and criticize multiculturalism. In 2018, for example, there was panic about an
“African gangs” crisis in Melbourne, triggered by comments by Home Affairs Min-
ister Peter Dutton that Victorians were so cowed by African gang violence that
they refrained from going out to restaurants at night. In a separate intervention,
Dutton also proposed that white South African farmers be given “special atten-
tion” for fast-tracked humanitarian visas because of their alleged persecution on
the grounds of race (no such policy was ever enacted). During the same year, then
Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs Alan Tudge warned that Aus-
tralia was veering toward a “European separatist multicultural model.” The leader
of the far-right One Nation Party, Pauline Hanson, in October 2018 proposed a
motion in the Senate to acknowledge “the deplorable rise of anti-white racism and
attacks on Western Civilisation” and “that it is okay to be white” (repeating a well-
known white supremacist slogan). The motion was only narrowly defeated, with
23 government senators voting in support of the motion, though the government
recanted its support following public outcry, claiming that its senators’ votes were
the result of an administrative error (Soutphommasane, 2019, pp. 44–46).
Race politics did not abate during the COVID-19 pandemic, not even with the
global anti-racism moment generated by Black Lives Matter protests (Soutphom-
masane, 2020). If anything, the movement reinforced a certain enthusiasm for the
culture wars from conservatives. For example, while the death of George Floyd
at the hands of police in Minneapolis in May 2020 focused attention in many
countries on institutional racism, anti-racism protests in Australia were quickly
dismissed by some as leftist excesses. Prime Minister Scott Morrison criticized
protests against Aboriginal deaths in custody for “importing” the issue of institu-
tional racism into domestic political debate, suggesting that anti-racism protests
have been “taken over” by “politically driven left-wing agendas.” He also stated
that racism in the country could not be compared with that in the United States
because “there was no slavery in Australia,” a statement for which he later apolo-
gized, following public criticism that he was indifferent to historical experiences of
racial injustice (Murphy, 2020).
Through all this, education has featured prominently. There are periodic
debates about whether “identity politics” focusing on race (along with gender
and sexuality) have exerted an undue influence within Australian universities,
preventing academics from placing a proper focus on Judeo-Christian ethics
and the Enlightenment in the university classroom. Various universities were
criticized for declining to fund new degrees on Western civilization supported
by a $AU 3 billion bequest from health-care magnate Paul Ramsay (the largest
philanthropic gift in the history of education in Australia). Major newspapers and
evening cable news television routinely scrutinized, attacked, if not derided uni-
versity research and teaching about racism – specifically about anti-racism. But
there is special attention reserved for any teaching about racism within schools.
Efforts by authorities to develop anti-racism materials for schools, for example,
are criticized by prominent media outlets as “indoctrination” and “deeply trigger-
ing” for children, as they involved references to “white privilege” and “uncon-
scious bias” (Bye, 2021). In the words of one commentator, anti-racism in schools
involves a “blatant politicization of Australian children [that] is equivalent to
child abuse” (in Morrow, 2021a).
The Australian Senate is also preoccupied with the treatment of race and rac-
ism in schools. In June 2021, the Australian Senate voted in support of a motion
by Pauline Hanson, the leader of the far-right One Nation, calling for a rejection
of “critical race theory” in the national curriculum. The motion followed media
commentary about the proposed new draft national curriculum being “preoccu-
pied with the oppression, discrimination and struggles of Indigenous Australians”
(Anderson & Gatwiri, 2021). In the 25 years that have passed since John Howard
became prime minister, one might say that very little has changed in the public
conversation about race and education.
The “Absent Presence” of Race in Australian Education

Australia remains in a curious state of affairs when it concerns race and racializa-
tion – one perhaps presaged by Reid in those pre-federation times. It is character-
ized by contradiction and dissonance. On the one hand, within public discourse,
there is a tendency to uphold the principle of equality and deny that race should
determine the opportunities that individuals can enjoy: no one, of course, should
be excluded because of their creed, color, or circumstances. And if there are
instances of racial discrimination, then that must warrant due condemnation,
though one must be skeptical about them reflecting any institutionalized or sys-
temic racism. On the other hand, there will always certainly be exceptional cases.
The formal affirmation of principles of non-discrimination and equality does not
prevent political practice from regularly racializing segments of the Australian
population. One might say, then, that race exists within Australian public con-
sciousness as what others have referred to as an “absent present” (Apple, 1999), a
force that animates debates but is formally repudiated.
This peculiar pattern has been noted by scholars across different domains for
some time (Hage, 1998; Gershevitch, 2010; Nelson, 2013). How, though, are we
to track the absent presence of race, racism, and racialization in education? Apple
(1999) lays out the challenges faced by such a venture, as well as offering a clue to
how we might proceed:
Placing race at the center is less easy than one might expect, for one must do
this with due recognition of its complexity. Race is not a stable category. What
it means, how it is used, by whom, how it is mobilized in public discourse, and
its role in educational and more general social policy – all of this is contingent
and historical. (p. 10)
If making race visible as a key factor in education is made difficult because it is an

unstable category dependent on its uses, then its constant disavowal in Australia
adds some degrees of difficulty. Yet, it is in those instances where race, racism, and
racialization are vociferously denied, or when they are insistently displaced onto
another terrain, that their persistent presence becomes most visible. Put simply,
race is often at play in those moments where it is declared to not exist or be a fac-
tor, or when protagonists declaim the “real issue,” whether that is crime, national
security, territorial sovereignty, or whatever else.
Considering this, we propose a two-pronged approach to tracking the opera-
tion of race, racism, and racialization in Australian education. This involves pay-
ing attention first to its denials, and second to its displacements, which together
serve as defense mechanisms that reinforce an idealized image of Australia – what
Hage (1998) has called “a White-centred conception of the nation grounded in
White nation fantasy” (p. 23). These denials and displacements can be situated
within a historical arc of racism in Australian education regarding the “unfinished
business” of reconciliation with First Peoples and anxieties around immigration,
respectively.
“We Don’t Have a Race Problem Here”: Denying Racism

The treatment of Australian history within the curriculum has re-emerged as a
political issue within public debate, considering an ongoing review of the national
curriculum. In April 2021, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting
Authority (ACARA) released in a discussion paper some proposed changes to the
curriculum. Among them was that students be taught that Australia was invaded –
not settled or colonized – by the British. According to ACARA, the current
curriculum fails to recognize that “:the First Peoples of Australia experienced
colonization as invasion and dispossession of land, sea and sky.” Moreover, the
curriculum neglected how Australia is home to the world’s oldest continuing
culture and fails to “showcase the sophisticated political, economic and social
organizational systems of the First Peoples of Australia.”
Writing shortly after their release, First Peoples lawyer Teela Reid (2021) wel-
comed the proposed changes as necessary for equipping students to “confront the
truth of our past head-on.” It was necessary, she argued, to “begin to dismantle
systems that flourished on the displacement and dispossession of First Nations.”
There was a responsibility, moreover, for education systems to equip students to
understand not just past injustices but contemporary shortcomings. According
to Reid, students are already “marching in the streets for Black Lives Matter”
and “showing up to demand climate justice,” but “with the understanding that
this challenge cannot be divorced from the knowledge of this continent’s First
Nations.” It was time for the curriculum to catch up with the realities already
lived by students. Central to that, though, would be a correction of a colonial
racialization of national history, which would put “the lived experiences of its First
Nations at the centre of Australia’s story” (Reid, 2021, p. 25).
As alluded to at the outset, these proposed changes have faced resistance.
There remains a significant section of Australian society, especially vocal within
political and media quarters, that rejects such a view of the curriculum. Predict-
ably, voices within the conservative media were quick to discredit the advisory
body that recommended the proposed changes to the national curriculum, claim-
ing it was dominated by First Nations activists who were aligned with “critical race
theory” and who believe “this country is born of racism.” The federal education
minister Alan Tudge responded by saying, “There is a lot of work to be done to get
the history curriculum back into shape, where students learn to love our country
and have a desire to make a contribution to it.” Acknowledging that there was a
role for being critical of the past, Tudge added there should be “an understand-
ing of why we are such a great country where millions of people have migrated to
make Australia their home” (in Morrow, 2021b).
That month, media in Sydney also focused attention on race within one Sydney
primary school that was teaching its students about the Black Lives Matter move-
ment. Following discussions in class, Year 5 and 6 students at the Sydney school
made posters, some of which contained phrases “stop killer cops,” “pigs out of the
country,” and “white lives matter too much.” “SCHOOL WHITE WASH” was
the front-page headline in the Daily Telegraph, Sydney’s tabloid, accompanied by a
standfirst reading, “Primary students given a lesson in hating cops” (Harris, 2021a,
p. 1). The story also featured prominently within the major commercial televi-
sion stations’ news coverage. Responding to the media outrage, the NSW Educa-
tion Minister Sarah Mitchell directed her departmental secretary to launch a full
review and declared that “[a]ny teacher found to be politicizing a classroom will
face disciplinary action” (cited in Harris, 2021b, p. 4). The Police Minister David
Elliott expressed “disgust” that a state-funded public school might “promote this
sort of approach to law enforcement, [which] runs the risk of children losing faith
in the justice system” (cited in Harris, 2021b, p. 4). In other statements, Elliott
lashed “left-wing ideologues who use ‘what is happening in the United States to
muddy the waters here’ ” (cited in Lathouris, 2021). According to Elliott:
We don’t have a race problem here in Australia and these left-wing academics
who are quite happy to say every time an Australian soldier sets foot overseas
that it’s not our war, well this isn’t our war . . . this is nothing short of indoctri-
nation and it will eventually put these kids’ lives at risk because when they’re
in trouble they won’t know who to turn to.
In a subsequent letter to parents, the principal of the school in question apologized

to those offended but clarified that the posters came about through teachers ask-
ing students “to write down all the issues they have heard from the mainstream
news, other information sources or commentary.” “The comments on the posters,”
the principal clarified, “were not taught to students. The posters were part of an
upper-primary school class dedicated to exploring ‘key moments in Indigenous
history’ ” (Chrysanthos & Baker, 2021, p. 11). The damage, though, had been
done. The school in question, Lindfield Learning Village, an experimental state
school licensed by the NSW Department of Education to adopt a more flexible
curriculum, has since faced calls for its special status to be revoked. According to
NSW politician Mark Latham, the leader of the far-right One Nation in the state:
It sounds like it’s a sinkhole for leftist ideological teaching . . . I think we’ve
got to do more than sack the teacher, I’d also sack the principal who’s lost
control of this school and I would close down the experiment as failed and
send it back to being a normal school.2
The debates about these two episodes – one focused at a national level concern-
ing the national curriculum, and one focused at a more local level involving a
particular school – are illustrative of some of the patterns of denial that charac-
terize public debates about racism, education, and the First Peoples of Australia.
Most striking is the reflex among some political actors and media commentators to
reject the idea that racism could be a problem in Australia, and merely a product
of the importation of foreign ideology.
Of course, few things could be further from the truth. With respect to First
Peoples, the historical effects of racism are well-known and documented. In the
same month as these debates about First Nations perspectives and racism were
occurring, the NSW State Parliament published its report into an inquiry on the
“disproportionate rates of incarceration of First Nations people and First Nations
deaths in custody” (Parliament of NSW, 2021). Coming 30 years after the land-
mark Commonwealth Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the
NSW Parliament report acknowledged that
[M]any reports, research and inquiries that have extensively considered the
over-representation of First Nations people in the criminal justice system.
Many have comprehensively outlined the historical, social, and economic
context which has contributed to disproportionate incarceration rates of
First Nations people, including dispossession and systemic racism. Many
have examined the entrenched disadvantage First Nations people have faced
over time, particularly in terms of health issues, housing, employment, and
education. (p. 2)
Education is implicated in the historical disempowerment and marginalization

of young First Nations peoples in Australia. As Pihama and Lee-Morgan (2019,
p. 19) explain, “education was both a target and tool of colonialism, destroying
and diminishing the validity and legitimacy of Indigenous education, while simul-
taneously replacing and reshaping it with an ‘education’ complicit with the colo-
nial endeavour.” In a similar way to what theorists of “internal colonialism” have
described in other settings, in which Indigenous peoples became “aliens in their
native lands” (Chávez, 2011), First People’s ways of educating were supplanted by
British forms of education.
With the institutionalization of mass schooling in the century after colonization,
young First Nations peoples came to be seen as an educational “problem” to be man-
aged in relation to those who were seen as legitimate aspirants to the ideal, white
Australian citizen. With slight variations across the country, this management regime
took on different forms over time. First came the “Native Institutions” and Missions
period (ca. early nineteenth century to late nineteenth century) that sought to
“Christianize” and “civilize” young First Peoples in European ways by stripping them
of their cultural connections to Country3 and families (Burridge & C hodkiewicz,
2012, pp. 13–14; Jackson-Barrett & Lee-Hammond, 2019, pp. 302–303).
This was followed by the Protection period (ca. late-nineteenth century to mid-
twentieth century), where young First Peoples were segregated into schools on
missions or reserves, or else in Aboriginal-only schools or, failing the availabil-
ity of the latter, in separate classes (Burridge & Chodkiewicz, 2012, pp. 14–15;
Jackson-Barrett & Lee-Hammond, 2019, pp. 304–305). The Assimilation period
(ca. mid-twentieth century to late-twentieth century) succeeded this phase,
when education for young First Nations peoples was seen as a means of attaining
full citizenship, but one that was predicated on “the ultimate absorption of the
native race into the ordinary [white] community” (Commonwealth of Australia,
1937, p. 3), albeit with them locked into lower levels of the socio-economic order
(Jackson-Barrett & Lee-Hammond, 2019, p. 306).
Since the 1970s, federal and state governments have introduced policies
to increase consultation with and self-direction for First Peoples communi-
ties regarding their own affairs, including education, albeit with varying levels
of commitment (Holt, 2016). At this time, “Australia ‘discovered’ the problem
of profound educational disadvantage among its Indigenous people” (Gray &
Beresford, 2012, p. 197). Although successive policies and programs have been
directed toward resolving this inequality – and innovative approaches led by First
Peoples educators have gained visibility (Yunkaporta & Kirby, 2011; Sarra, 2012;
McCollow, 2012), a national “gap” persists between the educational outcomes of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and other Australians (Australian
Institute of Health and Welfare, 2021). Although it is commonplace in political
discourse to frame this “gap” as an “Indigenous problem” that needs fixing through
further interventions (see, e.g., Commonwealth of Australia, 2018, pp. 50–73),
this can downplay, if not dismiss, the history of colonial dispossession and the
norms and ideals to which young First Nations peoples are measured against in
racialized ways (Walter, 2010; Rudolph, 2016; Brown, 2018).
This denial of a not-so-distant past points to what Maxwell et al. (2018) call
“the realities of an unresolved history of nation-making” (p. 164). In other words,
there has been an inadequate reckoning with decolonization and what this means
for national identity in Australia. Without this, education policies for First Nations
peoples will continue to be predicated on what Morgan (2019) calls the “guest
paradigm,” whereby “non-Aboriginal people create and administer the terms and
conditions that regulate Aboriginal involvement and participation in education
systems” (Morgan, 2019, p. 121).
Yet perhaps this is precisely the function of denial – illustrated both in the case
of the Sydney primary school students’ posters and in the broader culture wars
over Australian history. At play is a defensive reflex that preserves a national iden-
tity against what Keynes (2019, p. 10) has dubbed the increasingly “burdensome
past,” whereby nation-states are “called upon to take responsibility and atone for
past harms and historical injustices and to recognize minority experiences.” In the
face of such a burden, along with the perceived threats to national identity and
cohesion, it is not surprising that conservative political actors and media commen-
tators would react with denial and defensiveness toward issues of race. At stake,
after all, is a national history or heritage that must be deemed worthy of loyalty.
Selective Anxieties: Displacement and Race by Proxy

On March 11, 2021, around 15,000 late-primary school students in NSW sat for
a series of competitive tests to gain one of 4,248 places available in selective-entry
high schools across the state (NSW Department of Education, 2021a). Many
of these students and their families would have been aware that they would be
the first to face the newly designed testing regime for those coveted spots. The
new-look tests place “a greater emphasis on thinking skills, mathematical reason-
ing and problem solving,” and the assessment criteria “adjusts and balances the
weighting given to mathematics, reading, and thinking skills test components”
(NSW Department of Education, 2021b) – specifically increasing the weight given
to English reading and writing relative to mathematics and “schoolwork” (Baker,
2021). The Sydney Morning Herald, the moderate liberal newspaper of record in
Sydney, had forewarned a few months prior that the changes made the tests “Nice
and Hard” as a part of its long-running coverage of NSW selective schools and the
controversies surrounding them (Baker, 2020). The new tests, its education editor
explained, were “supposed to be less coachable, more female-friendly, and able to
identify a more diverse range of the state’s brightest students” (Baker, 2020).
The social impact of a selective-entry system within public schools, which in
effect stratifies schools based on academic merit, has long been debated (Teese &
Polesel, 2003). Leaving this aside, though, it is difficult to fault the stated aims of
the reformed testing regime. “Academic prowess does not discriminate by gender,
ethnicity or postcode,” declared then-Education Minister of NSW Rob Stokes
at the release of the report in 2018 that informed the changes (cited in Baker,
2018a). Yet for many who had tracked the public scrutiny of selective schools in
NSW in the years preceding this change, it was difficult not to detect the shadow
of ethnicity over the review and restructuring of the tests. That the discourse on
selective schooling came to be about gender or postcodes – or test “predictability
and coachability” (NSW Department of Education, 2018, p. 17) – is emblematic
of how racialization operates in Australian education discourse: by proxy.
Selective high schools that enroll only students who have achieved high scores
in annual competitive and state-wide entrance tests are not unique to NSW
(Kosanovic, 2021). However, for historical reasons, the state has by far the largest
number in Australia. Unlike other states such as Victoria or Queensland, where
church and grammar schools dominated the landscape of secondary education in
the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, middle-class families in NSW
were users of public secondary education from the 1880s (Campbell, 2020). Accord-
ing to Campbell (2020), many public high schools in the state that are known today
as selective schools were usually selective from their inception, requiring prospec-
tive students to pass primary school examinations with distinction to achieve entry.
As demand rose for secondary schooling in the early twentieth century, a paral-
lel system was established for the “less clever,” the “less likely to succeed” and
those considered more suitable for technical or “vocational” education (Campbell,
2020). Historically, and especially in the context of Aboriginal exclusion and immi-
gration restriction, it was white professional and aspiring middle classes that were
the most successful in “managing their children in ways that ensured their access
to academically selective schools” (Campbell, 2020). This would change with the
rise of Asian migration after the eventual dismantling of the White Australia pol-
icy in the 1970s (Proctor & Sriprakash, 2017, pp. 2380–2381), a change acceler-
ated by the reorientation of immigration policy in the 1990s toward skilled and
business migrants, especially highly educated professionals from Asia (Ho, 2019,
pp. 514–517).
Over the past two decades, the children of Asian Australians have in fact come
to dominate numbers in selective schools and classes (Ho, 2019, 517). Accord-
ing to Ho, parents of Asian background in Australia have tended to adopt a
“credentialist” view of education, reflecting “immigrant pessimism” caused by
downward mobility and discrimination in the labor market. In Ho’s view, this had
two effects. First, because selective schools enroll students based on test scores and
not geographic areas as comprehensive high schools do, the former are segregated
from their local communities. Second, “the demographic makeup of the student
population creates a hyper-racialized environment in which people are eternally
defined by their ethnicity” (Ho, 2019, p. 525; see also Ho, 2011, 2015, 2016).
This perspective has been influential in shaping public sensibilities about selec-
tive schools. It has been picked up by some sections of the media that cater to the
middle classes, specifically the middle classes for whom selective high schools have
historically been the vehicle for securing an elite professional status (Campbell &
Sherrington, 2004, pp. 5–6). In short, educated middle-class white parents. The
disquiet of the latter had begun to be clear by the beginning of the 2010s, with
heated online forum debates on allegedly authoritarian Asian parenting styles,
exam coaching, and the “Asianisation” of selective schools (Funnell, 2015). These
were given voice by moderate liberal outlets like the Sydney Morning Herald. Ini-
tially deploying the heavily racialized language of “white flight” and “tiger par-
ents” (e.g., Millburn, 2011; Broinowski, 2015), the Herald’s editorial focus would
then metastasize into concerns about the socioeconomic status of selective school
students’ families (e.g., Singhal, 2018; Baker & Morgan, 2018), about selective
high schools not representing the demographics of the “local communities” where
they are situated (e.g., Smith & Gladstone, 2018; Baker et al., 2019), and about
the predictability of test questions, making the entry system for selective schools
“susceptible to coaching” (Baker, 2018a, 2018b). Few issues of educational policy
have been placed under such sustained, critical scrutiny.
Why did selective schooling become a problem necessitating political inter-
vention in the 2010s? Or to put it more pointedly, why do schools with large
proportions of students from Asian backgrounds get marked as “hyper-racialized,”
while schools with large proportions of white students do not? As Proctor and
Sriprakash (2017) have observed, the anxieties and controversies surrounding
selective schools form part of a longer history of racialized “immigration anxi-
ety” in Australia, as well as “a longer history of competition over the schooling
of the nation’s leadership classes” (p. 2381). As previously mentioned, given that
selective schools in NSW have been the preserve of children of the middle classes
and professional elites since their inception, the socioeconomic backgrounds of
its students cannot have come as a surprise. This leaves us with questions about
“locality” and test “coaching” – both of which are heavily racialized in relation to
the “natural” belonging and dominance of white middle classes in the Australian
educational system (Al-Natour, 2017; Edgeworth, 2015; Sriprakash et al., 2016;
Ho, 2017).
It is unsurprising, then, to find these debates develop in a manner where exer-
cised members of the educated white middle classes have been at pains to distance
themselves from racial motivations (Proctor & Sriprakash, 2017, p. 2382). The
rhetorical move that allows for such polite distinction from more “vulgar” forms of
racism is displacement: the shifting of antagonisms around race onto less explicit,
but nonetheless perceptibly racialized metonyms such as “locality” and “coaching.”
Beyond the selective schooling example, we might also point to other recent con-
troversies in Australia around religion and “violent extremism” in suburban high
schools (Low, 2019; Abdel-Fattah, 2020), or scandalous allegations of plagiarism
among international students and “soft marking” in Australian higher education
(Saltmarsh, 2005; Bodis, 2021), which have functioned as racialized proxies. Such
displacements enable racist assumptions about who legitimately belongs in educa-
tional institutions to remain operant while remaining politely silent on race.
The Enduring Power of Race

It has become conventional wisdom among Australian political elites to describe
the national identity as comprising three elements. In the words of the lead-
ing Cape York advocate Noel Pearson (2014), Australia is a country built on an
ancient Indigenous heritage (reflecting 60,000 years of Indigenous culture), with
British political institutions (reflecting the legacy of British colonization and the
historical dominance of white Anglo-Celtic Australia) boasting a multicultural
achievement (reflecting the successive waves of mass immigration since the end
of the Second World War). The description aptly captures the multiple historical
dimensions of an Australian national identity. Yet, it can feel that some parts of the
identity have primacy over others. For all the symmetry of Pearson’s description,
within public debates the Indigenous and multicultural elements of the Australian
national identity can quickly become subordinated to the third. And what may
formally be stated as Australia’s inheritance of British political institutions can
morph into something else: a broader cultural inheritance that frequently lapses
into more ethnic, atavistic expressions.
At play is the mythical power of Australian nation building. Like the members
of every nation, Australians have ideas about the kind of people they are: they are
fair and egalitarian, friendly and generous, and a people suspicious of authority
and possessed with an irreverent streak. Australians frequently draw upon this
national self-image to explain themselves. While there are debates about First
Nations reconciliation and recognition, for the most part Australians have a
positive sense of their national identity. On this self-understanding, Australia has
been an exemplar in diversity, able to absorb waves of immigrants from around
the world because its people are fair, egalitarian, friendly, and generous. And that
irreverence toward authority, the story goes, helps make Australian society open
and dynamic in ways that others could only dream of emulating.
All national identities involve myths; while drawn from elements of historical
experience, the national myths can also deviate from them and take on a life of
their own. In fact, any failure of national ideals to be reflected does little to dimin-
ish their power. The persistence of racism in Australian society, in various forms –
ranging from the systemic to the banal everyday – has done relatively little to
disrupt an Australian self-image of fairness and egalitarianism. Yet it is because
race poses such a profound challenge to the national story that it can touch a raw
nerve and spark prolonged cultural battles (Soutphommasane, 2018).
In few domains has race featured so prominently than education. As we have
noted in this chapter, public debates about education and schooling in Australia
have been racialized in two ways. With respect to Indigenous issues, there is a
denial that racism plays a role in Australian history, which then militates against
any effort to conduct historical self-examination or criticism in the classroom. By
contrast, things have taken a different turn within debates about multiculturalism
and education. As demonstrated by the discourse on selective schooling, there has
been a tendency for putative concerns about testing, coaching, and belonging to
act as proxies for racialized anxiety about immigration and its effects (particularly
as it concerns Asian immigrants and their children).
These patterns in educational debates themselves reflect broader tendencies
within Australian political culture. The Australian public sphere is notable for
its regular celebrations of multiculturalism and cultural diversity. Political leaders
frequently proclaim Australia as the most successful multicultural society in the
world. For more than a decade, most Australians believe that multiculturalism is
good for the country. Similarly, most people express commitment to Indigenous
reconciliation and recognize that Indigenous people experience racism in a way
that is different to others in Australian society. And yet, for all this progressive
tenor, Australian debates still struggle with race and racism. Reactions against
anti-racism can be vociferous and distort public discourse: the mere mention of
racism’s existence can be enough to trigger some commentators into paroxysms
of outrage. It is a common trope that “political correctness” has led to a rampant
identity politics that obsesses about racism. There is the commonly aired charge
that anti-racism has become the real racism in society today. The most dangerous
racism, it is argued, is that which is now directed toward white Australians, the
source of which is an ideology of multiculturalism aligned with “cultural Marxism.”
Compounding this, debates about social issues can lapse quickly into racial stereo-
types and racialized anxiety.
It is tempting to understand this as a symptom of a global political shift to the
right. The influence of the “alt-right” movement – drawing upon far-right politics
and white supremacist doctrines – is undeniable. The Trump presidency in the
United States has emboldened right-of-center commentators to be more aggres-
sive in asserting claims about “reverse racism,” in expressing grievances on behalf
of a white majority, and in detecting the alleged pernicious influence of “critical
race theory.”
Yet that is only half the picture. If there has been a pattern of denial and deflec-
tion around race within Australian debates about education, it may reflect some-
thing more structural – something within Australia’s institutional makeup. The
racialization of public debates routinely occurs within Australian media, where
politicians with extreme and provocative views about race are given mainstream
platforming and legitimacy. For all of Australia’s public endorsement of diversity
and multiculturalism, racism can be presented less as something that society wishes
to eradicate and more as something for society to debate. One possible explana-
tion is that Australia’s major institutions – certainly, the leaders of its political,
media, and other institutions – remain overwhelmingly white and Anglo-Celtic in
their composition. For all the multicultural character of its population, Australia
has yet managed to have institutions that reflect its diversity.
The racialization of debates in Australia goes beyond the normalization of race
politics and the heightened influence of far-right political elements. It also reflects
the lingering discomfort that sections of Australian society have about race. Whether
they are generated by multiculturalism or by the desire for First Peoples recognition,
the demands of diversity fundamentally challenge an idealized white, Anglo-Celtic
image of Australia – one that still retains its social, cultural, and political power.
Notes
1 We use the term “First Peoples” or “First Nations peoples” when referring to Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia. When the term “Aboriginal” or “Indig-
enous” is used in this chapter, it is with reference to public statements, historical policies,
statutory bodies, official reports or scholarly sources that have used those designations.
2 https://www.2gb.com/youre-making-that-up-mark-latham-drops-bombshell-on-ray-
hadley/
3 Country is a term often used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to describe
the lands, waterways, and seas to which they have a long and enduring cultural con-
nection. The term contains complex ideas about law, place, custom, language, spiritual
belief, cultural practice, material sustenance, family, and identity (AIATSIS & Pascoe,
2018, p. 21). In addition, Country, and everything it encompasses, is an active partici-
pant in the world, shaping and creating it (Bawaka Country et al., 2015).
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8 Latinx (Im)migrant
Racialization, Anti-Blackness,
and the Social and Educational
Landscape of the U.S. South
Sophia Rodriguez, Rebeca Gamez, and
Timothy Monreal
As researchers grounded in the lived experiences of marginalized racial/ethnic

groups in the United States, we anchor this chapter in an undocumented Latina
youth’s enduring identity, belonging, and racialized struggles in the United States.
Latinx1 migrants in the United States are situated within U.S. racial history and
hierarchy in relation to immigration policy and law (López, 2006; Lacayo, 2015,
2017). Latinx migrants in the United States, as a highly racialized population, is
not monolithic. We ground the concept of racialization (discussed later in this
chapter) in our collective research, and through scholarship that defines, chal-
lenges, and interrogates racialized othering processes. Immigrants are not a single
racial or ethnic group, and they are racialized differently, yet many immigration
scholars fail to engage race and racialization in their study of immigrant groups
and immigration (Lacayo, 2017). Immigrants can become entwined with raciali-
zation through the criminal justice system. Especially during the Trump era, the
category of Latino/x immigrant became associated with racialized criminality
(Armenta, 2017).
Race is a social construct that has deeply lived consequences. Race in the
United States largely has been defined through white enslavement and subjuga-
tion of African Americans, and often “race” has been measured and judged based
on the belief in an innate cultural inferiority of non-whites (Golash-Boza, 2013).
This experience of Latinxs in the United States remains equally as complicated.
Scholars conflate the experiences of non-white and non-Black groups into the
“Brown” category. Scholars of race increasingly see such a blanket term as essen-
tialist and rooted in anti-Black colonial logics (Busey & Silva, 2020). For exam-
ple, “Brownness” reifies a monolithic Latinidad2 that leaves aside intersectional
identities, largely invisibilizing the intersections of Afro-Latinidad and Indigenous
Latinidad. Thus, these broad racial/ethnic categories, such as “Brown” and/or
“Latinx/o/a” are taken for granted and must be interrogated.
In this chapter, we draw from interviews with Latinx youth and educator
migrants to provide insight into the process of racialization in the United States.
We first define racialization, Latinx racialization, and how they manifest in rela-
tion to undocumented immigrants in the context of the U.S. South. Finally, we
describe how research situated at the nexus of Blackness, anti-Blackness, and
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-11
140 Sophia Rodriguez et al.
Afro-Latinx studies can extend current understandings of racialization broadly
and Latinx racialization specifically.
Racialization
Omi and Winant (2014) offer a foundational theory of racial formation, show-
casing the concept of racialization. While racialization has been taken up across
several disciplines, including sociology and education, it is important to consider
this concept in tandem with additional concepts and othering processes. Raciali-
zation is particularly relevant for understanding Latinx immigrant youth because
Latino/x groups typically are marked by their immigration status. While “Latino” is
often conceived as an ethnicity (Gómez-Cervantes, 2021; Rodriguez, 2020), U.S.
laws and policies that appear race neutral may uphold existing racial hierarchies
through processes of racialization (Fergus, 2017). Such laws use code words, or
dog whistles, such as “illegal alien” to refer to racial themes without directly mak-
ing those connections (Haney-López, 2014). Researchers find that white people
overwhelmingly hold racist views toward Latinxs, view them as culturally inferior,
and that these attitudes are both permanent and are ascribed to Latinxs regardless
of immigration status or even generation (Flores-Gonzalez, 2017). While social
scientists consider differences between ethnicity, white people use ethnic terms in
everyday language as fixed racial concepts, constructing Latinxs or immigrants as
a racial group (Lacayo, 2015). Further, many Latinx individuals themselves con-
sider their national origin or ethnic identity as a racial identity because of their
experiences of racialization (Rodriguez, 2020), thus challenging existing under-
standings of race and racial classifications.
These perspectives inform the complexity of individuals’ perceptions of race
and racial groups and the structures and systems in which they work, such as
schools. We align with the previous understandings about racialization in soci-
ology and education (Rodriguez, 2020). Notably, the concept of racialization is
broadly understood as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially
unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (Omi & Winant, 2014, p. 111).
The linking of race to cultural and structural symbols and practices – and to the
real distribution of capital – has been articulated well elsewhere (e.g., Emirbayer &
Desmond, 2012; Omi & Winant, 2014; Ray, 2019). Within this literature, we
observe that racialization may also be understood as an exercise of power, used to
“tell the truth” about individuals and enter processes of self-understanding. From
this perspective, racialization is understood as a “technique” of power (Foucault,
1979), deployed by the “government of individualization” (Foucault, 1982) along-
side strategies of normalization and problematization (Rodriguez et al., 2022).
Race and racialized bodies are inscribed in politics as “problems,” as they are made
into objects of knowledge through practices of dividing and categorizing.
Latinx Racialization
The racialization of Latinx groups transpires through systematic racism where
interpersonal and institutional oppression intersects with cultural ideologies
Latinx (Im)migrant Racialization 141
of superiority and inferiority to reinforce and justify their low placement in the
U.S. racial hierarchy. Latinx people experience overtly negative or xenophobic
discourses – albeit those that are seemingly race neutral. While descriptions of
“undeservingness” and “illegality” may not be openly racist, they are still dis-
paraging and create forms of exclusion (Patel, 2015; Rodriguez, 2018; Yukich,
2013). Relatedly, native-born and immigrant Latinxs have long experienced
racialization in the United States. José Cobas and colleagues (2009) assert that
Latinx racialization began with early European settler depictions of Indigenous
Americans and continued into the mid-1800s when white Americans justified
their conquest of Mexican land by claiming that Mexicans were inferior and inca-
pable of governing themselves (Menchaca, 1999). These initial encounters with
Mexicans set the racialized trajectory for subsequent Latinx immigrants and their
descendants in the United States, who continue to encounter social exclusion and
hyper-exploitability in labor markets (Blauner, 1987; Cabaniss & Cameron, 2018;
Glenn, 2015).
As noted, policymakers enacted laws to racialize immigrant groups. Rogelio
Sáenz and Karen Manges Douglas (2015) note that immigrants of color are still
“racial beings” who face ongoing barriers in the United States: “Although the
White litmus test was lifted from U.S. laws, it clearly survives in other – colorblind –
forms” (p. 171). Aranda and colleagues (2015) find that native-born Latinxs in
Miami engage in colorblind3 racism against Latinx immigrants by making nor-
mative distinctions between “deserving” and “undeserving” immigrants based on
perceived cultural differences between the groups, and perceived cultural defi-
ciencies to sustain differences between whites and Latinxs (Lacayo, 2017).4
Another way that Latinx groups experience racialization is through the race-
neutral discourse of “illegality” (Alcalde, 2016; Rodriguez, 2020; Menjivar, 2021).
Menjivar (2021) explains: “The immigration regime targets Latinxs today with par-
ticular force: both the legislative and the enforcement side of the regime illegalize
and racialize them” (p. 10). The status of “illegality” is not a race-neutral term; it
has become synonymous with “Mexicanness” and with being Latinx (p. 92). And
since race is a “fundamental organizing principle of social relationships, “illegality,”
like race, has become an axis of stratification with effects like those of other social
hierarchies” (p. 92). The racialization of “illegality,” therefore, has real-life con-
sequences for immigrants, their families, and communities (Rodriguez, 2022). At
the institutional level, immigration and enforcement policies that target Latinx
immigrants also contribute to the racialized construction of “illegality,” creating
consequences for both Latinx immigrants and the native-born Latinx population
(Arriaga, 2016; De Genova, 2004; Flores & Schachter, 2019).
Moreover, Arriaga (2016) found that local law enforcement agents routinely
used color-neutral ideologies that emphasized “illegality” to justify stopping and
detaining Latinx drivers for minor traffic offenses. As a result, there has been
a spillover effect (Aranda et al., 2014) and a disproportionate impact of poli-
cies directed at curbing “terrorist” threats on Latino/a citizens and noncitizens
(Aranda et al., 2014). While in the areas of crime and policing, scholars often
fail to account for how Latinx groups are entangled in the criminal justice sys-
tem. Increasingly, those individuals incarcerated in state and federal prisons are
Hispanic or Latinx (Oliver, 2011) and increasingly noncitizens (Light et al., 2014),
requiring researchers to go beyond both the Black – white binary and the assump-
tion that the criminal justice and immigration systems have separate impacts in
the lives of immigrants. While there is much discussion to be had regarding the
role and impact of racialization and moving beyond the Black-white history in
studying it, we situate Latinx racialization within the Black and white binary to
further analyze how Latinx racialization is linked to whiteness and anti-Blackness.
In the following section, we discuss the relationship between Latinidad, Blackness,
and anti-Blackness and explore current limitations to existing frames for thinking
about Latinx racialization.
Anti-Blackness, Latinidad, Afro-Latinidad

Despite efforts of previous scholars to elaborate on broader processes of racializa-
tion as it relates to Latinxs, limitations arise. Drawing from scholarly literature
situated at the nexus of critical Latinx, Afro-Latinx, and anti-Blackness studies,
this scholarship examines Afro-Latinx experience, as well as probes the relation-
ship between Latinxs, whiteness, and anti-Blackness. In this section, we expand
on this latter scholarship and maintain that as educational scholars and practi-
tioners continue to grapple with Latinx racialization, they also must do so in ways
that increasingly pay attention to the relationship between Latinidad, Blackness,
and anti-Blackness.
Latinx people are often broadly constructed as “illegal,” non-English speak-
ing, and “Other,” and some scholars have argued that this construction is often
discursively imagined as inhabiting a location between a phenotypic white and
Brown individual (Busey & Silva, 2020). Candelario (2007) argues that terms
like “Latino” or “Hispanic” refer to a “racialized non-white category in the United
States, and a non-black one” (p. 12). This tendency to pre-define and circum-
scribe the racialized boundaries of Latinidad in the collective imagination not only
reinscribes fixed biological notions of race but also effectively forecloses the inclu-
sion of individuals that fall outside of an imagined spectrum of whiteness and
brownness, particularly Afro-Latinxs and Afro-descendant individuals (and to a
large extent darker-skinned Indigenous peoples of Latin and Central America). In
examining the construct of Latinidad, Flores (2021) links this tendency to exclude
the experiences of Afro-descendants within studies of Latin America and Latinxs
in the United States to, what she contends is a misapprehension of the term “Latin
America.” She maintains that “Latin America is constructed as Eurocentric to
the degree that its conceptual boundaries perniciously exclude African diaspora
spaces” (p. 58) and that “Black Latin Americans are sidelined in national and
regional imaginaries” (p. 61). While the countries associated with the concept of
Latin America, as well as those communities and people associated with them,
have long been positioned by the United States as “Other” and inferior (Cobas
et al., 2009), this positioning operates in tandem with an anti-Black racism in
Latin America and in many Latinx communities, as well as an erasure of Blackness
from the concept of Latinidad.
Afro-Latinx activists and scholars have been at the forefront of complicating our
understanding of Latinx racialization by inserting the voices, knowledges, and expe-
riences of Afro-Latinxs and Black Latin Americans into public discussions and aca-
demic conversations about processes of Latinx racialization. They have advanced
scholarship on anti-Blackness that operates at the margins of or completely outside
of traditional scholarship on Latinidad. Spanning across disciplines, methods, and
theoretical orientations, Blackness scholarship has centered the singularity of anti-
Blackness (e.g., Coles, 2021; Dumas & ross, 2016; Warren & Coles, 2020; Wilderson,
2010). As Coles (2021) elaborates, anti-Blackness is a “structural regime where Black
people are imagined as less than and experience gratuitous violence” (p. 1). Black-
ness and anti-Blackness scholars have theorized how the global chattel enslavement
of Afro-descendant peoples has marked the ontological position of Black people,
or as ross5 (2021) clarified, “that the relation between humanity and blackness is
an antagonism, is irreconcilable” (p. 8). Afro-Latinx scholars have investigated
how a pervasive anti-Blackness is understood within Latinidad and how these pro-
cesses, in turn, shape how Afro-Latinxs experience and understand race, identity,
and belonging (e.g., Dache et al., 2019; Haywood, 2017; Hordge-Freeman & Veras,
2019). These scholars have also explored what an erasure of Black Latin Americans
and Afro-Latinxs from public and academic discussions about Latinidad means for
how we have come to understand our racialized past and present. The erasure of
the Haitian history of enslavement and revolution in relation to the history of the
United States and Latin America more generally, is an example of anti-Blackness
and Latinidad. As Tenorio-Trillo (2017) argues, “the anti-black consensus of most
of the European and American sponsors of the idea of Latin America – with few
exceptions . . . Latin meant not black” (cited in Flores, 2021).
The Racialization of Latinidad and Anti-Blackness

The racialization of Latinxs can further anti-Black narratives. For example, through
an examination of media, organizational, and political election discourses, Arlene
Dávila (2008) demonstrates how whitewashed, racialized constructions of Latini-
dad are linked to and can reinforce false and harmful contests between Latinx and
Black communities. Black and Latinx communities often inhabit similar socioeco-
nomic statuses and work, live, and attend school in similarly positioned spaces and
places, and as such, academic and public discourse has focused on understanding
“Black and Latinx” relations. Media portrayals often focus on “tension” or “con-
flict.” Dávila (2008) contends that a “politics of whiteness” engages in a project
of simultaneously racializing Latinos and Latino/a immigrants as “inferior” and
“Other,” while simultaneously whitewashing Latinos and Latino culture in stra-
tegic ways, a process she calls “Latino spin.” Drawing on seemingly race-neutral
language, Latino spin projects tropes about values of hard work, family values, and
docility onto Latinx immigrants, while at the same time hiding how many Latinx
communities continue to be deeply marginalized socially, politically, and economi-
cally. Crucially, as Dávila has demonstrated, Latino spin also conjures anti-Black
scripts that position Black communities as the “inferior” and “downwardly mobile”
unnamed referenced against which Latinxs are positioned. Educational research-
ers have explored these relational racialization processes mired in white supremacy
and anti-Blackness within school and other educational contexts, demonstrating
how these processes have symbolic and material consequences for youth that are
constructed as Black and Latinx (e.g., Gamez, 2020; Shange, 2019). The forces of
racialization simultaneously criminalize and racialize Latinx groups while leverag-
ing anti-Black scripts to reinforce Black inferiority.
While U.S. expansionist and colonial projects have positioned both the geo-
graphical concept of Latin America and those associated with Latin America as
inferior, “Other,” and a threat to nation-building projects that have contributed to
projects of Latinx racialization and oppression (Cobas et al., 2009), these raciali-
zations intersect with and can reinforce anti-Blackness (and anti-Indigenous)
projects. Capturing the complexity of Latinx racialization in educational research
and practice requires attending to how White supremacy and anti-Black (and
anti-Indigenous) logics reproduce and reinforce existing racial hierarchies that
construct, rank, sort, and evaluate groups. In the following section, we discuss
Latinx racialization in the context of the U.S. South.
The Case: Racialization in the U.S. South and Its Impact

on Latinx Youth and Educators
In this section, we discuss the case of the U.S. South. We focus on the South to
understand Latinx racialization within a historically and contemporary “Black-
white” space. We move beyond the outdated understanding of the South as a
region in which race and race relations are binary, distinct, and unchanging. Rob-
inson (2014) argues that a forever backward South is a necessary foil to the imag-
ined racial progress in other parts of the nation. However, such simplistic and rigid
racial narratives hide, or at least minimize, the ongoing and contextual processes
of racialization. As the Latinx population of the U.S. South has increased via
changing (im)migration patterns and established multigenerational communities,
new practices of othering, categorization, and problematization are being remade
(Gamez & Monreal, 2021; Guerrero, 2017; Jones, 2019; Rodriguez, 2020). Thus,
as a case, (Latinx in) the U.S. South helps scholars understand how racialization
works in relation to emergent interpersonal and group relations, historical racial
boundaries, and sociopolitical laws and discourse. Latinx racialization in the U.S.
South reveals the complexity of racial formation, where local racial structures, sys-
tems, and relations work alongside, and diverge from, broader racial scripts such as
illegality. This context, where we have conducted research independently and col-
lectively, points to contexts that transcend the U.S. South, given the complexity of
the Latinx diaspora in the United States (Hamann & Harklau, 2021).
Racialization in Southern Spaces

While the Latinx population of the United States is concentrated in California,
Texas, Florida, and the Southwest (Brown & Lopez, 2013; Flores, 2017), increasing
numbers of Latinx live in the U.S. South. In fact, researchers and demographers
continue to reiterate that the Latinx population of the U.S. South has grown
faster than in any other U.S. region for at least the last 25 years (Guzmán, 2001;
Noe-Bustamante et al., 2020). For example, North Carolina and Georgia now
have over one million Latinx people (U.S. Census Bureau, 2021). Between 2000
and 2010, South Carolina had a 148% increase in its Latinx population (Ennis
et al., 2011) and from 2010 to 2020 it increased another 49.7% (U.S. Census
Bureau, 2021). While the Latinx population in Maryland grew from 8% to 14%
overall in the last decade, the Latinx population comprised the fastest-growing
ethnoracial group within Baltimore City (Frey, 2021; U.S. Census Bureau, 2021).
There was ambivalent and improvisational welcome of Latinx throughout the
South in the 1980s and 1990s (Hamann et al., 2015), but the twenty-first century
is characterized by anti-Latinx individual and institutional racism and discrimi-
nation. In particular, the 2000s brought more restrictive and explicit anti-Latinx
state/local policies.
In lieu of national immigration reform, many Southern states, counties, and
municipalities enacted their own policies regarding Latinx population growth
and immigration. These state policies and local ordinances, interacting with
inaccurate, inflammatory, and racialized rhetoric/action, were overwhelmingly
restrictive, and limited access to housing, driving, policing, education, and access
to resources. For example, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina passed legisla-
tion prohibiting undocumented students from attending at least some of their
state’s colleges, and local governments passed anti-congregating ordinances,
housing regulations, and English-only language policies specifically aimed at
Latinx workers, residents, and students (Odem, 2009; Odem & Browne, 2014;
Rodriguez & Monreal, 2017). These measures came to be known as “Juan Crow”
laws (Brooks, 2012). Playing on the U.S. South’s history of de jure Black/white
segregation (Jim Crow laws), “Juan Crow” refers to contemporary state and
municipal policies across the same region that create uneven and racialized sets
of legal rights for individuals based on (perceived) legal status (Browne & Odem,
2012; Lovato, 2008).
Juan Crow policies further racialized Latinx communities, not only as othered
minorities, foreigners, and (low-skilled) workers, but also as dangerous criminals,
targets, and threats to a national/state security vision that emphasized border (in)
security (Vargas et al., 2017). In short, the Latinx population in the South is/was
constructed and tied to the politics and policies of perceived immigration status
(Jones, 2019; Lacy & Odem, 2009; Rodriguez & Monreal, 2017). The techniques
of power, such as agreements between local law enforcement and local programs
through programs and discourses of illegality, create local spaces that criminalize
Latinx groups broadly, regardless of immigration status. These processes of raciali-
zation homogenize all Latinx; marking their lives hyper (in)visible, their bodies
the sites of specific in/action, their neighborhoods the place of surveillance, and
making the navigation of everyday activities precarious. Furthermore, tying Latinx
to (illegal) immigration also works to create categorization boundaries vis-à-vis
other racialized groups, especially Black people.
From the Field: Latinx Educators and Youths’ Experiences
of Racialization
In our studies, participants used and resisted the category of Latinx and racializa-
tion processes. Racialization can be a generic frame, applying in any racial/ethnic
group othering process. However, we observed the complexity of Latinx educators’
and youths’ responses to and uses of the processes of racialization to which they
were subject. We offer these accounts from our research to illustrate the diver-
sity of racialization experiences, rather than to claim generalization across their
experiences.6
Latinx Youth in Maryland (Rebeca’s Study)

Rebeca’s study collected ethnographic data between 2016 and 2018 across two
middle schools and their immediate neighborhoods, with 66 students categorized
as Latinx and Black. Both schools are in a majority African American, segregated
southeastern city experiencing the settlement of Latin and Central American
communities since the early 2000s. The examples illustrate the complexities of
how immigrant youth navigate belonging, and their understanding of Latinidad
in educational spaces. Respondents also emphasize how Afro-Latinidad is often
excluded from the Latinx category, and call attention to the Latin American cul-
tural legacy of anti-Blackness.
In this example, drawn from a conversation that occurred after school, new-
comers Isabela (a 13-year-old from Guatemala) and Adriana, (a 14-year-old from
Honduras) are talking about their long migration journeys and their experiences in
their new city and school. Isabela brings up the subject of Latinidad. She explains:
I think being Latino means, well here [in the United States], it means that
we need to try to, try to learn new things, learn new things to later, or, I don’t
know. Because well they should learn new things, coming from over there to
here, and try to learn English and all that. And it means to make an effort.
They need to have strength in order to get something, here, in the United
States. Because we face a lot of discrimination here. Like in school. The
teachers think just because we are new and speak Spanish that they can treat
us any way they want. But then, I don’t know. I see people like Rocio, Stormy,
and Avery and then, I don’t know, I get all confused in my head. I see them,
and their group, like their little group, is like all morenos (Blacks). They act
like the morenos too, all aggressive and mean. And, they’re not our friends.
They don’t stick up for us. I don’t know. (Field note, March 6, 2017)
Isabela’s explanation highlights two important aspects about Latinx racialization.

First, for Isabela the category of Latino is constructed within the context of the
United States and, specifically, tied to overcoming a set of shared obstacles, such
as linguistic discrimination on the part of teachers at school. As she demonstrates
in the broader project, newcomer youths’ construction of a Latino identity was
specifically tied to educators’ racialization of Spanish use (Gamez, 2020). Isabela’s
comment also reveals how the construct of Latino is never straightforward.
For Isabela, the fact that Rocio, Stormy, and Avery, all students born in the United
States to parents from Central America, would rather associate with Black youth
than “stick up for them,” is “confu[sing]” to her understanding of what it means
to be Latino and the imagined group solidarity she perceives should accompany
the term.
Second, Isabela’s characterization of Black youth as “aggressive” and “mean”
points to how immigrant youth navigate racial scripts about Blackness. Adriana
responded to Isabela’s comment:
Yea, my dad told us all about how Black people here in the city were danger-
ous and that we needed to be really careful. That’s why we moved to this
street because where we live there are not so many Blacks, but it’s funny that
in school it’s mainly Black! But then, I see Avery. She’s Black and she speaks
Spanish. I never would have guessed that she was from Panama, I thought she
was just one of them. But we had Black people in Honduras too. Not where
we lived, they live in a different part of Honduras, but they’re like their own
people. I guess that’s why she gets along with them better than us, she’s really
one of them.
Like Isabela, Adriana’s comments point to how immigrant youth navigate stereo-
types about Black communities in the United States, particularly within the con-
text of a segregated urban context. Yet, Adriana’s comments also directly speak to
how the historical erasure of Blackness in Latin and Central America forecloses
youths’ opportunities to see shared commonalities with Black Latinxs. Here,
Adriana may be referring to Afro-Hondurans,7 which comprise a significant por-
tion of the population in some parts of Honduras (England & Anderson, 2005).
For Adriana, Afro-Hondurans are “like their own people” and do not necessarily
belong to the Honduran national imagination. We return to Isabela and Adriana’s
perceptions and how stereotypes of Black criminality were part of the everyday
discourse of their home life and schools.
Latinx Undocumented Youth in South Carolina (Sophia)

While racialization in Rebeca’s study revealed the complexity of Latinx identities
and how youth rely upon, intentional or not, discourses of anti-Blackness such
as perceived criminality, Sophia’s participants call into question the larger racial-
ized othering processes in U.S. society and locally, that include indirect under-
standings of anti-Blackness. Sophia’s examples are from ethnographic data she
collected between 2015 and 2019 across two high schools in a southern city with
63 undocumented youth. Both schools had rising populations of Latinx undoc-
umented and unaccompanied newcomer youth. Like Rebeca’s examples, these
illustrate the complexities involved in how immigrant youth navigate belonging
and their understanding of Latinidad and their Latinx identity in educational
spaces. Specifically, these examples show how youth asserted their Latinx-ness as
they were racialized as such, and how they resisted it to counteract the violence
of racialized othering. An example of this identity assertion comes from Elena
(pseudonym), an undocumented immigrant youth:
It is hard to live in the U.S. even if you’re not illegal as a Latino. I feel like you
have to do extra work and work harder than everyone else (Americans). If
they (immigrants) have to work they accept any type of work, it does not mat-
ter they just want to work. We have to live with the racism and discrimination
and when we come here we have to learn the language which is hard. Ameri-
cans feel that they can treat immigrants however they want just because they
are immigrants. They (white and affluent individuals) feel like they are above
us. (Interview, 2019).
Sophia has conducted longitudinal ethnographic observations and interviews

with Elena. After the initial study concluded, Elena and Sophia continued to
engage in life-history interviews (six between 2019 and the present) discussing
her experiences of Latinx racialization, and the complexity of her identity and
belonging across the life span (from high school and now into her college experi-
ences). When asked in several interviews what it meant to be an immigrant in the
United States, Elena said:
is hard to live in the U.S. even if you’re not illegal as a Latino. I feel like
It
you have to do extra work and work harder than everyone else (Americans).
If they (immigrants) have to work they accept any type of work, it does not
matter they just want to work. We have to live with the racism and dis-
crimination and when we come here we have to learn the language which is
hard. Americans feel that they can treat immigrants however they want just
because they are immigrants. They (white and affluent individuals) feel like
they are above us.
Elena’s experience of racialization extended into her everyday feelings of belonging

and identity as well as perceptions of Latinx racialization in the broader U.S. society.
Elena explained how colorblind discourses about the “American dream” mask
the racial hierarchy and violence that persist for non-White European immigrants
such as the Latinx newcomers like her. Elena’s identity further helped her
understand and live racialization processes as she was born in Spain to Dominican
parents and lived in both Spain and the Dominican Republic before migrating to
the United States with her mother. In the community, youth experienced raciali-
zation. Elena described one incident:
I remember one time when I was on the bus with one of my friends and we
were talking in Spanish and this one [white] woman told us “You should
speak English since you’re in America.” We didn’t say anything and kept talk-
ing and ignoring her.
In describing this story and the “ignorance” of community members, she also noted
that she did not always face as harsh racism as some of her other Dominican peers
or even her mother who she described as having darker skin. She explained: “It
depends on your skin color here [in the United States]. I am lighter so I don’t get
a lot of racism toward me, but I have friends who are Dominican and darker, and
they have more racist stories.” Elena noted that her father was undocumented
and being criminalized and targeted in the community. Meanwhile, she noted
she and her mother faced racism due to language barriers but that her mother
traveled to Spain “without any problems from immigration,” which to Elena was
odd. This made her reflect upon this in several of our interviews. She said, “maybe
it’s because she is going to Spain they don’t question her overstaying her visa as
much?”
Another youth, Serena also associated her Latinx identity in relation to the
false discourse of the “the American Dream,” which she understood as a color-
blind and false discourse perpetuating the racial hierarchies. Serena described her
migration journey from Brazil by bus and realized upon entering the United States
that immigrants were badly treated. Her experience in detention shaped her view
of the U.S. perspective and treatment of immigrants. Serena explained how the
United States pressures immigrants into leaving and going back to their coun-
tries by routinely checking their homes or not allowing them to work certain jobs:
“They [immigration] made my mom wear a leg bracelet and would call our house
non-stop. My mom was so stressed out.” All of her possessions were taken once
she and her mother were detained, and she was forced into horrible living condi-
tions. She reflected:
We didn’t take showers. We just have the rest of what they (immigration offic-
ers) gave us. We didn’t eat for 20 hours. They just gave us some cookies. They
don’t care. . . . It looks like you are a prisoner. It’s like a wall. You cannot see
nothing. They put us in the car and didn’t say anything about what they’re
going to do with us, they didn’t say anything.
Experiences of migration journeys and detention centers were commonly dis-

cussed where youth revealed border stories, reasons for migration, and pointed
to the hypocrisy of U.S. immigration enforcement. The contradictory and inhu-
man treatment of immigrants is an important part of the immigrant experience
in the United States. Serena also pointed out the contradictions for navigating
the education system across multiple life-history interviews. Serena and Elena are
in the United States without documentation, and as such, they are ineligible for
temporary benefits through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Serena’s interviews also focused on the educational inequality she faced in her
high school versus the higher-quality magnet schools in her district. These latter
points reveal less obvious or direct racism, namely, the structures of oppression
embedded in schools and through the immigration enforcement systems. These
deprivations speak to how racialization and criminalization along with racial hier-
archies intersect with immigrant youths’ everyday lives.
Latinx Educators in South Carolina (Tim’s Example)
Tim’s examples come from a qualitative study of 25 Latinx educators in South
Carolina. Using semi-structured interviews, photovoice, and ecomaps, the research
mapped Latinx teacher identify formation across a state and its schools that have a
small percentage of Latinx teachers. Latinx teachers in South Carolina felt outside
the racial norms of Southern spaces as non-white and correspondingly felt forced
to negotiate their racialized subjectivities as Latinx teachers. This section focuses
on Amara, a high school math teacher who identifies as Chicana8 and Black. This
self-identification, as well as her use of Afro-Latina, led to a self-description of
a “unicorn” because so few teachers shared this racial-ethnic background. In an
interview, she shared:
At some point I get tired of answering the same questions, right? Like every-
one assumes I’m Puerto Rican because of, like, a particular way they think,
you know, Hispanic people should look. And, um, and then a lot of times,
unless my sister opens her mouth, no one believes she’s Mexican because
she’s so white. . . . So like, I feel like a lot of the times, like I’m a unicorn.
Amara explained that she and her sister shattered popular perceptions of how
“Hispanic people look” since she was Afro-Latina and her sister was very light-
skinned. She perceived racialization to be through the Black-white binary in this
southern space. Additionally, Amara explained how she felt it was important to
challenge these static Black/white categories in the South saying:
Usually at some point it [Afro-Latinidad] comes up and the biggest thing for
kids in South Carolina is when you say you’re mixed, they just assume Black
and white and that’s the only possible mixing that could ever take place.
In this case, Amara complicates the Black-white binary and potential anti-
blackness in the South while also leveraging aspects of her Afro-Latina identity to
disrupt static racial categories. Amara asserted her Afro-Latina identity because
people were confused that she could be “Black” and “Latina.”
Amara’s Afro-Latina identity speaks to the complexity of Latinidad and pro-
cesses of racialization. She asserted that her presence was important within her
context of Black and Latinx racialization, even playing with racial stereotypes
to explicitly represent her difference. Amara shared that it was important to her
that she wore her hair in a “big poof ball,” stressing physical appearance was “one
of those things where I may not talk about it out loud . . . but [something] you
know, [students see] in the hallway or in class.” Her hair was also an intentional
signal to both acknowledge the power of racial scripts (by playing up certain
racialized physical appearances) and leverage such scripts to disrupt their sig-
nifying power (by identifying as Afro-Latina). Here, she is using stereotypes of
Blackness to assert her presence and disrupt Black-white binaries and normative
racialization.
In addition to the physical markers that racialize her, Amara described how her
last name was part of her racialization process. For example, when her last name
was Fernandez (from a previous marriage), she shared:
kids and adults saw that [last name] and then saw me, they thought I was a
Spanish teacher. I even had a friend who knew I was a Math teacher and tried
to get me a new job as a Spanish teacher.
However, when she got remarried and her last name was Frank (pseudonym), she
said, “that Spanish teacher thing was not a big deal because I was a Math teacher
and it is an in-demand subject.” Like Rebeca and Sophia’s examples of how the
construction of a Latinx identity rested on language, Amara speaks to how her last
name became a visible marker of a perceived Latinx identity. This tied to a percep-
tion of what she wanted to, and could, teach, in her school setting, something that
shifted when her last name did.
Discussion and Conclusion

While the examples we have provided through our research occur within different
regions across the U.S. South, they also point to broader underlying processes and
phenomena that are important for understanding Latinx racialization across dis-
tinct geographical and educational spaces. Specifically, we explored the complex-
ity of Latinx racialization, including how anti-Black discourses and stereotypes
and Afro-Latinx identity markers complicate essentialist and one-dimensional
understandings of Latino/a/x or “being Hispanic.” In this section, we further dis-
cuss the examples from our research, elaborating on implications our analyses
have for educators and scholars studying Latinx communities and processes of
racialization.
Our cases reflect the complexity of racialization processes and the diversity of
experiences within the Latinx community. Candelario (2007) argues that while
terms like “Latino” or “Hispanic” refer to a “racialized non-white category in the
United States, it is also a non-black one” (p. 12). Scholars, and educators alike
consider race as a social construct, but the reality is that a category like “Hispanic”
or Latino/a/x simultaneously is both diverse and homogenized. Latinxs are seen
as “good” and deserving at times, when compared to Black youth, for example
(Rebeca’s examples), while “bad” and “illegal” in other cases (Sophia’s example of
Serena) when positioned in the larger racial hierarchy in the United States where
they are non-white (Omi & Winant, 2014). Latinx (a once cultural term) is used
to racially classify and differentiate the Latinx groups in our research while also
reinforcing the racialized social systems. This feature of the U.S. system generates
and sustains racial stratification, where scholars Bonilla-Silva and Glover (2004)
have referred to this as a “tri-racial system” with “whites” at the top, an intermedi-
ary group of “honorary whites,” and a non-white group or the “collective black” at
the bottom (p. 150). Challenges to this system occur when we underscore the lived
experiences of the participants in our research; however, racialization is useful for
understanding the practices of racial and ethnic identity dynamics. Accordingly,
Hochschild (2005) argues that “the structure of racial hierarchy will be different
races are conceived as discrete and insular” (i.e., one can be black or white but not
both) rather than if they are conceived as occurring along a continuum. This is the
strength of Black-white binaries of race and anti-black racialization – to p erceive
and ascribe monolithic understandings of racial classification. We leverage the
lived experiences of Latinx participants in a southern context that is saturated
with such beliefs about race that ensure the erasure and systemic oppression of
Black and Latinx groups.
We also observed how Latinxs are subject to processes of othering. Based on
language proficiency, or as Elena (Sophia’s example) notes, skin color, shades of
Latinx-ness, the boundaries of Latinidad are constructed, negotiated, and con-
tested. Elena observed that her lighter skin contributed to less racism and discrim-
ination, but her language proficiency or accent subjected her to discrimination.
She noted this in relation to her mother’s skin color as well as while her mother
was less subject to discrimination because she was traveling, undocumented, to
and from Spain. Within one example of Elena, the factors that impact and shape
racialization processes are evident.
Although colorblindness and explicit references to Afro-Latinx identity were
mildly prevalent across our respondents, these dynamics highlight the importance
of intervening in narrow conceptualizations of who is Latinx as we attempt to
further understand processes of Latinx racialization. These examples also indicate
what is missed by overlooking the relationship between Latinx racialization and
the perpetuation of anti-Black racial scripts. The historical legacy of excluding the
African diaspora from Latin America and the concept of Latinidad has meant that
the experiences of Afro-Latinx communities and youth are erased. For example,
for youth like Adriana and Isabela, being Black and being Latino or Hispanic, or
being Black and living in Latin or Central America, were seemingly incommen-
surate facts. For non-Black Latin and Central American youth, Blackness is often
considered “foreign” or “Other,” or as Adriana stated, are conceptualized as “like
their own people.” As an Afro-Latina, Amara felt this “Otherness” in relation
to Latinidad as she attempted to negotiate her Afro-Latinidad as a teacher in a
setting where the concept of Afro-Latinidad may have been particularly foreign.
Amara’s experiences, in conjunction with Isabela and Adriana’s comments, sug-
gest that as educators grapple with how foreign and U.S.-born Latin and Cen-
tral American youth navigate belonging, exclusion, and identity, they must also
recognize the layered experiences that Afro-Latinx youth traverse as they con-
tend with criminalization, othering, and, crucially, anti-Blackness. Adriana and
Isabela’s comments about their Black peers and their negative characterization of
Black communities starkly illustrate the prevalence of anti-Black stereotypes and
racial scripts that youth are exposed to and perhaps are socialized into. Enduring
anti-Black racism(s) proliferated globally and conditioned, at least initially, and
perhaps longer-term, immigrants’ understanding of belonging and exclusion in the
United States (Treitler, 2015). As educators and scholars study racialization and
push toward more socially just educational spaces, they must also pay attention
to how the forces of racialization promote false contests between groups, as they
continue to marginalize, criminalize, and racialize Latinxs while also leveraging
anti-Black scripts that further dehumanize Black communities.
Latinx racialization occurs through systematic racism where oppression, at
interpersonal and institutional levels, intersects with cultural ideologies of superi-
ority and inferiority to reinforce and justify their low placement in the U.S. racial
hierarchy. Latinx racialization takes place amid the stronghold of anti-Black racism
that perpetually positions Black people on the bottom of any hierarchy. We inter-
rogate the variation of experiences of Latinxs in concert with knowledge about
anti-Blackness. Practically, understanding these larger forces, processes, and how
they influence/shape youths’ and educator experiences in schools is critical for
transforming educational systems and increasing coalition building and belonging
across and within groups.
Notes
1 We use “Latinx” to reference people that have familial and/or personal origin from Latin
American countries. We see Latinx as an inclusive term that represents a spectrum of
gender identity rather than the masculine/feminine binary of Latina/o. We recognize that
the term “Latinx” is contested and used contextually in communities of practice (Salinas
Jr., 2020).
2 “Latinidad” is a term first adopted by U.S. Latino studies and sociologist Felix Padilla
(1985) that aimed to describe and engage Latinx communities beyond a Latin American
context. In this chapter, we draw on Rodriguez’s work (2003) and define Latinidad as
“a particular geopolitical experience but it also contains within it the complexities and
contradictions of immigration, (post)(neo)colonialism, race, color, legal status, class,
nation, language and the politics of location” (p. 10).
3 We recognize that the use of the term “colorblind,” when used to talk about race, can also
be considered a form of ableist language as it devalues people with disabilities. While we
recognize the problematic use of this term and advocate using the term “color-evasive”
or “race-evasive,” we use the term “colorblind” in several instances. In the first instance,
we include the term because it is quoted from the literature. In the second instance
(pp. 18–19), we leave the term because of how it was utilized and interpreted by the first
author’s participant Elena.
4 Similarly, research by Nagel and Ehrkamp (2016) demonstrates that Christian faith
communities further “colorblind” narratives of “good” and “bad” immigrants by creat-
ing precarious spaces of welcome for those deemed “deserving” – immigrants who prove
their worth, merit, ability, and legality to “be better than ordinary Americans” (Nagel &
Ehrkamp, 2016, p. 13).
5 The author uncapitalizes her last name (ross instead of Ross).
6 Given this chapter reveals the complexity of racialization, we encourage review of the
more detailed methods of our studies elsewhere. Sophia and Rebeca conducted multi-site
longitudinal critical ethnographies in South Carolina and Maryland involving extensive
observational and interview data collection specifically related to racialized experiences
and Latinidad, while Tim conducted a critical qualitative study of Latinx teachers and
their experiences navigating racialized spaces in South Carolina, with in-depth inter-
views and unique visual methods (Gamez, 2020; Rodriguez, 2020).
7 The Afro-Honduran population is diverse, representing different histories of arrival to
Honduras. Despite these differences in arrival times, their histories are tied to a legacy
of chattel enslavement. The largest and most visible are the Garifuna, of which a sizable
community can be found in the department of Olancho (England & Anderson, 2005).
Honduras has a complicated relationship with Afro-Hondurans as this history is tied
to racialized nationalist discourses that aim to present the Honduran population as a
homogenous mestizo nation.
8 Chicano/a/x is a politically aligned self-identification to denote a person of Mexican
descent, usually, but not always, born in the United States. Chicano/a/x is a self-descriptor
and can be used regardless of immigrant status and generational length of residence.
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9 Race and Racialization in
Canadian Education
Schools and Universities
Frances Henry and Carl E. James
Multiculturalism and Canadian Schools

Canada’s official federal policy of multiculturalism purports to promote recogni-
tion of “the diversity of Canadians as regards race, national or ethnic origin, colour
and religion . . . while working to achieve the equality of all Canadians” (quoted in
James, 2010, p. 136). Our concern here is with how the promise of equity is oper-
ationalized in the schooling policies, programs, and practices. We also consider
how the policy and resulting cultural practices have produced schooling systems
in which racialized students have access to educational opportunities that are
responsive to their needs, interests, expectations, and aspirations. And in the con-
text of the COVID-19, we discuss the effect of the pandemic on the education of
students. The chapter ends with a discussion of how and why schooling, whether
at primary or postsecondary levels, does not create conditions of full equity.
Education as Framed Through a Eurocentric Lens

In Canada, as in other Western societies, white European outlooks deeply
influence learning systems. This disproportionate influence often excludes alterna-
tive knowledges and has over many years endorsed whiteness and cisgender male
attributes as the ideal. In Canadian education, methods of governance, schol-
arship, and other entitlements associated with advanced learning have largely
remained as they were hundreds of years ago in Europe. In the “new world,” colo-
nial settlement entitlements included the continuance of the Eurocentric model
even in governance and structure. Today as we move ever more into more racially
and ethnically diverse societies, schools, like other institutions, need to adjust
accordingly. Inclusivity, structural barriers, and systemic biases need to be chal-
lenged and not only changed but transformed. That is the challenge that faces
traditional multicultural values and approaches to schooling, and it should lead
to a transformational approach to the traditions of the educational institutions.
Before moving forward, here, we briefly present an overview of how the effects
of colonialism, racism, and misogyny play out in Canadian society. The history of
racism in Canadian society begins several centuries ago when settlers from Europe
beginning with French explorers and leading to colonial settlers from the United
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-12
Racialization in Canadian Education 159
Kingdom came to what was then Upper and Lower Canada. At the time, the area
was home to Indigenous peoples. For instance, along the St. Lawrence River, the
European setters would have encountered, among others, the Anishinaabe and
Huron-Wendat Nation.
With arrival of Europeans, the systematic exploitation of Indigenous people
and their communities began and has continued to this day. Based on the racist
assumption that Indigenous people were/are inherently inferior and incapable of
governing themselves, European settlers enacted an exploitative relationship with
Indigenous nations, and many treaties were signed. Over the years, these treaties
have been frequently ignored, and colonizers extracted land and further dispos-
sessed Indigenous nations of basic rights. In more recent times, colonizers created
a residential school system for Indigenous children to forcibly socialize them into
European cultural ways and thereby deprive them of their own cultural values and
practices (Cote-Meek & Moeke-Pickering, 2020). Today, many Indigenous com-
munities face poverty, inadequate housing, poor schooling, serious health prob-
lems, and low levels of educational attainment. This settler-colonial dynamic set
the context for other racialized people who would later immigrate to Canada.
Multiculturalism, Schooling, and General Education Systems

The multiculturalism policy was intended to encourage a discourse of r ecognition
of the cultures and languages of marginalized and minoritized ethnic groups (Jean-
Pierre & Nunes, 2011). The policy set in place an overarching ideology that had
its roots in the ideological and political structure of coloniality that has shaped
Canada’s patterns of governance. And given the growing number of immigrants,
refugees, and asylum seekers – in recent years many of them racialized, with the
largest numbers coming from Asia, India, China, and a smaller number from
Africa and the Caribbean – the introduction of this federal policy was an attempt
to confront its history of racism, exclusion, and segregation with the aim of pro-
moting acceptance of the ethnic and racial diversity and difference to be found in
the growing population.
Multiculturalism masks the discriminatory education polices and related
practices that maintain the white or dominant ethnic group. Canadian policy-
makers and educational leaders espousing multicultural ideals often fail to accom-
modate the needs, interests, expectations, and ambitions of racialized, immigrants,
and religiously marginalized people. As such, the status quo of whiteness remains
(Guo & Wong, 2015). Haque (2012) writes that the underlying nationalism of the
multicultural policy and program sought to establish a clear distinction between
“us” (White English Canadians) and “them” (non-English and French Canadi-
ans) with the expectation that through the assimilative socialization over time
the “them” would become part of “us,” as defined by the dominant culture. The
fact is, the promise of equal treatment and respect for cultural difference is not
evident in Canada, for the “cultural” measures that are in place do not guarantee
inclusion or address, change, or eradicate the various systems of oppression faced
by racialized communities.
160 Frances Henry and Carl E. James
Notwithstanding that multiculturalism is interpreted and taken up differently
in the different provinces and territories in Canada (given the ethnoracial diver-
sity of their population), there are inherent contradictions in the programs and
practices that claim to be advancing the goals of, as Guo and Wong (2015) sug-
gest, positive intercultural relations and students’ pride in their heritage. Several
programs, such as teaching English as a Second Language, which purportedly was
intended to help students retain their heritage or ethnic languages, and/or cur-
ricula programs of literature, art, dance, food, clothing, folk rhymes, and religion
designed to address ethnocentric bias in schools have been having little to no
effect on the institutional culture of schools (Guo & Wong, 2015).
For instance, in Ontario (the most diverse Canadian province), after relentless
calls to political leaders, policymakers, and school administrators1 from concerned
parents, community members, and researchers to address the gaps in educa-
tional performance and achievement of Indigenous and racialized students, the
Ontario Ministry of Education produced its Equity and Inclusive Education Strat-
egy (2009) document. The document described the government’s commitment
to remove barriers to student access to and participation in education, thereby
ensuring their success and promoting their well-being. It was acknowledged that
for students to feel inspired to succeed in school, educators must cultivate a school
culture of inclusivity, respect, high expectations, and partnership with parents and
community in which students see themselves reflected in the curriculum, educa-
tional materials, and the photographs of awards that hang on school walls. This
learning environment, the Ministry of Education document asserted, would help
“secure Ontario’s prosperity” (Ministry of Education, 2009, p. 5).
According to racialized students, their education fails to be inclusive of their
experiences. For as one Black student pointed out, their education teaches that
All Black people and white people should hold hands, but we’re not going to
ever talk about other things. It’s a very one-sided conditioning way of teach-
ing about antiracism, and it’s one that is very ineffective. It allows ignorance
and societal racism. (in Howard, in press)
The fact is, as Howard (in press) points out, many Black, Indigenous, and racial-
ized students experience an education system that pushes them to bury their
personal experiences of racism and to resist engaging in anti-racist, anti-colonial
activism to conform to the narrative of an egalitarian multicultural society. And
when they decide to speak and act from their experience, they are often chal-
lenged by other students who have learned to accept and seek to maintain the
status quo. For instance, speaking of her experience with her white peers, another
Black student said:
You feel kind of trapped in the way that you try and make your voices heard.
If you try and make your voice heard you get ostracized, you’re making too
big of a deal out of it. You’re somehow not supporting equality. . . . We had a
discussion-based class where I see these people three times a week. So, I have
said some things throughout the year that may have rubbed people the wrong
way, because I am not going to give you a filtered view on [my] experience. . . .
But a lot of people have said, “You have such a negative view”. . . . I got
scolded and basically the whole classroom was against my points, and I got
called a racist. (Howard, in press)
Understanding and implementing a program of education that does not engage

anti-racism – specifically, anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism – as an explicit
goal for addressing the inequities in education, ignores the consequences of race
that fosters a state of “racelessness,” which is highly problematic for students’ sense
of self and their successes (Guo & Wong, 2015; Lentin, 2005). Education that
ignores or denies the realities and histories of racialized students contributes to
their miseducation and ignorance (Howard, 2014). There is a need to go beyond
re-inscribing culture and interrogate racial inequities and discrimination. It is only
then, through a deliberate utilization of anti-racist praxis, that students might
gain an understanding and appreciation of racial diversity that address the inevi-
table challenges that come with teaching diverse groups of students (Berman &
Paradies, 2010).
A key aspect of the multiculturalism discourse is the promotion of tolerance.
But engaging students in conversations about racial and cultural differences should
not be to have them tolerate difference but to accept difference, and in doing so,
help them to come to an understanding of whose identities are considered or por-
trayed as different – and as such exoticized, marginalized, and racialized. It is also
to help them learn about who has the privilege of not being “different.” Not host-
ing meaningful dialogue about cultures and simply teaching students about them
from a surface-level perspective will merely simplify the students’ identities, thus
reinforcing hierarchies that view some as less than (Guo & Wong, 2015).
Racialized educational inequity is reflected in the differences in achievement,
the low graduation rates, and the disproportionate representation of Black and
Indigenous students in non-academic courses, as well as special education and
behavioural classes. Further, the high suspension and expulsion rates of these
students also account for their differences in the performance and outcomes
(James & Turner, 2017). The Canadian education system has yet to equitably
educate its racialized students so that they develop the necessary skills and com-
petences needed to read the world and society around them. There continues to
be justified concern from parents and community members that schools are unable
to manage the growing diversity and as such have unwittingly become hubs for
reinforcing segregation and isolation and breeding grounds for the perpetuation
of racial injustice (Guo & Wong, 2015). For instance, Black and Indigenous stu-
dents tend to be placed into educational programs that lead to work and possibly
community college, while white and other racialized students are more likely to be
found in the university program stream, as well as in gifted educational programs
(James, 2021; Parekh et al., 2020).
COVID-19 and the Exacerbated Educational Lives
of Racialized Students
Insofar as to date, multicultural educational programs and practices have been
ineffective in responding to the educational needs, interests, and aspirations of
racialized Canadian students, it is understandable that the COVID-19 pandemic
would exacerbate the inequities in educational engagement of marginalized stu-
dents whose schooling has been failing. Furthermore, teachers’ lack of time, pre-
paredness, and experience have made it difficult for them to transition to online
or distance teaching, which undoubtedly affected the ways in which they have
been able to carry out their jobs; and in turn, had an impact on students’ learn-
ing – especially those who had limited access to resources such as reliable internet
or other technology, quiet spaces in their homes, access to a familiar teacher, and
parental support (Middleton, 2020).
So, the equal opportunity and meritocratic message that was believed to be a
basis of Canadian schooling has now been exposed as erroneous, as remote learning
fails to be presented in ways that are responsive to the different needs of students –
a situation that likely brings students’ awareness of the inequitable education sys-
tem. As Farhadi (2019) notes, remote learning has the potential to become an
extension of a system that does not recognize or prioritize difference, and while
inclusive education may have been an aim of educators prior to the pandemic, it
has since become less so (see also Hillis et al., 2021). In such a context, if racialized
students before COVID-19 were feeling unheard, disengaged, misunderstood, and
rendered invisible, online learning merely relegates students to one of many faces
or names on a screen (Farhadi, 2019). And in cases of in-person class, the six-feet
apart rule further contributes to potential limits to in-person schooling contexts.
Moreover, socialization and sensory experiences necessary to the developmen-
tal needs of children and youth are likely to be nonexistent in a context of social
distancing (Bhamani et al., 2020). Clearly, there are likely to be long-term rami-
fications that will plague this generation of students for years to come. It is also
important to consider the effect that the pandemic and isolation has had on student
mental health, especially that of racialized and marginalized students. Students’
psychological well-being cannot be disregarded when it comes to their learning.
Having failed to actively engage racialized students in the teaching-learning pro-
cess, combined with the anxiety, stress, and depression that they likely experience
in schools means that schools – specifically, teachers and school administrators –
will have to move beyond the claims of multiculturalism and approach education
with a framework that considers the consequences of systemic racism.
Postsecondary Education: The University

While the general education system, we argue, does not meet the needs of racial-
ized students, it might be expected that higher institutions of learning such as
the university would be able to provide a more complex, sophisticated, and all-
inclusive level of learning and teaching. However, this is not the case. The academy
has always defined itself throughout its history as “above it all.” And even today, it
does not think it is a part of a burgeoning changing and disparate society. In many
ways, the university is still basically an age-old Eurocentric institution. Universi-
ties and colleges think of themselves as largely neutral and relatively free from the
traditional and well-known values of society. They believe themselves to be – and
are – generally thought of as the bastions of higher learning. In fact, “tradition has
a palpable effect on how people see an institution and not always for the good . . . it
has an effect on the culture of an institution” (Fabrikrands, 2020, n.p.). The trap-
pings of tradition inhibit change, especially for younger members. The big problem
with the legacy of the past is that it can be notoriously difficult to walk away from.
Today they are beginning to recognize that they must accept its new status as being
a racialized and gendered institution that is historically embedded in coloniality
that defined its patterns of governance, scholarship, and overall structure.
It is not only students that experience damaging psychological effects from the
current educational system, but also university faculty. In the first major study of
racialized university faculty in this country, we collaborated with other colleagues
on a nationwide study of racism/racialization at Canadian universities. Using a
multifaceted methodology that included 79 personal interviews with faculty at a
sample of universities across the country as well as a survey of over 1,000 faculty
members from across the country, we were able to achieve a detailed understand-
ing of what it means to be a racialized faculty member in a structure built and still
maintained and staffed by the white mainstream of power.
Racism is alive and well as one Black female faculty member told us:
It is so subtle; it is so hidden. But specific things that come to my mind are

things that I should often feel like I shouldn’t be here, or that my presence
here is not wanted or expected. This makes me feel that maybe the academy
is just not for me. What could I possibly have to offer?
In the interviews we conducted in The Equity Myth, such comments were not
unusual. Feelings of alienation and low self-esteem were very common in our
respondents. At this higher educational level, multiculturalism has also failed
to achieve an educational environment that meets the needs of its increasingly
diverse populations.
How does racism affect the university and specifically racialized faculty? Results
of our research on this topic uncovered many of the ways in which racialism played
a role specifically with respect to faculty and graduate students. The effects of
racialization begin with graduate students and later with faculty (Henry et al.,
2017, p. 263).
Graduate Students
Graduate students often do not receive enough training or education in race-
related issues during their studies. This is largely related to the paucity of racial-
ized professors in their program of study and especially in science subjects such
as engineering, physics, and other hard sciences. Graduate students also have
difficulty finding advisors to supervise their theses concerning racialization: This
also relates to the small numbers of racialized professors in many disciplines,
especially the sciences. Even in social sciences, the few faculty who are avail-
able and interested are often overburdened with too many students or student
requests. This lack of faculty availability affects the wording of letters of refer-
ence, for example, when students need to request reference letters from faculty
who are not greatly interested in their topics and who write superficial letters of
recommendation.
Inequality for graduate students also involves whose voices are heard and
embraced in classrooms and at decision-making tables. Racialized students are
often not given attention and respect when attempting to participate in discussion
or at meetings where decisions are made. Graduate students are often invited to
participate in university panels and even at professional conferences, but racialized
students are less often chosen. The “excuse” given sometimes is that their topics of
research are not always of universal or great interest to audiences.
Faculty
Racialized university contexts deeply affect faculty students and what academic
outputs and productivity are measured. This manifests itself in many ways, espe-
cially for promotion and tenure decisions. Some racialized faculty come from other
areas of the world, and their universities are not recognized by North American
schools. While they may have been hired to teach, promotion and tenure deci-
sions can be influenced by the alleged lack of status of the undergraduate univer-
sity. Racialized faculty are often penalized because their research, which is often
community based, is not considered to be worthy. This is especially true when the
methodology is informal and when the researcher is a member of the community
being studied. Their areas of study often do not lend themselves to mainline jour-
nals, and their articles are often published in smaller localized journals or other
publications. These kinds of publications do not have the prestige of large-scale
national and international journals.
These issues also extend to which professional networks are available to racial-
ized faculty. University faculty find access and the use of professional or even
informal networks very valuable to further their work. Racialized faculty do not
appear to have equal access to these useful professional networks. There also exist
inequities in terms of what is included and excluded from disciplinary canons. The
disciplines that constitute the typical calendar are based on age-old traditions
such as English language and literature, Classical history, and many other predom-
inantly European histories. Racialized faculty are often involved in more modern,
contemporary disciplines or areas of study that are not recognized as legitimate
in the traditional canon. Although many universities have in more recent times
added to their traditional disciplines, it is still difficult for racialized faculty to find
a “home” or introduce students to them.
Racialized othering also effects how white colleagues determine if faculty “fit in”
or make “good” colleagues. This othering begins with how résumés and qualifica-
tions are interpreted, where credentials were obtained, and which regions, accents,
and cultures are most valued. Decisions around who fits in or who will make a
good colleague are very much in evidence when hiring takes place, especially dur-
ing the interview. Factors such as place of origin, the accent of the applicant, and
even their names may indicate a lack of “fit.” It is often assumed that applicants
who are different will have different values and ideas that will make for a bad “fit.”
Even when racialized faculty are hired, they face additional hurdles related
to performance metrics. Teaching evaluations tend to prize standardization and
support the dominant culture. Teaching evaluations are extremely important in
determining a faculty member’s rapport or lack of it with students. Some universi-
ties still use traditional standardized teaching evaluation forms rather than newer
methods of evaluation such as peer observation and teaching portfolios. Biases
based on race as well as gender, accent, and other features are frequently used by
students to evaluate teaching performance. There is often a lack of value given
to service work and support, which is disproportionately taken up by racialized
and Indigenous faculty. Racialized faculty are also unlikely to serve in leadership
of universities whose leaders are largely white and male (The Equity Myth, p. 301,
this chapter was written by co-author Malinda Smith).
The University Today

In the latest census, the numbers of racialized university professors, which includes
all racialized groups,2 increased from 17% in 2006 to 21% in 2016. There has been
a slight improvement of Black university teachers increasing from 1.8% to 2.0%
in 2016 (CAUT Equity Report, 2018). Many of these are second generation in
addition to newly arrived immigrants. As the numbers of racialized faculty slowly
grew at urban universities and also in smaller areas of the country as the West, for
example, echoes of discontent and complaint began to be heard.
Henry and Tator (2009) published research on the status of racialized and
Indigenous faculty members titled “Racism in the Canadian University: Demand-
ing Social Justice, Inclusion, and Equity,” a publication that included several
scholars. This was the first attempt to raise the issue of race and the university
and demonstrated the profound discontent that many such faculty faced in the
academy. Up to that time, the issues of racism and inequity had simply not come
up. And in a sense, this may be considered a failure of multiculturalism: it pro-
vides something of an umbrella, but it rains anyway. Globalization, transnational
mobility, and internationalization of human rights are eroding the legitimacy of
the nation-state, and complex diversity politics on the rise disrupts its hegemonic
and harmonizing logic (Fleras, 2021).
One of the first small steps that the university took was to create “race rela-
tions” offices, later called “equity” offices. What these small offices provided was a
place where students who felt they had been unfairly treated because of their race,
color, or ethnicity could launch a complaint that might or might not be investi-
gated and usually led to some people being interviewed or forms to be filled out.
The offending parties were never held to task, and the most that would happen
is a small report sent to some member of the university’s administrative structure.
A letter might be sent out or not, and the investigation was then concluded. No
significant action ever resulted from this procedure.
The directors of these offices were usually fellow academics with some interest
or experience in these matters or later persons who had earned a degree in some
field that included human relations. They were usually of low status in the overall
hierarchy of the university. Many of the offices were spatially hidden away in a
small wing of a corridor or on the other side of campus, making them hard to find
and hard to get to. The titles of these offices evolved as the movements for change
began to take more action – some adopting a human rights model – but however
the title, their power remained extremely limited. It was not until more significant
student social action and the increase in racialized student enrollment took place
that more significant changes were even contemplated.
Today, important changes have been taking place in Canadian universities, for
example,
• Several universities, including Ryerson in Toronto have conducted or initi-

ated surveys of their student populations including the use of disaggregated
data to show where representation is low.
• Racialized professors are being appointed to head what is called “EDI” (stand-
ing for equity, diversity, and inclusion) administrative divisions within the
structure of the university because only 8% of university leaders are racialized.
• Racialized faculty are being appointed to equity vice presidents and other
major administrative positions.
• There is an increase in special conferences, panels, and discussion groups to
discuss and provide support for EDI. At least two of our leading universities in
Canada that have held conferences specifically geared to support and brain-
storm new ideas, and more action plans are being developed. One university
also held a special conference for only Black professors and administrators.
• Most universities have created working groups, task forces, and commissions
of inquiry to deal with racism.
• Because Black professors make up only 2% of faculty, and in some universities
only 1%, some universities are engaging in cluster hiring to increase numbers.
It is also being recognized that there is a great need for new positions to reflect
new and broader scholarship, especially in the social sciences. There is also
some attention to opening new tenure track positions in specific disciplines
like law, sciences, engineering, medicine, and others.
• In terms of anti-racism, universities that have not had Black Studies Programs
are looking to develop them.
• There is greater use of collecting and analyzing disaggregated data by race,
gender, and Indigenity.
Our analysis of the issues facing racialized faculty at university led to the conclu-
sion that the university today is largely controlled by neoliberal forces that empha-
size economic practices over the maintenance of innovative scholarship and the
provision of good learning to students. Scholarship and contributions to knowl-
edge appear to have taken second place in the dominant value system. However,
the demands of increasing diversity in both the student body and among the fac-
ulty – which reflect the growing diversity of Canada’s population – have led to the
need to promote equity as an important goal. Our research, however, highlights
that equity programs have, by and large, not been overly effective in bringing
about needed change. Instead, “our findings suggest that attention paid to the
concepts of equity or diversity is not tied to a commitment to overcome racism”
(Henry et al., 2017, p. 302). We also conclude that the only way to challenge and
change the “current and ongoing process of racialization” is by more aggressive
and basic changes to the very structure of the university and the ways in which
they operate. It needs to move away from neoliberal thinking and structures to a
complete recognition of diversity and to an acceptance of the many ways in which
knowledge can be framed.
Although positive first steps are being taken in the university of today, it is
already apparent that they alone cannot achieve the structural transformations
necessary to decolonize the university’s history and accept racialized people as full
equals.
Conclusion
If multiculturalism education practices were enough, racial inequities in schools
and inequity at universities as observed in the educational performance and
achievements of students and the many biases directed at racialized faculty in
universities should have ceased to exist. The fact is, in Canada, if we consider
the situation of Indigenous peoples, it might be said that today, compared to say,
a mere 30 years ago, the apologies by politicians, the Truth and Reconciliation
messages, and the growing land acknowledgments assertations have not trans-
lated into cultural security, better living conditions, and more successful educa-
tional outcomes for Indigenous peoples. Essentially, Indigenous and racialized
people do not have equitable access to education that would prepare them for
employment and careers that they might have productive lives to which they are
entitled (Eisenberg, 2019). Moreover, if hired, upward mobility is stagnated. Our
own research demonstrates that racialized and Indigenous professors experience
systemic barriers and inequitable access to promotions.
Schools, including universities, are not culturally neutral spaces, and there is a
dominant culture into which immigrants and marginalized and racialized students
are expected to fit. There is a need to account for the role that culture of the soci-
ety and the school plays as a continuing barrier to the educational success of stu-
dents (and their teachers and professors). So, despite its multicultural policy, the
education system in Canada is one in which marginalized, immigrant, and religious
minoritized students are “Othered” and racialized; and the situation of French-
speaking marginalized students (immigrants, racialized, and even those who are
generation in Canada) remains problematic (Fleras, 2021). Moreover, as James
(2018) writes: “the use of a mono-cultural, rather than a multi-cultural, approach
is one of the greatest contributing factors to the disenfranchisement of immigrant
students in the education system” (p. 283). There is a failure of the school system –
teachers and policymakers – to provide marginalized students with schooling and
education that is culturally relevant and responsive to their learning needs.
Postsecondary institutions like universities need to go further than fulfilling a
diversity check list; they need to start listening to racialized immigrants and Indig-
enous and other faculty of color. We know that universities and colleges are not
free-thinking objective spaces; they are built on a framework that values Eurocen-
tric schools of thought and culture.
The fact that there is a continued pre-eminence of the white ethnic domi-
nance, or one that tells a dubious story of an egalitarian Western nation-state that
has transcended racism, then, Canada might serve as a model of multiculturism.
However, if one holds a critical view of multicultural education that has social
justice at its core, Canadian versions would not be ones to emulate.
Notes
1 Many of these calls have been through community meetings, research findings (e.g., James &
Turner, 2017), and in more recent times through social media.
2 “Racialized (typically, identified in Canada as ‘visible minority’) refers to persons, other
than Aboriginal [Indigenous] Peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white
in colour.” South Asian (25%), Chinese (24%), and Black (15%) represent the largest
groups, although there is much diversity within these three groups.
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students in the greater Toronto area. York University.
Jean-Pierre, J., & Nunes, F. (2011). Multicultural education before and after the federal
multiculturalism policy: A case study of the board of education of the city of Toronto.
Canadian Ethnic Studies, 43(1), 153–174. https://doi.org/10.1353/ces.2011.0006
Lentin, A. (2005). Replacing “race,” historicizing “culture” in multiculturalism. Patterns
of Prejudice: The Culture of Politics and Multiculturalism, 39(4), 379–396. https://doi.
org/10.1080/00313220500347832
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and assessment. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 39(3), 41–44. https://doi.
org/10.1111/emip.12368
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participation and graduation trends. Faculty of Education, York University & Toronto
District School Board. www.researchgate.net/publication/356392516_Who_Comes_
to_York_Access_Participation_and_Graduation_Trends#fullTextFileContent
10 The Racialization of Caste
Internal Colonization and
Education in South Asia
Gaurav J. Pathania and Nina Asher
The Indian caste system is the hierarchical division of people based on birth and
fixed heredity – Brahmins (priests), Kshtriyas (kings/warriors), Vaishyas (traders/
merchants), and Shudras (servants/service class). Those who were assigned menial
tasks (cleaning human excreta, skinning dead animals, etc.) fall outside this hier-
archy and were known – and treated – as “Untouchables.” Now known as Dalits,
they continue to face violence from upper castes in everyday life. Indeed, everyday
life in India remains largely organized around casteist arrangements of duties and
occupations that follow rigid notions of purity and pollution. Laws banning caste
discrimination notwithstanding, these notions have not changed – with the caste
system being approximately 5,000 years old and predating colonial history. The
caste system is based on occupational hierarchies that exist within a culturally
created dialectical rubric of “sacred/profane,” “pure/impure,” and, by reference,
also work according to a symbolic system of meanings attached to notions of
“honor” and “shame.” This everyday privilege, never questioned, is kept, and
manifested via caste organizations called caste sabhas, which function to control
such social functions as marriage and voting.
There are two discourses that make caste a global phenomenon. One, increased
migration from South Asia to the Western world has rendered caste a global
phenomenon in the twenty-first century. Indian communities, highly culturally
embedded for centuries, continue to create extremely endogamous, caste-based,
systematic power and privilege conclaves. Second, “caste” was identified as an
important social and sociological category at the 2001 United Nations World Con-
ference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intoler-
ance1 held in Durban, South Africa. Since then, global academia has compared
the age-old caste system with racism, with caste being among the most inhuman
systems of practice, equivalent to the race-based system of apartheid. Given that
casteist discriminatory practices are not necessarily based on physical appearance
or skin color, caste can appear to be non-predatory. Racialized casteism refers to
the sociopolitical processes of differentiation that produce particular and coincid-
ing experiences of anti-Black racism and caste-based discrimination in the lives
of Africana people in South Asia (Jayawardene, 2016, p. 342). Cultural construc-
tions of identity and community in the context of disenfranchisement and mar-
ginalization in Siddi and Kaffir communities2 (who migrated to South Asia from
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-13
The Racialization of Caste 171
Africa centuries ago) can be better understood when examined in conjunction
with the development of social signifiers such as racism, casteism, and colorism in
the region (Jayawardene, 2016, p. 342).
In this co-authored essay, two Indian-born, U.S.-based scholars – a sociologist
(Gaurav) and a curriculum studies scholar (Nina) – take up the question of the
racialization of caste in relation to education, through a consideration of the inter-
sections of casteism, racism, and the legacies of colonialism. Specifically, via criti-
cal analyses of the structures and processes of colonization, we consider how the
internalization of caste and race hierarchies is perpetuated over the decades and
across continents and the related implications for social justice education. Gaurav,
as both the lead author and as a scholar who has been writing regularly about caste,
sketched out the structure of this chapter and generated the original draft. Nina
incorporated perspectives drawing on postcolonialism and d ecolonization at the
intersections of race, caste, culture, gender, and nation in relation to education.
Internal Colonization Theory

Internal colonialism originally drew on Marxism, critiques of racism and I ndigenous
and anti-colonial struggles. Internal colonization theory interrogates the processes
and forms of traditional domination within the colony. Blauner (1969) coined the
term “internal colonialism theory” (ICT) to highlight the “blurred” lines between
geographically close locations that are clearly different in terms of culture. ICT
serves as a guide for understanding sentimental particularities of postcolonial soci-
ety, culture and politics and economy (Martin, 2018). It explains the horizons and
current interests of postcolonial, anti-colonial, and decolonial criticism and the
place of politics in heterogeneous societies, including the metropole/center and
the colony/periphery, under colonial rule and capitalism. Other intersubjective
factors that separate the core from the periphery are language, religion, physical
appearance, types and levels of technology, and sexual behavior.
In the education field, Freire (1982) conceptualized the internalization of the
oppressor and conscientization; hooks (1994) theorized education as the practice
of freedom; and Tuhiwai Smith (1999) called for decolonizing research methodol-
ogies. Freire, hooks, and Smith’s writings have discussed the need for dismantling
external as well as internal structures and practices of oppression, marginalization,
and silencing in the effort to move toward equity and justice (see Sedwal & Kamat,
2008). At the same time, multiple voices – in terms of race, gender, culture, and
nation – have become audible in discussions related to decolonization, equity,
and justice in education in the United States, with increasing complexities. For
instance, recently, the representation of caste in education in the United States
and the call to make caste a protected category as regards discrimination have
become part of the debate.3 Indeed, the California State University (CSU) system,
which includes 23 campuses, responding to organizing led by transnational Dalit
activists and CSU student leaders, voted to include caste as a protected category
in its nondiscrimination policies (Carrasco, 2022). California has also been the
site of state-wide textbook controversies that positioned a multi-faith coalition
172 Gaurav J. Pathania and Nina Asher
of scholars, activists, and educators against forces from the diasporic Hindu Right
over the latter’s attempt to erase mentions of caste and gender inequality in text-
books and distort representations of Muslims and Sikhs in South Asian History
from 2005 onward.4
Conceptualizing the Racialization of Caste, Class,

Race, and Gender
“Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place” says
Wilkerson (2020, p. 19) in her book Caste and has reignited the race-caste debates.
According to Wilkerson (2020), caste is about power, resources, respect, authority,
and competence, and about which groups have it and which do not. Further, Rege
(2006) has noted that “since the 1980s, caste identity and caste consciousness
have dominated the political scene” (p. 64). The destruction of caste, according
to India’s first Law Minister and leading Dalit leader, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, “requires
an ideational change, since, for him, caste is a social organization of society; . . .
a state of mind” (in Rodrigues, 2004, p. 289). Per Ambedkar, the caste system is
a malignant division of laborers. He offers a strong critique to M.K. Gandhi who
believed the caste system to be a benign division of labor.
Several social scientists have compared caste with other global forms of dis-
crimination. Sociologist D. L. Sheth (1999, p. 2508) used the term “classization of
caste,” where caste has acquired “new economic interest and a political identity.”
As a result, new socio-economic formations [like the ‘upper castes’, the ‘other
backward castes’ (OBCs), the Dalits or Scheduled Castes (SCs) and the ‘Adivasis’
or the Scheduled Tribes (STs), also known as Dalit-Bahujan] competed for control
of resources in society, with the idea of upward social mobility motivating people
of all castes, collectively as well as individually.
According to Cháirez-Garza et al. (2022), the modern Indian state is funda-
mentally a “racial state” (Goldberg, 2002); racialization is integral to how the
state manages, perpetuates, and, at times, exacerbates social hierarchies. “Race”
is a matter of both social structure and cultural representation, for example in
the United States, for national groups like African Americans, Latinos, Native
Americans, and Asian Americans (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 56). Similarly, in
India, at present, Muslims are racialized as foreign to India, but at the same time,
the Indian state has ideologically and politically embraced and aligned with West-
ern imperial and settler colonial states (see Ashutosh, 2021), revealing India’s
imperial aspirations in the contemporary global order (Anand, 2012; Osuri, 2017).5
Indian Christians are becoming targets of violence who are also seen as “outsiders”
(despite their presence in South Asia for nearly two millennia), but it is also
interesting to notice how the same ideology mutates when it comes to economic
profit with Western countries. With the rise and expansion of fascist Hindutva
nationalism, we find racialization to be an indeterminate battle, fought between
the authoritarian state project of contemporary Hindutva and those subjugated by
modernity and the nation-state who have forged anti-colonial and internationalist
alliances6 (Yengde, 2019).
What makes this race-caste-color phenomena interesting is the complexity of
the (internalization of) colonialism or settler-native/outsider-insider dynamics.
The attempt to “scientifically” or “medically” justify the (im)purity of lower castes
or Adivasis is a colonial construction that does not value traditional knowledge
and practices. The impact of scientific racism, according to Cháirez-Garza (2022,
p. 196), also extended beyond debates about caste, heavily influencing colonial
investigations of Adivasis (Indigenous communities in South Asia). In their study
of colonialism and education, Kelly and Altbach (1984) conclude that colonial
education strips the colonized people away from their Indigenous learning struc-
tures and draws them toward the structures of the colonizers.
According to Orkin and Joubin, “epistemologies of race signify relationally,
which means a group that suffers from discrimination can themselves discrimi-
nate against other groups based on any combination of the factors of race, class,
gender, religion and politics” (2019, p. 196). Darder and Torres7 (2004) describe
“race as the central unit of analysis of racialized oppression and racism” (p. 198).
On the other hand, caste as a social category and form actively governs the life
of the South Asian. Caste violence, which is systemic and structural (Brown &
Khandare, 2020), is rarely questioned.
Referring to the northeast Indian context, Bora highlights that even though the
racialization of people from the Northeast is accepted at a commonsense level, it
has not been studied adequately (Bora, 2019, p. 846). Anyone who doesn’t “look”
a certain way is considered as “outsider” or from “another race.” On several occa-
sions, university students from India’s northeast studying in Delhi have become
victims of racial discrimination and hate crimes.8 Furthermore, this is typically
viewed as a cultural problem, not a racial one. In this case, culture (eating habits,
language, dress, celebrations, etc.) becomes the substitute rationale for racial dis-
crimination. Agencies like the police and government offices reproduce existing
caste-based discrimination and racism (Kikon, 2021, p. 279).
Social scientists such as Oliver Cox (1945) define caste as wholly unlike race
because, they argue, caste is relatively peaceful and harmonious, ordained by reli-
gious scripture, and is therefore unquestioned by submissive caste subordinates,
denying that fundamentally, caste is rooted in class antagonism. Gerald Berreman
(1971) countered that Cox’s description of caste could not have been farther from
the truth and strangely parrots what he termed a “brahminical view of caste,”
which frames caste as consensual and passively accepted. An eminent historian,
Chinnaiah Jangam (2017) claims that the reframing of Indian national identity as
an explicitly Hindu brahminical identity both excludes and appropriates Dalit pol-
itics and resistance. The Hindutva campaign to consolidate a unitary Indian (read
Hindu) identity has even appropriated the language of “decolonization,” first to
blame the British (see Dirks, 2001) and then purportedly to cleanse itself of British
colonization’s effects (Upadhyay, 2020; Rao, 2020; Rao & Rahul, 2020). Other
scholars (Bates, 1995; Natrajan, 2022; McDuie-Ra, 2015) believe that Hindutva
uses the logic of differentiating, constructing these subjects in authoritarian ways.
Whereas some identities are constructed to be particularly despised by Hindutva,
and hence ultimately disposable, others are tolerated even as they are disciplined
and domesticated. Yet others remain ambiguous. But no social identity in India
is outside the purview of Hindutva (Natrajan, 2022, p. 304). This process paral-
lels and bolsters global Islamophobic discourses of anti-terrorism, security, and
democracy that rely on and revive Orientalist tropes of Muslims as the irreconcil-
able “other” of Western modernity (Rana, 2011; Kumar, 2012) (see also Chapter 4
in this volume). Parallel to multicultural, liberal democracy inviting white settler
citizens to imagine themselves as invested in notions of diversity and understand
themselves as less racist than their colonial forefathers, South Asians understand
their diaspora to be more progressive and “de-casted” compared to communities
back home. In fact, South Asians settled in the West carry with them their social
constructs and norms, including the institution of caste.
Scholars (e.g., Kumar, 2016; Paik, 2014; Singh, 2019) have explored how caste
discrimination influences education at all levels. For example, Paik (2014) high-
lights shared struggles of Dalit and Black women as victims of upper-caste and
white patriarchal spaces. Dalit-feminist scholar Roja Singh (2019) presents inter-
nal struggles of Dalit girls to look “beautiful” in a society governed by patriarchal
and casteist violence emanating from Hindu scriptures. The next section of this
chapter discusses how the process of the racialization of caste takes place in the
educational system.
Understanding the Racialization of Caste in the Higher

Education Context
The traditional landscape of higher education in India has changed significantly
over the past two decades due to the rampant privatization of education. Recent
scholarly works (Advani, 2009; Lukose, 2009; Rowe et al., 2013) as well as popu-
lar writings (Adiga, 2008; Kapur, 2012) have focused on the effects of economic
liberalization and the continuing legacies of colonialism, including the schism
between rural and urban India; internal as well as transnational migration to
Indian cities; the economic significance of learning English; and the intersections
of caste, class, and gender. For instance, in her discussion of “language and the
postcolonial predicament,” Advani (2009) noted that globalization has further
consolidated the reign of English as the language that has afforded “access to
metropolitan white-collar jobs” (p. 45) in India since it gained independence from
the British, nearly seven decades ago. Her analyses of Indian textbooks revealed
the privilege of the urban middle class in depicting employment (e.g., doctors,
lawyers, engineers) and the omission of such occupations as “weavers, potters,
sweepers” (p. 119).
Framing questions of difference in India through racialization and racial
capitalism also allows us to dialogue with critical race, Indigenous, and Black and
Africana Studies scholars, a testament to the generative potential of transnational
translations (see also, Jegathesan, 2021). In the United States, areas such as Black
studies and intersectional studies interrogate the dehumanization of African
Americans and other communities on the margins. Indeed, transnational analyses
are emerging from grassroots movements such as Dalit-Black-Muslim dialogues on
solidarity. Such solidarities reveal “the operation of state power and its effects on
gendered/racialized bodies and communities around the world” (Mohanty, 2006,
p. 15) and challenge “hegemonic citizenship projects.” These considerations are
relevant also to the introduction of Dalit studies in Indian academia (Hunt, 2014;
Kumar, 2014; Pathania & Kalyani, 2022; Rawat & Satyanarayan, 2016).
Despite the expansion of Dalit studies, it has not changed the fact that higher
education is still dominated by upper castes and “lacks diversity” (Kumar, 2016;
Sabharwal & Malish, 2017). However, the most recent study of an elite campus by
Pathania and Tierney (2018, p. 10) observes that the “hallways of elite institutions
do not transcend existing prejudices and stereotypes.” Despite all the develop-
ment, such issues remain unresolved. Most recent studies also highlight discrimi-
nation and the everyday “problems” in the academic and non-academic lives of
Dalit students (Malish & Ilavarasan, 2016; Pathania & Tierney, 2018; Pathania,
2016, 2018, 2020; Rathod, 2020). For such privileged groups (students and staff),
“casteless merit” has become an (implicit) idiom of caste privilege, based on their
special capacity to deny/invisibilize caste as a source of advantage. The issue of
quality education, dropouts in school education9 (see Lall, 2005; Mukherjee, 2015;
Govinda, 2011) as well as in higher education, is a burning issue. Between 2016
and 2019, around 2,400 students have dropped out of the elite Indian Institute of
Technology campuses, half of those dropouts being SCs and STs. On these issues,
the New Education Policy 2020 is completely silent (Pathania, 2020). One impor-
tant step toward helping Dalit and Adivasi students would be to have grievance
redressal mechanisms for minorities in all educational institutions. Caste as racial
segregation, separating the upper-caste Aryans from the lower-caste non-Aryans,
was viewed as a scientific way of organizing society in keeping with modern ideas,
but this view was gradually discarded when there was evidence to the contrary
(Thapar, 1996: 10; also see Waughray, 2013, 2022).
The social mobility of historically marginalized peoples due to caste-based res-
ervation (India’s form of affirmative action) policies notwithstanding, upper-caste
individuals and communities continue to prevail by dint of such factors as having
been educated in English and in the West and having access to the global econ-
omy. While education was the only way for the lower castes to access the global
village, new mechanisms were created to keep them out of the global discussion
on democracy and civil society. Caste-based reservations, mid-day meal schemes10
(free school lunch programs), and English-Hindi (or the regional languages) as
medium of instruction are examples that reveal such socio-psychological subor-
dination. In colonial terms, it is settler colonialism. Indian education and educa-
tional institutions have internalized the hegemony of colonialism (see Shah et al.,
2021; Pathania & Tierney, 2018). Scholars (e.g., Bhukya, 2008; Smith & Gergan,
2015) explore the utility of racialization as an analytic tool for understanding tribal
identity in India by theorizing how the movement and mobility of Himalayan
tribal youth exposes them to both racism and opportunities to forge contingent
solidarities with racialized others.
Internalizing Language
“Nearly one million school students failed in Hindi in the most populated state of
Hindi speakers.”11
In a shocking turn of events, close to one million students in India’s Hindi-

speaking state failed to pass their Hindi language exam, their mother tongue, in
the year 2020. Those who are familiar with pedagogical Hindi know the difference
that written curriculum Hindi has with spoken colloquial Hindi. The difference
between the two points toward the existence of Hindi as a language with feudal
underpinnings which seeks to differentiate between people.
Language is a category of analysis to understand the colonial subjugation of
the mind. Juxtaposing multiple contexts of colonialism and knowledge production
requires that we acknowledge our complicities in multiple and related systems
of oppression by specifying “the vectors of similarity, continuity, and difference”
(Frankenberg & Mani, 1993, p. 297). The English language clearly tops the list,
with India home to between 300 and 400 million English speakers, thought to
be the largest in the world. The popular perception of Indian education is the
acceptance of the supremacy of Western culture over the local Indigenous culture.
Recently, an educational institution called for an initiative for making a habit of
students brushing their teeth. They called the initiative KISS. They managed to
get over 26,000 students in November 2019 to set a Guinness World Record for
the most number of students brushing their teeth simultaneously together.12 How-
ever, this tacitly also led to the creation of a feeling that Adivasi (ST) people are
uncivilized, and that the KISS initiative for brushing teeth was civilizing them.
A similar situation exists in most of the other North Indian states. Language has
always been a tool of oppression used by the colonizers. Harish Trivedi (2006), for
example, deconstructed the nature of the colonial enterprise, offering a nuanced
understanding of colonialism as a cultural transaction taking place within a Fou-
cauldian framework of knowledge/power. In this perspective, to continue to teach
English literature in independent India, he says, “is by definition a post-colonial
practice, even though many of us have not yet begun to reflect or care whether it
is also at the same time an act of decolonization” (p. 236). The aesthetic imaginary
created by English literature has nothing to do with Indian realities. In the past
two decades, translation studies has also gained momentum in India with Eng-
lish departments getting interested in introducing works of literature produced
in other regional languages. Alongside courses in postcolonial literature, courses
in Indian literature have flourished, which have expanded to include Indian writ-
ers writing in English in India, to Indian writers writing in English outside India,
comparative literature, literature in other Indian languages available in English
translations, and world literature. Similarly there are several translation projects
being taken up by young Dalit authors who are translating many Dalit writings and
popular Black authors’ writings into Hindi and other languages.13 Thus, decolo-
nization requires the critical understanding of the production of knowledge and
the way it is acquired as a collective process – a process in which no one person,
community, or nation can justifiably claim ownership over (Sefa-Dei & Jajj, 2018).
Curriculum and the Language of Representation
In recent years, a number of scholars have critiqued Eurocentrism in education
and spoken to the issues of marginalization and loss of Indigenous knowledge and
ways of knowing as well as the internalization, transmission, and reproduction of
colonialist structures and practices and the resultant contradictions and contesta-
tions in curriculum frameworks and teaching practices (Altbach & Kelly, 1987;
Babu, 2020; Chakrabarty, 1995; Dimitriadis, 2005; Kamat, 2004; McCarthy, 1993;
Smith, 1999; Villenas, 2006; Viswanathan, 1988). Anne Hickling-Hudson (2007),
a Jamaican-born educator, now teaching in Australia, reveals how the complex,
intertwined identities of colonizer and colonized work to shape new, oppressive,
silencing hierarchies in school and society, curriculum and teaching. Thus, we see
how differences of race and class, language and culture, intertwined with the inter-
nalization of the colonizer and a legacy of Eurocentrism in curriculum and teach-
ing, work to reify, re-create, and transmit the effects of colonization (Asher, 2009,
p. 8). These processes occur through what Bediako-Amoah (2018, p. 13) calls a
“Colonial Assembly Line of Education” to reinforce Eurocentric ideology that he
further defines as “educational gentrification” (ibid). It’s hard to understand these
processes without an “anti-colonial framework” (ibid: p. 11). Decolonizing works
toward epistemic equity, bringing a humility of “knowing” and acknowledging the
power of “not knowing” (Sefa Dei & Jajj, 2018).
Another popular trend that scholarly writings have highlighted is to treat non-
racialism to the idea of racelessness. It’s a belief that to recognize race is to be a
racist, so the historic privileges accumulated by whites (and to a lesser extent,
Indians, cannot be questioned as this goes against the grain of non-racialism
(Vahed & Desai, 2021, p. 185; also see Bonilla-Silva, 2006). This idea resem-
bles Satish Deshpande’s (2013) concept of “castelessness” in the Indian context.
Indians and whites want to leave caste/race behind, believing that they are now
“raceless,” just as the upper castes in India believe that they are now ‘casteless’
(Deshpande & John, 2010, p. 41).
Education Is the Road to Cultural Transformation

In South Asia, Blackness and African-ness are synonymous. Instances of racist
violence against African people are more common in Indian society than in Sri
Lanka (Jayawardene, 2016, p. 339). And, racial language is still used prominently
which we call casteized racism. In the process of decolonizing everything, we must
be cautious to not cater to other forms of colonialism or internal colonialism.
Anti-caste activism continues to aspire to build alternative futures.
Language, as part of human rights discourse, is another important tool to under-
stand cultural transformation (see Bajaj, 2012, p. 4; Delpit, 2006; Dembour, 2010;
Sadana, 2012). Language is used to counter internal colonization. In the words of
a Dalit student leader who comes from a Hindi-speaking region but is determined
to only speak in English: “We have been kept from education for centuries. Now
because of the right to education we are in the system but are only accessing the
government (public) schools which they (upper caste) have already destroyed by
making private schools. They became masters in English but keep telling us to
learn the Matribhasha Hindi. They became English-wala and grabbed all the jobs
and opportunities.”14 This is also an example of resistance to internal colonization
through language and shows the persistence of practices of colonization in the
twenty-first century as a series of ongoing power-knowledge relations and eco-
nomic exploitation.
The role of education in neoliberal globalization processes and its contribu-
tion to urban transformation has been underscored by Nambissan (2017), who
argues that the state is complicit in these transformational processes. She sug-
gests the use of relational frameworks for analyzing the changing urban land-
scape and exploring factors such as class, caste, gender, ethnicity, privilege, and
advantage (also see Bajaj, 2012; Mukherjee, 2018; Jain et al., 2020; Tukdeo,
2019). Middle-class urban parents mobilize their social and cultural resources
and seek to claim positional advantage for their children in a globalizing world
(Nambissan, 2017). These cultural resources are not equally available to Dal-
its and other marginalized groups. Understanding this phenomenon, social sci-
entists from socially marginalized communities have realized that English can
be a medium to generate cultural capital and connect to the global society. In
April 2010, a group of Dalit scholars-activists made a temple to an “English
Goddess” and worshipped her as Angreji Devi (English Devi).15 “The path to
our emancipation opens up only through English” argues Kancha Ilaiah, a public
intellectual from a Bahujan community who celebrates his birthday as Dalit-
Bahujan English Education Day to convey the importance of learning English.
Similarly, Dalit literature has brought a paradigmatic shift in the ways in which
subaltern studies were conventionally understood within academic spaces.
Recent interdisciplinary studies (Pathania, 2016; Gundimeda, 2016; Garalyte,
2016) have highlighted identity assertion among Dalits and Other Backward
Class (OBC) students in higher education. “One who looks dark and ugly is
called asura, rakshasa, jungli, and devil in our history, as they were the lower caste
people who were not allowed to be part of mainstream society” (Pathania, 2020,
p. 541). Such hegemonic, casteist and racist practices that exist in the form of
racist and sexist language, festivals, and rituals were challenged and boycotted
by Dalit and OBC students. Their critical inquiry and their activism have altered
the existing “campus culture” of many universities that are rooted in upper-caste
ways of being.
Critical questions do not always stem from textbooks. Curriculum is not a neu-
tral and disembodied field of knowledge, but rather a mechanism of power, particu-
larly regarding which critical questions need to be asked (Apple, 2019). As South
African scholar Jansen argues: “Who produces knowledge? What knowledge is
produced and what knowledge is ‘left out’ are central questions of inquiry within
the politics of knowledge” (2019, p. 2). To further understand these questions,
we must focus on the political and social entanglements of colonization, colonial-
ity, and decolonization. This also centers on knowledge production and power.
In order to become part of the knowledge and cultural production, marginalized
communities must “search the debris of history” (hooks, 1992/2005, p. 170). Caste
as an age-old problem permeates every aspect of Indian life. Caste and race are
neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive, as Wilkerson emphatically concludes:
“Caste is the bones; race the skin” (Wilkerson, 2020, p. 19).
Conclusion
Any analysis of Indian education must understand the role of caste, colonialism,
class, capitalism, internal colonization, and the forces of Brahmanism. There-
fore, to counter the process of internal colonization of education, Indian educa-
tion must be De-Brahminized. In Ambedkar’s words: the “destruction of caste
requires an ideational change” (2014, p. 286). At the same time, the challenge
is casteized racialization. Critical scholars in education in the United States and
globally are familiar with distortions, silences, absences, and lacunae in extant
discourses and curricula related to the sufferings, struggles, strengths, and con-
tributions of communities on the margins. We recognize the work that lies ahead
of us. Today, in the age of twenty-first century migrations and information flows –
alongside activism related to such movements as #BlackLivesMatter,
#DalitLivesMatter, and other liberation struggles across the globe – xenophobia
and racism are also on the rise. It is all the more imperative, therefore, to per-
severe – within and beyond the classroom – with the work of dismantling rac-
ism, casteism, sexism, poverty and socioeconomic inequalities, xenophobia,
queer-phobia, religion-based discrimination, and ableism. While it is crucial to
educate ourselves about our shared and specific struggles of the past and the
present, it is equally important to continue building fruitful, informed coalitions
and solidarities.
Cultural locations of the past define the meaning of the present race and caste
conundrum that we are in today. Indian education is a great mirror to look at how
caste plays out in color and racial frames. Through the frameworks of internal
colonization and the racialization of caste, this chapter attempted to show that
there are deliberate processes to whitewash thousands of years of casteist history
and oppression by blaming colonial history. There has been a conscious ideologi-
cal process of using school textbooks and curriculum to eulogize the history of
the dominant castes. Similarly, erasing Mughal history from textbooks can also be
understood in a similar fashion. One should be cautious of using the term “race”
for caste or “racism” for casteism. Without this clarity, it is hard to precisely locate
the oppression. It is not possible to have freedom from oppression without locat-
ing the oppressor. There is a dire need to confront caste in the classroom and also
discuss its effects in policymaking as well as at home. This is what we mean by
looking at caste as an inherent part of culture that (un)consciously reflects our
everyday practices.
The racialization of caste does not imply the exclusion of other kinds of
discrimination such as gender and untouchability. The racialization (of caste)
is the extension of caste culture that continues to cultivate itself within the
glasshouse of the religious system. Racism emanates from the culture that per-
petuates notions of caste purity. By criticizing caste as culture or culture of
caste, we open up a possibility of changing this culture, changing the attitude
and notion of superiority among those who are privileged within a caste hierar-
chy. The role of education is to bring about critical consciousness about caste
privileges. Education, in this regard, is a key instrument of social change. The
classroom, in the words of bell hooks, with all its limitations, remains a location
of possibility.
Notes
1 www.un.org/WCAR/durban.pdf
2 Race, caste, and colorism form a dialectically interrelated system of oppression that
affects Africana people in particularly salient ways.
3 See also, www.cnn.com/2022/01/30/us/csu-caste-protections-universities-cec/index.html
4 See, www.southasianhistoriesforall.org/
5 While Hindus make up a majority (79.8%) of India’s population of 1.38 billion, Mus-
lims account for 14.2%, and Christians, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs comprise approxi-
mately 6% of the national population.
6 In the United States, the significance of a transnational approach to racialization is
clearly visible in a case that raises the question of whether caste discrimination may
be considered racial discrimination (Krishnamurthi & Krishnaswami, 2020). A lawsuit
filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing in 2020 alleges
caste discrimination by software giant Cisco Systems Inc. against a Dalit engineer
employee and shows the transnational flow of brahminical casteism and how caste is
reconstituted through global technical migrant labor pools that operate through the
coded notion of “merit” within Indian higher education institutions (Subramanian,
2019).
7 Darder and Torres (2004) posit that class and “race” do not occupy the same analytical
space and “thereby cannot constitute explanatory alternatives to one another . . . class
is a material space, even within the mainstream definition that links the concept to
occupation, income status, and educational attainment – all of which reflect the mate-
riality of class” (p. 128).
8 See also, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-26131423 [Indian Media: ‘Hate Crimes
Against Students from North-East, BBC, February 11, 2014].
9 As per the data of the 2011 Census, India had 10.13 million child laborers between the ages
of 5 and 14 years. According to a Human Rights Watch report, a large majority of them
are Dalits, members of Scheduled Tribes, and other minorities. (For details: www.hrw.
org/report/2014/04/22/they-say-were-dirty/denying-education-indias-marginalized)
10 See also, www.downtoearth.org.in/news/governance/how-caste-is-marring-mid-day-
meals-60898
11 See also, www.ndtv.com/india-news/nearly-10-lakh-students-fail-hindi-board-exams-
in-uttar-pradesh-2031147
12 See also, https://caravanmagazine.in/education/kiss-kalinga-tribes-adivasi-anthropol-
ogy-world-congress?fbclid=IwAR1Rt6Gc5BzeoQj5hnxBEB5tZ8zITy6NWxqvMHNN
60l7CxVsb9Ny4Yf00sw
13 See also, www.firstpost.com/living/dalit-writing-global-contexts-from-jv-pawar-to-mano
ranjan-byapari-examining-the-english-translations-of-literary-works-from-across-
india-8271241.html
14 From an interview with a college professor who teaches Hindi [June 9, 2021].
15 See also, www.thehindu.com/books/a-temple-for-a-language/article17752224.ece
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Section 3
Social Movements,
Anti-Racist Pedagogies,
and Reparative Futures
11 Racialization and Resistance
in South African Education
Salim Vally
At the very moment of the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic judgment in Brown v.
Board of Education in 1954 that formally ended racially segregated schooling in the
United States, the notorious Bantu Education Act codifying legal segregation in
apartheid South Africa’s education system was being implemented. After the first
South African democratic elections in 1994, apartheid legislation in education
was removed from the statute books, and the Bill of Rights in our constitution
prohibited racial and other forms of discrimination.
Yet, the shadow of exclusionary apartheid ideology continues to cast its Stygian
gloom no longer through racially explicit policies but by proxy. The latter involve
the costs of education including user fees, spatial and residential inequality, issues
of citizenship particularly for undocumented African migrant workers and refugees
and restrictions concerning language instruction and learning in schools – mostly
related to social class.
A study prepared for the South African Human Rights Commission in 1998
(Vally & Dalamba, 1999) concluded that an examination of racial discrimination
in the post-apartheid education system must acknowledge its historical context
and how racism is woven into the warp and woof of South Africa’s racial capi-
talist social fabric. Present-day educational segregation in post-apartheid South
Africa must be examined with reference to the history of racial capitalism and to
contemporary socio-economic and political disadvantage and patterns of inequal-
ity in society. Racism in education does not constitute an autonomous form of
oppression but is inextricably linked to power relations and reproduced in con-
junction with class, gender, and other inequalities. This chapter begins with an
overview of the genesis of racial segregation in education in South Africa before
discussing contemporary forms of “race” and class stratification in education.
Historical Overview of Racialization in South

African Education
Predating apartheid, from the first school for the enslaved in the Western Cape
Province in 1658 by the Dutch East India Company and through the colonial
period, education was designed to fit Black people into subordinate positions in
the racially structured division of labor and aimed to reproduce this structure.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-15
190 Salim Vally
The roots of segregated schooling were tied to the particular form of extractive
mining capitalism and the nature of the colonial state and its social policies in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cross & Chisholm, 1990). Educa-
tion and schooling were predicated on maintaining a Black migrant workforce
and a stabilized white working class. Schooling was to ensure the reproduction of
this labor structure along racially defined lines. The gold mining industry in the
late nineteenth century in particular, relied on a rigid and pervasive racial division
of labor into “occupations with different functions, income and status” (Cross &
Chisholm, p. 45). Colonial practices suffused with racial prejudices were systema-
tized and formalized to regulate migrant labor in the mining industry and extended
into political and social life, including education. For Cross and Chisholm, “The
ideology of segregation soon became the dominant mediating mechanism for the
existing economic and social forces” (1990, p. 46).
The overt white supremacist social policies of the National Party, which came
into power in 1948, extended previous colonial segregationist policies through its
program of “separate development” or apartheid. Several laws were promulgated
enacting segregation in the education system under the apartheid state’s ideology
of “Christian National Education” that implemented separate education systems
for each “population registration group.”1
In the 1950s, the apartheid state introduced the “Bantu Education” system in
terms of which schooling for “Africans” was removed from missionary control and
brought under the control of a state committed to white supremacy and the pur-
suit of these policies through education. Through legislative provisions contained
in the Bantu Education Act of 1953, the Extension of University Education Act
of 1959, the Coloured Persons Act of 1963, the Indian Education Act of 1965,
and the National Education Act of 1967, education was linked explicitly to the
goals of political, economic, and social domination of all Black people. Expansion
of primary, secondary, and higher education for “Africans” in the 1960s and 1970s
occurred in the context of the development of “bantustan” policy, where “African”
political aspirations were to be redirected to artificial and economically unviable
“homelands.” It also occurred on the basis of unequal spending on education for
children administered under “white,” “Indian,” “coloured,” “African,” and various
“bantustan” education departments.
Schooling
The expansion of poor-quality education in the context of political and eco-
nomic oppression resulted in the growth of massive resistance among youth.
Resistance in education to the goals, control, content, and quality of educa-
tion was a feature throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Efforts to reform the sys-
tem failed. In 1986, the then Minister of National Education, F.W. de Klerk,
announced a 10-year plan to finance the upgrading of Black education. In 1989,
he admitted the plan had failed: a sluggish economy was unable to realize the
funds necessary to keep pace with rising numbers of enrollments at primary and
secondary levels of schooling.
Racialization in South African Education 191
The 1980s saw the growth in South Africa, as elsewhere, of private provision in
education as state schools were either unable or unwilling to admit Black children.
The majority of Black children who failed their final-year schooling (or matricula-
tion) examinations could not be reabsorbed into the system. Age restrictions on
entry to secondary schools was imposed in the early 1980s. As a result, private
schools began opening their doors to increasing numbers of Black children, but
prohibitive user fees meant that they were restricted to children whose parents
could afford the fees. In the 1980s, “alternative schools” – whose fees and stand-
ards varied as widely as their ability to sustain themselves – also mushroomed to
absorb increasing numbers of children.
Pressure to open white schools increased in major centers like Cape Town and
Johannesburg in 1989. In 1990, white schools were permitted to admit Black stu-
dents under limited conditions, which included a provision that the school remain
51% white and that the “ethos and character” of the school was maintained. In
Black schools, apartheid education meant minimal levels of resources, inadequately
trained and few staff, poor-quality learning materials, shortages of classrooms,
and the absence of laboratories and libraries. Besides these tangible deprivations,
schools also inculcated unquestioning conformity, rote learning, autocratic teach-
ing and authoritarian management styles, syllabi replete with racism and sexism,
and antiquated forms of assessment and evaluation (Vally & Spreen, 2003).
Schools were fragmented into 19 different education departments, and fund-
ing varied on the basis of “race.” In 1986, per capita subsidies for “whites”
were R23652 compared with R572 for “Africans” in Department of Education
and Training schools. Per capita subsidies in the “homelands” were even lower.
Between 1985 and 1992, there was an increase in real spending per pupil and
a move toward closing racial gaps in funding. Nevertheless, in 1992, four times
as much public money per capita was spent on white pupils as on Africans. In
1993, average spending on pupils was R4700 for whites, compared with R1440 for
Africans (Chisholm et al., 1998).
The 1976 Uprising that began in Soweto against apartheid education – resulting
in the police killing of many hundreds of high school students – was a water-
shed moment in the struggle against apartheid in education. Commemorating
the uprising a decade later, ex-Robben Island political prisoner and educationist
Neville Alexander wrote lyrically:
In the seamless web of South African history, the 16th of June 1976 repre-
sents both an end and a beginning . . . the rifles and ammunition that laid low
Hector Peterson [the first student that was killed] and his comrades and that
sent the Tsietsi Mashininis into exile and the Dan Motsisis into prison put an
end to illusions that the struggle for educational equality could be separated
from the struggle for democracy and eventually from class emancipation.
(Alexander, 1992, pp. 25–26)
Prompted by the uprising, the South African Catholic Bishops Conference

decided to defy apartheid educational legislation and to enroll Black students in
192 Salim Vally
Catholic schools. In the 1970s as well, private schools traditionally catering to an
elite group of white South Africans also enrolled Black students. These were usu-
ally the children of African diplomats, Black South African government officials,
or exceptionally wealthy Black parents (Carrim et al., 1993).
Limited desegregation of white state schools only began in 1990, following edu-
cational reforms. “Coloured” and “Indian” schools in South Africa though began
to admit “African” students in 1985, although this practice was deemed illegal
by the state up to 1990. In October 1990, the Minister of (white) Education in
the House of Assembly, Piet Clase, announced the possibility that white state
schools might legally admit Black pupils. To do this, white school parent com-
munities needed to vote on the issue. Schools were required to achieve an 80%
poll, out of which they needed to obtain a 72% majority. Schools were given the
option to vote for one of three models – A, B, or C. These became known as the
Clase models. (For a summary of these models see Carrim et al., 1993). Although
unrestricted formal desegregation by decree only came into being by 1993, there
were 60,000 Black students at Model C schools and about 40 000 “African” and
“coloured” students at “Indian” schools. By the end of 1995 the number of “Afri-
can” students at “coloured,” “white,” and “Indian” schools did not exceed 15% (or
approximately 200 000) of the total student enrollment at these schools (see Race
Relations Survey, 1994/1995; Naidoo, 1996).
Higher Education
Higher education formed an integral part of the racial capitalist system during
apartheid, and a large and centralized bureaucracy exerted control and reinforced
the asymmetrical racial distribution of power in South Africa. Prior to 1994, South
Africa had 36 racially segregated higher education institutions, which were fur-
ther differentiated according to languages and sociopolitical, academic, and intel-
lectual traditions. White English universities had strong Anglo-Saxon traditions,
while Afrikaaner institutions were based on Dutch and German traditions (Hay &
Monnapula-Mapesela, 2009, p. 11). Black universities reflected the racial and eth-
nic imagination of the apartheid rulers, most were established in rural “home-
lands” and were forced to adopt the traditions of the Afrikaner institutions that
became dominant under Afrikaner nationalism in the 1950s. Enrollments in Black
institutions remained low during the early apartheid years but increased slightly
during the 1970s and 1980s.
The apartheid system bequeathed a differential tertiary education legacy.
Privileged, well-resourced institutions were developed for white students that
contrasted with the meager facilities and poor quality of education at the “histori-
cally disadvantaged” institutions for “African,” “colored,” and “Indian” students.
Deep structural disparities in the higher education system during apartheid were
entrenched in the university system through (1) unequal distribution of resources,
(2) poor facilities and lack of capacity in Black institutions, (3) a skewed distribu-
tion of students in disciplines, and (4) inadequate governance. The participation
of Black students and women in fields of sciences, engineering, and technology
was limited.
With the rapid expansion in manufacturing, skills shortages detrimental to
economic advance became a significant problem. Job reservation legislation
that favored the employment of white labor failed despite the introduction of
vocational and technical school curricula for the white minority. An ideologi-
cal framework that would entrench control over a Black majority became neces-
sary while satisfying the economic needs of the dominant political group. State
modernization during the 1970s required an increasingly more stable and better-
educated labor force, and access to higher education increased for a small number
of Black people.
Post-Apartheid Education
The first post-apartheid Ministry of Education was unambiguous about the
challenges for the higher education system and its goals in the post-1994 period.
The Higher Education Act 101 of 1997 not only established the groundwork
for better governance and representation but made a clear case for the need to
“redress past discrimination and ensure equal access” (Department of Education
[DOE], 1997). That same year, White Paper 3: A Programme for the Transforma-
tion of Higher Education (DOE, 1997) put forward the need to set goals for equity
and redress:
The transformation of the higher education system and its institutions requires
increased and broadened participation. Successful policy must overcome a
historically determined pattern of fragmentation, inequality and inefficiency.
It must increase access for blacks, women, disabled and mature students, and
generate new curricula and flexible models of learning and teaching, includ-
ing modes of delivery, to accommodate a larger and more diverse student
population. (p. 6)
The White Paper also recognized the need for strong financial support and quality
to ensure success:
Such transformation involves not only abolishing all existing forms of

unjust differentiation, but also measures of empowerment, including finan-
cial support to bring about equal opportunity for individuals and institu-
tions. . . . Ensuring equity of access must be complemented by a concern
for equity of outcomes. Increased access must not lead to a “revolving
door” syndrome for students, with high failure and drop-out rates. In this
respect, the Ministry is committed to ensuring that public funds earmarked
for achieving redress and equity must be linked to measurable progress
toward improving quality and reducing the high drop-out and repetition
rates. (DOE, 1997, p. 7)
194 Salim Vally
The need to redress the imbalances of apartheid, to broaden “access” to educa-
tion for all – especially Black people, women, and mature learners – has been at
the forefront of the national agenda. However, although public in name, the state
only partially subsidized higher education institutions. This led to the increasing
expectation that the institutions themselves would raise the remaining funds from
student fees and private endowments. Despite the concerns of the earlier National
Commission on Higher Education, the costs to attend universities have increas-
ingly been placed beyond the reach of many students – largely Black students
from poor backgrounds. These developments resulted in protests almost every
year since 1994 against the commodification of education and for free quality
public education. Massive protests under the banner of #FeesMustFall took place
in 2015 and 2016. These developments are discussed later in the chapter.
Close to three decades since the first democratic elections in South Africa, the
combined weight of apartheid’s legacy exacerbated by neoliberalism has meant
that the promise of a quality public education system for Black and working-class
students remains a chimera. While a mélange of new official policies on every
conceivable aspect of education exists and racially based laws have been removed
from the statutes, the education system as a whole reflects and reproduces the
wider inequalities in society.
Toward the end of 2008, Neville Alexander and other key educationists
launched the Public Participation in Education Network (PPEN). In its “Call to
Action,” PPEN declared that the failures evident in the education system had
induced cynicism among various communities and even among educators, school
managers, and other public officials. It warned that these sentiments would fur-
ther entrench the sense of powerlessness and a loss of hope about the possibility
of meaningful outcomes for society as a whole. While a minority of schools mostly
situated in middle-class and rich communities excelled, South Africa essentially
has a segregated two-tier education system. PPEN asserted that schools were not
failing individually; rather, the nation was failing them collectively. PPEN’s decla-
ration (Vally, 2009) read in part:
South Africans face an important moment in our history . . . our education
system is in crisis. It is not a technical problem to be solved by experts but
a national disaster requiring our collective efforts. The majority of children
in South Africa are not learning to read and write with any confidence. Too
many schools are bleak and uninspiring places for our children and teachers.
If we do not act decisively now, we run the risk as a nation of “getting used
to this.”
Alexander expanded on the nature of the crisis identified by PPEN, but also dis-
cussed ways of reversing this trend. In an article originally entitled “The Truth
About Education in the New South Africa,” published as “Schooling In and For
the New South Africa,” Alexander3 lamented that
fundamental mistakes of a conceptual, strategic and political-pedagogical

character [policies such as Outcomes Based Education, teacher redeployment
and others critiqued by Alexander at the time] were made in the process
of transition from apartheid to post-apartheid education during the period
1993–1998 approximately. Not everything was wrong, of course, but many
of the beacons that should have facilitated a soft landing for the new system
were placed wrongly.
Alexander identified and discussed a few key omissions and mistakes, includ-
ing the failure to move away from the spatially segregated/apartheid location
of schools, which perpetuates racial and class divisions and the unequal alloca-
tion of resources, the inadequate professional development of teachers, and the
blind spot of language policy in schools. Alexander spent many years promoting
early childhood development, reading, and multilingualism in schools, explain-
ing its importance for cognitive development, overcoming divisions, and building
national unity but also explained why the promotion of African languages was also
about addressing the skewed and unequal power relations in our country.
Besides Alexander, a number of educationists have written about the problems
besetting the post-apartheid education system in South Africa. They include
writings on educational management, school governance, curriculum, language,
assessment, equity, teacher education, early childhood development, adult basic
education, and many other issues involving the process of educational reform
in post-apartheid South Africa. These texts have also dealt with external influ-
ences on the education system and system change, arising from the wider remit
of state policies such as the financing of education and the democratic state’s
orientation to educational investment, labor markets, and globalization (Sayed &
Jansen, 2001; Motala & Pampallis, 2001, 2002; Chisholm, 2004; Vally & Motala,
2014). Yet few of these texts and policies have dealt specifically with the existence
of social classes for the unfolding reform process and its interaction with struc-
tural racism in the aftermath of the pre-1994 negotiations and the importance of
working-class community participation. Where class is referred to, as in the case
of Chisholm (2004), the discussion is essentially about the effects of educational
reform on social class formation in the post-apartheid period, and Chisholm’s
major conclusion relates to how present policies favor an “expanding, racially-
mixed middle class” (p. 7).
Neglecting social class has contributed to the failure in addressing and over-
coming the deep inequalities that characterize the South African education sys-
tem. In a linked way, it is imperative to question how and why social movements
and social actors on the ground, who were initially central to policy formulation
and critique, were largely marginalized once policies were institutionalized. The
trajectory of the latter trend, related to the class nature of the post-apartheid state
and the political economy of the transition from apartheid to democracy, I argue,
is key to the seemingly intractable problems we face. Critical policy analysis use-
fully views the terrain of the state and therefore policy formulation processes as
spaces of contestation and negotiation. Not all of the different social demands and
actors are acknowledged by the state and therefore may not be manifest in formal
policy arenas. The conceptualization and analysis of the barriers to social justice
and equality in education and the relationship between the state, civil society, and
196 Salim Vally
class interests are informed and sustained by a tremendous body of work produced
by global critical, postcolonial, and political economy of education scholars.
Educational reforms to deracialize education should be accompanied by a wider
range of redistributive strategies, democratic participation, political will, and
clear choices about the social ends policy interventions seek to achieve. These
issues are prompted by other framing questions such as does the right to educa-
tion impact on the development of democracy and social transformation in South
Africa, what are the obstacles and impediments to the fulfillment of educational
rights, and what is the relationship between the state and civil society in educa-
tional policymaking and the meaning of this relationship for the establishment of
democracy in education?
Various articles (Vally, 2007; Spreen & Vally, 2006) describe how communi-
ties have documented the failure of existing policies intended to remove social
and economic barriers that prevent Black people and children from working-class
backgrounds from accessing and completing basic education. They also show how
social movements can facilitate direct and expanded participation of poor and
disadvantaged communities in education policymaking.
Privatization
Given the desultory state of public education in South Africa, calls for the privati-
zation of schools in all their permutations are receiving greater resonance (Vally,
2018). Advocates of right-wing reform in South Africa stridently demand a variety
of responses ranging from outright privatization of education and the withdrawal
of the state, to various versions of market-friendly policies. Policymakers and ana-
lysts in South Africa are wont to borrow policies and their prescriptions largely
from Europe and North America, regardless of the vastly differing histories, con-
texts, and circumstances. These imitative approaches are adopted uncritically. In
effect, although many of the borrowed policies have been shown to be ineffective
in the very countries of their origin, they continue to be purveyed as policies and
“best practice” useful to development elsewhere. Such policy borrowing is fos-
tered, regrettably, not only through the work of “expert” consultants (often from
developed economies) but also by “native” researchers who have little regard for
the critical literature on this issue. They are intent on providing “solutions” based
on these ostensible “best practices” – some of which have been severely criticized
by researchers in the very countries of their provenance for perpetuating racial
and class inequalities.
The upshot of neoliberal discourse concerning education in South Africa as
elsewhere has been to ignore the problems faced by public schools and to promote
market solutions through private schools, public-private partnerships, vouchers,
charters, and the like. This proposed “market solution” to our education crisis,
even with state regulation, is less a case of a pragmatic attempt at resolving the
problem than a case of ideological wishful thinking and in most cases a justifica-
tion for profiteering.
The purveyors of these ideas do not speak to the adverse consequences of pri-
vatization. Of these, perhaps the most troublesome relates to the value systems
inculcated by the privatization of education and the power it vests in unaccount-
able and undemocratic corporate interests already hugely dominant in the world
(Spreen & Vally, 2014) and unwilling to address issues of “race” and class inequal-
ity. Corporations and their “experts” have a large part to play in the development
of the curriculum, in shaping the orientation and outcomes of education, and in
determining the “suitability” of teachers and administrators associated with the
rationalization of costs and the determination of what is “relevant” and what is
not. In effect, it converts education into a commodity to be purchased and sold in
a highly commercialized and competitive market. These characteristics of privati-
zation are further augmented by
• The absence of a national curriculum or forms of assessment that engen-

der wider social outcomes and goals necessary for social cohesion and
deracialization
• The effects on the (already parlous) state of the public system, which ends up
catering to only students from the most deprived communities – largely Black
and working class
• The removal of especially middle-class children from the public schooling
system based on the criterion of affordability and ostensible “choice” and their
separation from a wider network of social engagements and interactions
• The obvious effects on deepening social inequality and stratification among
the citizenry whatever the putative “gains” of private education
• The frequently continued use of public infrastructure and almost invariable
reliance on the best publicly trained teachers (There is little or no training of
teachers in the private sector, and consequently, the privatization of educa-
tion plays a parasitic role by depending on the public provision of qualified
teachers.)
Neoliberal globalization’s narrow focus on business and the market system contin-
ues to undermine and distort the purposes of good quality public education. It has
the potential to negate the struggles for an anti-racist, just, and humane society,
substituting these for unaccountable and avaricious global autocracies.
Social Class, “Race,” and Education

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the local and global literature on the political econ-
omy of education and the relationship between social class and education was
extensive. Key texts included Richard Sennet and Jonathan Cobb’s The Hidden
Injuries of Class (1973) with its examination of the consequences of anti-academic,
anti-school behavior among inner-city youth; Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’
Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), which explained working-class failure as
the raison d’etre of the capitalist system; and Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour (1981),
198 Salim Vally
which showed how working-class teenage “lads” consciously resisted and rebelled
against schooling and classroom authority yet continued to reproduce social class
relations. The “correspondence theory” of Bowles and Gintis (1976, p. 131) and
others in this period explained how schools reproduced the social relations that
capitalism required.
Correspondence theory was critiqued for ignoring the agency of those involved
and the capacity of people to resist the system. The theory was also seen as
overly deterministic and mechanistic for focusing primarily on the power of eco-
nomic structures to influence education. The work of later writers such as Henry
Giroux (1983) and Michael Apple (1996) explored the complex inter-relation-
ships between class, “race,” and gender in education and the dynamic relation-
ships between cultural reproduction and economic reproduction. These writers
also documented resistance and contestation to class, social, and cultural oppres-
sion in education settings.
In South Africa too, Motala and Vally (2010) showed that “throughout the
period of the 1970s up to the early 90s, debate about class analysis characterized
a vast array of writings including historical studies, sociology, political science and
economic analysis in particular,” and the field of education was not exempted.
Analytical educational analysis in this period in South Africa revolved around
the debate between liberal and radical discourses. The latter partly critiqued the
liberal approach as inadequate in that it examined education separately from
the wider economic, political, social, and cultural context. The radical approach
emphasized class and its intersection with “race” and largely argued for using the
tools of political economy. For instance, Cross and Chisholm (1990, p. 43) insisted
that instead of placing the “moral and legal responsibility for separate schooling
at the door of the National Party and Afrikaner ideology” as adherents of lib-
eral ideology did, the social policy of education and schooling was predicated on
reproducing a super exploited Black migrant workforce and a stable white work-
ing class. Molteno (1984) as well as Christie and Collins (1984) used a Marx-
ist framework to analyze the historical foundations of schooling in South Africa.
Referring to Bantu education, Christie and Collins (1984, p. 182) asserted that
“the central continuing feature remains, namely that schooling for the Indigenous
people of South Africa is in the main for the purpose of reproducing a certain kind
of labour, as required by the particular form taken by the accumulation process at
a particular time.”
The theoretical approach of these writers allowed for addressing the entire
nexus of relevant issues in which education is one strand in the plethora of eco-
nomic, political, class and racial policies, and social forces that impinge on the
everyday lives of working-class students in South Africa. Jean Anyon (2009), writ-
ing of the inner-city schools of the United States true too for most Black South
African working-class communities argued that
the problems of schooling, jobs, segregation, police brutality and incarceration

are tangled together in the fabric of everyday living in poor neighborhoods . . .
only when the knot itself is undone do the threads come free. I have retheorised
urban school reform and education policy, therefore, to include necessary reform of
the public policies that cause the social problems that constrict educational possibil-
ity . . . school reform without economic reform is a partial and only partially
helpful solution. What this approach to school reform entails, of course, is
that we retheorise solutions to the problems of urban education as extending
considerably beyond policies that we normally think of as “educational.”
(p. 16) [italicized by Anyon]
The dominance of the radical discourse in education declined post-1994. Cross

et al. (2009, p. 20) provide a few specific factors that contributed to this regres-
sion: (1) a decline of the practice of critique particularly with regard to the role
of the state; (2) disregard in scholarly work for issues of social justice and human
rights that dominated radical discourses in the struggle against apartheid; and 3)
an almost unproblematic acceptance of neoliberal approaches and positivism in
social research.
Apart from notable chapters in Chisholm’s Changing Class (2004) and articles by
Crain Soudien (2004) and Ken Harley and Volker Wedekind (2004) scant atten-
tion is paid directly to issues of social class in education over the past two decades.
Grappling effectively with contemporary education problems including structural
racism requires bringing issues of class and community back to the forefront in
theorizing and understanding education policy in the South African context.
The handling of desegregation in most South African schools is firmly within the
assimilationist framework and the multiculturalist model. Anti-racists understand
that eliminating racism and segregation requires restructuring power relationships
in the economic, political, and cultural institutions of the society. It is a struc-
tural problem not limited to interpersonal interactions. Despite the requirement
of long-term structural change to effectively eradicate segregation, I do not wish
to imply that inequalities in schools cannot be mitigated in the short term. On the
contrary, as far as desegregation is concerned, several strategies can be employed –
in fact must be implemented if fundamental rights are not to be breached – even
within the constraints of present social relations.
Ultimately though, the wider context in which racism and segregation is gen-
erated is vital; even if sound anti-racist educational policies for the classroom,
corridor, and playground are developed, this will not be enough to eradicate seg-
regation from education. What happens outside the school gates will inevitably
affect the gains made in schools. The patent failure of the public education system
to provide quality education for the majority of learners has spawned a number of
suggestions to rectify the situation, including the crude resort to an apartheid-like
disciplinary regime and the privatizations of education. The upshot of neoliberal
discourse in education has been to ignore the problems faced by public schools
and to promote market solutions through private schools, vouchers, charters, and
the like. Privatization does not solve the problems in education; rather, it makes
them worse. Above all, we need to understand that segregation in education is
embedded in social class relations and largely reflects, reinforces, and reproduces
the inequalities in a capitalist society.
200 Salim Vally
Resistance
South Africa has a proud history of resistance in and through education. This
resistance has generated popular epistemologies and pedagogies against racial
capitalism. The “peoples’ education movement,” “worker education movement,”
and “popular adult and/or community education movement” are examples. This
praxis, relative to the struggle against apartheid, has diminished but still exists,
and its center of gravity today has shifted to social movements as they resist the
impact of neoliberalism and increasing poverty and inequality in post-apartheid
South Africa. Since the massacre of 34 striking mine workers at the Lonmin mine
in Marikana in 2012, South Africa has witnessed daily community protests for
democratic accountability and what is called “service delivery” protests.
In the education sector too, there have been protests at the beginning of every
year against the exorbitant costs of higher education and financial exclusions of
students at many universities in South Africa. In 2015 and 2016, these sporadic
protests culminated in a movement against the commodification of education
throughout the country where students demanded free education from preschool
to higher education.
In the 2015 protests – the biggest university protests in South Africa since the
end of formal apartheid in 1994 – students and workers in universities across
South Africa powerfully expressed their dissatisfaction with the status quo. Their
demands against financial exclusion – encapsulated in the “Fees Must Fall”
protests – was a call for a higher education system in the interest of the public good.
The movement gave meaning to Fanon’s (1963, p. 41) dictum, often quoted in this
period, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil
it, or betray it.” A significant number of this generation spoke to the intersection-
ality of class exploitation, racism, different forms of oppression, and patriarchy in
concrete ways. It does signal a new consciousness among important layers of youth,
students, and workers, but also exasperation with the sophistry of the ruling party,
frustration at thwarted hopes, the everyday injuries of mere survival under racial
capitalism, the failure of an economic system that increases inequality and unem-
ployment, the venality of politicians, and the brazen excesses of cronyism.
At the end of 2015, the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation held
a conference to reflect on the tumultuous events at South African tertiary institu-
tions. Student, academic, and worker participants from 22 universities attended
and engaged in vibrant discussions focused on the #FeesMustFall campaign.
Many of the participants were at the epicenter of the struggles for education and
other rights, and together brought the considerably valuable experience they had
accumulated in the course of the debates, discussions, and actions over the last
period from many parts of the country. The conference provided them the oppor-
tunity not only to share their experiences but also to contest the issues that arose
in the course of the campaigns including the political, ideological, and social ori-
entations they brought to them, the issues these raised, and the complexities they
had to deal with.
Developments since the #FeesMustFall and other student protests have
opened up critical debates at a number of institutions – not just universities –
about the purpose of education in relation to the idea of transformation and
decolonization in a situation of the global marketization and corporatization of
education. These debates are not just about colonial and apartheid era statues
since they relate to a raft of other issues, all of which go to the root not only
of education but also of society (symbolic representation, structural racism and
interpersonal prejudice, demographic issues, hetero-normativity, patriarchy,
“whiteness,” culture of institutions, language, culture and knowledge, power,
and history). The national #FeesMustFall student movement promoted solidar-
ity between students and workers in and between universities and challenged the
corporatization of the academy. They called for an education system that speaks
to the needs of citizens and not to the business of profit. For this cause, students
were prepared to close their institutions, occupy their campus buildings, chal-
lenge authority and power, and courageously put their bodies on the line. In their
mass marches to the ruling party headquarters in Johannesburg, Luthuli House
on October 22, 2015, and the Union Buildings and Parliament on October 23,
2015, tens of thousands of students and workers expressed their support for the
movement and through it, their vital desire for an education that promotes a
dignified and fulfilled life for all.
For the few students from working-class communities who make it to tertiary
education, life is often a constant struggle – the financial aid scheme is woefully
inadequate, many are financially excluded, and only 50% complete their degrees
and diplomas. Universities increasingly have to raise their own funding, most
often from the private sector, and in the process modify courses and programs
to meet the needs of businesses. Public higher education costs have been ris-
ing every year. This has certainly put pressure on students to confront rising
costs, and on the state and institutions to provide more financial aid for needy
students. However, in a worsening situation where resources and funding allo-
cated to higher education cannot meet the high demand for access, the result
is a combination of shrinking space for new students and massive exclusions on
a financial basis for those who cannot keep up with their payments when fees
increase – the burden falls largely on students from Black and working-class
communities.
Increasingly, there is an understanding that education is embedded in social
class relations and largely reflects, reinforces, and reproduces the inequalities in a
racial capitalist society. This does not mean that resistance and counter-hegemonic
efforts are fruitless, but that in making these efforts, we must be cognizant of the
combined impact of social class, gender, and a racist history. A bland consensus-
seeking constitutionalism often serves as a barrier to social analysis and praxis and
strategies to overcome structural racism. For many communities in South Africa,
there is a realization that the struggle against apartheid education is not over – this
time against class apartheid.
202 Salim Vally
Notes
1 An explanatory note on the terminology used in this chapter is important. The apartheid
state marshalled a taxonomy of racial classifications to aid in the pursuit of its segregation-
ist policies. The fragmented apartheid education system, perhaps more than any other
social sector, reproduced the apartheid categories of “African,” “white,” “coloured,” and
“Indian” – the apartheid registrar’s “population registration groups.” Often people were
separated and deemed to belong to one or another group in a demeaning and arbitrary
manner. The Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s rejected and actively opposed
these classifications as well as the collective phrase “non-white,” preferring instead the
term “Black” as a political term for all who were oppressed. Despite these efforts, the
apartheid terms took on a salience and an acceptance, both under apartheid and after,
among many people classified in this way by the apartheid regime. While I reject the
discredited and debunked notion of “race” as a biological entity, I use the apartheid cat-
egories for pragmatic explanatory purposes and use “race” as a social construct. I signal
my discomfort with the apartheid categories through the use of quotes and embrace the
term “Black” when all oppressed groups are referred to.
2 $1 equals approximately R15 in today’s terms.
3 https://hsf.org.za/publications/focus/focus-56-february-2010-on-learning-and-teaching/
schooling-in-and-for-the-new-south-africa
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12 Affirmative Action and
Racialization in the United
States and Brazil
Jeana E. Morrison, Mike Hoa Nguyen, and OiYan Poon
In this chapter, we join together Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory (2014)
and Mills’ racial contract theory (1997) to spotlight how affirmative action poli-
cies and their evolutions over time represent how race and racism are publicly
understood in socially bound contexts. Central to these and other theories of
race is the recognition that race has no biological reality, yet racial meanings and
racialization allow social systems to reproduce very real material inequalities and
violences. Affirmative action, as a public policy, serves as a powerful racial project,
or facilitator, that serves to challenge racial meanings and racial power relations
in a society.
By bringing together these two theories of racialization, we explain how
affirmative action policies and their associated public debates reflect local con-
texts of how race and racism are understood and contested. We discuss different
affirmative action policies across national contexts, comparing and contrasting
contemporary policies and discourses between the United States and Brazil. We
offer a broader view of how race and racism have been historically shaped and
understood across national contexts, and the implications for racialized educa-
tional policy worldwide.
Introduction/Overview
What is needed . . . is a recognition that racism (or, as I will argue, global white
supremacy) is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal or
informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution
of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties.
(Mills, 1997, p. 3)
In presenting the canonical concept of the racial contract, Charles Mills offered
a way to identify relational lines of racial power and domination between people
categorized as white and those who do not possess whiteness (i.e., people of color1)
around the world. The racial contract, according to Mills (1997), is a set of agree-
ments that maintains a sociopolitical system of white supremacy that dehumanizes
and subordinates people of color around the world. Who is included as “white
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-16
Racialization in the U.S. and Brazil 205
people” as a group changes; as Mills (1997) explained, “the membership require-
ments for Whiteness are rewritten over time, with shifting criteria prescribed by
the evolving Racial Contract” (p. 81).
Mills’ work attests to a core aspect of race and racialization, that of fluidity.
Omi and Winant (2014) extended this concept through racial formation theory
in which meanings of race and intergroup relations of power and domination also
shift over time. These changes occur through racial projects, which are struc-
tural and/or cultural initiatives and efforts that represent and rearticulate social
meanings of race in a society. Racial projects are foundational building blocks to
defining and redefining what race and racial categories mean through processes
of racial formation. An example of a racial project is how the design of U.S. cen-
sus counts categorizes racial and ethnic groups, and changes nominal categories
over time (Gogue et al., 2021). We bring together Omi and Winant’s and Mills’
theories of racialization to illuminate localized processes of racialization and racial
categorization and to recognize how affirmative action policies may be limited in
upending systemic white supremacy.
Through racial formation theory, affirmative action2 policies exemplify racial
projects. They may be intended to disrupt unequal conditions of material ine-
qualities by race, ethnicity, gender, and/or class, and to remedy past harm to sub-
jugated and racialized groups or to advance diversity in social institutions such
as higher education, state economies through employment and/or entrepreneur-
ship, and political participation. Consequently, they can unsettle public notions
of who deserves access to opportunities and resources and can challenge the
often-implicit racial contract upholding white supremacy through seemingly race-
neutral policies and practices.
In the mid-twentieth century, as global Third World Liberation Movements
seeking to overthrow colonial power pushed for new social contracts that acknowl-
edged the humanity of Indigenous people and people of color, affirmative action
policies emerged as one response by the state. Since that time, over 40 countries
have developed some form of affirmative action to address inequitable higher
education systems (Dudley-Jenkins & Moses, 2014). The practice of affirmative
action may be designed and implemented differently depending on the context and
may have other names (e.g., quotas, reservations, positive discrimination) (Moses,
2010; Sowell, 2004). In this chapter, “affirmative action” refers to the extension
of access to higher education for marginalized populations enacted by a country’s
government (Khaitan, 2015; Moses, 2010; Ratuva, 2013; Sowell, 2004). Imple-
mentation differs with regard to consideration of social identities and through the
reservation of admissions spaces based on criteria such as test scores and socioeco-
nomic status (Dudley-Jenkins & Moses, 2014; Moses, 2010; Pazich & Teranishi,
2012). Across these variations, policymakers have consistently used affirmative
action as an inclusivity tool for populations that have historically been excluded.
Affirmative action policies are often contested. At issue is a lack of consensus
regarding what policies, if any, are needed to ameliorate systemic disparities and
inequities in how people of different classes of race, ethnicity, religion, gender,
206 Jeana E. Morrison et al.
economic class, and so on, participate in a nation’s social and public institutions
and opportunities for mobility. Shaped by local contexts of systemic inequalities
and politics, these policy debates represent and serve varying moral imperatives
within contested terrains of social and political power and social inequalities
(Moses, 2016). Because affirmative action policies in different places represent
unstable “diversity bargains” between white supremacist systems of power and
calls for equity and justice (Warikoo, 2016), they are often rife with political ten-
sions and backlash in their implementation. These political debates can facilitate
transformations in racial meanings (Carbado & Harris, 2012; Kim, 2018).
Studying affirmative action and related policy debates in different national
contexts can offer windows into how race and racism organize social relations
of power and dominance in each country’s context. Therefore, we highlight how
affirmative action debates and policy implementations facilitate localized concepts
of race and racism in Brazil and the United States. Through these two case stud-
ies, we identify cross-context similarities and differences. We end by discussing
implications for utilizing theories of racialization to understand race and racism as
a global system of power and domination connected to localized racial meanings,
contexts, and racialized systems.
Background on Affirmative Action in the United States

In the United States, one of the earliest appearances of the term “affirmative
action” in government documents came in President John F. Kennedy’s 1961
Executive Order 10925 (Urofsky, 2020). This mandate stated that government
contractors receiving federal dollars needed to “take affirmative action to ensure
that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, with-
out regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” President Kennedy also
created a committee on Equal Employment Opportunity to make recommenda-
tions for “additional affirmative steps which should be taken by executive depart-
ments and agencies to realize more fully the national policy of nondiscrimination
within the executive branch of the Government.” President Lyndon B. Johnson
later expanded on Kennedy’s generally passive nondiscrimination policy stance to
a more active anti-racist posture, which he signaled in a commencement speech
at Howard University (Garces & Poon, 2018). In this speech, Johnson explained:
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liber-
ate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “You are free
to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been
completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All
our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. And this is the
next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not
just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability,
not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact, and equality as
a result. (June 4, 1965)
In the following decades, political and legal attacks have rolled back how affirma-
tive action can be implemented and for what purposes. In admissions practices
in the United States, colleges and universities may only consider race as one of
many factors through holistic practices, if race-neutral approaches to admissions
have fallen short in allowing a campus to enroll a racially diverse class to reap the
educational benefits of diversity (Poon & Garces, 2022).
Federal case laws established by the U.S. Supreme Court (see UC Regents v.
Bakke, 1978; Grutter v. Bollinger, 2003; and Fisher v. University of Texas, Austin,
2016) have affirmed and reaffirmed that U.S. colleges and universities may only
consider race as one of many factors for the purposes of obtaining educational
benefits from diversity. Starting with the Bakke ruling in 1978, the Court limited
the consideration of race in admissions and replaced the remedial rationale for the
use of race in admissions – addressing historic and ongoing racism and systemic
racial oppression – with the diversity rationale. In other words, if a college or uni-
versity wishes to include the consideration of race in admissions decision-making,
it can only do so with the intentions of enhancing the educational benefits of all
students. It may not legally justify the consideration of race in admissions for the
purpose of acknowledging centuries of history and contemporary systemic racism
as foundational barriers to equity in college access.
This long-standing legal precedent represents an unstable racialized “diversity
bargain” that remains contested (Warikoo, 2016). Because affirmative action and
race are inextricably linked, racial formation theory offers a lens through which to
examine the complex dynamics and the ever-changing legal landscape of affirma-
tive action in the United States. Moreover, through this framework, we are better
able to situate ongoing public debates with local contexts of how race and rac-
ism are understood, and the resulting implications for the “slippages” and “shifts”
of racial boundaries. In other words, studying debates over affirmative action in
an American context can offer windows into racialization, concepts of race, and
how racism is reproduced over time through shifting social relations in the United
States and other international contexts.
Asian Americans and Affirmative Action

Lawsuits challenging the use of race in college admissions after the Grutter and
Gratz v. Bollinger (Nguyen et al., 2021) University of Michigan cases can be traced
to white conservative activist Edward Blum and his organization, Students for
Fair Admissions (SFFA). Blum has dedicated his life to establishing a “colorblind”
American society by filing lawsuits with the goal of dismantling laws and policies
seeking to advance racial justice, including redistricting, voting rights, and affirm-
ative action (Nguyen et al., 2021). His efforts exemplify how racial formation and
racialization are debated and reconstituted in higher education, specifically with
respect to race-conscious admissions.
In 2008, Blum recruited Abigail Fisher, a white woman, to challenge the Uni-
versity of Texas, Austin’s (UT) admissions program. Blum argued in an interview
that, “it’s our belief that but for the fact that she’s white, she would have been
admitted to UT” (Chuck, 2013, para. 12). Although the U.S. Supreme Court ulti-
mately ruled in favor of the University of Texas in the second Fisher (2016) case,3
Blum altered his tactics and established SFFA, co-founding the organization with
Abigail Fisher, intending to recruit and cast Asian Americans as plaintiffs to sue
Harvard. He explained this racialized strategy:
Many of them are, uh, children of immigrant, uh, Chinese, children of first
generation Korean and Vietnamese. And they have superlative academic
records, I mean, just startlingly so, perfect GPAs, perfect SATs and ACTs,
active in sports, lots of volunteer efforts . . . that’s why we don’t have any
whites as plaintiffs in our Harvard lawsuit, that’s why none of the kids that
join [SFFA], to challenge Harvard were white, it’s because they are benefit-
ing from the discrimination that Asians are suffering there. (Abumrad, 2017)
Blum’s racial reconfiguration and argument of who “benefits” and who is “dis-
criminated” in affirmative action policies, as well as considering his longtime
conservative activism, reveal his true intention to establish race-evasive college
admissions. Blum’s “ultimate goal is to have the Supreme Court revisit its, we
think unfortunate opinion in Fisher, and end the use of race and ethnicity once
and for all. That’s the goal of [SFFA], and this organization will stay active until
that happens.” Of note is that his intentions are silent on the welfare of Asian
Americans (Abumrad, 2017).
As SFFA v. Harvard moved through the federal courts, the U.S. Department
of Justice (DOJ) under the Trump administration launched an investigation into
Yale’s admissions practices in 2018, at the behest of a small group of vocal and
racially conservative Asian Americans (Nguyen et al., 2020). Although Asian
Americans have been engaged in affirmative action debates since the 1970s
(Poon & Segoshi, 2018; Takagi, 1992), Blum’s SFFA lawsuits have placed them
front and center. While empirical research demonstrates that the majority of
Asian Americans are in support of affirmative action, this vocal minority of Asian
Americans (mostly Chinese Americans), who are vehemently opposed to race-
conscious admissions, have sided with Blum and his efforts, and have received a
disproportionate share of media attention (Chen et al., in press). In the waning
months of the Trump administration, the DOJ used the investigation to file a fed-
eral lawsuit against Yale, charging that it discriminates against Asian Americans
in its admission practices. The DOJ lawsuit was dropped in February 2021, after
President Biden took office. In response, Blum submitted his own lawsuit based on
similar lines of reasoning used by Trump’s DOJ.
In SFFA v. Yale, as well as in the previous DOJ complaint, Blum specifically
excludes Cambodians, Hmong, Laotian, and Vietnamese Americans from his defi-
nition of Asian American. The DOJ and Blum’s intentional exclusion of certain
Southeast Asian American groups in Yale, while including them in Harvard, is
at the practical level, manipulative, misleading, and advances a false narrative
about Asian Americans to seek a legal elimination of the use of race in college
admissions. It engages a racial project to overtly seek reclassification of the Asian
American racial category, relying on racial stereotypes of Asian American aca-
demic achievement. It blatantly counters state-based racial and ethnic classifica-
tions used by the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Education, and the
Office of Management and Budget.
Furthermore, it does not consider how Southeast Asian Americans have been
and are racialized, as well as how they have built pan-ethnic Asian American
coalitions, communities, and identities with other Asian American subgroups
(Espiritu, 1992; Gogue et al., 2021; Okamoto, 2014). The implications of these
intentional racialized actions are threefold. First, this manipulation of who Asian
Americans are demonstrates that policy opponents cannot effectively argue that
race-conscious admissions harm this diverse population. Second, it illustrates that
Blum and his crusade are not actually focused on advancing justice for Asian
Americans. And finally, this maneuver, if realized, will disenfranchise educational
access and opportunity of many Asian Americans, including Southeast Asian
Americans and other communities of color.
Omi and Winant (2014) argued that the process of racialization and racial for-
mation is often motivated by social, economic, and political forces, where the
process in which groups are racialized can be advanced through racial struggle
and resistance, as well as domination and supremacy. Through this framework,
we are better able to explain how opponents of race-conscious admissions are
simultaneously constructing new racial understandings of Asian Americans while
reconstituting these same classifications to exclude Southeast Asian Americans,
to advance their ideological approaches, and to uphold white supremacist logics
about merit. Through their affirmative action opposition, conservative actors are
striving to reshape racial categories through federal court cases, which we argue is
a racial project mobilized by white racial power interests.
In addition to SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. Yale, U.S. Supreme Court Associate
Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent in Fisher II (2016) is instructive of this motivation.
Even though Asian Americans were not a key aspect of the Fisher case, Justice
Alito wrote at length regarding his assessment of the educational experiences of
Asian American college students. Specifically, he stated:
the Court’s willingness to allow this ‘discrimination against individuals of

Asian descent in UT admissions is particularly troubling, in light of the long
history of discrimination against Asian Americans, especially in education . . .
students labeled [as] “Asian American,” seemingly include “individuals of
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, Indian and
other backgrounds” . . . [i]t would be ludicrous to suggest that all of these
students have similar backgrounds and similar ideas and experiences to share.
So why has UT lumped them together and concluded that it is appropri-
ate to discriminate against Asian-American [sic] students because they are
‘overrepresented’ in the UT student body? (Fisher v. University of Texas, 2016,
pp. 26–27)
Omi and colleagues (2020) argued that Justice Alito “is using the heterogeneity of
AAPIs to critique and challenge the continued use of racial and ethnic categories
altogether,” where “[a]ny forms of racial and ethnic classification in his eyes are
illegitimate and suspect” (p. 62). Here, Justice Alito argued to dismantle all racial
categories based on the diversity, histories, and complexities of Asian Americans,
while ignoring that Asian Americans are racialized in similar ways. And in doing
so, he sought to achieve a form of color evasiveness through a politically strategic
social dismantling of an Asian American racial category that may not reflect the
desires of Asian Americans (Gogue et al., 2021).
Racial formation theory helps us to see that racialization processes are organ-
ized, enforced, and often constituted to uphold power (Omi & Winant, 2014).
The intentional racialized reclassification of specific groups or individuals or
the wholesale disintegration of the Asian American racial category within par-
allel federal lawsuits demonstrates how race can be exploited for political gain.
The context of affirmative action is an illustrative example of how conservative
actors, in some cases, by state-based actors, attempt to redefine and reclassify who
Asian Americans are, to achieve an environment that maintains and uplifts white
supremacy. We now turn to a consideration of affirmative action outside of the
United States with an expanded theorization.
Applying Racial Formation to Brazil

A review of the affirmative action scholarship reveals that many countries are
grappling with issues of access and equity in higher education (Harvey, 2014;
Khaitan, 2015; Ratuva, 2013; Sowell, 2004). Here, we turn our attention to Brazil
to highlight the utility of race-conscious admissions policies across borders. In
doing so, we focus on what can be learned about racial formation in comparison to
the United States, and purposefully underscore the importance of grappling with
global Blackness (see also Chapter 13).
Constructions of racial identity and maintenance thereof in Latin America
continue to be a contested site that includes global race understandings and race
relations. Brazil has provided a long and rich history for the study of race in the
last century (Degler, 1971; Freyre, 2006; Hasenbalg, 1996; do Nascimento, 1977;
Fernandes, 1978; Telles, 2006; Roth-Gordon, 2017). Indigenous origins, Portu-
guese colonialism, and formerly enslaved Africans provide the foundation and
historical dimensions of racial formation in Brazil. Brazilians believe that every
Brazilian can trace their familial heritage back to one or more of these roots,
fueling the ideology of a racial democracy – an idea that essentializes race mixing
to justify the sentiment that race does not matter in society writ large (Freyre,
2006; Fry, 2000; do Nascimento, 1977; Skidmore, 1983). This national discourse
of race neutrality has become a political and social project that is reflective of
age-old habits to avoid how racialization and systemic inequality are deeply inter-
twined (Omi & Winant, 2014; Roth-Gordon, 2017). It has also given rise to a
national identity that is based on a common Brazilian ethnicity rather than an
individuals’ race. To add to this complicated mix of identity and belief is the real-
ity that Brazil is home to the largest population of African descendants outside
of Africa (Hernández, 2010; IBGE, 2010; Lehman, 2018). As a result, Brazilians
have a distinct relationship with Blackness that affects the dynamic understanding
and categorization of race according to phenotype.
Despite the embrace of racial plurality because of miscegenation, hierarchies of
race and racial identity still exist (dos Santos, 2006; Schwartzman, 2008, 2009).
The further one is from the appearance of whiteness, the less likely one stands to
benefit from social and structural privileges (Lehman, 2018). This racialized oth-
ering manifests in different ways across contexts, including institutions of higher
education and university admissions processes. Activists have long disputed the
idea of racial democracy to highlight the inconsistent messaging that race is invis-
ible and does not matter in Brazilian society (Gonzalez, 1988; do Nascimento,
1977; dos Santos, 2006; Penha-Lopes, 2017; Pereira, 2013). One area where they
galvanized efforts was the push to increase access to the elite sector of higher
education.
Historically, higher education in Brazil has been reserved for children of the
elite. These students often are white and from upper socioeconomic backgrounds.
In 2002, the government legislated the use of affirmative action in university
admissions by employing the quota system,4 which allowed for the reservation
of 50% of spaces for students who attended public primary or secondary school.
These reservations are based on socioeconomic status, race, and disability. The
racial quota was designed to benefit students who self-identify as Black or Indig-
enous. We focus specifically on the quota for Black students for two reasons. First,
racial inequities faced by the Black population in Brazil was one of the primary
motivations for the use of affirmative action among Black activists. Second, the
racial quota for Black students has gone through significant changes since the
policy’s inception (Lehman, 2018; Mendes de Miranda et al., 2020).
The Unified Black Movement (MNU) and other activist allies relied heavily on
a racial justification (Moses, 2010) for increased access to higher education. Fur-
ther, to combat the prevalence of racial ambiguity in identification of policy ben-
eficiaries, activists and social scientists mandated that students only self-identify
as Black even if they were multiracial and would normally identify as something
else. Mckinley (2012) detailed how the fluidity of race has proliferated in the mul-
ticulturalist rhetoric and understandings of Latin America. She aptly argued that
while the law (particularly federal law) may recognize racial identities as fixed,
the way that this is interpreted and enacted is mediated by individuals and the
specificity of their local contexts. The disconnect between policy and peoples’ real
lives is one of the most significant challenges to effectively addressing barriers of
inequity in education and other facets of public society. Furthermore, it is within
this space that racial realities are actively entangled with educational experiences
and simultaneously impacting racialized identities.
Unique to the racial quota at the beginning of its implementation in Brazil is the
narrowly defined categories for identification juxtaposed with a context steeped
in racial plurality and flexibility. Activists pushing for the use of affirmative action
argued that using Black as the single category of identification for African descend-
ants was necessary to push back on racial ambiguity. They felt that this was neces-
sary because of the tendency for mixed-race Brazilians to identify as “Brown,” an
official category included on the national census that often signifies an individual
who holds multiple racial identities (IBGE, 2010; Schwartzman, 2008, 2009). As
such, deciding to join the categories of Black and Brown together would mitigate
uncertainty. Perhaps unwittingly, Black activists and their allies adopted an Amer-
ican understanding of racialized Blackness for application to a completely different
context and approach. Requiring students to only identify as Black resembles the
“one-drop rule” (Blay, 2013) in the United States, where Black ancestry, regard-
less of how distant, assigned Black state classification. While it was used to cement
a fixed Black racial identity for multiracial individuals, and to uphold notions of
white purity, this is not so easily accomplished in Brazil where miscegenation is
embedded in the social fabric, and racial identity is much more complex.
The decision to enforce fixed racial identity on Brazilians has been interrogated
by sociologists who study the elaborate process noting who benefits and who does
not from this form of classification (Lehman, 2018; dos Santos, 2006; Schwartz-
man, 2008, 2009; Silva & de Souza Leão, 2012). In the context of affirmative
action, there has been a growing body of work that argues how pardos or mixed-
race identifying students were less likely to gain the advantages of affirmative
action because of the ambiguity in their appearance that distances them from both
Blackness and whiteness (Schwartzman, 2008; Silva & de Souza Leão, 2012).
This work highlights some of the unintended consequences of Brazil’s approach
to affirmative action, such as excluding a sector of students whose experiences of
racial inequality as a barrier to higher education may not be so obvious. Since the
policy became federal law, there have been significant changes that allow students
to identify as both Black and Brown (Francis-Tan & Tannuri-Pianto, 2015).
Alongside the challenges that have arisen with racial self-identification is the
increase in fraudulent cases where students attempt to embellish a connection to
a distant Black relative to exemplify African descent and benefit from the quota
system (Mendes de Miranda et al., 2020). Attempts to fake a Black racial identity
for individual gain are problematic, primarily because this weakens the sharp sting
of oppression and power differentials that are real for Black lives across the dias-
pora. Furthermore, this highlights the ways that racial identity can be weaponized
by dominant groups as something that can be put on or taken off like a piece of
clothing. This effort diminishes the centrality of race in all aspects of society. How-
ever, in this specific case, it also indicates how competitive and exclusive higher
education spaces can be in Brazil. Moreover, the rise in incidents of fraud reflects
the general entitlement and contempt held by whites for policies that expand
opportunities to racially minoritized groups. This happens not just in Brazil but
can be found the world over.5 Mills (1997) described this phenomenon as racial-
ized moral psychology in which whites
will experience genuine cognitive difficulties in recognizing certain behavior

patterns as racist, so that quite apart from questions of motivation and bad faith
they will be morally handicapped simply from the conceptual point of view in
seeing and doing the right thing . . . [thus], the Racial Contract prescribes, as
a condition for membership in the polity, an epistemology of ignorance. (p. 93)
Accordingly, white supremacist ideology is ever present even during efforts to rem-
edy past and current racialized harm through race-conscious educational policies.
While the grassroots fight for the recognition of racial inequality was a strong
impetus for the legislation of affirmative action in Brazil, it did not exist without
pushback. There was resistance from diverse stakeholders, including Black and
Indigenous people. Some Black people in particular felt that they did not need
assistance and a policy like affirmative action fed into stereotypes that Blacks were
intellectually inferior (Penha-Lopes, 2017). Oppositional whites, on the other
hand, leaned on an all-too-common argument that increasing access would dimin-
ish the quality of higher education and take opportunities away from more deserv-
ing white students, presuming a racist ideology of white superiority (Johnson &
Heringer, 2015). Additionally, there were proponents from all racial groups who
reinforced the idea of racial democracy to purport that the focus should not be on
race but on class (Schwartzman & da Silva, 2012; Schwartzman & Paiva, 2016).
As a result, the centrality of race that characterized earlier efforts of support for
affirmative action has essentially waned over time. Race no longer stands alone
as criteria to apply for a quota space and is considered alongside socioeconomic
status. Thus, socioeconomic status has become the gold standard for determining
quota eligibility. The case of affirmative action policies in Brazil demonstrate that
white supremacist power structures, even in a deeply multiracial context, diminish
the reality of systemic racism when addressing inequality in educational spaces.
Conclusion
Racial formation and the racial contract are powerful concepts to reveal the ebbs
and flows of how a society attends to racialization, race, and racism. These con-
structs make clear that racialization is a historical and ongoing process that is
simultaneously cemented and rendered flexible throughout time (Omi & Winant,
2014). In the United States, federal courts serve as the primary place for ongoing
debates and racial projects that challenge and transform racial meanings through
affirmative action case law and litigation. There, racial formation theory, which
was originally intended as a lens to understand race and racism in the United
States, remains applicable for analyzing the political moves engaged by various
parties and organizations. However, outside of the United States in places like
Brazil, racial formation theory offers insights but must be extended with global
theorizing.
The race making that took place in Brazil within the context of colonialism and
slavery shaped the national discourse of race as illusory, thereby rendering invis-
ible the foundation of white logics that undergirded colonialization (Hernández,
2010; Lehman, 2018; Telles, 2006; Winant, 1992). In other words, race mixing
among the Indigenous, Portuguese, and enslaved Africans has long been upheld
as the pride of Brazilian identity rather than a source of unequal social relations
and a reflection of racialized violence and Indigenous dispossession (Mills, 1997).
Ignoring this reality has allowed dominant understandings of race as insignificant
to proliferate the private and public sphere (Roth-Gordon, 2017). As such, race
neutrality has become a political, social, and economic project not only of the
government but also for activists in their resistance to this dominant discourse
(Omi & Winant, 2014).
On one hand, racial formation provides a basis for understanding race as a
project within the historical setting of colonialism and domination. Racial forma-
tion theory was created specifically from a U.S.-based perspective. While this lens
helps to clarify some understanding of the way racialization functions in society
and in higher education policy contexts specifically, it can fall short in addressing
the particularities that shape race and racism in particular international contexts.
Even though the racial realities of these countries are shaped by similar structural
forces, we must attend to the various ways that they manifest.
Winant (1992) takes up this limitation in his attempt to extend racial forma-
tion theory to the study of race in Brazil. He appropriately contends that “the full
range of racially salient sociopolitical cultural dynamics has not yet even been
identified” (p. 192). However, he does not fully engage the misstep in applying a
U.S.-dominant lens to an area that significantly varies from this standard. There
is also somewhat of a dismissal in his argument of the knowledge that is being pro-
duced by Brazilians on this very topic. Furthermore, while racial formation delves
into the construction and implementation of race from a general level, it does
not elevate specific consequences that arise out of being racialized as Black, and
exhibits what Saucier and Woods (2016) name as “the requirement that black-
ness take a back seat to the multicultural coalition in order that there be a viable
progressive left politic” (p. 3).
Racial formation theory and Mills’ concept of the racial contract together offer
significant contributions as transdisciplinary lenses. They create the space for new
insights on how postcolonial countries might redress the racialized harms they
have perpetuated, as evidenced by the deep racial inequality in higher education
access and attainment that are evident in countries like the United States and
Brazil. This conceptual approach continues to be essential, particularly in the cur-
rent climate of extreme anti-Black and anti-Asian sentiment in the United States
and abroad, and in the comparative rise in white supremacist movements. As the
world becomes increasingly multi-raced, while also unequal, it is imperative that
we think through the impact that these changes may have for education in general
and for policies like affirmative action.
Notes
1 We recognize the imperfection of the term “people of color,” and use the term to denote
people who are not typically racialized as white and privy to the full racial benefits of
whiteness and white supremacy.
2 Throughout this chapter, we use the term “affirmative action” as a heuristic to refer to
policies that aim to address systemic resource access inequities, including those found in
college access by race, ethnicity, class, and gender lines.
3 The Fisher case was heard twice by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2013, the Supreme Court
remanded the case to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. This case is often referred to as
Fisher I. In 2016, the Supreme Court offered a second decision, and final ruling, on the Fisher
case. This is often referred to as the Fisher II case. For more, see Garces and Poon (2018).
4 We use the terms “quotas” and “quota system” interchangeably.
5 See, for example, news and academic articles on the Rachel Dolezal case.
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13 Racialization, Social
Movements and Political
Engagement in Brazil
The Brazilian Black Movement
and Education
Renato Emerson dos Santos
Brazil is a country of colonial formation, with a history marked by the extermina-

tion of native populations, by 350 years of African slavery, by a national project of
whitening of the population, and by the emergence in the twentieth century, of an
official discourse of Racial Democracy, which denied the existence of racism while
operating on the mechanisms of exclusion and subordination of non-white groups.
Such historical processes imprinted marks on education, such as the Eurocentric
curriculum, racial inequalities in educational trajectories, and the whitening of
professional bodies. Yet, these subordinated groups have always sought strategies
to access education and demanded polices from the state. Here, we focus on the
struggles of the Brazilian Black Movement. Due to the mobilizations and pressures
of this social movement in advance of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism
in Durban, South Africa, educational achievements gained force, and new agendas
and arenas of dispute were intensified. Law 10,639/2003, which changes the school
curriculum by introducing African and Black history, increased the disputes regard-
ing the school environment and teacher training. Curricular disputes also occurred
in university settings: some universities began adopting racial quotas in 2003, and a
national law was passed in 2012, one of the most comprehensive affirmative action
laws in the world, aimed at reducing inequality in higher education access.
In this chapter, we describe the Brazilian Black Movement in Education, with
an emphasis on the most recent agendas and struggles. We find that, historically,
the struggles of the Black Movement have been over access to education and
“quality,” which has been understood as the meaning of education and its power-
ful effects on race relations. This implies deep conflicts over which education is
offered. In this way, the recent struggles that denounce and combat the Eurocen-
tric hierarchies that predominate the Brazilian case center education as a pos-
sible equalizer. The Black Movement has also focused on combating stereotypes
and prejudices by valorizing the contributions of the socially marginalized and
oppressed as educational strategies for racial equality. Such efforts also extend
to the universities, where Brazil has historically been marked by not only by the
whiteness of its students and faculty, but also by the whiteness of its curricular
constructions, theoretical references, and the research agendas.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-17
Racialization in Brazil 219
To address these themes, we focus on a procedural reading of the construc-
tion of the movement’s agendas to identify the repertoires of action of the Black
Movement. We understand the Brazilian Black Movement as a “system of action”
(Melucci, 1994), which involves a diverse set of actors, forms of action, arenas of
dispute, and repertoires of action that establish traditions of activism. This text
is organized in three sections. The first section covers a brief history of the Black
struggles for education in Brazil since slavery. In the second section, we discuss
the agendas of the struggle in primary education, which were strengthened by the
passing of Law 10,639/2003. In the third section, we address the disputes in the
university since the beginning of the racial quota systems in 2003.
Historical Agendas of the Black Population in Brazil

Education has always been a central issue and space of conflict within Brazilian
race relations. Hegemonic forces have created impediments to educational access
for the working classes and the Black population and have used education as a tool
of domination. Racialized groups have always fought for and created strategies for
access and equality. The denial of access to education for Black populations has
profound, historical roots. Even during slavery, which was only abolished in 1888,
legal provisions such as the Decree 1,331-A of 1854, known as the Couto Ferras
Reform, prohibited slaves from attending school (Costa, 2011). Such prohibition is
not surprising when one considers that many of the enslaved Black population had
mastered writing, were literate, and used their skills to transmit information about
the revolts, such as the Malê Revolt in the city of Salvador at the beginning of the
nineteenth century (Lopes, 1988). The discrimination experienced by the free Black
population, whose presence in the schools was opposed by white families, meant
that Black teachers frequently created schools for Black students. Illustrative of this
case is the Black teacher, Pretextato dos Passos Silva, who in 1856 applied to the
General Inspectorate of Public Instruction of the Court. He solicited authorization
to regularize the school that he had opened in his house and included two petitions
from the parents of his students (Silva, 2000). He argued that along with the refusal
by parents of white students, teachers also refused to admit Black children into their
classes or mistreated them when they did accept them. This, dos Passos Silva argued,
harmed the quality of education and the educational trajectory of Black students.
The official recognition of Pretextato’s school was an exception, but Black
teachers’ strategy of creating schools for Black children, in their own homes, was
common (see, for example, Cavalcante, 2013). Beyond these initiatives, Black
associations and social movements also created schools or held Black literacy
classes. Some examples include the Feliz Esperança Association (Associação
Feliz Esperança) from the end of the 1880s until 1917 in the city of Pelotas, Rio
Grade do Sul, and the Paulista Federation of Colored Men (Federação Paulista dos
Homens de Cor) in São Paulo, among others addressed by Domingues (2009). Two
well-known twentieth-century organizations of the Brazilian Black Movement
had educational initiatives, which were literacy programs and/or schooling. The
Brazilian Black Front, formed in 1931, which reached more than 60 delegations in
220 Renato Emerson dos Santos
several states and became a political party, was ended in 1937 by Getúlio Vargas’
Estado Novo dictatorship regime. The Black Experimental Theater was created
in Rio de Janeiro at the end of the 1940s by the leadership of Abdias do Nasci-
mento (Larkin, 1981). These two initiatives, along with cases such as the MABEC
(Movimento Afro-Brasileiro de Educação de Cultura; Afro-Brazilian Movement
for Education and Culture), created in the 1940s in the city of Campinas, also
had a political goal. Beginning in 1881, illiterate people were prohibited from vot-
ing, an exclusion that disproportionately affected the Black population and Black
political candidates.
The goals of expanding Black students access to formal education that resisted
racist curricula, beginning in the 1930s, and expanding political inclusion became
fused. The Federal Constitution of 1934, by expressly bringing in Article 138,
“Stimulating Eugenics Education,” enforced guidelines that had curricular con-
sequences and contributed to the whitening of the composition of the teaching
faculty of schools and teacher education institutes, as demonstrated by D’Avila
(2006). In this context, textbooks with racist content circulated, such as the book
General Geography by Moisés Gicovate, for first graders. In the chapter dedicated
to the “classification of the races,” the author highlighted “the white race or the
Caucasian” as the “intellectual race,” gifted with a “well-proportioned body, well-
developed intelligence, and a superior civilization.” On the other pole, the “Black
race or the Ethiopic, also known as the affective race,” is marked by the “rudi-
mentary civilization” (Gicovate, 1944, p. 107). While such open manifestations
of racism and eugenics have, in later decades, been gradually removed from text-
books, new and more subtle strategies for inculcating ideologies of racial hierarchy
persist (Santos, 2018), in line with practices of a “new racism” (Camino et al.,
2001) with emergence of the so-called racial democracy (Fernandes, 1965; Abdias
Nascimnto, 1978).
The decline and fall of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985) created
a political environment that institutionalized the Black Movement’s struggles for
education. The dictatorial regime adopted and enforced the official discourse of
racial democracy, including the exclusion of the question of racial/color identifica-
tion in the population census of 1970 (Petruccelli, 2000). The Black Movement
denounced the racial democracy as a “myth” and pointed to the existence of rac-
ism and its social impacts, with education emerging as an important agenda in the
fight for recognition and affirmation of difference as a basis for achieving equal-
ity (Gomes, 2017). The color/race question was re-introduced on the Population
Census of 1980 and the resulting data allowed for important studies on racial
inequality in education and in other sectors (Hasenbalg, 1988).
With the weakening of the dictatorship, opposition parties that won municipal
and state elections from 1982 onward, with the support of sectors of the Black
Movement, began a process of institutionalizing the anti-racist agendas of the
social movement. They created departments for the treatment of the situation of
the Black population (the first was the Council of Participation and Development
of the Black Community of the State of São Paulo, described by Santos, 2006), and
passed anti-racist legislation. Because of the Federal Constitution of 1988, which
recognizes racial discrimination as a crime, states and municipalities adopted this
principle in their state constitutions and municipal laws. Silva Jr. (1998) highlights
a vast array of state and municipal laws about education, with anti-racist articles
in diverse cities such as Aracaju, Belém Belo Horizonte, Brasília, Porto Alegre, Rio
de Janeiro, São Paulo, Teresina (i.e., examples in all regions of the country) and in
states like Bahia and São Paulo. For example, there are laws indicating the valori-
zation of the history and culture of Black Brazilians and Africans, their struggles
and resistance, the participation of Black people in the formation of Brazilian soci-
ety being within the formal school curriculum. Some of these laws, such as cases
in the cities of Aracaju, Belém, and Brasília, also require the education secretariats
to guarantee training to teachers on these topics. Others such as Porto Alegre and
Aracaju provide the acquisition of didactic and bibliographic material to support
teachers’ expertise. The states of Espírito Santo, Paraná, and Mato Grosso do Sul
prohibit racial discrimination in their education systems. These sets of laws dem-
onstrate how the educational agenda of the Black Movement involved curricular
content, teacher training, teaching materials, and the combating of discrimination
in the school environment.
The 1990s, when many of these municipal and state laws passed, came with
national, mass mobilization of the Black Movement. For example, the Zumbi
dos Palmares March brought more than 30,000 Black activists to Brasília, the
federal capital, on November 20, 1995, to commemorate the 300th anniversary
of the assassination of Zumbi, the leader of the Quilombo of Palmares. Quilom-
bos were communities of Black people who had escaped slavery. Palmares, the
largest such collective, engaged in military combat against Portuguese coloniza-
tion for a century. As a result of the March 1995 mobilization, then-president
of the republic Fernando Henrique Cardoso created, within the scope of the
federal government, an Interministerial Working Group for the Valorization
of the Black Population (GTI), composed of leaders of the Black Movement
and ministry representatives including the Ministry of Education. Aimed at for-
mulating policy proposals to combat racial discrimination and to valorize and
develop the Black population, the GTI became an important channel for the
promotion of discussions about the institution of the anti-racist agenda within
the federal government.
The governmental effort to create agencies and legislation had already been
building a political, institutional, and legal environment for anti-racist public pol-
icy proposals, but the resistance of hegemonic political forces and the investment
in the “myth of racial democracy” prevented progress. For example, the Jornal
Folha de São Paulo published a study about racism in the country, in a special sup-
plement turned into a book (Turra & Venturi, 1995). This study’s conclusions
were elucidative of the pattern of Brazilian race relations: 89% of the interviewees
believed that racial prejudice existed in Brazil, but only 10% admitted having a
little or a lot of prejudice. These results confirmed what Fernandes (1965) found
about the myth of racial democracy: Brazilians deny having prejudice. Another
aspect of racial democracy that the author highlights was that the majority sectors
of Brazilian society also emphatically rejected actions to combat racism.
In this same period, the Black Movement focused on racial inequalities in
higher education. The emergence of the preparatory courses for the vestibular,
the university entrance exam, aimed at Black students drew their attention. The
principal initiative was the Pre-Vestibular for Blacks and the Poor (PVNC), cre-
ated in 1993 in the Baixada Fluminese, a city near Rio de Janeiro, that was one of
the largest pockets of poverty in the country. This course, delivered by volunteer
teachers and coordinators, grew to more than 80 centers in Rio de Janeiro by the
end of the 1990s (Santos, 2011b). According to movement leader José Carlos
Esteves (1997), the initiative arose as a reaction to the lack of supply and poor
quality of the public high schools in Baixada that made it impossible for Black and
poor students to be competitive for university spaces and to the low percentage of
Black university students. According to documents shared among activists, only
5% of Brazilian universities were Black, while the Afro-descendant population
made up 44% of the national total. Thus, the Black Movement linked the agendas
of access and quality high school education to higher education. The debate over
“quality” in the PVNC courses also included concerns about the constitution of
curricula oriented by the anti-racist struggle (Santos, 2005), one that focused on
racism, racial inequalities, and Black struggles and resistance, in addition to Black
history and culture. The opposition to the curriculum was linked to the agenda of
the Black Movement struggle.
The “Racial Turn” in the 2000s

The 2000s began with continued mobilization of the Black Movement and its
relationship to the state. There was also renewed effort to institutionalize poli-
cies to overcome racism and to escalate efforts to pass affirmative action. In
2001, the United Nations hosted the Third World Conference Against Racism,
Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, in Durban, South
Africa. Preparing for the conference was an important moment of political mobi-
lization for the Black Movement. There was a National Preparation Conference,
preceded by regional seminaries and state meetings, with large participation from
organizations and activists of the Black Movement (Geledés, 2021). These con-
ferences were to subsidize the National Preparation Committee, composed of
government representatives and leaders of the social movement. Brazil sent a
delegation of government representatives to Durban, but many activists, non-
governmental organizations, political parties, and unions also participated, the
vast majority from the Black Movement. The participation of Black Movement
activists and their political allies, constituting “multiple belongings” (Burity,
2001), allowed these spaces in which the Black Movement was inserted to be
transformed into “arenas,” in a multi-scalar focus on the racial agenda (Santos &
Soeterik, 2015).
The Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA), which was then the
principal think tank advising the federal government for the promotion of public
politics, produced studies on racial inequality. In these studies, education garnered
significant public attention. The studies showed that throughout the twentieth
century, although there was an increase in the average amount of schooling, struc-
tural inequality between the white and Black populations remained unchanged
(Henriques, 2001). The National Preparation Committee report recognized the
insufficiency of the adopted actions up to this point, and recommended action
based on the principle of positive discrimination toward groups socially marginal-
ized by racism, as a guideline for public politics (Brasil, 2001). The activism of the
Black Movement and the success of the preparatory courses for Black students
for the college entrance exam resulted in the state government of Rio de Janeiro,
passing State Law 3,708 in November 2001, which implemented university enroll-
ment quotas, reserving seats for Black students in state universities. The imple-
mentation of this policy began in 2003, in the then two universities of the state
system, the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and the State University of
North Fluminense (UENF). In addition, the State University of Bahia (UNEB)
also adopted a racial quota policy, but this action was based on a process that
began in 2001, under the influence of the political climate leading up to the Dur-
ban Conference.
Beyond the pressure on different spheres of the government, the “Durban
process” also allowed Black Movement advocates to pressure other sectors,
such as trade unions, social movements, and political parties. This had reper-
cussions in the 2002 presidential elections, where candidates felt pressure to
commit to anti-racist agendas. For example, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, who
won the presidential election of 2002, embraced ant-racism in his electoral
platform: The “Brazil Without Racism Program,” prepared by the National Sec-
retariat for Combatting Racism of the Worker’s Party (Ribeiro, 2014). Lula
da Silva assumed the presidency of the republic on January 1, 2003, and on
January 9, passed Federal Law 10,639/2003, which federalized curricula related
to race and education. Law 10, 639/2003 made it mandatory to teach Afro-
Brazilian History and Culture, including the History of Africa and Africans,
the Black struggle in Brazil, Black Brazilian culture, and the role of the Black
population in the formation of national society, rescuing the contribution of
the Black masses in the areas of social, economic, and political areas pertinent
to Brazilian history.
The victories of university quotas and Law 10,639/2003 are the primary axes
of the educational struggle of the Black Movement while they are also “victories”
and “instruments” for struggle in different arenas. Arroyo (2012) affirms that the
social movements reeducate those who benefit from them; when their subjects
(their sons and daughters, their activists) reach schools and universities through
the victories of the struggle and politicize their new environments. This politicized
presence of subjects, their “affirmative presence,” requires education spaces to
interrogate hegemonic, universalist discourses, demanding new educational prac-
tices, theories, and pedagogical practices, and the reorganization of their daily
relations. All these aspects will also be taken up by the ongoing Black Movement,
in both schools and universities.
Law 10,639/2003 and Formal Education as an Object
of Dispute of the Black Movement
The passing of Law 10,639/2003, even as it was a victory for Black Movement
struggles, involved the impacts of the “Durban process,” and the support of the
presidential candidates in the 2002 elections. In addition to this and other leg-
islative achievements at the beginning of this term (such as Decree 4,887/2003,
which regulates the land titling process for the remaining communities of for-
mer quilombos), a cycle of institutional building in the federal administration to
address racial issues continued. The most important of these was the creation
of the International Day Against Racial Discrimination; this was created by the
Special Secretary of Policies for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR), a
secretariat with ministry status. Regarding the anti-racism education agenda, the
Secretariat of Continuing Education, Literacy, and Diversity (SECAD) was cre-
ated in 2004 within the Ministry of Education. Within SECAD there existed the
General Coordination of Diversity and Educational Inclusion – headed by Black
educator Elaine Cavalleiro, an activist and president of the Brazilian Association
of Black Researchers (2008–2010).
The creation of racial equity structure within the Ministry of Education also
allowed for the construction of public policies to promote racial equality. Law
10,639/2003 is a curricular prescription. Its transformation into curriculum (Kelly,
2004) depends on the interpretations (and disputes of interpretations) of the
agents in education, whether in school environments or in the bureaucratic appa-
ratuses responsible for educational policies (Santos, 2007). The guidelines for its
implementation depended on guidelines from the National Education Council
(CNE), a collegiate advisory body to the Ministry of Education. The presence of
a Petronilha Beatriz Silva, an important educator with a long history in the Black
Movement Black counselor in the CNE was critical for the issuance of guide-
lines for the implementation of Law 10,639/2003 (Brasil, 2004). The guidelines
delineate the responsibilities of the educational systems and their governing enti-
ties, pedagogical coordinators, teachers, higher education institutions, and even
research centers. In addition to clarifying the law, the regulatory guidance indi-
cates metrics for the adequacy of pedagogical practices, teaching materials, and
teacher training. It also suggests the need for dialogue between these institutions
and the Black Movement in the implementation of the law.
The NEC created the legal and institutional environment for all these aspects
to be influenced by the agents of the Black Movement. At that time, SECAD
became a channel for dialogue between the Black Movement and the Ministry
of Education. It functioned as a policy actor and as an institutional articulator of
the anti-racism agenda. To meet the need for the production and diffusion of bib-
liographic reference materials of Law 10,639/2003 and on racial themes, SECAD
began publishing books, such as the Education for All Collection and UNESCO’s
General History of Africa, with eight volumes and almost ten thousand pages. By
mainstreaming racial themes, SECAD has influenced the distribution programs
for teaching materials to schools under other secretariats. One example is the
National Program of Books and Teaching Materials (PNLD), one of the largest
programs of its kind in the world. In the 1990s the PNLD evaluated whether
books contained or encouraged prejudice (an effect of the 1988 Federal Constitu-
tion’s criminalization of racial discrimination). After Law 10,639/2003, the PNLD
complexified the evaluation of racial themes in books, requiring that, in addi-
tion to not containing or encouraging prejudice, the books should “4) positively
promote the image of Afro-Brazilians and descendants of Brazilian Indigenous
ethnicities, considering their participation in different jobs and professions and
spaces of power; 5) positively promote Afro-Brazilian and Brazilian Indigenous
peoples’ culture, giving visibility to their values, traditions, organizations, and
socio-scientific knowledge; 6) address the issue of ethnic-racial relations, preju-
dice, racial discrimination and related violence, aiming at the construction of an
anti-racist, fair and egalitarian society” (Brasil, 2005, p. 35), which caused some
advances in textbooks (Santos, 2018). Another example was the insertion of the
racial perspective in the National School Library Program for Early Childhood
Education. Analyzing the books purchased and distributed in the 2008, 2010,
and 2012 editions, Rodrigues (2018) notes a gradual increase in books with Black
themes and characters.
The Ministry and the education secretariats also influenced changes within
local schools. One important action was to encourage the recognition of success-
ful experiences, such as the one carried out by the Center for Studies on Labor
Relations and Inequalities (CEERT), a Black NGO from São Paulo, through
the national contest “Educate for Racial Equality” (https://ceert.org.br/premio-
educar). Dedicated to pedagogical and school management practices, this con-
test identifies promising initiatives and inspires the creation of others. Teachers
who tried to lead the implementation of the law have often faced resistance from
teachers and coordinators (Santos & Santos, 2020). The law says that its con-
tents will be taught throughout the school curriculum but then indicates “espe-
cially in the areas of Artistic Education, Brazilian Literature, and History.” Such
duality, indicating the whole curriculum but then pointing out specific disciplines,
makes many teachers consider themselves not responsible for the implementa-
tion, having nothing to change in their practices. The mainstreaming of racial
issues throughout the entire school political-pedagogical project (Trinidade, 2007)
is challenging. The reconstitution of alliances and negotiations with other actors is
the strategy used by teachers who seek to implement the law in “the entire school
curriculum” (Pereira, 2007), in a scenario in which the school routine is a political
and epistemic environment of anti-racism (Santos, 2011a).
The dispute of interpretations of the law also takes place in the specificities of
each school subject. The search for balance in the representations of the different
groups that make up the nation, valuing their culture and histories, implies breaks
with the Eurocentric logics that guide the selection and organization of school
knowledge. This implies epistemic displacements and valuations of subjects and
points of view that have been historically excluded from these matrixes, seeking
an intercultural dialogue on critical bases (dos Santos, 2021). It is not enough to
insert content, it is also necessary to review contents (Santos, 2007), just as it is
not enough to deal with such aspects only in commemorative or specific dates, but
throughout the school process (Gomes, 2005). The agendas of the Black Move-
ment’s struggle in education, which since the nineteenth century has had access as
the main goal, have gained complexity in the recent period by covering the raciali-
zation of the curriculum in its different dimensions: contents, pedagogical prac-
tices, management of race relations in daily school life, and in support materials.
The Anti-racism Struggle in the University Since the

Quota Policies
Universities continue to be sites of struggle for racial equity. The debate over racial
quotas in universities in Brazil emerged in the context of the preparation for the
Durban Conference, anchored in the publicization of educational inequalities
and the agenda of pre-vestibular courses for Black students. The beginning of
the implementation of these quotas at UERJ, UENF, and UNEB, in 2003, gener-
ated a new moment of public discussion. These cases, especially that of UERF,
brought strong reactions from media conglomerates and some elites but also cre-
ated new sites for anti-racism advocacy. In 2003, quotas were approved by law in
Mato Grosso do Sul (State Law 2,605/3004), and by the university councils of the
University of Brasilia (UnB) and the Federal University of Alagoas. In the follow-
ing years, dozens of state and federal universities across the country also adopted
quotas, with strong support from a few Black professors in a “bottom-up” con-
struction of the policy (Lehmann, 2018). “Top down,” that is, an initiative from
the federal government, seemed to have no political traction for the approval of
a national quota law (Santos, 2015), despite the legal and institutional advances
of the anti-racism struggle at the time. The federal government even sent a bill to
the National Congress in 2004, but it was shelved in 2009. Only after the Supreme
Court ruled that racial quotas in universities were constitutional, did President
Dilma Roussef enact Federal Law 12,711/2012, establishing quotas in federal insti-
tutions of higher education.
The “bottom-up” strategy highlighted by Lehman (2018) shows how the anti-
racism struggle makes the daily life of universities an important arena of conflict.
After the quotas, Black presence in universities signified not only an increase of
Black people, but it also meant that the students’ presence was politicized because
it required public policy and Black social movements to achieve. dos Santos
(2021) analyzes this politicization in three aspects: the impact of the Black pres-
ence in daily race relations at universities, the construction of Black collective
political actors, and the Black epistemic disputes. In this view, the physical pres-
ence of Black bodies balances race relations in everyday university life. Racism
becomes not only denounced but increasingly confronted as a political agenda to
be institutionalized. But if the Black body is the social marker of race, in a country
whose standard of racial classification is centered on phenotype (Nogueira, 1988),
this body and its Africanized aesthetics are also increasingly markers of affirmation
(Gomes, 2008).
In addition, Black political presence grows through the constitution of new
actors as collective subjects enunciated by their Blackness. In the early 2000s,
the creation of the Brazilian Association of Black Researchers and the Consor-
tium of Nuclei of Afro-Brazilian Studies (NEABs) emerged on the national scene,
along with the adoption of quotas, and black political collectives of professors
and students emerged. Black collectives already existed before, such as the André
Rebouças Working Group in 1975 at the Federal University in Fluminense (Silva,
2018), or the Black Consciousness Core (Núcleo de Consciencia Negra) at the
University of São Paulo, created in 1987. However, in a university environment
where, nationally, 97% of professors were white, enacting a regime of “academic
racial confinement” (Carvalho, 2006), such a possibility of political aggregation
was rare. At UERJ, in the first year of quotas, in 2003, the Black Professors’ Collec-
tive – Sempre Negro – was created. In 2005, after mobilizing against a change made
by the Undergraduate Dean’s Office related to the college entrance exam process,
which would make it more difficult for quota-holders, the Black student collective
Denegrir was created (https://g1.globo.com/g1-15-anos/noticia/2021/09/12/faces-
negras-fabio-tavares.ghtml).
These collectives, as well as NEABs, have become essential to the p oliticization
of racial agendas in everyday university life, expanding and complexifying the
anti-racism agendas in academic spaces. With the nationalization of quotas,
they dispute the forms of implementation of this policy, denouncing the fraud of
white candidates who declare themselves Black to occupy reserved places. The
university rectors have since begun to create commissions for identification and
verification of racial classification of candidates (Santos, 2021). They are also
key players in the demands for quotas for Black graduate students: according to
a recent survey by O Estado de São Paulo, graduate program quotas exist at 31
federal universities (https://educacao.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,ao-menos-
31-universidades-federais-tem-cotas-para-negros-em-todos-os-mestrados-e-
doutorados,70003521634). They have also been leading the institutional struggles
related to the application of racial quotas in university competitions, in compli-
ance with Federal Law 12,2990/2014, which reserves vacancies for Black students
in public competitions. They have also been advocating for race relations in vari-
ous fields of knowledge. These groups construct “racialized interpretations” of the
difficulties of access and retention of Black students in undergraduate, graduate,
and faculty positions within universities, expressions of institutional racism still
hegemonic in the academic world (Guimarães et al., 2020). Within the Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro, the Black Professors’ Collective has proposed to cre-
ate a Chamber of Antiracist Policies as a permanent fixture within the university.
A third field of dispute concerns the Black epistemic presence, which is char-
acterized by critiques of Eurocentrism and canons of knowledge. This advocacy
has produced research on the creation of disciplines on race relations, initially
emphasizing education (Pereira et al., 2016), as a teacher training policy for the
implementation of Law 10,639/2003, and later other disciplines (Castelar &
Santos, 2012). In addition, there is the struggle for the incorporation of Black
themes or themes related to race relations, Black authors, and African and Afro-
diasporic knowledge in curricular training. These efforts aim to disrupt theoretical
and methodological references, seeking the decolonization of the university – not
only in research, but also in projects and extension actions (Soares & Silva, 2021).
There are also endeavors to highlight and celebrate the trajectories of Black pro-
fessors and researchers, denouncing racism as a producer of inequalities in the
academy but also valuing action and epistemic agency, especially of Black women
in science (Xavier, 2021). The search for decolonization of the university environ-
ment led by the anti-racism struggle of the Black Movement in Brazil focuses,
therefore, on knowledge, institutional logics, and the valuation of historically
excluded subjects.
Conclusion
Anti-racist educational struggles in Brazil have a long history, dating back to
the period of chattel slavery. But in recent decades, the Black Movement has
demanded institutionalization at the state level through multiple strategies. The
passage of a federal law in 2003 allowed a multi-scalar focus, from the educa-
tional policy management bodies to daily school life. The Black Movement has
denounced Eurocentric curricula as central to worldviews that sustain racism, and
also critiqued pedagogical materials, teacher training, and teaching practices. The
focus on anti-racist teacher training is connected to the university environment
with the racialization that emerges in the context of quotas. It is strengthened by
increased Black presence, while it also provides courses to eradicate the Eurocen-
tricity in education and other spaces. The critique of educational racism extends
to daily life, curriculum content, and theoretical and methodological research.
The Black Movement’s resistance to racism was instrumental in the anti-racist
efforts within Brazilian universities and schools.
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14 Racial Justice in “South-South”
Internationalization
of Higher Education
Susanne Ress, Miriam Thangaraj, Upenyu Majee,
and Teresa Speciale
The Promise of South-South Cooperation

One of several world-(re)building projects in the wake of World War II,
“South-South cooperation” emerged from the rubble of the Empire as a Third-
World refusal of its peripheralizing politics, economics, cultural histories,
and racial hierarchies. Instead, newly independent nations across Africa, Asia, and
Latin America, inspired by the Haitian Revolution of 1791, sought to name and
claim the South as the center of a liberatory politics that repudiated and redressed
shared histories of colonization, extraction, and marginalization (Ndlovu- Gatsheni,
2019). Thus, the Non-Aligned Movement of 1955, a landmark in the ongoing
history of the South, engaged Third-World solidarities against hegemonic colo-
nial histories and hierarchies – and also against neocolonial capitalist expansion
and dependency traps. The Bandung spirit, as Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2019) pro-
claimed, “was a refusal of both economic subordination and cultural suppression”
(pp. 45–46, emphasis ours).
In the liberatory spirit of Bandung, southern projects of educational cooperation
offered an obvious opportunity to wrest the production of knowledge – including
knowledge about the Third World – from First-World hands and to foster human
capital development as a means to self-reliant and autonomous nation building
(Abdenur, 2002; Morais de Sa e Silva, 2009). Hence, Cuban experts and Bra-
zilian cooperantes (volunteers) joined hands with their counterparts in Angola
and Mozambique to build education systems, write curricula, and train teachers
(Hatzky, 2008; Henighan, 2009; Azevedo, 2012), and international schools and
universities were founded in Moscow (the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship
University, in 1960), Cuba (the Isle of Youth, in the 1970s), and the German Dem-
ocratic Republic (the School of Friendship, in 1982) in support of anti-imperialist
ideologies (cf. Matusevich, 2008; Dorsch, 2008).
The two-pronged imprint of these early endeavors can be seen across a range
of present-day educational collaborations in the south, from teacher education,
literacy programs, and education assessment (Morais de Sa e Silva, 2005; Hickling-
Hudson, 2004; Steele, 2008) to scholarship programs, academic networks, cultural
institutes, vocational training centers, and higher education (Gillespie, 2009;
King, 2010; Soudien, 2009; Gomes & Vieira, 2013; Milani, 2015). These current
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-18
Racial Justice in South-South Education 233
endeavors, in rehearsing a South-South relational paradigm of solidarity, equality,
cultural affinity, and mutual responsibility (Abdenur, 2002), self-consciously recall
the imperatives of Bandung. Brazil, for instance, acknowledges asymmetrical histo-
ries of colonialism and slavery as the cultural grounds for educational engagements
with African countries in the form of subsidies (Barbosa et al., 2009), while South
African higher education outreach celebrates the pivotal role of the South African
Development Community (SADC) in anti-apartheid struggles (Saunders, 2011).
Indeed, for Mignolo (2014), what was paradigmatic about the Bandung moment
was its call to unite – not primarily as the workers of the (third) world but –
as the “world of people of color” (p. 27): a call to recognize the shared identity of
colonized peoples as the racialized Other in Eurocentric hierarchies, in order to
then articulate – on their own terms – ways of being and belonging together.
Despite material and rhetorical efforts toward political-economic and racial
justice, South-South cooperation is not without its ambiguities, shaped as it is, by
constellations of cultural and economic difference (Chisholm, 2009), not unlike
North-South relations. In this chapter, drawing on our own research at a Brazil-
ian international university1 and a predominantly white South African university,2
we examine South-South cooperation in higher education in the light of Band-
ung: in particular, we examine their effectiveness in addressing and dismantling
entrenched Eurocentric racial hierarchies. Our work is informed by broader deco-
lonial imperatives in the field of education that consider the (im)possibilities for
racial justice in universities, given their deeply colonial origins (Stein, 2021).
Justice as Both Recognition and Redistribution

Given the twin registers of Bandung’s call for cultural and economic justice, we
draw on Nancy Fraser’s (1995, 1998, 2000, 2009) approach to justice that requires
both redistribution and recognition. While Fraser may not be the most obvious
political philosopher for considering postcolonial contexts, we find that her analy-
sis of social justice dilemmas in a post-socialist era resonates with the experiences
of many Third-World nations. In these contexts, socialist demands have been
increasingly overtaken by struggles over group identities in the political sphere,
even as material inequalities have risen sharply. Her call for a “critical theory of
recognition” echoes the Bandung refusal to prioritize socioeconomic redistribu-
tion over recognition claims (and vice versa), while offering a timely rejoinder
to the inadequacy of increasingly mainstreamed, self-congratulatory postcolonial
analyses in the face of an apparently self-determined embrace of deeply unequal
capitalist distributive schemes.
For Fraser (1995), “redistribution” broadly refers to structural efforts for eco-
nomic justice: the just ordering of socioeconomic relations within a collectivity
such that all its members can claim the resources they need to engage on par with
other members. “Recognition,” on the other hand, seeks to transform oppressive
symbolic, representational, communicative, and interpretational schemes, such
that all members of the collectivity – especially those from historically maligned
or invisible-ized groups – can claim respect, including respect for their differences.
234 Susanne Ress et al.
While this distinction captures the ideological polarizations that have marked
transnational movements for justice in the last century, in practice, maldistribu-
tion is often mutually intertwined with and reinforced by misrecognition. Race,
for instance, as Fraser argues, is paradigmatically a “bivalent” mode of collectivity:
economic exploitation as well as cultural domination are implicated in racial injus-
tices, with neither entirely reducible to the other. Anti-racist struggles, therefore,
demand both redistribution and recognition. However, while redistribution claims
typically undermine group-specific economic arrangements (the racial division of
labor, for instance) and seek to reduce differentiation, recognition claims valorize
group specificity (such as positively valuing hitherto disparaged “Black” literatures
as curricula), which rely on differentiation. This is the anti-racism dilemma of
justice: the need for both kinds of claims to be made simultaneously, even as their
logics differ and may even be mutually contradictory.
Fraser’s framework allows us to examine the complex ways institutions of higher
education as well as groups and individuals within these institutions “negotiate
and position themselves within a global relational racial field” dominated by white
supremacy (Christian, 2019, p. 2). In this chapter, we adapt it to examine the kinds
of transnational, southern collectivities that were institutionally promoted – or that
emerged in response to institutional conditions – in the two sites of South-South
higher education cooperation. Given the broader struggles for justice as South-
ern peoples, what kinds of collectivities – whether drawing on cultural-historical
identifications of language and shared experience or on transnational class soli-
darities or both – emerged in each context? What kinds of claims for justice –
whether redistribution, recognition, or both – drew these collectivities together
or apart; and – central to this chapter – what implications did they have for
racial justice?
The South African Case

The urgency lies with the Black South African struggle [which] I don’t think is
mutually exclusive to an international student struggle. But because South Africa
does have a unique colonial struggle of its own, where ours is not a colonial struggle
that ended in the 60s . . . ours is one that ended in the 90s and is still going on to
this day because of an entrenched white society.
(National student activist, South Africa)
Having been colonized by the Dutch in 1652, conquered by Britain in 1803, and
unified in 1910 after a devastating war, South Africa was ruled by a quasi-Western
state until it came to an end in 1994 when a white apartheid government gave
way to majority Black rule. One of the key schemes of the apartheid regime was to
fragment racial solidarity: since the 1950s, the Nationalist Party sought to not only
remove Blacks from white, urban areas into tribal reserves, but to break up Black
peoples by corralling them into separate ethnic homelands known as Bantustans
(Evans, 2014; Unterhalter, 1987). The scheme legalized citizenship for Blacks –
but only within the bounds of their own homelands – while granting them inde-
pendent governing authority in their homelands; in effect, denying Blacks civil
rights in “white South Africa” while enclaving them into ten separate Bantustans.
If, in the political-economic ideology of the apartheid state, Bantustans were
created to provide the regime with a reserve army of cheap labor (Legassick &
Wolpe, 1976), then education policy served to reinforce its thrust. As epitomized
by the Bantu Education Act of 1953, segregated primary and secondary school sys-
tems deliberately sought to put/keep Blacks in their place (in urban townships and
rural homelands, and out of white society). Deliberately under-resourced, they not
only constrained Black students’ pathways to tertiary education, they engendered
Black inferiority and intellectual under-development (Maile, 2011).
As opportunities for higher education were limited for Black students, so were
their opportunities in higher education. The Extension of University Education Act
45 of 1959, promulgated by the white minority government of the National Party
who came to power in 1948, was not only racially organized, it was two-tiered
by design. Black students were prohibited admission to historically white univer-
sities. Instead, they were required to attend newly established tribal colleges in
the Bantustans, while “Colored” and Indian students were segregated into their
own exclusive campuses in Bellville and Durban, respectively (Davies, 1996).
Collectively – and pejoratively – known as the Bantu, Black, Bush, or Tribal col-
leges (Moodie, 1994), their inferior facilities and limited programs reflected the
racialized political-economic calculus of the apartheid state (see also Chapter 11).
Tightly controlled – through predominantly white/Afrikaner faculty and senate
bodies – these “fifty-niner” institutions nevertheless birthed Black Consciousness
and fostered vibrant student activism. Students not only protested the teaching
and governing practices at their own institutions, but in their sights was the entire
edifice of higher education created by the apartheid state: the racially and ethni-
cally divided two-tier system that remains significant to this day, underlying the
post-apartheid labels of “top-rated” and “research-intensive” (white) universities,
in contrast to the “bottom-tier” of “historically Black” universities. One such top-
ranked, research-intensive, and historically white institution is WCU or World
Class University (pseudonym), the primary field-site for this chapter. A so-called
liberal university, WCU never officially adopted a segregation policy, yet records
show that the intake of Black and non-white students never exceeded 6% – not in
the pre-apartheid “open” era, and not even during World War II when demand for
trained personnel momentarily destabilized the racial calculus.
Post-apartheid struggles for justice and redress in higher education are not
limited to the segregationist history of South African universities, however.
Regional solidarities, marked by long-standing labor migrations and shared anti-
apartheid/anti-colonial struggles – the Southern African Development Com-
munity (SADC),3 in particular – also impel justice claims. In harboring the
leadership of the banned African National Congress and supporting the educa-
tion of South African students during apartheid, SADC neighbors, themselves
excluded from South African education by the 1954 ban on non-European inter-
national students, were themselves rendered targets of the apartheid regime. The
“destabilization” campaign unleashed against regional governments in SADC dur-
ing the apartheid era left more than a million dead across the region and cost over
$60 billion in infrastructure and development (Booth & Vale, 1995; Khadiagala,
1999; Hentz, 2005). It was in recognition of this history that the SADC Protocol
on Education and Training was developed in 1997, enjoining the post-apartheid
South African state to offer SADC students subsidized fees and accommodation
on par with home students. As an exercise in South-South cooperation in higher
education, the protocol represents a moral care argument in the best tradition
of Bandung: it mobilizes shared historical struggles for justice across SADC to
sustain fair regional (re)distributions of higher education resources in the p resent.
The protocol opened up the South African university system – the most devel-
oped in the region – to students across southern Africa, including Zimbabwe,
Swaziland, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zambia: SADC students
regularly comprise upward of 70% of South Africa’s international student popula-
tion (CHE, 2017).
At WCU, for instance, where international students contributed 10% of the
student body in 2013, at least 70% were SADC students. However, this SADC
vision of a cross-border community of students bound by reparative claims played
out at WCU (and other top-tier institutions) alongside competing pressures: the
post-apartheid transformation agenda for a multiracial, multicultural “Rainbow
Nation,” on the one hand, as well as pressures to be “globally competitive” in a bid
to secure resources for the university as state support for higher education fell. In
this context, Black students from SADC neighbors with relatively strong school
systems – Zimbabwe, for instance – found access to top-tier universities easier than
their less-prepared South African counterparts from an under-resourced school
system that had borne the brunt of apartheid. In WCU’s institutional calculus,
Black SADC students not only contributed to their global competitiveness – by
earning better grades and producing coveted research and higher on-time gradu-
ation rates – they also contributed to a more racially diverse, Rainbow Nation-
appropriate university campus.
Effectively, in the race for places in higher education, Black citizens’ claims for
redistribution in higher education came up against SADC solidarity: as SADC
students were increasingly perceived as the disproportionate beneficiaries of post-
apartheid transformation, they were faced with rising anti-immigrant sentiment
in South Africa. Given the unsatisfactory pace of transformation at WCU – the
faculty remained predominantly (70%) white and the curriculum, persistently
colonial – Black South African students saw the ongoing recruitment of SADC
students as further evidence of the university’s embedded institutional racism.
Their claims on the university and state for historical redress, compounded by
fears of financial exclusion from higher education, did not recognize – could not
accommodate – the political-institutional and economic claims of international
(SADC) students. Both the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) and #FeesMustFall
(#FMF) student movements, for instance, which engulfed South African public
universities in 2015 and 2016, were heavily nationalistic in sensibility. As the
quote by a leading student activist at WCU at the beginning of this section
put it, the decolonial project in South Africa was unique and urgent – SADC
neighbors did not have to contend with the ongoing dominance of a white set-
tler society.
While the movements did not exclude non-national Black students, they did
not address the threat of rising xenophobia that SADC students faced either
(Seekings, 2008). In this heated context, the possibilities for cross-border, anti-
racist/anti-colonial Southern collectivities on university campuses shrunk in the
face of immediate, Black/nationalist anxieties about higher education opportuni-
ties and finances. On the other hand, the exclusionary nationalist imagination
that gave force to #RMF and #FMF recalled the ethno-national enclosures of the
colonial enterprise: the segregated townships and separate Bantustans that were
designed to fragment Black struggles for equality and justice.
The Brazilian Case

All this talk about slavery. I am not a slave. My ancestors were not slaves.
(International students from Guinea Bissau in Brazil)
The Transatlantic Slave Trade provided the foundation for the economic devel-
opment and emergence of the Brazilian nation-state. Between the sixteenth and
nineteenth centuries, Portuguese slave traders and their middlemen transported
over 5.5 million people from West-central Africa (e.g., Bight of Benin, Luanda)
and Mozambique to Brazil (Lovejoy, 2011) to work on farms and in mines – men,
women, and children were rendered commodities in the unequal triangular trade
between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Slavery was abolished only in 1888;
yet, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Brazilian social scientists adopted
a number of evolutionist and determinist theories developed by Europeans and
North Americans, which promulgated the cultural inferiority of Africans as sci-
entifically proven and biologically determined (Schwarcz, 1999). As a result, a
politics of whitening in Brazilian society ensued, which incentivized European
migration in the post-abolition period and relegated non-white Brazilians to the
poorest segments of society (Telles, 2004).
Historically, Brazil’s higher education system has been highly stratified. Public
universities are tuition-free and considered high-status. They provide the better
part of graduate education. Access to undergraduate education in public universi-
ties has been limited, however, and gated through competitive entrance examina-
tions. Public school students stand little chance to pass these exams, which has
led to a high proportion of private school, high-income students attending public
universities at the expense of low-income students. This classed access effectively
excluded Black and Brown Brazilians from universities, given their mostly low-
economic backgrounds (Schwartzman, 2009, 2012). The majority of public univer-
sities (federal and state) are located in large urban centers near the coast whereas
the rural interior remained neglected, which further disadvantaged Afro-Brazilian
and Indigenous populations (Durham, 2004). Brazil also has a growing sector of
private universities, which provides the better part of undergraduate education.
These universities charge tuition and are considered lower quality than public
universities (Balbachevsky & Schwartzman, 2010). By the end of the 1970s, a
three-tier Brazilian higher education system had emerged: research-oriented, top-
ranked, public institutions and non-profit private institutions that increasingly
aligned their goals to those of the public sector; and entrepreneurial, fee-charging
private institutions with limited capacities for high-quality research and teaching.
Since the beginning of the 2000s, in response to sustained activism and in col-
laboration with social movements like, for example, Movimento Negro (Paschel,
2016), the Brazilian government launched a number of reforms to combat these
inequalities (see also Chapter 13). In 2005, the government began giving tax incen-
tives to private institutions through the Program of University for All (PROUNI)
to open up slots for low-income students (Ceaser, 2005); while in 2007, it imple-
mented the Program of Restructuring and Expansion of Federal Universities to expand
the federal university system, creating evening courses and opening new cam-
puses (Paiva, 2013), including three inter-regional universities (McCowan, 2016).
When the Supreme Court declared the affirmative action policy of race‑targeting
quotas legal in 2012, the government made them mandatory for federal universi-
ties a year later (Schwartzman & Paiva, 2014). Another milestone for race rela-
tions in Brazil was Law 10.639, sanctioned in 2003 by then-President Lula da
Silva, which mandated the teaching of African and Afro-Brazilian history and
culture at all levels of education (as also discussed in Chapter 13). In the wake
of these combined efforts, Unilab, the Universidade da Integração Internacional da
Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira (University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian
Lusophony) was created.
Unilab was also the brainchild of the charismatic former president. Established
in 2011, in the small, interior town of Redenção in Northeast Brazil, the uni-
versity embodied the best of the Bandung spirit of South-South cooperation,
invoking the principle of “solidarity cooperation” to open its doors to the Com-
munity of Portuguese-Language Countries (Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portu-
guesa, CPLP). Students and professors from Brazil, Guinea Bissau, São Tomé and
Príncipe, Angola, Mozambique, and East Timor would work together to produce,
exchange, and disseminate scientific and cultural knowledges that recognized,
redressed, and resisted the histories of Portuguese colonization and domination
they shared. This was the Unilab vision, emphasizing commonalities derived from
shared cultural-linguistic, historical, and developmental legacies, while rejecting
conditionalities and commercial interest: in stated contrast to the imperialist prac-
tices of northern donors, CPLP members would not interfere in partner countries’
domestic issues (Cabral et al., 2012; Cesarino, 2012, 2017; Martin, 2014).
Unlike in South Africa, where the state-institutionalized ideology of apart-
heid racially organized and openly discriminated against Black peoples (and, in
turn, fomented Black consciousness movements and activism), Brazilian society
has been characterized by an idealized color continuum and an absence of clearly
defined racial groups, stymying the emergence of a similar Black constituency
among Afro-Brazilian populations (Loveman, 2014). However, over the twentieth
century, resistance groups in Brazil have sought to create a unified Black Move-
ment (Movimento Negro) against white superiority and “racial democracy”: not
only drawing on the Negritude literary movement (1930s), the U.S. civil rights
struggle (1950–1960s), and anti-colonial resistances in Angola, Guinea Bissau,
and Mozambique (1970s), but also grounded in a transatlantic, transnational
understanding of Black solidarity (Agier, 1995; Alberto, 2005; Pereira & Alberti,
2007). In this context, Lula’s efforts to intensify southern alliances were welcomed
by Afro-Brazilian movements as a platform for strengthening their constituency
(Silvério, 2017). Thus, for Lourdes, an Afro-Brazilian professor at Unilab, her uni-
versity served as an important political and pedagogical opportunity for B razilian
students to learn about their African heritage while recognizing the key role
Afro-Brazilians played in Brazilian society.
For Afro‑Brazilian movements striving to establish Blackness as a meaningful
political category for recognition and redistribution, South-South internationaliza-
tion efforts were not about symbolic power alone. At Unilab, Afro-Brazilian activ-
ism sought to enfold students from CPLP as allies in struggles against racialized
economic disenfranchisement in higher education – struggles that took on even
greater urgency post-2015, as Lula’s successors cited a downturn in the Brazilian
economy to cut public spending on higher education. However, Afro-Brazilian
struggles, in emphasizing Unilab’s founding narrative of a “shared history,” also
rendered “Blackness” as self-evidently homogeneous, unifying, and empowering.
Many CPLP professors and students resented such flattened representations in
Afro-Brazilian overtures for solidarity, as the quote at the beginning of this section
illustrates. For some of them, it was recognition on their own terms – as qualified
and cosmopolitan university students and faculty – that was at stake. They refused
to be primarily, reductively perceived as (reparative) symbols of B razil’s slave-
owning past to advance Afro-Brazilian claims against white superiority. Drawn by
Brazil’s development, they had moved to Redenção (where Unilab is located) in
a bid to secure membership and mobility in a global economy in which their own
countries were marginally positioned. If CPLP students’ cosmopolitan aspirations
had suffered in rural and relatively underdeveloped Redenção, itself marginally
positioned in Brazil, labels of Blackness only threatened to push them further into
the very spaces of marginality that they had sought to escape. In this context,
Afro-Brazilian struggles against local racialized economic injustice were not read-
ily sensible and did not resonate with them.
While shared histories of colonization gave force and meaning to the present-
day South-South solidarities that Unilab sought to manifest and reinforce, in
flattening postcolonial inequalities within and across countries, they failed to
sustain transnational, anti-racist/anti-colonial collectivities. More troublingly,
in valorizing Blackness as the grounds for recognition and redistribution in Bra-
zil, local Afro-Brazilian struggles effectively instrumentalized Black African stu-
dents and faculty at Unilab – paradoxically, recalling colonial tendencies for
commoditizing Black bodies. Equally, African students’ claims for development
as future-oriented postcolonial citizens in a globalized economy, in effect (if
not in intention), endorsed an uncritical theory of recognition: one that readily
acknowledged cultural-historical Lusophone solidarity but underplayed the slave
economy that tied Africa and Brazil and whose ongoing socioeconomic conse-
quences impelled Afro-Brazilian struggles. If Unilab’s celebration of the “shared
history” that bound Africa and Brazil made transatlantic Southern collectivities
possible, then its partial or over-generalized interpretations among the universi-
ty’s local (Afro-Brazilian) and international (African) members could not sustain
these Southern collectivities.
Fragmented Southern Collectivities

It is worth repeating that distributional injustices are often inextricable from and
reinforced by recognitional injustices – even as the group-solidarity logics of redis-
tribution may conflict with the group specificity-based logics of recognition. It
is this dilemma that anti-racist struggles, which demand recognition as well as
redistribution, must constantly grapple with. At WCU (South Africa), Black stu-
dent movements challenged Eurocentric university curricula (Rhodes Must Fall)
while demanding economic justice (Fees Must Fall). Similarly, at Unilab (Brazil),
Afro-Brazilian movements fought to expand higher education opportunities for
poor/rural (and typically of African-descent) students and to push for history cur-
ricula that celebrated their African heritage over white superiority myths. In both
contexts, student movements were also self-consciously anti-racist, deliberately
drawing on the language and imagination of Black consciousness (South Africa)
or Movimento Negro (Brazil). They held out the possibility of transformation in the
best Bandung sense – “transformative justice,” as Fraser (1995, 2009) calls it – not
only attempting to seize the higher educational opportunity and access, but simul-
taneously deconstructing Eurocentric racial hierarchies as well.
However, as our cases illustrate, in the context of internationalization in higher
education, student movements at WCU and Unilab were also exclusionist in
practice and, consequently, unable to fully realize their potential for transforma-
tive justice. While recognizing, even celebrating, a transnational imagination of
“Blackness” in their mobilizing efforts, their demands on the state and the univer-
sity were premised on a far more limited and nationally bounded understanding
of Blackness. Neither #RMF nor #FMF upheld the interests of Black SADC stu-
dents in South Africa; while at Unilab, in the very pursuit of transatlantic Black
solidarity, Afro-Brazilian movements effectively elided the developmental desires
of African CPLP students. How do we make sense of such disappointing out-
comes, given their promising auguries for transformative racial justice?
In the first instance, it is important to place projects of South-South coopera-
tion in the context of “international development” ideologies in higher education.
A range of statist moves in higher education in South Africa and Brazil – from
cutting public spending on higher education to introducing cost-sharing strategies
(like tuition fees), imposing accountability and efficiency measures for students
and faculty, or incentivizing universities to innovate into attractive globally trad-
able commodities – all exemplified a neoliberal turn in development (Robertson
et al., 2007). Equally, neoliberalism’s celebration of the entrepreneurial individual
(cf. Harvey, 2005) fueled higher education circuits of international students in
a scramble for human capital and social mobility. Between state cutbacks and
market-institutional incentives premised on competition, the possibilities for
expansionary redistribution – for a transformative socializing of higher education –
were drastically scaled back. On the one hand, they fueled student resistance and
activism; on the other, anxieties about scarcity and inequality countered South-
ern solidarity, typically, fragmenting student movements for redistribution along
national – even implicitly racial – lines. In the absence of broad social-democratic
political economies, struggles for transformation may easily fracture along lines of
(racial) difference.
Race, as scholars of globalization have ironically observed, is the often-unnamed
elephant in the room in international development (see also Chapter 1). In neo-
liberal development regimes of deliberate public under-investment, as new pat-
terns of inclusion, exclusion, and inequality arise in higher education, Clark and
Thomas (2013) remind us that they are likely to be “implicitly conceptualized
in racial terms, even when the language of race is not mobilized” (p. 307). The
pursuit of SADC students by WCU, for instance, while institutionally framed in
terms of internationalization and “world-class” competitiveness, sustained the his-
torical segregation of Black South African students, while instrumentalizing Black
international student bodies as signs of post-apartheid transformation. Even when
progressive development efforts do name race as a means of redress, they tend
toward functional imaginaries that compress the contradictions of identity into
apparently coherent, and unitary forms like “Blackness” (see Soudien, 2009). In
effect, opaque narratives of “shared histories” of colonization that underlie South-
South cooperation may subsume locally instantiated racial hierarchies and local
histories of the production of race – even obscuring the unequal colonial ter-
rain on which regional formations like SADC and “Lusophone” blocs like CPLP
were built. For instance, Brazilian efforts for “solidarity cooperation” foregrounded
“shared histories” to project Unilab as an engagement between equals – in the
process, disregarding spatially and temporally different trajectories of slavery
with divergent consequences – the foundation of a nation-state on one side of
the Atlantic and the destabilization of social and cultural constellations on the
other side – and present-day innovations and movements on the continent. In
overlooking these differences, the efforts of Afro-Brazilian movements to build
transatlantic coalitions found resistance among Unilab’s international members.
Afro-Brazilian claims did not reflect the cosmopolitan aspirations of students and
faculty from CPLP countries.
Transformative racial justice is demanding. When redistribution claims are
made in the context of a tight-fisted state, or when recognition claims are made
on the grounds of an essentialized Blackness that erases the specificities of the
lived experience of race, southern collectivities may fragment along nationalist/
ethnic differences in ways that echo the racial organization and hierarchies of
colonial regimes (Ress, 2019). For Fraser (1995, 2000), the possibility of inter-
sectional collectivities may protect against such tendency to fragmentation by
precluding exclusivist constructions of interests and identities – after all, no one
is a member of only one subordinated or dominant collectivity. It remains to be
seen what intersectional cross-border collectivities emerge at Unilab or WCU – in
the context of gender or environmental justice, for instance – that may subvert
nationalist or racializing enclosures.
Notes
1 Research was conducted between 2011 and 2015 with a total of five months of ethno-
graphic fieldwork. Fieldwork began when the first campus was inaugurated in Redenção,
Ceará, in 2011. By the end of the research in 2015, the university enrolled 2,666 under-
graduate students (73% Brazilian, 27% non-Brazilian). The university employed 173
professors (87% Brazilian, 13% non-Brazilian). It offered seven undergraduate disciplines
including agronomy, engineering of sustainable energies, public administration, nursing,
social sciences and humanities, teacher education in mathematics and science, and
pedagogy.
2 Research was conducted between 2014 and 2016 with a total of six months of
ethnographic fieldwork at one of South Africa’s top-ranked, research-intensive, pub-
lic universities. As of 2013, the university enrolled more than 30,000 students – 68%
undergraduates, 31% postgraduates, and 1% non-degree students – in over 30 schools
(e.g., Science, Engineering, and Humanities) that offered some 3,600 programs.
3 A regional economic community comprising the following 15 member states: Angola,
Botswana, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauri-
tius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and
Zimbabwe.
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15 The Black Lives Matter
at School Movement
Demanding Educational
and Racial Justice
Monisha Bajaj and Janelle Scott, with Denisha Jones,
Sam Carwyn, Lisa Covington, and Chanel Hurt
Three Black women, two who identify as queer, declared that “Black Lives Matter”
on social media in 2013 in the wake of the acquittal of an armed vigilante who had
brutally murdered an unarmed 17-year-old Black boy, Trayvon Martin, the year
prior.1 The Black Lives Matter hashtag grew into a movement demanding dignity,
justice, and human rights for all. Yet police and vigilante violence has continued
unabated in the United States and elsewhere across the globe against marginalized
and racialized communities. In 2016 – after the police killings of Philando Castille
in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana, and the death of Sandra Bland
while in police custody in Texas – educators in Seattle, Washington, organized
an action that would bring attention to racial justice issues. On a designated day,
educators at John Muir Elementary School in Seattle, Washington, planned to
wear shirts with Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName (a hashtag developed by
the African American Policy Forum directed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw
to bring attention to Black women and girls affected by state violence).
With media attention from right-wing news outlets and a bomb threat to the school
seeking to thwart the racial justice action by teachers in Seattle, in response, educators
from across the city organized in solidarity; in October of 2016, Seattle educators at
dozens of schools organized a “Black Lives Matter at School Day” in which they wore
shirts declaring that Black Lives Matter and offered lessons as well as film screenings,
visits from guest speakers, and meaningful discussions on institutional racism. Wayne
Au and Jesse Hagopian – core organizers for the Seattle events, which later grew into
the Black Lives Matter at School movement – noted, “By the end of the day, thou-
sands of educators had reached tens of thousands of Seattle students and parents with
a message of support for Black students and opposition to anti-Black racism – with
local and national media projecting the message even further” (2020, pp. 41–42).
From one day of action planned initially in one school in Seattle to a day-long
event galvanizing schools across the whole city of Seattle to events in 20 to 30 cities
that first school year (2016–2017), the Black Lives Matter at School movement
now includes a Week of Action that takes place in over a hundred schools across
the United States and Canada (and likely elsewhere), as well as year-round events
to bring attention to institutionalized racism and racial injustice. According to
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-19
Black Lives Matter at School Movement 247
Denisha Jones, a Black Lives Matter at School leader, “Ours is a transformative, cul-
turally relevant pedagogy that goes beyond the simple call to support ‘diversity,’ . . .
but instead asks students to affirm Blackness in all its forms and to work col-
lectively against anti-Blackness. Our pedagogy demands that this country finally
recognize that Black lives do and should matter” (2020, p. 202).
This chapter documents the history, principles, demands, and activities of the
Black Lives Matter at School movement since its genesis in 2016 to the present,
drawing extensively from an interview carried out by Monisha Bajaj and Janelle Scott
with members of the Black Lives Matter at School steering committee (Denisha
Jones, Sam Carwyn, Lisa Covington, and Chanel Hurt) on February 25, 2022.
Black Lives Matter at School: Principles, Demands,

and Activities
In the summer of 2017, Black Lives Matter at School (BLM at School) formally
became a national movement. The elaboration of core demands in Seattle and the
mapping of the Black Lives Matter Global Network guiding principles onto days
of the week by Philadelphia educators became core tenets of the BLM at School
movement that was launched at the Free Minds, Free People conference in Balti-
more, Maryland, in the summer of 2017; these demands and principles continue
to inform the annual Week of Action held the first week of February each year (see
also Table 15.1). The three initial demands adopted by the national movement
included the following:
(1) End “zero-tolerance discipline” and replace it with restorative justice. Not-
ing that Black students are “suspended at four times the rate of white stu-
dents nationally” and that such forms of disproportionate discipline fuel the
school-to-prison pipeline, BLM at School’s first demand seeks to ensure that
Black students are treated with dignity and fairness in schools (Hagopian,
2020, p. 15).
(2) Hire more Black teachers. The U.S. teaching force (of approximately four
million educators) is about 80% white despite the fact that white students
make up 49% of students nationally; of all students, 15% are Black, 26% are
Latinx,2 and 5% are Asian American/Pacific Islander (the remaining 5% are
Native American or multiracial) (Loewus, 2017; NCES, 2021). Black teach-
ers make up just 7% of the U.S. teaching force (Schaeffer, 2021), and studies
have linked school closures to a further decline in Black teachers, particularly
where neoliberal reforms have shuttered schools (Hagopian, 2020, p. 17).
Research has shown that having a Black teacher benefits students of all racial
backgrounds (Perry, 2020), and especially Black boys who are much less likely
to drop out of high school if taught by a Black teacher in elementary school
(Kamanetz, 2017).
(3) Black History/Ethnic Studies mandated in all schools, kindergarten through
12th grade. BLM at School organizers have noted the correlation between
curriculum that reflects students and their persistence in school. BLM
248 Monisha Bajaj et al.
at School founder, Jesse Hagopian, cited a study from Stanford University
researchers that found that by “adding ethnic studies to the curriculum,” stu-
dents’ “GPA improved on average by 1.4 grade points” and “attendance rose
21 percentage points” (2020, p. 18).
In the 2018–2019 school year, BLM at School organizers added a fourth
demand to their movement:
(4) Fund counselors, not cops. Leaders of BLM at School have noted that
“1.7 million children go to a school in the United States where there is a
police officer and no counselor – and some 14 million students attend a
school where there is a cop but no counselor, nurse, psychologist or social
worker” (Hagopian, 2020, p. 19). This demand echoes calls that have existed
for decades in the United States for more holistic support for students rather
than over-policing that leads to racialized violence and involvement in the
criminal justice system. Indeed, as the NAACP Legal Defense and Educa-
tional Fund has noted, “Although students of color do not misbehave more
than white students, there are disproportionately policed in schools: nation-
ally, Black and Latinx youth made up over 58 percent of school-based arrests
while representing only 40 percent of public school enrollment” (as cited in
Kamenetz, 2018).
Local BLM at School organizers have also tailored additional demands to the com-
munities and districts they are a part of. For example, in New York City, BLM at
School steering committee member and core organizer Denisha Jones noted, “one
of the things organizers have advocated for when they speak about education to
the union is housing. Their students don’t have housing and that’s a big issue
for schools in New York City. . .. But that’s not necessarily something that every
city’s going to want to take on” (February 25, 2022). The core that unites BLM at
School members and organizers across the nation are the four demands listed as
well as the Guiding Principles as presented in Table 15.1.
Choosing February for the annual Week of Action was a strategic decision by
movement organizers to have time in the Fall to prepare for the week through cur-
riculum fairs and to coincide with the first week of Black History Month (February)
in the United Sates as a way to secure support from administrators, districts, and
communities. The national movement has a steering committee; subcommittees,
including a curriculum committee which has curated dozens of lessons available
for download; and state-wide groups that engage and network locally (see also,
www.blacklivesmatteratschool.com).
The BLM at School movement draws on various historical antecedents that
have centered the dignity and need for socio-politically relevant education (Bajaj
et al., 2017) for Black students, such as the citizenship schools initiated by educa-
tor and activist Septima Clark in the late 1950s and 1960s, the freedom schools
in Mississippi that began in 1964, and the Black Panther Party (BPP) Community
School that operated from 1973 to 1982 in Oakland, California, that all cen-
tered the experiences and realities of Black children, youth, communities, and
Table 15.1 Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action Guiding Principles
Day Principles
Monday Restorative Justice: We intentionally build and nurture a beloved

community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle
that is restorative, not depleting.
Empathy: We practice empathy to connect with others by building
relationships built on mutual trust and understanding.
Loving Engagement: We embody and practice justice, liberation,
and peace in our engagements with one another.
Tuesday Diversity: We acknowledge, respect, and celebrate differences and
commonalties.
Globalism: We see ourselves as part of the global Black family, and
we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged
as Black people who exist in different parts of the world.
Wednesday Trans Affirming: We are self-reflexive and do the work required to
dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially
Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately
impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.
Queer Affirming: When we gather, we do so with the intention of
freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,
or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless
s/he or they disclose otherwise).
Collective Value: We are guided by the fact that all Black lives
matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender
identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability,
religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location.
Thursday Intergenerational: We cultivate an intergenerational and
communal network free from ageism. We believe that all people,
regardless of age, show up with the capacity to lead and learn.
Black Families: We make our spaces family-friendly and enable
parents to fully participate with their children. We dismantle the
patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts”
so that they can mother in private even as they participate in
public justice work.
Black Villages: We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family
structure requirement by supporting each other as extended
families and “villages” that collectively care for one another,
especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and
children are comfortable.
Friday Black Women: We build a space that affirms Black women and is
free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are
centered.
Unapologetically Black: We are unapologetically Black in our
positioning. In affirming that Black lives matter, we need not
qualify our position. To love and desire freedom and justice for
ourselves is a prerequisite for wanting the same for others.
(as cited in Hagopian, 2020, p. 12)
educators (Charron, 2012; Payne, 2007). BLM at School partners with educators
and schools but also takes its educational initiatives to the community in places
where the impediments are too great to work within schools. For example, BLM at
School steering committee member Denisha Jones noted,
Sometimes schools start to say “we don’t want to do this, can you change the
name”? The answer is “no.” What organizers then do is leave the school and
take it to the community. That happened in Maryland a couple years ago; the
school didn’t want to endorse or support it, so youth and educators did a whole
Week of Action at local events and the kids were out there leading it. They
got all this press and then the school said, “high school students are doing all
this and it’s not at school?” The next year, the school fully endorsed the Week
of Action and it’s happening now at that school. (February 25, 2022)
Certainly, while local and global calls for Black lives to matter resounded in the
aftermath of the brutal killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020,
backlash has also simultaneously grown in the United States to the teaching of
accurate historical facts around slavery and racial discrimination, which conserva-
tive commentators have mistakenly called “critical race theory” (see also Chap-
ter 3). [In actuality, critical race theory simply posits that “race is a social construct,
and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also
something embedded in legal systems and policies” (Sawchuk, 2021)]. Black edu-
cators and communities from earlier times, such as through the citizenship and
freedom schools mentioned earlier, have sought out-of-school spaces to be able to
enact their vision of liberatory pedagogies for Black students.
Out-of-school spaces can provide the space and flexibility for “freedom dream-
ing” (Kelley, 2002) by Black educators and students, apart from state mandates,
administrator reticence, and right-wing hysteria around teaching about race and
racism. BLM at School steering committee member and educator Lisa Covington
has led several different programs in Iowa including a Books and Breakfast pro-
gram where students read books centered on Black history modeled on the Black
Panther Party’s free breakfast programs that offered thousands of children a nutri-
tious start to their day in dozens of cities from 1969 to 1980 (in 1969 alone, the
BPP fed 20,000 children, more than the entire state of California had that year)
(Gebreyesus, 2019). Covington has also spearheaded an Ethnic Studies Leader-
ship Academy for Black girls in Iowa across the state to come together each week
outside of school. Covington noted:
We have girls from across the state learning every week about different topics
and creating digital story maps on different issues. The book bans are alive
and well in Iowa and the governor signed a similar ban on the teaching of
“divisive language and concepts” that 30 other states have banned. We have
actively decided that we are doing what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said – that
it’s our duty to not follow unjust laws; we’re just teaching our children what
the truth is and centering them in this work. The Ethnic Studies Leadership
Academy is not physically in a school and we are not funded by a school. We
are working with allies and accomplices who want to help purchase books so
we can get these banned books to Black and brown students across the state.
(February 25, 2022)
Despite the rising censorship across the United States in public schools of books
that discuss race, racism, and the accurate teaching of historical facts, educators
and organizers like Covington are finding ways to work around regressive man-
dates to ensure that youth are equipped with the knowledge and skills to navigate
racialization and its attendant inequalities.
The Year of Purpose

Since 2016, BLM at School has grown to encompass activities within and outside
of schools, including weekend programs as mentioned in Iowa and elsewhere,
reading groups for educators, youth councils that engage in advocacy locally,
as well as other year-round activities. Many of these year-round activities were
launched in tandem with the BLM at School Year of Purpose initiated in 2020,
and that also coincided with the publication of Black Lives Matter at School: An
Uprising for Educational Justice, an edited volume featuring the work of the move-
ment co-edited by BLM at School steering committee members Denisha Jones
and Jesse Hagopian. According to Denisha Jones, the official designation of the
“Year of Purpose” sought to offer educators and schools who had engaged in the
Week of Action a way to go into further depth, knowing that the Week of Action
would remain a core component of BLM at School given that it provides a coor-
dinated time to engage in many activities and forms of advocacy. In 2020, the
Education for Liberation Network (that puts on the biannual Free Minds, Free
People conference) published a special “Teacher2Teacher” feature written by
two members of the BLM at School steering committee based in New York City
(NYC), Awo Okaikor Aryee-Price and Christopher Rogers, and their colleague
Maria Fernandez. In the article, the authors posed several questions for educa-
tors to consider about relationships within their classroom, school, and the larger
community.3 Denisha Jones noted, “Building on those great reflection questions,
we took the principles and put them on every month throughout the year so that
especially people who had been doing the Week of Action for a long time could
take it to the next level . . . and engage themselves, their students, other staff,
and the community throughout the year” (February 25, 2022). The self-reflection
questions, adapted from those posed by the NYC educators, that have guided
the Year of Purpose (that has been ongoing since it was launched in 2020), are
as follows:
1 What is our school’s relationship to Black community organizing? Do we

have relationships with local movement organizers? Do they see our school
as a place that believes in their mission? Do they see our school as a place to
connect with local families?
2 How are school-wide policies and practices – especially disciplinary practices –
applied across categories of race? Do problematic patterns emerge when we
look at how policies are applied to Black students and when we also con-
sider the intersections of gender, sexual orientation, and (dis)ability with
Blackness?
3 How are the voices, accomplishments, and successes of Black folx uplifted in
my lessons, units, and curriculum? Rather than focus on singular events or
individuals, does my approach highlight the everyday actions and community
organizing that will lead to change?
4 In what ways do our practices erase the histories of our students and prevent
them from bringing their whole selves into the learning environment?
5 How do I understand the role that local/state laws and policies have on the
educational experiences of my students? What is my role in working to change
policies, regulations, and practices that harm Black students and families?
(Hagopian, 2020)
The Year of Purpose further extended the mapping of principles for the Week of
Action to the entire school year. For example, September is “Black to School”
where all the 13 principles are introduced. Sample activities for the first day of
school advocated by BLM at School include to “Wear the shirt; Review the BLM
at School reflection questions and write up your anti-racist action plan for the
year; Graffiti wall: ‘What are we going to do differently this year to further the
movement for Black lives in our school’; Post a video to social media; and/or a
Twitter chat” (Jones & Hagopian, 2020, p. 211). October is the month of George
Floyd’s birthday (October 14) and emphasizes the principle of “restorative justice.”
November is the month of the Transgender Day of Remembrance (November 20)
and highlights the principle of being “trans-affirming.” December is the month of
the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (December 3) and acknowledges
that Harriet Tubman and Fannie Lou Hamer were “two disabled freedom fighters”
(Jones & Hagopian, 2020, p. 211); the month highlights the principles of “glo-
balism and collective value.” January focuses on “Queer Organizing Behind the
Scenes,” highlighting the principle of being “queer-affirming.” February empha-
sizes the principle being “unapologetically Black” during Black History Month and
contains the annual Week of Action during the first week of February as well
as a special mention of February 18, Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison’s shared
birth date. March has a “Student Activist Day” that highlights the principles of
“loving engagement and empathy.” April highlights the principle of being “inter-
generational” and focuses on the role of “revolutionary Black arts” through sug-
gested exploration of works by authors such as Zora Neale Huston, Faith Ringgold,
Alma Thomas, Augusta Savage, and Jasmine Mans. May honors Septima Clark’s
birthday (May 3) as “Black Radical Educator Day” and highlights the principle
of “Black villages.” June hosts “Education for Liberation” day, highlighting the
principles of “Black Families and Diversity” on Juneteenth (June 19) – the date
when, in 1865, enslaved people in Texas received news of their emancipation from
federal troops, a full 2.5 years after then-President Abraham Lincoln had signed
the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all enslaved people in the United
States. Finally, July offers educators a chance to “reflect on your year of anti-racist
teaching” by reviewing all of the 13 principles (Jones & Hagopian, 2020).
Launched in 2020, the Year of Purpose is an ongoing endeavor calling for engage-
ment throughout the school year by educators, youth, and communities. BLM at
School steering committee member Sam Carwyn noted, “The Year of Purpose is a
way to connect us back to looking at our principles and demands and continually
ask ourselves ‘how do we move forward?’ ” Another steering committee member
Chanel Hurt noted, “The Year of Purpose is the practice part that should happen
every day within and outside of the classroom” (February 25, 2022).
Making Black Lives Matter at School and Beyond

Highlighting anti-Blackness and centering the dignity of Black students in public
schools whether in the United States or globally has regularly garnered resist-
ance; in the United Sates, it is visible in the rampant bans on “divisive language”
(e.g., any discussion of racism, historical or contemporary) in some states and the
disciplining of educators who pledge support for Black lives to matter. As steering
committee member Chanel Hurt noted, “One educator got disciplined for shar-
ing a BLM at School coloring book with elementary school students” and BLM at
School has had to liaise with unions, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education
Fund, and others to support educators who utilize their materials and face sanc-
tion by their schools and districts. BLM at School has partnered with the African
American Policy Forum that has set up a hotline to assist parents and educators
to advocate for accurate history in schools and hosts an educators’ working group
that meets weekly. BLM at School has also partnered with educational organiza-
tions like the Zinn Educational Project, Teaching for Change, the Education for
Liberation Network, and Rethinking Schools that seek to advance social justice
through education.
BLM at School centers Black students, educators, and parents, while at the
same time resisting racialization that posits these individuals and communities as
inferior or subordinate. Steering committee member Sam Carwyn noted that the
movement’s structure “acknowledges racialization that happens in the broader
community and tries to combat that intentionally rather than accepting it as the
norm” (February 25, 2022). Resisting adverse forms of racialization occurs within
a framework of internationalism as well; steering committee members discussed
Black immigrant students in schools and communities intimately tied to places
that U.S. foreign policy is deeply implicated in, such as Somalia, Haiti, and else-
where. Denisha Jones noted, “Globalism is a core principle of BLM at School and
we have to continually reflect on what it means to be part of the African diaspora
in different parts of the world. How do we center those experiences and those nar-
ratives?” (February 25, 2022).
BLM at School also exemplifies deep pedagogies of solidarity (Gaztambide-
Fernández, 2012) with other communities affected by racialization and state vio-
lence. For example, in 2019 when the then-Trump administration was separating
children from their families through immigrant detention, leaders of BLM at
School traveled to El Paso, Texas, to join a teach-in at the border. BLM at School
organizers have written that “Black liberation is bound together with the liber-
ation of all other oppressed people” and specifically shared a statement at the
teach-in, read by BLM at School organizer Erika Strauss Chavarria, that noted the
commonalty of oppressive forces that face detained immigrant children and Black
students in U.S. schools:
Trump’s rhetoric of “zero tolerance” on the border mirrors the “zero toler-
ance discipline” policies in schools that have led to a spike in suspension and
expulsion rates – disproportionately impacting Black and Brown students.
Zero tolerance discipline, then, contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline,
which fuels the racist system of mass incarceration. . . . The movement for
immigrant rights and the Black Lives Matter at School movement are both
strengthened when we work together in common cause to stop the unjust
detention and incarceration of all Black and Brown youth. (Jones & Hago-
pian, 2020, pp. 194–195)
Educators involved with BLM at School in all types of schools at all education
levels continue to carry out yearlong events, the annual Week of Action, partner-
ships with other educational justice organizations, and advocacy within unions and
districts for resolutions and concomitant policies that support Black students, edu-
cators, families, and communities. The inherent institutional racism and structural
inequalities built into the U.S. educational system pose challenges; given school
financing models rooted in property taxes, a 2019 report found that predominantly
white school districts in the United States have received $23 billion more in public
funding than districts that are composed primarily of students of color (EdBuild,
2019). Despite disparate funding mechanisms, districts have spent inordinate
amounts on contracts with police departments to ensure their presence at schools.
Many school districts (e.g., Minneapolis, Oakland, and Denver, among others) dis-
mantled school police forces in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police and the
racial justice uprisings that ensued, terminating contracts with police departments;
however, many districts continue the use of police in schools, a presence that has
been linked to the increased criminalization of youth of color (Barnum, 2020).
As the globe has been emerging from the COVID-19 shutdowns of schools
globally in 2020 and 2021, the forces of anti-Blackness in education continue to
be laid bare by educators, activists, youth, and families. In 2020, a 12-year-old
child participating in virtual school had a sheriff sent to his home and was sus-
pended from school for playing with a toy gun visible to the teacher on the screen
during the pandemic; such behavior by school authorities reveals both the deep-
rooted criminalization of Black children and youth, and the profound absurdity of
considering a toy gun in a child’s home a threat to safety (Jankowicz, 2020). Re-
envisioning schooling that is relevant and affirming for Black children and youth
requires spaces – whether within or outside of schools – for learning, reflection,
and joy. BLM at School offers educators tools, resources, curricula, support, and
inspiration to counter oppressive forces and center the dignity of Black children
and their families and communities. Denisha Jones, a steering committee member
of the BLM at School movement, sums it up aptly:
Educators who use the Black Lives Matter at School pedagogy . . . are seeing
victories for students whose lives are made better by finally seeing themselves,
their history, and their people uplifted in the school curriculum. They are
acknowledging the joys inherent in the struggle and affirming that working to
ensure that Black lives matter is a profound privilege and worthy endeavor.
(Jones, 2020, p. 206)
Notes
1 These three people were Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.
2 Latinx is a term that includes the full range of gender identity and diversity in referring
to people of Latin American origin and descent.
3 The original questions and article can be accessed at: www.edliberation.org/wp-content/
uploads/2020/02/BLM_special_feature.pdf
References
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D. Jones & J. Hagopian (Eds.), Black Lives Matter at school: An uprising for educational
justice (pp. 33–48). Haymarket.
Bajaj, M., Argenal, A., & Canlas, M. (2017). Socio-politically relevant pedagogy for immi-
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Barnum, M. (2020). Do police keep schools safe? Fuel the school-to-prison pipeline? Here’s
what research says. Chalkbeat. www.chalkbeat.org/2020/6/23/21299743/police-schools-
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Carolina Press.
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Gaztambide-Fernández, R. A. (2012). Decolonization and the pedagogy of solidarity. Decol-
onization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 41–67.
Gebreyesus, R. (2019). ‘One of the biggest, baddest things we did’: Black Panthers’ free
breakfasts, 50 years on. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/17/
black-panther-party-oakland-free-breakfast-50th-anniversary
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Black Lives Matter at School: An uprising for educational justice (pp. 1–24). Haymarket.
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old Black boy after he showed a toy gun in his Zoom class. Insider. www.insider.com/
colorado-school-called-sheriff-black-boy-toy-gun-zoom-class-2020–9
Jones, D. (2020). The Black Lives Matter at School pedagogy: Affirming Black lives,
resisting neoliberal reform, and reimagining education for liberation. In D. Jones &
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Schaeffer, K. (2021). America’s public school teachers are far less racially and ethnically
diverse than their students. Pew Charitable Trusts. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.
org/fact-tank/2021/12/10/americas-public-school-teachers-are-far-less-racially-and-
ethnically-diverse-than-their-students/
Conclusion
Monisha Bajaj and Janelle Scott
The preceding chapters have explored the intersections between racialization,

education, and inequality in distinct global locations, and across temporal and
spatial dimensions. Distinct racial formations through the processes of colonial-
ism, development, enslavement, resistance, and migration have influenced the
manifestations of inequality in racialized ways across the chapters in this volume,
and more broadly across the globe. To be sure, many more chapters and examples
of racialization across contexts could have been included and should be in further
comparative examinations of racialization and educational inequality. Regional
comparisons may prove useful, for example, in the comparative exploration of
racialization and Black movements in Colombia as compared with Brazil or Ven-
ezuela, or in the racialization of refugees to Europe as compared with those arriv-
ing to North America or Australia and New Zealand. There is need for greater
studies of racialization and education across the globe and in conversation with
one another through a comparative lens.
Through the three sections in this World Yearbook (Section 1: Racialization:
Theories, Discourse, and Globalization; Section 2: Coloniality, Development, and
Racialization in Education; and Section 3: Social Movements, Anti-Racist Peda-
gogies, and Reparative Futures), several themes emerge across the chapters that
could guide further inquiry on racialization and educational inequality globally.
These themes include the following:
1 The “afterlives” and incarnations of colonialism and empire are ever

present in schools and societies. Across several chapters, we see the deep
imbrication of coloniality and its racialized moral justifications in present-day
education and forms of social stratification (see Chapters 6, 9, and 10), which
implicitly invoke Hartman’s powerful idea regarding the afterlife of slavery
(1997). Development organizations and discourses continue to erase discus-
sions of and the naming of race (Chapter 1), and such erasures obscure analy-
ses of power and the creation of appropriate and contextualized interventions
that are rooted in community needs and realities. Analyses of the unique
realities in each context, and where intersectional forms of solidarity may be
forged, can also surface new possibilities for development and international
cooperation, whether, for example, through higher education exchanges
DOI: 10.4324/9781003241393-20
258 Monisha Bajaj and Janelle Scott
(Chapter 14) or through the translation of texts on the Black American free-
dom struggle for Dalit communities in South Asia (Chapter 10). The creation
of schools as tools for domination in colonial contexts often undermine efforts
to reform them toward more equitable ends, even when curriculum reforms
aim to create more inclusive learning, such as the focus on multiculturalism
in Canada (Chapter 9). Out-of-school and community-based spaces can often
side-step the logics of oppression baked into the modes of Western schooling
that were implemented in settler colonies and extended across the globe in the
eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries; these out-of-school spaces –
their promise and their limitations – merit greater scholarly attention.
2 Processes of racialization are never absolute. Across chapters, we see
that the processes of racialization, often impelled through colonial contact,
enslavement, and imperialism, are indeed not absolute or immutable. Individ-
uals and communities always resist and subvert domination in myriad ways,
demonstrating strategic and transformative agency in seeking greater dignity
and rights (Bajaj, 2019). Examples that emerge through the chapters in this
volume include conceptualizing educational marronage and its relevance for
Black students in the United States and marginalized students transnation-
ally (Chapter 3), digital storytelling projects that center the experiences and
realities of Muslim youth in France (Chapter 4), student protest in distinct
parts of Africa, such as Nigeria and South Africa, against racial and economic
subordination (Chapters 6 and 11), and through social movements demand-
ing equitable policies and justice, such as the Black Brazilian movement and
Black Lives Matter at School movement in the United States (see Chap-
ters 12, 13, and 15). These sites of collective struggle embody a prefigurative
politics that seek to transform hierarchies; as adrienne marie brown (2017)
writes, reflecting on what she learned from mentor and Asian American activ-
ist Grace Lee Boggs, “what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for
the whole system. Grace articulated it in what might be the most-used quote
of my life: ‘Transform yourself to transform the world.’ This doesn’t mean to
get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships
as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment
with each other and the planet” (p. 33).
3 Racialization and education cannot be studied without attention to racial
capitalism. Several authors in this volume draw from Cedric Robinson’s con-
ceptualization of racial capitalism (Robinson, 1983), or the idea that “racial-
ized exploitation and capital accumulation are mutually constitutive. Racial
capitalism created the modern world system, through slavery, colonialism, and
genocide because ‘the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist
society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology’ (Rob-
inson as cited in Laster Pirtle, 2020, p. 504). Zeus Leonardo refers to “race-
class” through his scholarship on the globalization of whiteness (Chapter 2),
Salim Vally discusses the ongoing “class apartheid” even after the formal end
of racial apartheid in South Africa (Chapter 11), and Steven L. Nelson dis-
cusses the role of racial capitalism in his conceptualization of transnational
Conclusion 259
critical race theory (Chapter 3). Further attention to the ways that racializa-
tion and class operate in tandem in distinct and entangled ways in the service
of oppression, and how they manifest in education, is needed. Discussions of
school choice, privatization, and school closures are rooted in racial capital-
ism but often get discussed in race-evasive or race-neutral ways; visibilizing
racial capitalism and how its logics operate within educational discourses and
policies is both urgent and necessary.
4 The reverberations of demands for justice can be felt globally. Through the
chapters in this World Yearbook of Education 2023, we see global resonances of
different movements (often unbeknownst to organizers and activists in differ-
ent locations). The “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign in South Africa to topple a
statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town (see
Chapters 6 and 11), inspired Black American activist Bree Newsome to pull
down a confederate flag from in front of the South Carolina state house in
2015, while on yet another continent a few years later, Indigenous Colombi-
ans from the Misak, Nasa, and Pijao communities toppled a statue of Spanish
conquistador, Sebastián de Belalcázar. Black Lives Matter at School actions
and teach-ins have occurred across the United States (Chapter 15) and even
figured into some teachers’ curricula in Australia (Chapter 7), stirring pub-
lic debate and right-wing attacks in both national contexts. In 2020, after
the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of police – the whole world
watching the viral video while in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic –
movements for racial and social justice erupted across the globe in solidarity
with Black Americans. In our hyper-connected world, Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s words increasingly reverberate that “an injustice anywhere is a threat
to justice everywhere.” In the same Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King
notes that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” highlight-
ing the key tenets of mutuality and collectivity in the age-old African concept
of Ubuntu, translated as “I am because you are.”
5 International opportunities for dialogue across contexts can provide legiti-
mization and momentum to social movements on the global and national
stage. In multiple chapters, the consolidation of local efforts – such as in the
Black Brazilian movement (Chapters 13 and 14) and the global recognition of
caste as a form of racialized oppression (Chapter 10) – at the United Nations
World Conference Against Racism in 2001 provided needed support to
advance racial justice advocacy in domestic contexts. While education that
exists on the margins can be tailored to the needs of a community through
fugitivity (Givens, 2021), educational marronage (Chapter 3), and inspired
by quilombo praxis (Chapter 13), the question remains of how such forms of
transformative education can be scaled up (without cooptation or dilution)
into national curricula (e.g., the inclusion of Black history into the Brazilian
school curriculum), weeks of action (Chapter 15), and by moving beyond
liberal multicultural values (Chapters 7 and 9) toward an emphasis on racial
justice, and accurate truth-telling about history. Modern schooling emerges
from notions of the human rooted in the Enlightenment era in Europe; if
260 Monisha Bajaj and Janelle Scott
we take up Sylvia Wynter’s (1992) call to expand the notion of human and
humanness as praxis, what new forms of education might emerge to reshape
and reimagine the purposes and praxes of education?
These five themes across chapters, and many more insights culled from this vol-
ume, can guide further research on racialization and education globally, with an
eye toward the deliberate stratification of educational opportunity to the detri-
ment of the most marginalized. From the chapters and other work that has devel-
oped our analyses of racialization and education globally, questions for further
research emerge, including the following:
• How can intersectional analyses inform further research on racialization and

education in distinct global locations?
• What are the possibilities and pitfalls of solidarity across contexts?
• How does the COVID-19 pandemic and environmental crisis interact with
racialization, racial capitalism, and existing and growing inequality?
• In what ways can we understand the possibilities and conditions of “repara-
tive futures” – defined by Sriprakash et al. (2020, p. 2) as “the epistemic and
dialogic conditions of reparation” – in education locally and globally?
• How does white supremacy inflect the comparative formation of critical racial
consciousness within and across contexts? How does anti-Blackness operate
in different locales?
• How can educators and scholars understand rising nationalism and right-wing
backlash to racial progress in different national and local settings? What role
do efforts to distort textbooks and curricula play in the service of deepening
right-wing ideologies and narratives of nationhood?
• As the authors of Chapter 1 posed, “What racial projects uphold or produce
structures of domination?” To that, we would add, how can such racial pro-
jects be resisted, interrupted, or subverted?
• What role does collective action and movement-building play in creating
spaces – whether in formal, non-formal, or informal education settings – for
the advancement of equity and racial justice?
We hope that this World Yearbook of Education 2023 inspires and nourishes increas-
ing and necessary conversations about racialization and educational inequality
across the globe. The analytical tools and frameworks offered in the pages of this
volume can help us better analyze the conditions and processes of racialization; in
doing so, we can further understand and chart our way toward the dismantling of
educational and social inequalities that impede the dignity and rights of all.
References
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Conclusion 261
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African Diaspora, 8(2).
Index
Note: Page numbers in bold indicate a table.
9/11 Commission Report 70 anti-apartheid struggles, SADC

(impact) 233
abolitionist movements, power 45 – 47 anti-Blackness 139, 142 – 144, 152; impact
Abolition of Whiteness, The (Roediger) 37 57; institutionalization/weaponization
absent presence 124 – 133; tracking, process 50; projects, reinforcement 144;
124 – 125 racialization 143 – 144; structural regime
abyssal thinking 76, 84 – 85; rejection 81; 143; transnational anti-Blackness,
work, situating 82 – 83 consequences 51 – 52; violence,
academic freedom 42 – 43 rejection/resistance 54
academic language 85 anti-Indigenous projects,
additive bilingualism 88 reinforcement 144
affirmative action 205; Asian Americans, anti-racism: Black Studies Program,
relationship 207 – 210; Brazil 204; development 166; protests (Australia)
opposition 209; United States 204 123; reactions, vociferousness 132 – 133;
affordances 93 struggle (Brazil) 9, 226 – 228
Africa: colonialism, impact 104; anti-terrorism, Islamophobic discourses 174
coloniality/racialization afterlives, Anyon, Jean 198
youth (relationship) 103; racialization Anzaldua, Gloria 42
104 – 105; youth, progress (UNICEF/ apartheid: afterlives 112 – 115;
AU report) 103 anti-apartheid movements 9; cessation
African American Policy Forum 253 258 – 259; legacy 194; system, tertiary
Afrikaner ideology, separate schooling education legacy 192 – 193
moral/legal responsibility 198 Apple, Michael 37, 198
Afro-Brazilian movements, efforts 241 Aryee-Price, Awo Okaikor 251
Afrofuturism 62 Asher, Nina 8, 170
Afro-Hondurans, reference 147 Asian Americans: affirmative action,
Afro-Latina, 150 relationship 207 – 210; descent,
Afro-Latinidad 142 – 144; 146 discrimination 209; educational
Alexander, Neville 191, 194 – 195 experiences, assessment 209
Alito, Samuel (dissent) 209 Assessment for Learning program
Almontaser, Debbie 69 (Brookings Institute) 25
alt-right movement, influence 133 Australia: anti-racism protests 123;
Ambedkar, B.R. 172 Asian migration, rise 130; black
American dream 148; false discourse 149 armband, history view (rejection)
Angreji Devi (English Devi), 122; Black Lives Matter movement,
worship 178 discussion 126; Black Lives Matter
anti-apartheid movements 9 protests 123; British colonization,
Index 263
legacy 131 – 132; burdensome past Bishop, Julie 119
129; criminal justice system, First black armband, history view
Nations over-representation 127; (rejection) 122
culture wars 120 – 124; displacement, Black Brazilian movement 9, 218,
anxiety 129 – 133; dispossession 127; 224 – 226, 258
history, balance sheet 122; identity Black community, school
politics, debates 123 – 124; immigrant (relationship) 251
pessimism 130; immigration anxiety 131; Black epistemic presence, dispute 227 – 228
leftist ideological teaching 127; local Black folx, voices/accomplishments/
communities, demographics (selective successes (uplifting) 252
school nonrepresentation) 130 – 131; Black history/ethnic studies, mandate
mass schooling, institutionalization 128; 247 – 248
national curriculum, institutionalization Black History Month, Week of Action 252
(failure) 121; nation building, mythical Black Lives Matter (BLM) 10, 18;
power 132; political correctness 121, impact 246, 253 – 255; movement 126;
122, 132 – 133; race 120 – 124; race by principles/demands/activities 247 – 253;
proxy 129 – 133; race, denial 125 – 129; protests (Australia) 123
race, power (continuation) 131 – 133; Black Lives Matter at School 246 – 247,
Racial Discrimination Act 122 – 123; 253 – 255, 258; actions/teach-ins,
racial exclusion 120 – 121; racialized impact 259; pedagogy, educator usage
metonyms 131; racial motivations, white 255; School Week of Action guiding
middle class distancing 131; racism, principles 249; Week of Action 10, 247,
denial 125 – 129; selective anxieties 251; Year of Purpose 10, 251 – 253
129 – 133; skills tests, usage 129; Stolen Black Lives Matter at School (BLM at
Generations, Rudd apology 122; School) 251
systemic racism 127; White Australia Black Lives Matter Global Network,
policy, dismantling 130; woke diversity, guiding principles 247
excess 122 – 123 Black Lives Matter (BLM) marches
Australian education 120 – 124; debates, 125 – 126
patterns 132 – 133; higher education, soft Black Movement, action 219
marking 131; outcomes, national gap Blackness: establishment 239; geographic
(persistence) 128; race, absent presence borders, relationship 51; racial scripts,
124 – 133; race/racialization 119; race/ youth navigation 147; unitary forms 241
racism/racialization, two-pronged Black Panther Party (BPP) Community
approach 125; residual power 120; School, operation 248, 250
selective high schools, student Black peoples: ontological existences/
enrollment 129 – 130; selective schools, positionalities 55; resistance 50
Asianisation 130 – 131 Black South African struggle 234 – 237
authoritarianism, global context 41 – 42 Black students: education 160; trap, feeling
160 – 161
Bajaj, Monisha 1, 10, 35, 246, 257 Black Studies Programs, university
Bantu Education Act 113, 189, 190 development 166
Bantu Education system, apartheid Black teachers, hiring (increase) 247
introduction 190 Black thought, form 61 – 62
Belalcázar, Sebastián de 259 Black university teachers,
Berreman, Gerald 173 improvement 165
Biafran Civil War 111 Black-white binaries, disruption 150
Bilingual Education Act (1968) 87 – 88 Black-white binary 7
bilingual instructional approach 91 Black youth, characterization 147
bilingualism: conception 92 – 93; Blainey, Geoffrey 122
description 88; rejection 82; Bland, Sandra (police custody death) 246
understanding 87 – 90; usage 87 – 88 Blum, Edward 207 – 208
bilingual repertoires 89 Boggs, Grace Lee 258
bin Laden, Osama 67 – 68 bondage, rejection 59
264 Index
border regime, education (operation) 22 application 210 – 213; racial identity,
Bowles, Samuel 197 enforcement 212; racialization 204,
Brandis, George 123 218; racial quota, implementation
Brazil: affirmative action 204; 211 – 212; racial self-identification 212;
Afro-Brazilian movements 2390; Black racial turn 222 – 223; Secretariat of
epistemic presence, dispute 227 – 228; Continuing Education, Literacy, and
Black Movement, mass mobilization Diversity (SECAD), creation 224; slave
221; Blackness, establishment 239; trade 237 – 240; social movements 218;
Black population, historical agendas society, color continuum 238 – 239;
219 – 222; Center for Studies on State Law 2,605/3004 226; State Law
Labor Relations and Inequalities 3,708 223; Unified Black Movement
(CEERT), impact 225; Community (MNU) 211; Unilab, creation 238, 239;
of Portuguese-Language Countries Universidade da Integração Internacional
(Comunidadedos Países de Língua da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira (University
Portuguesa) (CPLP), impact 238, 239; of International Integration of
Consortium of Nuclei of Afro-Brasilian Afro-Brazilian Lusophony), creation
Studies (NEABs), emergence 227; 238; university, anti-racism struggle
cooperantes (volunteers), impact 226 – 228; Zumbi dos Palmares March
232; Couto Ferras Reform (Decree (1995) 221
1,331-A of 1854) 219; Durban Brazilian Association of Black Researchers,
process, impact 223; Eurocentric racial creation 227
hierarchies, deconstruction 240; Federal Brazilian Black Front, formation 219 – 220
Constitution of 1934, Article 138 220; Brazilian Black movement 9 – 10, 258;
Federal Constitution of 1988, impact education, relationship 218; formal
220 – 221; Federal Law 12,711/2012 education, dispute 224 – 226
226; Federal Law 12,2990/2014 227; British colonized Africa, case studies
formal education, Black student 107 – 108
access 220; hegemonic politic forces, Broderick, Alicia 38
resistance 221; higher education system, brown, adrienne marie 258
stratification 237 – 238; Institute of Brownness, reification 139
Applied Economic Research (IPEA), Brown v. Board of Education (1954) 189
public politics promotion 222 – 223; Brown, Wendy 44
Interministerial Working Group for the building back better, discourse 20
Valorization of the Black Population Bush, George W. (Iraq invasion
(GTI), creation 221; International justification) 71
Day Against Racial Discrimination,
creation 224; Law 10,639/2003 218, California State University (CSU) system,
223 – 226; military dictatorship, decline/ transnational response 171 – 172
fall 220; Movimento Negro 238 – 240; Canada: education (framing), Eurocentric
National Education Council (CNE) lens (usage) 158 – 159; education,
guidelines 224; National Preparation race/racialization 158; egalitarian
Committee report 223; National multicultural society, narrative 160;
Program of Books and Teaching Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy
Materials (PNLD) 225; oppositional document, production 160; Europeans,
whites, impact 213; political engagement arrival 159; faculty, issues 164 – 165;
218; Pre-Vestibular for Blacks and the graduate students, issues 163 – 164;
Poor (PVNC), creation 222; Program human rights model, adoption 166;
of Restructuring and Expansion of Federal multiculturalism, focus 258; race
Universities 238; Program of University relations offices, creation 165 – 166;
for All (PROUNI) 238; quota policies, racialized educational inequity 161;
impact 226 – 228; racial discrimination, schools, multiculturalism (relationship)
crime (recognition) 221; racial equity 158; schools, race/racialization 158;
structure, creation 224; racial formation, students, psychological effects (damage)
Index 265
163; teaching evaluations, importance coloniality: afterlives, youth (relationship)
165; universities, changes 166; 103; imbrication/racialized moral
universities, race/racialization 158 justifications 257 – 258; lingering
capital globalization, Marxist analysis colonialities 8
36 – 37 colonial logics/practices, persistence 2
capitalism: embracing 24; racial capitalism, colonial settlement entitlements 158
equivalence 20 – 21 colonies, embracing 24
capitalist society, racial direction 258 – 259 colonization, structures/processes 171
captivity, rejection 59 colorblind American society,
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 221 establishment 207
Cartesian logic 38 color evasiveness 210
Carwyn, Sam 10, 247, 253 colorness, relationship 35 – 326
caste: brahminical view 173; classization color-neutral ideologies, usage 141 – 142
172; other backward castes (OBCs) 172, Color of Supremacy, The (Scott) 40, 41
178; vestiges 2 Coloured Persons Act (1963) 190
casteism 19 – 20 Commonwealth Royal Commission into
casteless merit, caste privilege idiom 175 Aboriginal Deaths in Custody 127
castelessness, concept 177 community-based spaces, impact 258
caste, racialization 170; conceptualization community members, ignorance 149
172 – 174; understanding, higher Community of Portuguese-Language
education context 174 – 175 Countries (Comunidadedos Países de
Castille, Philando (police killing) 246 Língua Portuguesa) (CPLP), impact
Cavalleiro, Elaine 224 238, 239
Center for Studies on Labor Relations and Consortium of Nuclei of Afro-Brasilian
Inequalities (CEERT), impact 225 Studies (NEABs), emergence 227
Changing Class (Chisholm) 199 content and language integrated learning
Charlottesville attack (2017) 44 (CLIL) 91
charter school law enactment Conventions against Discrimination in
(Minnesota) 2 Education (UNESCO) 19
chattel slavery, original sin 52 correspondence theory 198
Chauvin, Derek 1 Couto Ferras Reform (Decree 1,331-A of
children, school absences 21 1854) 219
Chile, school reform 61 COVID-19: context 158; impact 5, 109,
civic participation, education (usage) 123, 259; racialized students, interaction
71 – 73 162; shutdown, emergence 254
Clark, Septima 248, 252 Covington, Lisa 10, 247, 250
Clase, Piet 192 Cox, Oliver 173
class: apartheid 258 – 259; racialization, Crenshaw, Kimberlé 42, 246
conceptualization 172 – 174; relations, criminal justice system (Australia), First
globalization 36 Nations over-representation 127
Cobas, José 141 crisis, discourse (presentation) 25
Cobb, Jonathan 197 Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 81
code-switching 82, 89 critical race theory (CRT) 39 – 40, 50,
collective action, role 260 250; applicability 3; application 60 – 61;
collectivity, bivalent mode 234 approaches 51 – 52; ban, attempt 45;
Collins, Patricia Hill 42 rejection 124; teaching 44; transnational
“Colonial Assembly Line of Education” version 52 – 53; TWAIL, connections 59;
(Bediako-Amoah) 177 usefulness 59
colonial dispossession 2 – 3 Cronulla riots 122
colonialism: afterlives/incarnations, cross-linguistic transfer 82, 88;
presence 257 – 258; impact (Africa) 104; code-centered view 89
internalization, complexity 173; settler cross-linguistic translanguaging theory
colonialism 2, 7 (CTT) 89 – 90
266 Index
Crusades 67 Dyer, Richard 38
cultural transformation, education dynamic languaging 92
(importance) 177 – 179
culture, Orientalist conceptions 71 economic analysis, concepts 36 – 37
curriculum: national curriculum, absence economic failure, addressing 26
(South Africa) 197; representation education 35; abyssal thinking, rejection
language, relationship 177 81; afterlives 7; Black movement
(Brazil), relationship 218; border regime
Dalit-Bahujan English Education Day 178 operation 22; Canada, race/racialization
Dalits 172 – 174; boycotts 178; studies, 158; comparative reflections
expansion 175 66; context 56 – 57; educational
Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice experiences, local/state laws/policies
(UNESCO) 19 (role) 252; framing, Eurocentric
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous lens (usage) 158 – 159; general
Peoples (UNESCO) 19 education systems, multiculturalism/
decolonialization, impact 115 schooling (relationship) 159 – 161;
decolonial thinking 92 higher education (Nigeria) 110 – 112;
decolonization (unfinished work), youth importance 177 – 179; neoliberal
(relationship) 115 developmentalism, implications
Decree 1,331-A of 1854 (Couto Ferras 24; neoliberal governance/racial
Reform) 219 capitalism 3 – 4; pedagogical practices,
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals understanding 92 – 93; policy, application
(DACA) program 149 60 – 61; post-Apartheid education
dehumanization (flight), marronage (South Africa) 193 – 197; privatization
(usage) 55 (South Africa) 196 – 197; racialization/
de Klerk, F.W. 190 resistance (South Africa) 189; racism,
democracy, Islamophobic discourses 174 erasures 17; racism, theorizing 22 – 24;
detention centers, experiences resistance/entrenchment 3 – 4; societies,
(discussion) 149 relationship 4; spread, unevenness
dialogue, international opportunities 107; study, problems 258 – 259; systems
259 – 260 thinking 27; understanding 90 – 92;
DiAngelo, Robin 45 usage 103; whiteness, relationship 44 – 45
difference, narratives 19 educational inequality, transnational
digital story maps, creation 250 – 251 perspective 1
discrimination: Latinx youth 146; educational justice, demands 246
surviving 148 educational marronage 3, 5 – 6, 50; Black
displacement, anxiety (Australia) thought, form 61 – 62; components 6;
129 – 133 concept 53; conceptualization 258;
distance, definition 57 development 60 – 61; engagement 58;
diversity bargain 206, 207 pillars (Roberts), relationship 57 – 59;
divide and rule logics 21 transnational CRT positioning 52 – 59;
divisive language/concepts, teaching ban transnational CRT, relationship 59 – 60
250 – 251 education and international development
dog whistles (code words) 140 (EID) 18, 20; analytic work 21
domination: addressing, CRT/TWAIL Education for All Collection 224
approaches 51 – 52; structures (creation), Education for Liberation Network 253;
racial projects (impact) 23, 260 “Teacher2Teacher” 251
dos Passos Silva, Pretextato 219 Education Reform for the Knowledge
Dred Scott v. Sanford 1 Economy (World Bank initiative) 70
Du Bois, W.E.B. 2, 36 – 40 Edward Said and Education (Leonardo) 46
Durban process, impact 223 egalitarian multicultural society,
Dutch East India Company, impact 189 narrative 160
Dutton, Peter 123 Einstein, Albert 36
Index 267
electoral franchise, access 60 France: cultural/civilizational differences,
Elliott, David 126 representations 75; newcomer Muslim
Emerson Dos Santos, Renato 9, 218 Youth (conditional guests) 74 – 77;
empire, racial hierarchies 19 republican values 75
enemy combatant category 69 Frankenberg, Ruth 37, 38
English as a Second Language (ESL) Fraser, Nancy 233 – 234
program, usage 85 freedom: Western liberal notions,
English, exclusive teaching (absurdity) 83 defending 68
epistemic communities, constitution 21 freedom, definitions (molding) 56
Equal Employment Opportunity, freedom dreaming 8
affirmative action committee freedom, education context 56 – 57
(creation) 206 Free Quality School Education program
Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy (Sierra Leone) 109
document, production 160 free speech 42 – 43
essentialism, impact 23 French Declaration of the Rights of Man
Ethnic Studies Leadership Academy and of the Citizen 76
250 – 251 fugitive acts 56
Ethnologue 84 fugivity, concept (importance) 61
ethnonationalism 21
Eurocentric racial hierarchies, Gamez, Rebeca 7, 139
deconstruction 240 García, Ofelia 6, 81
Europeans, arrival 159 gender, racialization (conceptualization)
exclusivism 111 172 – 174
exploitation, technologies (outworking) 24 general education systems,
Extension of Universities Act 113 multiculturalism/schooling (relationship)
Extension of University Education Act 45 159 – 161
(1959) 190, 235 General Geography (Gicovate) 220
General History of Africa (UNESCO) 224
faculty, racialized university (impact) gerontocratic structures,
164 – 165 circumvention 106
Federal Law 12,711/2012 226 Gicovate, Moisés 220
Federal Law 12,2990/2014 227 gilet jaune (yellow vest movement) 75
Fees Must Fall (FMF) student protest Gillborn, David 37, 40
movement 114, 200, 201, 236, 240 Gintis, Herbert 197
First Nations: criminal justice system Giroux, Henry 37, 198
over-representation 127; displacement/ Global Alliance to Monitor Learning,
dispossession 125; dispossession/systemic The 25
racism 127; incarceration rates, high global color line 36
level 127; perspectives, debates 127 global development, racism (relationship)
First Peoples: children, exclusion 18 – 22
121; colonization, experience 125; global elite, interests (development) 20
communities, self-direction 128; global learning: crisis 5, 25 – 28; metric,
recognition 119 development (World Bank interest) 25
Fisher, Abigail 207 Global Learning Crisis, The (UNESCO
Fisher II (Alito dissent) 209 report) 25
Fisher v. University of Texas, Austin 207 – 208 global order, emergence 24
flexibility 36 – 37 global periphery 20
flexible accumulation (economic analysis God, following 72
concept) 36 graduate students, race-related issues
Flores, Nelson 6, 81 (training/education problem) 163 – 164
Floyd, George 1, 123, 250, 259 Gratz v. Bollinger 207
fragmentation (economic analysis Grutter v. Bollinger 207
concept) 36 Guantanamo Bay, carceral facilities 69
268 Index
Haitian Revolution (1791) 232 Indigenous Australians, oppression/
Hall, Stuart 26 discrimination/struggles 124
Hamer, Fannie Lou 252 Indigenous dispossession, vestiges 2
Hanson, Pauline 122 – 124 Indigenous land, dispossession 7 – 8
Harley, Ken 199 Indigenous rights, racial significations 23
Harris, Cheryl 40 individualization, usage 140
Hartman, Heidi 40, 257 industrial education, Hampton-Tuskegee
Harvard University, Asians model 105 – 106
(discrimination) 208 inequality: regimes 17; reification 4
hegemonic citizenship projects, Influx of Chinese Restriction Act
challenge 175 (1881) 120
Henry, Frances 7 – 8, 158 Institute of Applied Economic Research
heterogeneous societies, politics 171 (IPEA), public politics promotion
heteronormativity 42 222 – 223
Hidden Inquiries of Class, The (Sennet/ institutional racism, focus 123
Cobb) 197 integration, political subject
higher education: discouragement 27; (controversy) 75
South Africa, education 192 – 193; interlinkages 17
South-South internationalization, racial Interministerial Working Group for the
justice 232 Valorization of the Black Population
Higher Education Act 101 (1997) 193 (GTI), creation 221
hooks, bell 42 internal colonization theory (ICT)
How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black 171 – 172
America (Marable) 40 International Convention on the
How the Irish Became White (Ignatiev) 37 Elimination of All Forms of Racial
human capital theory 71 – 72 Discrimination 60
human rights model, adoption 166 International Day Against Racial
human value, unequal differentiation Discrimination, creation 224
20 – 21 International Day of Persons with
Hurt, Chanel 10, 247, 253 Disabilities 252
Huston, Zora Neale 252 international development: racism,
erasures 17; racism, theorizing 22 – 24;
identity politics, debates 123 – 124 systems thinking 27
ideology, material existence 38 – 39 intersectional analyses, usage 260
ignorance, epistemology 5, 18 intersectionality, global context 41 – 42
illegal alien (code word) 140 Iraq invasion, Bush justification 71
illegality: race-neutral discourse 141; Islam, fear 67 – 69
racialization/racialized construction 141 Islamophobia: conceptual foundations
immersion bilingual programs, design 87 67 – 69; discourses 174; global
immigrant: meaning 148; pessimism 130 cadences 66
immigrants of color, racial beings
(equivalence) 141 James, Carl E. 7 – 8, 158
immigration anxiety (Australia) 131 Jangam, Chinnaiah 173
imperial rule, embracing 24 Jim Crow laws 43, 52, 145
India: difference, questions (framing) Johnson, Lyndon B. 206
174 – 175; hegemonic citizenship Jones, Denisha 10, 247, 248, 250 – 251,
projects, challenge 175; historically 253, 255
marginalized peoples, social mobility Jordan: disaffected/underemployed youth,
175; KISS initiative 176; language, threat/vulnerability 73; moderation/
internalization 176; New Education civic participation, education (usage)
Policy, problem 175; occupations, 71 – 73; “Youth Time Bomb,” defusing
omission 174 71 – 73
Indian Education Act (1965) 190 Juan Crow laws/policies 145
Index 269
justice: demands, reverberations (global Latinx educators: existence (South
attention) 259; educational/racial Carolina) 148 – 149
justice, demands 246; recognition/ Latinx youth: discrimination 16;
redistribution 233 – 234; restorative racialization experiences (Maryland)
justice, usage 247; South-South 146 – 147; U.S. South racialization,
internationalization, racial justice impact 144 – 145
232; transformative justice 240; Law 10,639/2003 (Brazil) 218, 223 – 226;
transformative racial justice 241 – 242 interpretations, dispute 225 – 226
learning crisis: proximate determinants 28;
Kaepernick, Colin 43 racism, articulation 26 – 27
Kelly, Christiana Kallon 103 learning outcomes 20
Kennedy, John F. (Executive Order Learning to Labour (Willis) 197
10925) 206 Learning to Realize Education’s Promise
Khalil Gibran International Academy, (World Bank report) 18, 26
opening (protests) 69 Leonardo, Zeus 5, 35, 38, 258
Khomeini, Ruhollah 67, 68 Le Pen, Marine (support, growth) 75
Kim, Jim Yong 26 Letter from a Birmingham Jail
King, Jr., Martin Luther 40, 250, 259 (King, Jr.) 259
Kumar, Deepa 67 lexico-grammatical systems 89
LGBTQIA+ students, inclusion 3
laicite (secularism principle) 7 liberty, Western liberal notions
language: abyssal thinking, rejection (defending) 68
81; academic/nonacademic division, lingering colonialities 8
impossibility 85; analysis category Lorde, Audre 42, 252
176; divisive language/concepts, Loveman, Mara 24
teaching ban 250 – 251; human rights Low, Remy 7, 119
discourse 177 – 178; internalization 176; Lugard, Frederick 105
pedagogical practices, understanding Lugones, Maria 41
92 – 93; policies, stigmatization 83;
representation language, curriculum Majee, Upenyu 9, 232
(relationship) 177; sociopolitical Mamdani, Mahmood 66, 105
definitions 86; translanguaging 84; Manges Douglas, Karen 141
understanding 83 – 87 Mans, Jasmine 252
Language Policy Task Force (Centro de Marable, Manning 40
Estudios Puertorriqueños) 89 maroons: communities 55; Western
late whiteness 36 – 37, 44 enslavement 53 – 54
Latham, Mark 127 marronage: modern marronage 55;
Latinidad 142 – 144; boundaries 152; past/present 55; pillars 57; radical
racialization 143 – 144 reconceptualization, relationship 56;
Latino/a citizens/noncitizens, terrorist resistance, form 5 – 6, 56 – 57; theory 56;
threats 141 – 142 usage 55; Western enslavement 53
Latino construction, complexity 147 Martin, Trayvon (murder) 246
“Latino spin” 143 – 144 Marxist analysis, usage 36
Latino/x groups, immigration status Maryland, Latinx youth (racialization
(impact) 140 experiences) 146 – 147
Latinx: anti-Blackness 139, 142 – 143; masculinity, problem 42
educators, U.S. South racialization Mashininis, Tsietsi 191
(impact) 144 – 145; (im)migrant mass incarceration, racist system 254
racialization/anti-Blackness 139; people, Matribhasha Hindi (learning) 178
“illegal” construction 142; population, Matias, Cheryl 41
concentration 144 – 145; racialization Maxwele, Chumani 114
7, 139 – 144, 148; undocumented youth McIntosh, Peggy 36 – 38
(South Carolina) 147 – 149 McLaren, Peter 37
270 Index
Melamed, Jodi 20 National Education Council (CNE)
Mexicanness 141 guidelines 224
Mignolo, Walter 82 National Entry-Exit Registration System,
migration: crisis 75; journeys, experience usage 68 – 69
(discussion) 149 national identities, myths
Mills, Charles 5, 9 (involvement) 132
Minneapolis-St. Paul schools, segregation/ nationalism, rise 260
inequality 2 National Party: separate schooling,
minoritized languages, perception 82 moral/legal responsibility 198; white
miscegenation, impact 211 supremacist social policies 190
Mitchell, Sarah 126 National Preparation Committee
moderation, education (usage) 71 – 73 report 223
Mohamed, Ahmed (arrest) 69 National Program of Books and Teaching
Monreal, Timothy 7, 139 Materials (PNLD) 225
moral failure, addressing 26 nation-states, embracing 24
moral panic, theory 26 necropolitical regime, securing 68 – 69
Morrison, Jeana E. 9, 204 Nelson, Steven L. 5 – 6, 50
Morrison, Scott 123 neo-abolitionism, student benefit 35 – 36
Morrison, Toni 252 neo-abolitionist pedagogy, emphasis 35
Motsisis, Dan 191 neoliberal developmentalism,
movement-building, role 260 implications 24
movement, definition 57 – 58 neoliberal discourse, impact 196
Movimento Negro 238 – 240 neoliberal globalization processes,
mujahedeen (freedom fighter depiction) education (role) 178
67 – 68 neoliberal governance 3 – 4
multiculturalism 44; discourse 161; failure neoliberal ideologies, outworking 24
165; focus (Canada) 258; interpretation neoliberalism: goal 44 – 45; impact 4
160; schooling/general education newcomer Muslim Youth, conditional
systems, relationship 159 – 161 guests 74 – 77
multiculturalism, Canada schools New Education Policy, problem (India) 175
(relationship) 158 Newsome, Bree 258
multilingualism, depoliticized Nguyen, Mike Hoa 9, 204
approach 92 Nietzsche, Friedrich 44
multilingual translanguaging 89 – 90 Nigeria: cartographic divisions, British
multinationalism (economic analysis creation 110; education 110 – 112;
concept) 36 exclusivism 111; higher education,
Muslim American youth, experiences power struggle 110 – 111; power,
73 – 74 contestations 110 – 112; regional
Muslim Otherness 73 chauvinism 111; university education,
Muslim Student Association (MSA), public discourse 111
flashpoint 73 – 74 non-racialism, treatment 177
Muslim youth: educational research non-White European immigrants, racial
69 – 71; newcomers, conditional hierarchy/violence 148
guests 74 – 77; racialization/education, non-whites, cultural inferiority 139
comparative reflections 66 normative racialization, disruption 150
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Odendaal, Rehana 7, 103

Fund 248, 253 One Nation 127; support 124
named languages: existence 84; socially Ontario, prosperity (securing) 160
constructed nature 83 – 84 Orelus, Pierre 36
national economies, interconnection Orientalism, perspective 6
71 – 72 “Orient” construction 67 – 69
National Education Act (1967) 190 Otheguy, Ricardo 6, 81
Index 271
“Other” 142 119; category, instability 124 – 125;
other backward castes (OBCs) 172, 178 epistemologies 173; graduate students,
othering, practices 144 race-related issues (training/education
Otherness, feeling 152 – 153 problem) 163 – 164; hierarchies 211;
Outcomes Based Education 194 impact 241; logics 105; ontological
out-of-school spaces, impact 258 status 24; politics, normalization
119; power, continuation 131 – 133;
Pathania, Gaurav J. 8, 170 problematization 35 – 36; problem,
Pearson, Noel 131 denial (Australia) 125 – 129; race
pedagogical practices, understanding by proxy 129 – 133; racialization,
92 – 93 conceptualization 172 – 174; social
pedagogy, conceptualization 92 construct 139; South Africa education,
Pedraza, Pedro 89 relationship 197 – 199; thinking 18 – 19
Peterson, Hector 191 race-caste-color, parallels 8
Pierre, Jemima 104 raceclass 36, 258 – 259
PISA for Development (OECD) 25 rrace-evasive legal liberalism 52
political norms, transnational Muslim racelessness, idea 177
youth (threat) 73 – 74 race relations offices, creation 165 – 166
Poon, OiYan 9, 204 Race, Whiteness, and Education
post-Apartheid education 193 – 197 (Leonardo) 36
post-colorblind racial discourse 42 – 44 racial beings, immigrants of color
postsecondary education (university): faculty, (equivalence) 141
racialized university (impact) 164 – 165; racial capitalism 3 – 4; attention 258 – 259;
racialized students 162 – 163; racialized capitalism, equivalence 20 – 21;
university professors, increase 165 – 167 theorizing 22 – 24
power: contestations (Nigeria) 110 – 112; racial capitalist order, consolidation
imbalances 72 – 73 106 – 107
Pre-Vestibular for Blacks and the Poor racial contract: evolution 204 – 205;
(PVNC), creation 222 theory 204
privatization 4, 8, 71, 112, 174, 196 – 197, Racial Contract theory 9
199, 259 racial democracy, national discourse 9
Program of Restructuring and Expansion of Racial Discrimination Act (Australia)
Federal Universities 238 122 – 123
Program of University for All racial discrimination, crime
(PROUNI) 238 (recognition) 221
property, concept 58 racial dispossession 52
Prophet Muhammad, Danish cartoons racial domination systems, entanglements 5
(impact) 72 racial equity structure, creation 224
proximate determinants 28 racial-ethnic background, unicorn 150
Public Instruction Act (1880) 120 racial formation: concept 22; notion/idea
Public Participation in Education Network 18, 23; theory 9, 27, 210
(PPEN), launch 194 racial hierarchy/difference, white
public schooling system, middle-class supremacist ideas 105
children (removal) 197 racial identities: constructions 210 – 211;
purpose, concept 58 – 59 creation, sociohistorical process 22;
enforcement, decision (Brazil) 212;
Quality Imperative, The (Education for All existence 211; reproduction 105
Global Monitoring Report) 25 racialization 35, 140 – 144; absent
Quijano, Anibal 41 presence, tracking process 124 – 125;
quota policies, impact (Brazil) 226 – 228 Africa 104 – 105; afterlives, youth
(relationship) 103; anti-Blackness
race: absent presence, tracking process 143 – 144; Australian education 119;
124 – 125; Australian education comparative reflections 66; concept 104;
272 Index
concept, grounding 139; experiences 133; surviving 148; systemic racism
(Latinx educators/youths) 146 – 151; (Australia) 127
Latinidad 143 – 144; Latinx educators/ “Racism in the Canadian University”
youths, experiences 146 – 151; Latinx (Henry/Tator) 165
(im)migrant racialization/anti-blackness “Rainbow Nation” 236
139; neoliberal governance/racial Ramsay, Paul 123 – 124
capitalism 3 – 4; processes 3, 209; Rassemblement National party, support
processes, absoluteness (impossibility) (growth) 75
258; resistance/entrenchment 3 – 4; raza cosmica, la 46
study, problems 258 – 259; theories reclamation, racialization theme 4
35, 204; transnational perspective recognition, use 233 – 234
1; understanding 140; U.S. South Reid, George 120, 124
racialization, impact 144 – 145 Reid, Teela 125
racialized bilingual groups 82 – 83 religious racialization 6
racialized bilinguals: education 8890 – 92; reparation, epistemic/dialogic
experiences 91 – 92; language/education, conditions 260
abyssal thinking (rejection) 81; language reparative futures: enactment
education, position 83; students, 8; possibilities/conditions,
fundamental deficiency 6 understanding 260
racialized bilingual speakers, language representation, denial 56
practices 92 re/production of difference, schools
racialized bilingual students, education 87 (relationship) 105 – 107
racialized educational inequity 161 resistance: movements, power 45 – 47;
racialized interest, alignment 2 racialization theme 4
racialized moral psychology 212 – 213 ressentiment 44
racialized people, marginalization/ Ress, Susanne 9, 232
exclusion 87 Rethinking Race, Class, Language, and
racialized professors, appointments 166 Gender (Orelus) 36
racialized students: exacerbated reverse racism 133
educational lives, COVID-19 (impact) Rhodes, Cecil 114, 258
162; postsecondary education Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign 114,
(university) 162 – 163 236, 240, 259
racialized university professors, increase right-wing backlash, rise 260
165 – 167 Ringgold, Faith 252
racial justice, demands 246 Roberts, Neil 57
racial maintenance, constructions Robinson, Cedric 20, 258
210 – 211 Rodriguez, Sophia 7, 139
racial nondiscrimination clauses, inclusion Rogers, Christopher 251
112 – 113 Rosa, Jonathan 6, 81
racial plurality, embracing 211 Roussef, Dilma 226
racial prejudices, systematization/ Rudd, Kevin 122
formalization 190 Ryerson University, student population
racial projects: analysis 23; impact 205, surveys 166
260; usage 23
racial self-identification 212 Sáenz, Rogelio 141
raciolinguistic ideologies, impact 84 – 85 Said, Edward 6, 40, 46
racism 21; absent presence, tracking Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 6, 81 – 82
process 124 – 125; articulation 26 – 27; Savage, Augusta 252
denial (Australia) 125 – 129; economic Scheduled Castes (SCs) 172
requirements 24; erasures 17, 22; Scheduled Tribes (STs) 172
global development, relationship schooling: legacies 6 – 7; multiculturalism/
18 – 22; political system, recognition general education systems, relationship
204; presence 163; reverse racism 159 – 160; public schooling system,
Index 273
middle-class children (removal) 197; silence: perception 17 – 18; production
South Africa, education 190 – 192 25 – 26
Schooling in Capitalist America (Bowles/ Silva, Petronilha Beatriz 224
Gintis) 197 Singh, Roja 174
schools: Black community, relationship “Slave Coast” (British imperialism
251; Black history/ethnic studies, focus) 110
mandate 247 – 248; Black Lives Matter, slavery: abolishment (South Africa)
impact 253 – 255; Black Lives Matter, 237; reparations 19 – 20; unfreedom
principles/demands/activities 247 – 253; metaphor 56
Black teachers, hiring (increase) 247; slavocracy: cessation 54; physical
colonialism, afterlives/incarnations distance 57
(presence) 257 – 258; community, Smith, Andrea 39
impact 250; counselors, funding 248; social class, South Africa education
digital story maps, creation 250 – 251; (relationship) 197 – 199
movement, Black Lives Matter social ideology, racial direction 258 – 259
(impact) 246; policies/practices, socially constructed linguistic boundaries,
application 252; reform (Chile) 61; navigation 93
re/production of difference, social movements, legitimization/
relationship 105 – 107; restorative momentum 259 – 260
justice, usage 247; school-to-prison societies, colonialism (afterlives/
pipeline 254; selective schools, incarnations) 257 – 258
Asianisation 130 – 131; Year of Purpose socioeconomic redistribution, Bandung
(Black Lives Matter at School) refusal 233
251 – 253; zero-tolerance discipline, socioeconomic stratification,
cessation 247; zero-tolerance school institutionalization 106
policies, cessation 10 Week of Action solidarity: cooperation 9 – 10; intersectional
guiding principles (Black Lives Matter at forms, forging 8, 257 – 258
School) 249 Soudien, Crain 199
Scott, Janelle 1, 10, 35, 246, 257 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) 36
Secretariat of Continuing Education, “Souls of White Folk” (Leonardo) 36 – 39
Literacy, and Diversity (SECAD), South Africa: apartheid, afterlives
creation 224 112 – 115; apartheid, cessation
secularism, principle (laicite) 76 258 – 259; Black African struggle
security, Islamophobic discourses 174 234 – 237; Black education, upgrading
selective schools, Asianisation 130 – 131 190 – 191; Centre for Education Rights
self-control, maintenance 57 – 58 and Transformation conference 200;
self-determination, right 19 – 20 exceptionalism 104; neoliberal discourse,
self-extrication, economic impacts 54 impact 197; policy borrowing 196;
self-possession, sense 57 – 58 racialization, perpetuation 114; racial
Seltzer, Kate 6, 81 nondiscrimination clauses, inclusion
Sennet, Richard 197 112 – 113; racism/segregation, generation
September 11, 2001 (attacks) 6, 67 199; rule 234 – 235; slavery, abolishment
settler-colonial dynamic 8 237; social class relations, education
settler colonialism 2, 7 (embedding) 201; Soweto uprising
SFFA v. Harvard 208, 209 191; white minority rule, establishment
SFFA v. Yale 208 – 209 113; white South Africa, Black rights
Shirazi, Roozbeh 66 (denial) 235
Sierra Leone: development, unevenness South Africa, education: access, equity
107 – 109; Free Quality School (ensuring) 193; alternative schools
Education program 109; political 191; apartheid system, tertiary
independence 108 – 109; postwar education legacy 192 – 193; higher
reconstruction 109; secondary/tertiary education 192 – 193; higher education
colonial education 108 system/institutions, transformation
274 Index
193; mistakes 194 – 195; national Speciale, Teresa 9, 232
curriculum, absence 197; Outcomes Special Secretary of Policies for the
Based Education 194; post-Apartheid Promotion of Racial Equality
education 193 – 197; private schools, (SEPPIR) 224
usage 196; privatization 196 – 197; Sriprakash, Arathi 5, 17
problems 198 – 199; public infrastructure, state institutions, restructuring 55
usage 197; public-private partnerships State Law 2,605/3004 226
196; public schooling system, State Law 3,708 (Brazil) 223
middle-class children (removal) Sterling, Alton (police killing) 246
197; race, relationship 197 – 199; Stokes, Rob 129
racialization 189 – 193; racialization, Stolen Generations, Rudd apology 122
perpetuation 114; resistance 189, Strauss Chavarria, Erika 254
200 – 201; schooling 190 – 192; schooling Strong, Krystal 7, 103
(historical foundations), analysis structural adjustment programs (IMF/
(Marxist framework usage) 198; World Bank) 109
schools, desegregation (handling) 199; “Student Activist Day” 252
social class, relationship 197 – 199; students: bilingualism 83; Black
structural change, phases 113; students, students, experience 160 – 161;
revolving door syndrome 193; system, educational experiences, local/state
crisis 194; teacher redeployment 194; laws/policies (role) 252; graduate
teachers/administrators, suitability students, race-related issues (training/
(determination) 197; vouchers/charters, education problem) 163 – 164; histories,
usage 196 erasing 252; postsecondary education
South African Development Community (university) 162 – 163; racialized students
(SADC): impact 233, 236 – 237; (exacerbated educational lives),
students, interests (upholding) 240; COVID-19 (impact) 162; revolving door
students, WCU pursuit 241 syndrome (South Africa) 193; special
South African Human Rights Commission privileges 74
study (1989) 189 Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA)
South Asia, internal colonization/ 207 – 208
education 170 subordination, education (usage) 103
South Carolina: Latinx educators, subtractive bilingualism 88
existence 150 – 151; Latinx Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
undocumented youth 147 – 148 framework, leave no-one behind
Southern collectivities, fragmentation discourse 20
240 – 242 systems language 27 – 28
southern collectivities, promotion 234 systems thinking 27
South-South cooperation: examination
9 – 10; promise 232 – 233 “Teacher2Teacher” (Education for
South-South internationalization, racial Liberation Network) 251
justice 232 teacher quality 20
South-South solidarities, Unilab Teachers College Record 39 – 40
manifestation/reinforcement 239 – 240 Teaching and Learning (Global Monitoring
Southwest Asia and North Africa Report) 25
(SWANA) 66 – 67; educational Teaching for Change 253
development/reform efforts 70; Thangaraj, Miriam 9, 232
liberation movements/revolutions 68; “thinking otherwise” 82
youth unemployment (time bomb) 72 Third World approaches to international
Soutphommasane, Tim 7, 119 law (TWAIL): application 60 – 61;
Soviet-Afghan War, mujahedeen depiction approaches 51 – 52; CRT, connections 59
67 – 68 Thomas, Alma 252
Soweto uprising 191 Tikly, Leon 5, 17
Spanish Reconquista 67 tolerance, promotion 161
Index 275
Tran, Hoang 35 U.S. Agency for International
transformative justice 240 Development (USAID), impact 70
transformative racial justice 241 – 242 USA PATRIOT Act 68 – 69
Transgender Day of Remembrance 252 U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity
translanguaging 84; evidence 90; spaces, Commission, discriminatory ruling 69
opening 91; theory, teacher engagement U.S. South: racialization, impact 144 – 145;
92 – 93; types 89 – 90 social/educational landscape 139
transnational anti-Blackness, consequences
51 – 52 Vally, Salim 9, 27, 189, 258
transnational critical race theory Vergas, Getúlio 220
(transnational CRT) 50, 52 – 59;
educational marronage, relationship Wages of Whiteness, The (Roediger) 47
59 – 60; intervention 61 Walker, Sharon 5, 17
transnational ideology 2 – 3 “War on Terror” campaign 67, 70 – 71
transnational Muslim youth: ethnographic Wedekind, Volker 199
studies 70; threat 73 – 74 Week of Action (Black Lives Matter at
Trivedi, Harish 176 School) 10, 247
Trump, Donald (zero tolerance Wei, Li 6, 81
rhetoric) 254 West Africa, development (unevenness)
Trump-era racism, expression 43 107 – 109
Tubman, Harriet 252 Western enslavement, maroons/marronage
Tudge, Alan 123, 126 53 – 54
Western political thought 56
UC Regents v. Bakke 207 White Australia policy, dismantling 130
UNESCO Statements on Race 18 – 19 white listening subject 86
unfreedom, metaphor 56 whiteness 35; averageness 43; concept,
Unhappy Marriage Between Marxism and difference 38; education, relationship
Feminism (Hartman) 40 44 – 45; ideology 37 – 39; intersectional
“Unhappy Marriage Between Marxism and understanding, pedagogy benefits 5; late
Race Critique” (Leonardo) 40 whiteness 36 – 37, 44; politics 143 – 144;
Unified Black Movement (MNU) 211 racialized identity 43 – 44; studies 36 – 37;
Unilab, creation 238, 239 studies, white privilege (persistence)
Union of South Africa, creation 113 41; transnational ideology 2 – 3; upkeep
unitary translanguaging theory 90 35 – 36
United Nations World Conference Whiteness as Property (Harris) 40
Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, white privilege 124; individualization 41;
Xenophobia and Related Intolerance persistence 41
(2001) 170, 218, 222, 259 whites: cognitive difficulties 212; white
United States: affirmative action 204, discourses, vicissitudes 35 – 36
206 – 207; affirmative action, Asian white South Africa, Black rights
Americans (relationship) 207 – 210; (denial) 235
civil rights, battle 206; immigrant, white supremacist social policies (National
meaning 148; living, difficulty 148; Party) 190
political norms, transnational Muslim white supremacy: phrase, usage 40; studies
youth (threat) 73 – 74; racialization 204; 39 – 41; weaponization 45
racialized displacement 51; southern White Women, Race Matters
spaces, racialization 144 – 145 (Frankenberg) 37
Universidade da Integração Internacional Willis, Paul 197
da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira (University woke diversity, excess (Australia) 122 – 123
of International Integration of World Bank, historical complicity 27
Afro-Brazilian Lusophony) (Unilab), World Class University (WCU):
creation 238 segregation policy 235 – 236, 240;
Untouchables 170 students, pursuit 241
276 Index
World Development Report (World Bank) 26 educators, racialization experiences
World Systems Theory (Wallerstein) 41 146 – 151; Latinx youth/educators, U.S.
Wynter, Sylvia 260 South racialization (impact) 144 – 145;
Latinx youth, racialization experiences
Year of Purpose (Black Lives Matter at (Maryland) 146 – 147; unemployment
School) 10, 251 – 253 (time bomb) 72
Yong Kim, Jim 26 “Youth Time Bomb,” defusing 71 – 73
youth: Africa coloniality/racialization
afterlives, youth (relationship) 103; Zedong, Mao 119
Blackness, racial scripts (youth zero-tolerance discipline: cessation 247;
navigation) 147; Black youth, zero tolerance rhetoric, mirroring 254
characterization 147; decolonization zero tolerance rhetoric (Trump) 254
(unfinished work), relationship 115; zero-tolerance school policies, cessation 10
Latinx undocumented youth (South Zinn Education Project 253
Carolina) 147 – 148; Latinx youth/ Zumbi dos Palmares March (1995) 221

World Yearbook of Education 2023 - Racialization and Educational Inequality in Global Perspective-Routledge (2022)

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The World Yearbook of Education 2023 centers on the intersection of racialization,

Janelle Scott is a Professor and the Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational

Monisha Bajaj is professor of international and multicultural education at the

Titles in the series:

World Yearbook of Education 2019

World Yearbook of Education 2020

World Yearbook of Education 2021

World Yearbook of Education 2022

World Yearbook of Education 2023

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/World-

Edited by Janelle Scott and

Introduction: Racialization and Educational Inequality

1 Erasures of Racism in Education and International

2 Racialization, Whiteness, and Education 35

3 Critical Race Theory Beyond Borders: Educational

4 Global Cadences of Islamophobia: Comparative Reflections

6 Education for Subordination: Youth and the Afterlives

7 Tomorrow’s Australia: Race and Racialization

8 Latinx (Im)migrant Racialization, Anti-Blackness, and

9 Race and Racialization in Canadian Education: Schools

10 The Racialization of Caste: Internal Colonization and

11 Racialization and Resistance in South African Education 189

12 Affirmative Action and Racialization in the United States

14 Racial Justice in “South-South” Internationalization

15 The Black Lives Matter at School Movement: Demanding

Nina Asher (EdD, 1999, Teachers College, Columbia University) is a professor in

On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Police Officer Derek Chauvin, ­having

Colonization and colonial logics include a racialized articulation of whiteness as

Racialization and Education Under Neoliberal Governance

Organization and Description of the Volume

Racism and Global Development

Theorizing Racism in Education and International

The emergence of a global order through a world-embracing system of capi-

tionalist projects of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim violence; and, as we discuss in

Consensus and Erasure

Despite the “failure” of postwar international development, to which Jim Yong

For those of us in Africa, some acknowledgement at the very least, of the

Neo-abolitionist pedagogy suggests that teachers and students work together

In essence, then, racialization processes are inextricably tied to global economic

Past and Present Whiteness Studies

White Supremacy Studies as a Necessary Intervention

The Persistence of White Privilege in Whiteness Studies

Intersectionality and Authoritarianism in Global Contexts

Post-Colorblind Racial Discourse

Whiteness and Education

Conclusion: The Power of Resistance and Abolitionist

This chapter argues that a transnational conceptualization of critical race theory

Blackness Beyond Geographic Borders

CRT and TWAIL: Different Yet Similar Approaches

Positioning Educational Marronage as Transnational CRT

Maroons and Marronage Within Western Enslavement

Marronage as a Form of Resistance and Freedom in the

If freedom has been a central concept in Western political thought, slavery

Marronage theory, as opposed to other theoretical frameworks, affords scholars

Roberts’ Four Pillars and Educational Marronage

Toward a Transnational CRT: Educational Marronage

Applying CRT-TWAIL and Education Policy

Educational Marronage as a Form of Black Thought

Educational Research on Muslim Youth

Jordan: Defusing the “Youth Time Bomb,” Educating

In connecting these imbalances of power, Ali’s remarks showed the compara-

United States: Transnational Muslim Youth Threatening

2 Racialization, Whiteness, and Education 35

11 Racialization and Resistance in South African Education 189

On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Police Officer Derek Chauvin, having

In a shocking turn of events, close to one million students in India’s Hindi-