anniversary article

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Critical antiracist pedagogy in ELT
Ryuko Kubota

Antiracism constitutes an important component of social justice in ELT. Yet,

discussing racism is often evaded, leaving the concept of racism inadequately
understood. This article aims to illuminate racism and invite readers to engage
in race-aware discourses and enact critical antiracism. I first outline key issues,
including what race is, how race and language are related, and what different
forms of racism exist. The complex nature of racism invites ELT professionals
to engage in critical antiracist pedagogy, which requires de-essentializing,
de-simplifying, de-silencing, and decolonizing antiracism. Critical antiracist
pedagogy recognizes intersectionality, different forms of racism, the need for
explicit discussion, and the privilege that settlers of color possess in settler
colonialism, the latter of which indicates the need for forging solidarity among
racialized groups. It also requires critical reflexivity of complicity and privilege
involved in antiracist enactment. I provide pedagogical recommendations
founded on a dialogic approach with situational ethics and reflexivity.1
Introduction Racism was brought to the global spotlight in 2020, prompted by anti-
Asian racist attacks during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic
and anti-Black police violence in the United States. These disturbing
events led the fields of ELT and applied linguistics to arrange special
publications, such as Race, Identity, and English Language Teaching - A Joint
TESOL Quarterly and TESOL Journal Publication2 and special papers and
authors’ online presentations on ‘the role of race in applied linguistics’ in
the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics.3
While the year 2020 seems to mark the beginning of attention paid to
antiracism in ELT, discussions on race, racialization, and racism in ELT are
actually not new. There has been interest in race, racialization, and racism
related to English language education since the 2000s (e.g. Curtis and
Romney 2006; Motha 2014; Jenks 2017; see Von Esch, Motha and Kubota
2020 for more details). Yet, racism is not as widely recognized or understood
as more familiar topics in ELT, such as communicative language teaching;
teaching grammar and vocabulary; motivation; NS/NNS; and global
Englishes. The reason perhaps derives from a sense of discomfort attached
to the concept of racism. It is often the case that people regard themselves
as not racist or they say they do not see color, participating in a discourse of
colorblindness or color evasion. Furthermore, for many White people, racism

ELT Journal Volume 75/3 July 2021; doi:10.1093/elt/ccab015 237

© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
Advance Access publication 25 June 2021
 is a disturbing moral offense, and being White alone can evoke emotions of
fear and guilt, causing defensiveness or silence. DiAngelo (2018) calls this
White fragility. To give an example, almost two decades ago, I published
an article, problematizing a scholarly discourse that positions English and

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related culture as superior to other languages and cultures. I argued that this
discourse reflects a colonial legacy, which includes White racism. However,
my argument was interpreted by a scholar as a construction of ESL teachers
and applied linguistics as racist. This kind of misrecognition still takes place
in everyday interactions.
This article, thus, aims to bring the concept of racism to light and invite
ELT professionals to critically engage in race-aware discourses. In order
to do so, I will first recap what race means, in what way race and language
are related, and what forms of racism exist. This will be followed by a
discussion of issues and concerns related to critical antiracist pedagogy,
a principled approach to antiracism in ELT that takes into account
intricacies and pitfalls in enacting antiracism in teaching. Finally, I will
offer some suggestions for approaching critical antiracist pedagogy.
I should note that the perpetrators of racism on a broader scale are not
always White people; there are historical power relations among racial
or ethnic groups in different geographical locations. However, because
English is traditionally associated with White users, I will mainly focus
on White racism. I write as an Asian female immigrant settler in Canada.
Although my views and experiences presented here are influenced by my
positionality and the specific context I work in, I hope readers will apply
relevant points to their own contexts.
Race In our everyday discourse, race is typically understood in terms of physical
characteristics such as skin color and facial features. However, recent
scientific research has revealed that the genetic makeup of all humans
is 99.9 per cent identical. This means that the racial differences that we
often perceive are not biologically based but rather socially constructed.
The idea that race is socially constructed does not imply that race does not
exist. Rather, the idea of race influences our value judgments of different
groups of people based on perceived bodily differences. These judgments
exist on a continuum of sophistication and crudeness, ability and inability,
and superiority and inferiority, (re)producing stereotypes, biases, and
prejudices. It is thus necessary to question everyday racial stereotypes,
which often accompany unfounded biological explanations, and critically
understand how such beliefs are socially, historically, and ideologically
maintained. For instance, it is widely believed that Asians are good at
math and Black people are fast sprinters. However, these racialized
groups do not biologically excel in these skills; rather, they tend to fulfill
expectations that are constructed socially, historically, institutionally, and
economically.
A concept frequently conflated with race is ethnicity. Although these
two terms are often interchangeably used, ethnicity is a category that
distinguishes groups of people according to sociocultural characteristics,
including ancestry, language, religion, custom, and lifestyle. In fact,
ethnicity and culture, especially the latter, often serve as a euphemism for
race because the term race, which evokes racism, is unsettling for many.

238 Ryuko Kubota

 Thus, when people discuss cultural difference in people’s behaviors and
views, they may implicitly refer to perceived racial difference.
The understanding that race is socially constructed provides important

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implications for English language teaching and learning. Leaners are
always surrounded by discourses disseminated by the media, pop culture,
online information, and other semiotic representations. In the classroom,
learners are also exposed to perspectives conveyed through textbooks,
other materials, and classroom discussions. These discourses are likely
to convey taken-for-granted racial, ethnic, or cultural differences. When
common stereotypes, such as Asians being good at math or Black people
being fast sprinters, are expressed during a classroom discussion, teachers
may seize this teachable moment to question these beliefs through a
problem-posing dialogic approach. I will discuss issues of pedagogy later.
The relationship The English language is traditionally linked to Whiteness due to its
between race and origin and spread through settler colonialism. Native speakers of
language standardized varieties of English are often imagined as White people.
This is manifested as linguistic stereotyping, in which listening to
standardized English evokes White speakers, as well as reverse linguistic
stereotyping, whereby the perceived English speaker’s race influences the
listener’s judgment of the speaker’s English proficiency and professional
competence (Kang and Rubin 2009).
However, the racial background of English language users has diversified
significantly due to the historical and contemporary mobility of people
on a transnational and transregional scale, which has been caused by
colonialism, economic displacement, and globalization. The resultant
diaspora and hybridity have disrupted the ideology of ‘one nation, one
race, one culture, one language’.
In ELT, teachers and teacher educators may discuss issues of linguistic
diversity and hybridity in terms of world Englishes, English as a lingua
franca, translanguaging, and plurilingualism. They can also add an
inquiry angle of human diversity—the racial diversity of the people who
use English in diverse ways.
Different forms Racism can be defined as ‘discourse, knowledge, and social practices that,
of racism by means of inferiorization, denigration, marginalization, and exclusion,
construct and perpetuate unequal relations of power between groups of
people defined by perceived racial difference’ (Kubota 2020: 712–713).
It manifests itself in different forms: individual, institutional, and
epistemological. These types of racism interact with each other to form
and maintain a system of domination and subordination.
The first type of racism is individual or interpersonal racism. As
implied in the introduction, racism is often understood only as personal
indignities, such as racial slurs and insulting behaviors. These intentional
or unintentional acts of racism, especially in subtle forms, are often called
microaggressions, and they communicate hostility and offense to the
victim. For example, in a study conducted by Lee (2011) in Canada, an
Asian Canadian NS teacher was asked by many of her colleagues ‘Where
are you really from?’ Additionally, she was often mistaken for a student

Critical antiracist pedagogy in ELT 239

 and treated as a student when she was included in a student group photo
for a program advertisement.
The second type of racism is systematic injustice seen in social

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institutions, as the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has brought to
light. Institutional racism is observed in under- or over-representations
of certain racial groups in the systems and structures of education,
healthcare, business, media, entertainment, incarceration, politics, and
more. It is reflected in the patterns of inclusion or exclusion of certain
racialized groups in social organizations, services, or activities. A clear
example in ELT is recruiting and hiring teachers. A preference is often
given to White NSs from Inner Circle countries (Ruecker and Ives 2015).
This tendency also perpetuates (reverse) linguistic stereotyping.
The third type of racism is epistemological racism, or racial biases
ingrained in our knowledge system (Kubota 2020). It is like a lens
through which we see and interpret social, cultural, and historical
products, practices, and perspectives. For instance, national holidays—
seemingly innocuous events—may celebrate the heritage of a dominant
racial group over others. In the United States, for example, the White
settlers’ perspective has been celebrated on Columbus Day. However,
this tradition has been challenged by Native Americans’ perspectives,
encouraging many states to replace the name with Indigenous Peoples’
Day. In education, the perspective presented in the curriculum and
textbooks tends to be outweighed by a dominant racial group in a
particular society (e.g. White settlers’ view of history in North America
as opposed to Indigenous peoples’ views). In EFL teaching materials,
topics related to stereotypical White middle-class English-speaking
people’s culture and history (e.g., holidays, heroes, customs) reinforce the
conceptual association between English and Whiteness. Furthermore,
in conducting research in our field, scholars are compelled to use and
cite concepts, theories, and knowledge developed by mainstream White
Euro-American scholars. Such citation practices consequently reinforce
institutional racism because scholars’ achievements are in large part
judged by citation records.
White superiority as a discursively and materially entrenched condition
becomes taken for granted. Many people of color too unconsciously
support it, making them complicit with White racism. White supremacy
unchallenged by people of color further makes racism invisible,
perpetuating institutional racism and even interpersonal racism. This
suggests that having a racialized identity does not necessarily make a
person antiracist.
Critical antiracist Discussions thus far indicate that ELT is not immune to various forms
pedagogy of racism. Given that language teaching aims to cultivate mutual
understandings among people from diverse linguistic, cultural, and
racial backgrounds, it is necessary for teachers to engage in antiracism
in their professional activities. However, because explicit discussions of
racism tend to be shunned in society, antiracist engagement in teaching
may simply be reduced to the rhetoric of being respectful to racially
minoritized peers and others in everyday interactions. While students
and teachers should indeed promote respectful human interactions

240 Ryuko Kubota

 across racial differences, antiracist engagement should go further.
It should question power and ideologies that reproduce the system
of domination and subordination and enact antiracism with critical
reflexivity on power dynamics, one’s own privilege, and potential pitfalls

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in enactment. In this sense, I advocate the type of antiracist engagement
in ELT as critical antiracist pedagogy. The following five principles are
essential for promoting this pedagogy: (1) de-essentializing antiracism; (2)
de-simplifying antiracism; (3) de-silencing antiracism; (4) decolonizing
antiracism; and (5) exercising critical reflexivity.
De-essentializing Although racism is the primary focus in antiracist advocacy, social
antiracism injustice is not caused only by racism, nor can racism explain all forms of
oppression experienced by racialized people. Other types of inequalities
related to gender, class, language, sexuality, ability, religion, and so on
intersect with racism, shaping human experiences in intricate ways.
Thus, antiracism cannot be conceptualized as a catchall remedy of social
injustice in an essentialized way. Instead, the experiences of subordination
and oppression need to be understood through a lens of intersectionality
(Collins 2019).
The concept of intersectionality has been used to understand especially
the marginalized experiences of African American women, which are
not identical with the encounters experienced by Black men or White
women. Thus, it is important to consider how multiple identity categories
intersect with each other in understanding systems of marginalization and
privilege.
In ELT, students and teachers of color in ESL contexts can become
a victim of not only racism but also linguicism, as demonstrated by
(reverse) linguistic stereotyping. If they are women, religious minorities,
LGBTQ, or disabled, they would experience different kinds of challenges.
Furthermore, students from an immigrant or refugee background may
suffer from economic hardships. Conversely, even if students or teachers
of color are racially marginalized, their privileged economic status may
give them more advantages than White working-class peers. Critical
antiracism should recognize and challenge all forms of injustice, rather
than attributing all inequalities to race.
De-simplifying As mentioned earlier, racism is typically understood as acts of individual
antiracism offense. To confront racism, teachers may tend to encourage students to
simply respect each other despite racial difference, or worse, not to see
racial difference. In fact, the discourse of color/difference blindness is
prevalent in education—teachers often claim that they treat all students
the same because race doesn’t matter. Time and again, I have witnessed
cases in which critiques of institutional and epistemological racism get
interpreted as a personal attack, resulting in defensive reactions based
on White fragility. This is perhaps because racism is not understood
beyond the individual level. Critical antiracism transcends such a
simplistic understanding of racism by acknowledging and problematizing
multilayered manifestations of racism.
De-silencing Just as the intersectional and multilayered nature of racism is not easy
antiracism to comprehend, open discussion of racism is often challenging due to

Critical antiracist pedagogy in ELT 241

 negative meanings associated with the idea. Sometimes those who discuss
or write about race and racism are accused of promoting racial divisions.
However, without open discussion, the status quo will continue. The
BLM movement has proved the positive effect of de-silencing antiracism.

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In ELT, when the topic of racism—whether it is individual, institutional,
or epistemological—is raised in the classroom or in other contexts, open
space for discussion needs to be created.
Decolonizing Antiracist efforts are often made by people of color who know how
antiracism outrageous and painful it is to be a target of racial discrimination.
Antiracism in Canada, for instance, often focuses on discrimination
against settlers of color, such as people of African, Asian, and Middle
Eastern origins. However, this focus ignores historical oppression
experienced by Indigenous people (Lawrence and Dua 2011). Settlers
of color are certainly disenfranchised, but they have also benefited
economically from settler colonialism. In a broader spectrum, they are
positioned favorably in a racial hierarchy of power vis-à-vis Indigenous
people. In advocating antiracism, it is necessary to recognize the racial
hierarchy of power that is embedded in settler colonialism. In this sense,
antiracism needs to be decolonized.
More broadly speaking, however, racism should not be understood as a
binary relationship between settlers and Indigenous people. Although
settlers of color in settler colonialism are all positioned with a privileged
status vis-à-vis Indigenous people, they belong to diverse racialized
groups that are hierarchically positioned in the power structure due to
historical and economic factors. For these diverse minoritized groups,
the concept of equity is important for achieving equality of outcomes,
which should not be confused with an equal treatment of different groups
that are unequally privileged to begin with. Nonetheless, trying to justify
the severity of oppression experienced by a certain group compared to
others, including Indigenous groups, leads to an oppression Olympics, a
problematic exercise that pits minoritized groups against each other.
In decolonizing antiracism and recognizing the problem of oppression
Olympics, teachers and students need to question their own privilege in a
power hierarchy and a specific context. It is important to always exercise
reflexivity to recognize where multiple types of privilege exist and question
complex relations of power for the purpose of establishing equity through
solidarity.
Exercising critical As mentioned earlier, epistemological racism is not only imposed by
reflexivity the colonizer/oppressor but also supported by the colonized/oppressed.
The hegemony of Whiteness legitimates its power via consent and it is
reflected in the desire of the people of color to emulate the perspectives
and practices of White NSs of English. A parallel phenomenon is seen in
how nonnative English-speaking professionals self-marginalize in their
preference for the NS norm in teaching and research (Kumaravadivelu
2016). This indicates that racially marginalized people often end up
legitimating the oppressive racist system, instead of advocating their
unique identity or disrupting the existing power relations.

242 Ryuko Kubota

 Complicity with oppression is exacerbated by today’s neoliberal academic
activities in ELT. As English is considered to be the most important
language worldwide for research and career advancement, many NNS
post-secondary students learning academic English and post-graduate

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students are compelled to acquire White Eurocentric academic knowledge
and standardized English used by White NSs. Critically reflecting on
one’s complicity with epistemological racism and seeking alternative
ways of knowing and expressing is one way of decolonizing academic
knowledge. Furthermore, in affirming alternative expressions in world
Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and translanguaging, teachers and
learners should think beyond linguistic plurality and critically reflect on
how English users’ race and other identities, such as gender, class, and
religion, shape particular power relations, which influences the nature of
interactions.
Additionally, exercising critical reflexivity enables teachers and learners
to recognize their own privilege not only attached to race but also other
identities including gender, class, sexuality, and ability (Vandrick 2009).
Privilege may also accrue from performing antiracist identity as a savior.
This would create another kind of power relation between the rescuer and
the rescued. All antiracists must be aware of these types of pitfall involved
in antiracist engagement.
Recommendations Critical antiracist pedagogy challenges power and ideologies that
and challenges reproduce the system of domination and subordination. It also
invites learners and teachers to critically reflect on their complicity
and privilege. In this sense, it is compatible with critical pedagogy
(Crookes 2013). Critical pedagogy is founded on a problem-posing
dialogic approach to raise students’ critical awareness of the existence of
inequalities among different groups that are reproduced by discourses,
ideologies, and economic systems. A combination of critical awareness
and praxis—critical reflection and action—enables transformation of the
status quo.
However, as in critical pedagogy, implementing critical antiracist
pedagogy is not easy. In what follows, I will discuss some key
considerations for teachers and teacher educators to take into account.
Raising critical To begin with, teachers and teacher educators must develop a critical
awareness awareness, knowledge, and stance regarding issues of racism and
antiracism. White professionals need to first overcome White fragility
and resist a colorblind rejection of racism. They also need to critically
understand how Whiteness can increase its advantage by engaging or
not engaging in antiracism. Conversely, professionals of color must
become aware of their complicity with White superiority as well as
their privilege as settlers of color if they are in a settler colonial society.
They need to be aware of the risk of playing oppression Olympics and
seek solidarity among racialized peoples in striving to establish equity
for all.
To raise awareness, teachers and teacher educators need to engage
in continuous professional development to learn about racism and
antiracism individually and collectively through reading, viewing online

Critical antiracist pedagogy in ELT 243

 materials, holding antiracist discussion forums, and so on. Teacher
education programs need to review their curriculum, course contents,
materials, and the diversity of instructors to see whether antiracism is
explicitly addressed. They should review what kind of course readings are

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used—whether they derive from White Eurocentric theories and practices
only or whether local knowledges and perspectives are addressed, how
field experiences prepare teachers to work on antiracism, and who
they recruit and hire as instructors. Learning opportunities can also be
offered by professional associations through publications, webinars, and
discussion forums.
Engaging Awareness raising for teachers and learners should be done in a dialogic
in dialogic manner rather than top-down lecturing of predetermined knowledge
approaches presented as the correct answer or solution. The ultimate goal is for the
learners to recognize that racism exists in different forms and alignments;
explore antiracist ways of understanding the self, the other, and the world;
and engage in antiracist praxis. As such, the goal is not necessarily to
reach a consensus or to find a single right answer, but rather to explore
how views, meanings, politics, and economic conditions produce and
reproduce structures of racial inequality.
There are many topics and materials to use, including current topics
or events in the media (e.g. BLM, COVID-19, immigration policies),
familiar topics (e.g. sport events, entertainment films), teaching materials
(e.g. readings, activities, and visual images in the textbooks), and more.
Learners can be invited to explore the following questions: What racial
and linguistic stereotypes are represented in multimodal resources?
In what ways are such stereotypes (re)produced? Are certain racialized
groups over- or under-represented? Why or why not? What historical,
economic, political, and discursive forces construct racial stereotypes and
representational inequalities? Who benefits and who suffers? How can the
stereotypes and inequalities be transformed?
In exploring these questions, concrete examples and focused questions
would be useful to prompt dialogues. Teachers would also need to
effectively moderate the discussion to keep it on track.
Although critical antiracist pedagogy can be planned in combination with
other topics, it can also take place in unplanned ways, in which case, the
teacher must decide how to approach the teachable moment. Addressing
racism can become quite personal, sensitive, and emotionally charged.
Similar to dealing with sensitively controversial issues in general, critical
antiracist pedagogy should consider contextual appropriateness and the
affective dimension of the learners (Kubota 2014).
Dealing Critical antiracist pedagogy entails a tension between an open-ended
with tension dialogic approach for exploration and teachers’ professional desire
to orient learners toward a certain way of thinking. Indeed, critical
approaches to teaching may be viewed as indoctrination when the
teacher has a strong belief on the issue and imposes it onto the learners
(Crookes 2013; Kubota 2014). This tension becomes more problematic
in a context where discrimination against racially minoritized groups
cannot be openly criticized. In that case, different approaches to

244 Ryuko Kubota

 antiracism need to be explored. It is thus important to find a delicate
balance between an anti-oppressive stance and a noncoercive and
contextualized approach to antiracism. This will require teachers
to exercise hyper-self-reflexivity in employing situated ethics and

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recognizing diverse values and stances that are also partial and
provisional in nature.
Conclusion Critical antiracist pedagogy is about fostering awareness, knowledge, and
attitudes regarding the intricate nature of racial inequities and approaches
to challenge them. It requires an understanding of what race is and
what forms racism assumes. It also goes beyond mere respect for racial
difference, and instead engages in the complexities of racism and racial
politics with critical reflexivity on power, privilege, and complicity. There
is no single right way of doing critical antiracist pedagogy because racism
manifests in intricate and contextual ways. Thus, teachers and teacher
educators must continue to learn and enact critical antiracism with open-
mindedness, perseverance, and vigilance.
Final version received February 2021

Notes Kubota, R. 2014. ‘“We must look at both sides”—but

1 Part of this paper has appeared in Kubota, R. 2017.
‘Illuminating and scrutinizing race in English
language teaching’. Selected papers from the twenty-
sixth international symposium on English teaching.
Taipei: English Teachers’ Association-Republic of
China (ETA-ROC).
2 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/
doi/toc/10.1002/(ISSN)1234–5678.
race-identity-and-english-language-teaching
3 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/
annual-review-of-applied-linguistics
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Critical antiracist pedagogy in ELT 245

The author work has been published in journals such as Applied
Ryuko Kubota is a professor in the Department of Linguistics, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies,
Language and Literacy Education in the Faculty Journal of Second Language Writing, TESOL Quarterly,
of Education at University of British Columbia and World Englishes, and in many edited books. She

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(Canada), where she teaches applied linguistics and is a co-editor of Race, culture, and identities in second
teacher education. Her research draws on critical language education: Exploring critically engaged practice
approaches to language education, focusing on (Routledge 2009).
race, gender, culture, and language ideologies. Her Email: ryuko.kubota@ubc.ca

246 Ryuko Kubota