Antiracist Education

Framework of the Antiracist Education Paradigm

Antiracist educators argue that racism continues to be a major problem in the United States and that sociological concepts such as “social dislocations” obviate its significance. The fact that race is socially constructed does not diminish its importance. They claim that race is much more important than social class in explaining inequality. As a causal construct, race underpins all identities, discourses, and institutional structures, they say. It determines how people treat each other, which groups have access to the material rewards of society, and how such access is negotiated. In the view of antiracist educators, failure to acknowledge this fact results in distorted self-understandings and discriminatory behaviors. Rooted in an autonomous culture, race has a logic relatively unconstrained by material factors.

In antiracist education, racism is viewed as a pervasive phenomenon that has multiple meanings and manifestations. For example, it is an ideological practice that creates, and then naturalizes, group distinctions based on phenotypic or other variations with the intent to establish relations of superiority and inferiority. Racism is an epistemology that privileges Eurocentric values, beliefs, and practices. It is the normative framework that defines whiteness as the standard by which to evaluate others. Racism is a set of institutionally embedded exclusionary practices that create, and then reproduce, socioeconomic status attainment disparities, including tracking in schools and discrimination in hiring. It is an aversion to critiquing the ideologies that justify existing arrangements such as equality of opportunity and meritocracy. Racism is manifested in opposition to race-targeted programs such as affirmative action. Sometimes it is likened to distorted thinking, impaired consciousnesses, or a cancer on society.

Antiracist education appropriated the postmodern premise that science is a form of hegemony that does not deserve its privileged status. In this view, science imposes restrictions a priori on what constitutes knowledge, is fraught with problems of subjectivity and preferentiality, and should not be privileged as objective, factual, or universal. In extreme interpretations, Western epistemology is seen as representing little more than domination by Eurocentric men. Here antiracist educators claim that “race thinking” (or “whiteness”) shapes what counts as knowledge. Scientific discourse is constructed in such a way that it cannot admit its complicity in the perpetuation of racial advantages and disadvantages. Antiracist educators reject the conception of research as advancement of knowledge for its own sake in favor of one that states research must be judged in terms of its contribution to particular political projects—specifically those that eliminate racism.

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