Antiracist Education

The Context

Antiracist education was born in the UK over two decades ago in response to an anti-immigration backlash from right-wing conservatives. Key figures that shaped the field were Barry Troyna and Bruce Carrington, and there was some important work in schools by David Gillborn. In the United States, antiracist education has direct links with the civil rights movement and has been advanced by a number of contemporary educational scholars who adopt a critical stance toward multicultural education; influential researcher activists leading the field include James Banks, Cherry McGee Banks, Christine Sleeter, Carl Grant, and Sonia Nieto. Their focus is on honoring difference and correcting differential learning experiences and outcomes, especially among minority and marginalized students. This has also been referred to as “antibias” or “antioppression” education, following Kevin Kumashiro, and there is an explicit connection to various forms of difference in social justice education in the United States.

The term antiracist education is more contested than multicultural education because it specifically mentions the word race, now understood to have no biological significance. While race no longer holds salience as a genetic concept, society has long been organized around categorizations of people based on perceived racial identity. The fact that Aboriginal peoples have lived on the land known as North America for some 20,000 years underscores the antiracist vantage point that power relations and identity need to be problema-tized within the context of colonization. Similarly, the infamous legacies of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and myriad discriminatory laws, policies, and social practices have divided the United States along racialized lines. The reality that more African American males are in prison than in university, combined with the illustrative socioeconomic and educational context, are further evidence of the effects of discrimination based on racial identities in contemporary American society.

Antiracist education seeks to correct inequities within this social context. On the one hand is the concrete reality of underachievement, marginalization, and discrimination, and on the other is a pervasive ideology of individualism, merit-based achievement, and an education system that has historically ignored social justice issues. For the past two decades, the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) has been one of the leading organizations articulating a vision for antiracist education, and it includes social justice and the struggle to eradicate inequity and discrimination in its official definition of multicultural education.

The Foundation

In their conceptualization of antiracist education, Canadian scholars George Sefa Dei and Agnes Calliste have questioned the notion of a color-blind society and argue in favor of a more transparent and equitable sharing of power. The history of race relations is never neutral, and antiracist education requires surveying and critiquing textbooks, curricula, policies, outcomes, and general conditions related to education to better understand and take action on inequity and racism. As Paul Carr and Darren Lund's recent work concludes, this must include recognition of Whiteness, the understanding that White people have acquired and exercised power and privilege based on their racial identity. The role and implication of White teachers in classrooms with diverse student bodies has been a growing area of interest for antiracist educators, including Gary Howard in the United States.

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