Anti-Racist Education

Racism as a Historical and Theoretical Problem

While anti-racist education has historically been, and continues today to be, discussed and practiced in myriad educational arenas in the United States, it has gained incrementally more acceptance in Canada and the United Kingdom. However, worldwide over it is still generally considered to receive far less attention and acceptance in mainstream educational contexts than other forms of antibias-oriented education. The marginalization of anti-racist education is a function of the perception, popularized through the neoliberal “color-blind” philosophies emerging in 1960s America, that paying overt attention to race is, in and of itself, racist. Perhaps ironically, this perception allows racism to persist unfettered by critical analysis or corrective action.

Anti-racist education is often described as a “radical” form of multicultural education, or as in contrast to the most prevalent forms of multicultural education. While progressive multicultural educators argue that a core feature of [Page 252]multicultural education is that it is anti-racist, anti-racist educators maintain that this feature of multicultural education is, at best, subordinated in mainstream practice. As a consequence, the gap in academic performance, largely between Native American, African American, Latina/Latino, and Asian American students from particular ethnic groups, and most white students endures. From the perspective of anti-racist education, this disparity persists precisely because the most prevalent applications of multicultural education are divorced from a sociopolitical context and, therefore, do not take into account relations of power in society that produce, reproduce, and perpetuate educational inequities and inequality based on race and class.

According to anti-racist education scholar Julie Kailin, reformist multicultural education focuses on the symptoms of racism or on describing how things are, rather than on the causes of racism or by asking why things are the way they are or if they have to be that way. Anti-racist, multicultural education scholars Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate contend that this happens because scholars across academia have not yet developed a cogent theory for understanding race and racism. Going one step further, Marxist scholars argue that, in addition to being theorized, race and racism must also be “historicized,” or located in a historical context, so that “political economies” or the “structural relations of production” out of which race and racism have emerged are made transparent.

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