Race Ethnicity and Education

This article explores how Gypsies, Roma and Travellers are positioned in relation to current decolonising work in higher education. Drawing on interviews with fifteen equality, diversity, and inclusion staff at twelve universities in Britain, we examine the extent to which the decolonising agenda tackles anti-Gypsyism. We find that, despite recognition of the importance of including Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in decolonising initiatives, they are overlooked and omitted from institutional discourses and strategies. We identify and discuss the main barriers to the inclusion of these groups in university decolonising work, conceptualising these within a thematic framework of factors relating to invisibility, ignorance, and unease. Arguing that anti-Gypsyism is a core component of both coloniality and established, institutionalised whiteness, we advocate for an extension of Critical Race Theory and the development of a RomaniTravellerCrit to expose and address the impacts of anti-Gypsy and anti-Roma racism and discrimination in higher education. ARTICLE HISTORY

Drawing upon culturally centered practices and tenets of critical pedagogy, our research explores how the Karibu Freedom School (KFS) cultivated Black Joy for its scholars. We use the baobab tree to symbolize our observations at KFS. The baobab tree collects water and nutrients in the wet season and nourishes the people and animals of the region during the dry season. Like the baobab tree, KFS cultivates Black Joy to nourish and sustain our scholars throughout the year. Through ethnographic observations, semi-structured focus group interviews, and endarkened storytelling that forms the composite narrative of a Black girl, we found KFS cultivated Black Joy through humanizing, restorative, cultural, educational, and social practices. Considering our findings, we believe that through intentional design and exemplars like KFS, we can create educational spaces and inform teaching practices that authentically support and sustain Black student populations’ joy and academic success within and beyond traditional educational institutions.

English language teaching (ELT) is a racially stratified industry that privileges whiteness as a norm. Drawing upon a Women of Colour feminist research design that draws on both racial capitalism and intersectional perspectives, this paper examines the experiences of 18 Chinese women teachers in the ELT industry through an innovative interviewing approach called Tucao. Our study reveals how the ELT industry in China constructs whiteness as a profitable investment for Chinese people – and, in so doing, constructs Chinese women as subordinate, exploitable, and ineffective teachers. These teachers, however, quietly oppose this gendered racism in the workplace. While this study focuses on the Chinese context, the study introduces the concept of ‘White profitability’ to explain how the commodification of whiteness underpins intersectional racism experienced by teachers of colour in the global ELT industry. The study contributes methodologically, empirically and theoretically to the scholarship on racial capitalism, intersectionality, and the commodification of race and gender in educational contexts.

Neoliberal multiculturalism is a global racialization process that works as a unifying discourse for the rationalization of neoliberal policies within U.S. global ascendancy and capitalist development. Invoking state multiculturalism, e.g., “diversity” or “equity,” neoliberal multiculturalism is officially antiracist. Official antiracism portrays multiculturalism as being at its core while limiting discussions of race and racism to sanctioned racial discourses. Using neoliberal multiculturalism as a framework, this paper presents a critical analysis of the racial ideology presented in TNTP’s founding teacher training curriculum designed specifically for its Teaching Fellows. The analysis demonstrates how official antiracism can function in curriculum designed to train fast-tracked selective alternative route program teachers to teach predominantly Black, Latino and immigrant students in lower-income neighborhood public schools.

Two problematics are exposed and explored within this paper which currently undermine the United Kingdom’s international commitments to address racial inequality and injustice: (1) the routes to national, regional, and international intellectual authority via the academic profession, particularly the assigned leadership position of full professor or ‘chair’; and (2) the effects of dysconscious data literacy, which is out of step with international mechanisms and agendas to combat racism and xenophobia. This is undertaken through a critical quantitative analysis of administrative data about the socio-demographic composition and employment conditions of academic staff in the devolved nations of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Iniquitous employment conditions revealed how the social determinants of ‘race’, ‘sex’, ‘nationality’, and ‘religious belief impact academics’ access to employment and participation once employed; particularly in the discipline of Education. Shortcomings in categorisation and reporting of official data serve to obfuscate transparency and accountability about inequality.