What is Anti-Racist Pedagogy?

Anti-racist pedagogies interrogate socially constructed notions of race and challenge systems and structures that re/produce and sustain racial disparities. This pedagogy is explicitly conscious of race, Indigeneity, ethnicity, language, accent, migration experiences, and place of birth, as well as intersections with gender, ability, social class, sexuality, and faith/worldview/religion. It addresses not only experiences and expressions of racism and intersecting systems of oppression, but also the social construction of whiteness by exploring how the knowledge, values, behaviours, interests and needs of White people have become privileged and normalized as the status quo or the norm in society. Anti-racist pedagogies acknowledge the prevalence of white supremacy as an economic, cultural, and political system that maintains power asymmetries, normalizes whiteness as the standard, and maintains control among White people (Frances Lee Ansley as cited in Gillborn, 2015). In challenging white supremacy and normativity, anti-racist pedagogies focus on centering a multiplicity of intersectional and experiential ways of knowing and being. Sharing the counter-narratives of Black, Indigenous, and racialized people and communities, challenges majoritarian narratives that dominate schooling and society and often create negative associations with non-white “Others” that are historically and intentionally denied access, opportunity, belonging, and education.

Anti-racist pedagogy is an active process of understanding, exposing and dismantling racism that moves within and beyond the classroom. It is an organizing effort for institutionalized and social change. This process requires educators to reflect on their social positions and apply these insights and anti-racist practices in their research, disciplines, institutions, and communities (Kishimoto, 2018). When instructors are teaching from an anti-racist approach, they must explicitly name and talk about race and locate themselves in these conversations. They must also acknowledge the historical and structural roots of racism and oppression and investigate how race and racism play out presently in their classrooms, education systems, and society at large.

Why Do We Need Anti-Racist Pedagogy?

Anti-racist approaches are needed to identify how racism is built into our social structures and systems and affords rights and protections for white people while reproducing racial inequity for Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities. These include racial inequities in education, justice, healthcare, politics, the media, housing, employment, policing, and more. Anti-racist pedagogies must also counter white, middle-class dominant norms in educational settings. When educators confront white students with the realities of racism from the perspective of racialized people without addressing the systemic constructions of whiteness, marginalized voices are dismissed, and learning is delayed (Leonardo, 2004; Reason & Evans, 2007).

What are Examples of Racist/Oppressive Education?

Examples of racist or oppressive education include teaching practices, materials, or curricula that:

• Use language or images that are offensive or derogatory.
• Promote or reinforce stereotypes and ideologies of “otherness.”
• Ignore or silence the contributions, lived realities, and knowledge systems, of racialized peoples or reduce their full range of human experience to deficit, trauma, and harm.
• Fabricate ideas of racial and other group-based hierarchies through “objectivity,” “scientific findings,” or other racist uses of research.
• Fail to center or critically analyze race and power.
• Fail to acknowledge, value, and engage students of colour.
• Fail to address racial slurs, microaggressions, and racist behaviours in person and online.

Racist and oppressive education can also manifest through policies that are silent on addressing racism, oppression, or histories of exclusion for racialized students (Galloway et al., 2019). Educational policies and practices can also be oppressive when they are designed to disproportionately target students of colour, for example, policies surrounding disciplinary action. Moreover, policies specifically designed to counter racial inequities can be oppressive if they utilize deficit-based or race-neutral language (Galloway et al., 2019).

Anti-Racist Pedagogy is Not

To engage in anti-racist pedagogy, instructors must create conditions for charged learning environments. In these spaces, students unlearn normative constructs in society and learn about knowledge systems that have long been marginalized. Instructors accept and expect resistance and center multiple and often contradictory truths. This will likely be an uncomfortable process for many people. However, it is important to distinguish between comfort and safety, especially for students with greater privilege in the classroom. The fantasy of comfort needs to be challenged by centring discomfort as a necessary part of this work. Safety acknowledges historical and present-day power asymmetries that result in relations of domination and subordination and disproportionate outcomes and realities politically, economically, socially, culturally, and psychically. Educators should accept and establish that anti-racist pedagogy is not:

• Easy
• “Positive”
• Comfortable
• Linear/neat/orderly
• Polite
• A quick fix
• A resume-builder