Table Of ContentCritical Literacy: Theories and Practices 8:1 2014
Antiracism Without Guarantees:
A Framework for Rethinking Racisms in Schools
Timothy J. Stanley
University of Ottawa
Abstract
Due to their dynamic nature, racisms are manifested in classrooms and in the lives of young
people in complex ways. As a result, teachers need antiracist literacies. No single antiracist
strategy can work for all times and all places. To facilitate these literacies, this paper proposes a
framework for analyzing racisms and identifying possibilities for antiracist intervention. The
framework builds on the analysis of racism developed by Robert Miles and reworked by David
Theo Goldberg. It also builds on the author’s own experience in teaching antiracism. The
framework proposes that racisms exist in the plural; that all racisms involve racialization,
exclusion and consequences; and that the conditions for racism point to antiracist strategies of
challenging racialization, fostering deracialized inclusions and mitigating consequences. The
framework is illustrated with examples from Canadian schools. The results do not guarantee an
end to racisms, but can help to open up antiracist spaces in the lives of young people.
Introduction
Confusion over racisms and their consequences is widespread. Depending on time and place,
racisms vary in their effects, their public and academic representation and in the ways they are
commonly understood (e.g., Herzog, Sharon, & Leykin, 2008; Silva, 2012). Writing in vastly
different contexts, scholars note that public discourse often simply denies the existence of
racism as a systemic feature of local societies (e.g., Comack & Bowness, 2010; Wasserman,
2010). Indeed, such denial is arguably central to the functioning of racisms in the first place and
is itself an expression of their local configurations (Rajiva & Batacharya, 2010; van Dijk, 1992).
Among other things, this situation poses huge educational challenges. It makes discussion of
racist privilege extremely difficult, delegitimizes the testimonies of people oppressed by racisms,
reduces the problem of racism to the supposedly isolated acts and expressions of a few flawed
individuals and licenses the continued existence of racist systems (e.g., Dunn & Nelson, 2011;
Lichtenberg, 1998). But as David Theo Goldberg (2009) reminds us racisms are not just
prejudices or problematic categorizations, they are exclusions. The processes of colonialism,
nationalism and capitalism that built modern societies created racist exclusions (e.g., Allen,
1994; Stanley, 2011). Thus racisms are not the result of innate, self-evident difference, but they
are historical products that have been made over time and that have come to structure modern
societies materially and symbolically (Hall, 1980).
The complexity of racisms present teachers with an enormous challenge. In the best of
circumstances, teaching about racisms is an emotionally fraught process (Tatum, 1992;
Wagner, 2005). Individual teachers themselves are positioned differently in relation to racisms—
some are directly subject to racist oppressions, others belong to dominant groups. Indeed, the
same teacher can be differently positioned depending on where they teach. Teachers who feel
unprepared to respond to racisms may simply ignore its presence in their classrooms and in the
lives of their students (Kannen & Acker, 2008; Montgomery, 2013). This can have disastrous
consequences for young people. When inadequately responded to, small things (like racist
name-calling) can escalate into big things such as a pattern of a lack of educational success for
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some students from certain backgrounds, thus reproducing the marginalization and exclusion of
specific communities (Varma-Joshi, Baker, & Tanaka, 2004). Even in apparently multicultural
schools, students from historically excluded groups—such as in Canada First Nations, Inuit and
Métis people and students of colour—can remain marginalized in school spaces and curriculum
(James, 2007; Van Ingen & Halas, 2006). Over time, this contributes to forcing marginalized
groups out of schools (e.g., Dei, Mazzuca, McIssac, & Zine, 1997). Meanwhile, teachers who
are aware of the racisms surrounding them can often become isolated from their colleagues
who are not. But as Mica Pollock and her colleagues note (2010), many teachers see racism as
such a big issue, as so overwhelming, that they are simply paralyzed, unless they are given
concrete specific things they can actually do in their classrooms (Pollock, Deckman, Mira, &
Shalaby). However, given the complexity of racisms, that is, the ways in which different racisms
can be at play differently in the same location, can change from one moment to the next and the
different effects racisms have as they enter into other dynamics of oppression, no one technique
or approach however effective in one context can address all manifestations of racisms. Thus,
teachers need to be able to analyze the presence and effects of racisms in specific contexts and
so identify suitable antiracist strategies. They need antiracist literacies (e.g., Skerett, 2011).
Anti-Essentialist Antiracism
In this context, I offer a framework for analyzing racisms and developing antiracisms. My hope is
that this framework can help teachers and scholars alike to identify racisms in the everyday, to
better understand their consequences on the lives of the people around them and to identify
more effective strategies for challenging racisms and undoing their consequences in specific
contexts. I have used this framework to analyze the dynamics of a particular historical racism
(Stanley, 2011). I have also used it to trace the excluded knowledges arising from racisms and
colonialism that shape contemporary taken-for-granted cultural formations (Stanley, 2009) and
have argued that it provides a way of conceptualizing research more generally (Stanley, 2012).
The framework itself emerges from my reading of the antiracism literature (e.g., Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982; Taylor, Gillborn, & Ladson-Billings, 2009) and from more
than 30 years in antiracist education. During that time, I have found that avoiding essentialisms,
teaching about the histories of the systems that bring about the current moment and
acknowledging complexity and affect can lead to antiracist understanding. Today, scholars are
calling this approach “reflexive antiracism” (Kowal, 2013; Spanierman, Todd, & Anderson,
2009). However, anti-essentialist approaches to antiracism have been long advocated by
scholars and antiracist educators alike (e.g., Barzun, 1937/1965; Cohen, 1992). Anti-essentialist
antiracism is not a magic solution to the problem of racism. Rather like Stuart Hall’s (1986)
Marxism, it is deeply engaged with analyzing social formations and their consequences so as to
understand and harness the forces that make change without presuming that this will produce
an end to history. As Jennifer Kelly remarked, it is “antiracism without guarantees” (personal
communication, October 21, 2006).
This framework recognizes that there are multiple racisms and that all racisms involve three
conditions: racialization, exclusion and consequence. The framework further suggests that this
analysis of racisms can be used to strategize antiracisms that address one or more of the
conditions for racisms. It builds on a significant historical literature that establishes that there is
no one essential form of racism, but that all racisms are invented (e.g., Delacampagne, 1983;
Roediger, 1991). The framework also builds on an anti-essentialist, reflexive critique of “race” as
a social category that notes its structuring role in social experience without reifying the category
itself (Hall, 1980; American Anthropological Association [AAA], 2011). In this analysis racisms
are not sets of ideas so much as they are material organizations of the world integral to the
systems that have made the modern world. Racisms have literally been organized into the
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concrete of modern cities (Stanley, 2009). Thus, racisms do not only come into classrooms
through the attitudes of those who enter them; they are already there in official curricula, the
relations of power that exist between individuals whether students, teachers or administrators
and above all in the nationalizing state systems that frame them (e.g., Goldberg, 2009).
The idea that racisms involve racialization, exclusion and consequences comes from the
comprehensive analysis of racism developed by Robert Miles (1989). He argues that the term
“racism” must be used rigorously if it is to keep its value as an analytic category. According to
Miles all historic racisms have shared certain features in common. These features need to be
analyzed to determine whether something is racism. Specifically, all racisms involve
racialization, which he characterizes as the sorting of populations through the signification of
alleged biological or cultural difference. To be signified, these differences do not have to be
actual, but must only be represented as real. Racializations in and of themselves are not racist,
but begin to be when they become the basis for exclusions. Miles further argues that to count as
racism, racialized exclusions must produce significant negative consequences for the racialized
and excluded. For Miles, racisms are ideologies, which he understands to be socially located
ideas, i.e. belonging to a particular group or social class. For something to be racist it needs to
be motivated by these ideologies. For example, he argues that institutionalized racism only
exists when discourse about racist exclusion is present (Miles, 1989).
In his reworking of Miles, David Theo Goldberg (1993) argues that racism is more about effects
than intentions. He argues that racisms need to meet certain conditions and that in the end
these conditions are cultural. Thus, he accepts Miles’ characterization that racisms involve
racialization, exclusion and consequence, but rejects the idea that they are merely ideologies.
For Goldberg (1993) racisms are material relations, primarily seen in their effects on the
racialized and excluded, and it is thus something that has little to nothing to do with the
intentions of the excluders. Indeed, his more recent work (Goldberg, 2009) underlines that
racisms are exclusions and that different societies have different configurations of racism even if
they all share certain analytic features in common. Or as Stanley (2011) argues, racisms create
what Arendt (1973) called organized textures of life.
One advantage of this approach is that it both recognizes that racisms are not a single thing or
have a single “authentic” way of being. It recognizes that racisms can have different
configurations—institutional, economic, epistemological, ontological and so on—but that these
configurations change as specific features are challenged or questioned by the excluded.
Racisms as a result are dynamic systems that are constantly changing. If they appear to be
fixed, it is because someone is intervening to refix exclusions that would otherwise disappear
over time (Stanley, 2011). Thus racisms are integral to modern state formations (Omi & Winant,
1994; Goldberg, 2002). Indeed, Foucault (2003) argues, they are their raison d’être.
By providing a basis for analyzing racisms, this framework of racisms’ racialization, exclusion
and consequences also identifies starting points for developing antiracist strategies. Just as
there are racisms in the plural, there are antiracisms. Although at one level anything that
opposes a racism is an antiracism (Bonnett, 2000), antiracisms can in practice address any one
or all of the conditions for racisms; specifically, they can challenge racializations, foster
deracialized inclusions and/or mitigate negative consequences. This conceptualization
recognizes that racisms are dynamic. As people variously resist, circumvent or accommodate
themselves to particular racism practices, the racist practices change. However, all antiracisms
begin with the resistance of the racialized and excluded. This resistance is what ultimately
changes racisms. Consequently antiracism education necessarily begins with seeking out and
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bringing into circulation and engagement the knowledge and meanings of the racialized and
excluded.
Racisms and Antiracisms are Plural
The framework begins by recognizing that racisms exist in the plural. Racism is not a single
thing that takes some prototypical or essential form. Rather there are multiple racisms, each
with their own histories and consequences. For example, anti-Semitism in Europe is a different
racism from anti-First Nations racism in Canada. Thus, even though these two racisms might
combine together in a certain context, such as by creating the double dominance of a racialized
group, there are no automatic pre-determined connections between the racisms, and they can
still enact different consequences. In Canada today, for example, histories of anti-First Nations
racisms and of European anti-Semitism (along with many other racisms such as Islamophobia
and anti-African Canadian racisms) have formed classrooms as material spaces, but at a given
moment as power is exerted in the space of the classrooms, one racism may be more important
than another.
These consequences are also changed, enhanced or reduced as particular racisms intersect
with other social oppressions, especially those of gender, class, ethnicity, dis/ability and
sexuality (Dei, 1996). That racisms have no essential or inevitable form implies that they vary in
form and intensity with time and place. Just because a particular racism takes a specific form in
one context, there is no automatic reason that it would take this form in another. Because there
are different racisms in the world, it is possible for a particular racism to be at play in a specific
time and place and in the next moment another racism to be at play (Goldberg, 1993, Chapter
5). Individual racism can exist in conjunction with, or be articulated through, other racisms.
There are even situations in which one racism may be in direct opposition to another (Miles,
1989; Goldberg, 1993). Among other things, this also means that while racisms are continually
being enacted in relation to and through other oppressions, there is no automatic connection
between particular racisms and specific oppressions. If a racism is expressed through or in
conjunction with another oppression (e.g., is linked to patriarchy), why and how this is so in a
particular context needs to be investigated (e.g., Razack, 2004).
Finally, an anti-essentialist approach to racisms means that if particular racist configurations
endure—such as, for example, white supremacy in Canada and the United States—it is
because someone is continually intervening to refix meanings that would otherwise have
slipped, to re-racialize and exclude yet again. Thus racisms are systems in which their different
parts are articulated in relation to each other; as one part is moved, the whole system re-
articulates (Omi & Winant, 1994). Left to their own devices, human beings have made common
projects across the sharpest of social divides (e.g., Todorov, 1997; Agamben, 2002). If in
particular contexts they do not, power is actively preventing them from doing so (Foucault,
2003). Thus, recognizing that there are racisms in the plural draws attention to the operations of
power.
Consequences in Schools
One of the first consequences of this analysis is the need to recognize that teachers also exist
in the plural. They are positioned in relation to different racisms differently, even as the other
ways in which they are socially positioned such as social class, gender, age, ability/disability
shape their possibilities for antiracist praxis. Thus, if racisms are plural, so are antiracisms. At
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some level anything that opposes a racism is an antiracism (Bonnett, 2000). The most
confirmed of racists can have their antiracist moments and the most committed of antiracists,
their racist ones. Indeed it is possible for someone to be strongly antiracist with respect to one
racism and strongly racist with respect to another. Much the same holds true for most
institutions and cultural systems; they can be both racist and antiracist at the same time and in
different proportions in different contexts. However, if there are multiple racisms that can take
different forms in different contexts, no one antiracist strategy or intervention can work for all
times and all places. Racisms and antiracisms can come together in different combinations. Just
because a strategy has addressed one racism in a particular time and place, it does not
automatically follow that other racisms have even been affected. Further, the dynamic nature of
racisms implies that even if a particular racist practice has been successfully challenged, the
racism itself may not have disappeared, but have only changed shape. Here Marilyn Frye’s
birdcage metaphor is disturbingly appropriate. If racism were a birdcage, each individual strand
would not seem strong enough to hold anyone, but taken together all the bars are indeed strong
enough. Even as people eliminate one bar, other bars come into existence (as cited in Coates,
2003, p. 235; see also Takaki, 1979). Thus, if racisms have no essential form, neither do
antiracisms.
All of this has enormous implications for antiracist practices in schools. Schools are complex
places where different racisms can come together, where in one moment one racism is at play
and in another something completely different is at play. My analysis suggests that single-
focused strategies are not likely to be successful, even if they are successful in challenging a
specific expression of a specific racism. Despite this, much official antiracism still focuses on
prejudice reduction as a global strategy. Variations of this include such things as “teaching
tolerance.” The central idea behind these interventions is that if young people can be taught to
identify and question prejudices, including their own, and also learn to “tolerate” differences,
then they will reject racisms. In other words, they lead to approaches that are intended to repair
the head of the prejudiced (read as damaged) person and are based on an understanding of
racism as in the head, rather than as in the world (Lichtenberg, 1998).
An example of such a strategy can be found in the official Ontario Grade 10 Canadian History
curriculum. All of Ontario’s required history curriculum focuses on Canadian history, except for a
single Grade 10 unit on the Holocaust (Ontario, Ministry of Education [OMOE], 2013). This unit
requires that students “analyse the impact of the Holocaust on Canada and on Canadian
attitudes towards human rights” (OMOE, 2013, p. 117) and “explain the significance of the
Holocaust for Canada and Canadians” (OMOE, 2013, p. 134). Teachers are encouraged but not
required to teach this in terms of such things as “changes in Canadians’ responses to minority
groups” (OMOE, 2013, p. 117) and “antisemitism in Canada in the 1930 and 1940s” (OMOE,
2013, p. 134). This is the only place in the curriculum that a history of racist exclusion is
required to be taught.
Since one of the objectives of this curriculum is to teach literacy, defined as including “critical
thinking and reasoning skills to solve problems and make decisions related to issues of fairness,
equity, and social justice” (OMOE, 2013, p. 50), it would appear that this is the place where
racism is intended to be countered. Yet the only racism that the entire curriculum requires to be
taught is that of the Holocaust in Europe. For the framers of this curriculum, racism does not
shape Canadian society in any systemic way; rather it is an “attitude” leading to discriminatory
actions. Indeed, racism is only mentioned as an example of what could be taught under such
themes as “civic issues of local, national or global significance” (OMOE, 2013, p. 152), as
“attitudes towards and significant actions affecting ethnocultural minority groups (OMOE, 2013,
p. 113), or as “challenges” facing “immigrants and other ethnocultural minorities.” (OMOE, 2013,
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p. 131). Racism apparently only affects “minorities.” Its role in shaping the dominant group is not
mentioned at any time. The colonialism and white supremacy that created the country in the first
place, the system of racially-based voting rights in Canada that deprived those racialized as
Asians of the right to vote in British Columbia until 1949 and prevented so-called “Status
Indians” from voting throughout the country until 1960 and even the federal Canadian
government’s complicity in the Holocaust (Abella & Troper, 2000) magically disappear. The
forced removal of Japanese Canadians from British Columbia during the Second World War
and the Indian Residential Schools are mentioned (as optional examples of what can be taught),
but are never signified as genocides. Dispersal destroyed the Japanese Canadian community
as a community. Residential schools were deliberately designed to destroy First Nations
people’s indigenous cultures, language and religions by forcibly removing children from their
homes, a practice that Mr. Justice Murray Sinclair, the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of Canada, has correctly called genocide (Puxley, 2012; see also Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2012) and which continues to have devastating
consequences for First Nations, Inuit and Métis people today.
Even if this unit provides students with transformative experiences that lead them to question
prejudices and their consequences, it does not follow that they would be able to analyze actual
racisms such as the treatment of so-called Status Indians by the Canadian state. Nor is it even
clear that a unit on the Holocaust reduces modern antisemitism in Canada when contemporary
expressions of antisemitism are often linked to developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
(Berenbaum, 2008; League for Human Rights, 2014). Indeed, as Raby (2004) has shown, many
young people in Ontario high schools are unable to equate the term “racism” with the everyday
racist violence that they experience and even perpetrate, while studies elsewhere have shown
that racialized conflicts also get re-read through other lenses (e.g., Bucholtz, 2011). Thus,
specific racisms need specific interventions that engage fully with the specifics of context; no
single method can work for all time and all places.
To say that there is no one approach to antiracism that can work and that racisms have no
essential form is not to say that anything and everything can be racist. Here I heartily endorse
Miles’ (1989) project of defending the use of the term racism for purposes of analysis on the
grounds that understanding what racisms are and how they work makes effective antiracist
strategies possible. Central to Miles’ analysis as reworked by Goldberg (1993) is that all racisms
meet conditions of racialization, exclusion and consequence.
Conditions for Racisms: Racialization
The first condition for something to be racist is that it must involve racialization. This condition
analytically distinguishes racisms from other forms of social exclusion (Miles & Brown, 2003, p.
103). While itself controversial, racialization is the social process of making “race” (Fanon,
1967/1991; Murji & Solomos, 2005). The idea of racialization builds on a long-standing critique
of “race-thinking” (Barzun, 1937/1965; Arendt, 1944), of race as a scientifically valid concept
(e.g., Montagu, 1964) and as a culturally meaningful category (Gilroy, 2000). Indeed many
scholars have noted that race categorizations are invented and ascribed (e.g., Lewis, 2003;
Ibrahim, 2003). Racialization is fundamentally what Miles (1989, Chapter 3) calls a signifying
practice, one in which a particular aspect of real or imagined human difference is selected to
mark one group in relation to another, i.e., is signified in essentialized and inescapable ways.
Historically a number of factors have contributed to racialization including geographic and
institutional segregation, economic systems, apparent skin colour, cultural, religious or linguistic
differences, even (in the case of the Rwandan genocide) height. The characteristic selected for
racialization must be readily apparent or easily marked and seemingly unchanging. Racial
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categories are in fact cultural inventions. For example, the American historian Theodore Allen
(1994) has established that the idea of a white race was invented at the turn of the eighteenth
century to preserve the system of plantation slavery in Virginia. As a representational or
meaning-making process, racialization involves the representation of real or imagined human
cultural or phenotypical difference in essentialized terms (Miles, 1989, pp. 74-75).
Racialization is always context specific. It is possible to be racialized one way in one context,
and racialized differently in another. For example, historically in Britain until the 1980s, the term
“Black” was used to refer to people of East Asian and South Asian origins as well as of African
origins, and used by these people themselves as a term for organizing resistance (Hall, 1992), a
practice that would have seemed nonsensical in Canada and the United States during the same
era. In the nineteenth century United States, “Black” Irish Catholics became “White” (Ignatief,
1995). Even though racializing schemes are specific to particular geographic, historical and
cultural contexts, all racializations involve systems of absolute classification. One can either be
racialized as an “X” or a “Y”, or maybe even as a “Z,” but never both as an ”X” and a “Y,” let
alone an “X” “Y” “Z.” In the ascriptive logic of racialization, Barack Obama is a “Black” president
and Tiger Woods a “Black” golfer whatever their actual genetic makeup or self-definitions.
Notice that racialization is always relational as one group is racialized in relation to another. In
other words, if someone is racialized as an X, this racialization is being created in relation to at
least one other category that is not-X. The sentence “Barack Obama is a Black president” is
only meaningful in a social context in which people are sorted into racializaed categories of
“Black”, “White,” “Asian”, etc., and in which the Blackness of a president is sufficiently unusual
that it is worth mentioning (by contrast, few people would mention that Obama is a president
who wears suits). The Whiteness of other presidents goes rarely mentioned as it is the
unmarked, taken-for-grated and dominant category (Leonardo, 2004).
That racisms are constructed around the social imaginaries of racialization is one of the hardest
things to teach. Essentialized representations of racialized difference are so common that it is
part of people’s common sense and their everyday language (Hill, 2008). At the same time,
confusion is further created by the ways in which racism causes some groups’ racialized
experiences to be central to their identity and racialized categories come to overlap with
ethnicized ones (e.g., Kelly, 1998; 2004). However, once it is recognized that racisms lead to
the signification of difference, i.e., make race, rather than racial difference that leads to racisms,
possibilities for challenging racializations emerge. Strategies that undermine the very categories
upon which common sense is predicated draw attention to and critique the signifying practices
that constitute racializations (e.g., AAA, 2011). These strategies can also be used to challenge
what Jacques Barzun (1937/1965) called race-thinking, the assumption that some aspect of
human behaviour can be reduced to an essential characteristic of the person, or the tendency to
racialize categories that are not self-evidently racial. For example, in English Canada discourse,
the term “Canadian” is almost always racialized, but never marked as such. In the excerpt from
the Grade 10 Ontario History Curriculum cited above, “Canadians” are contrasted to
“immigrants” and “minority groups” and problems of racism linked to the adaptation of “minority
groups” to Canadian society (OMOE, 2013). This is despite the fact immigrants and minority
group members are also Canadians. Meanwhile the nationalizing term is never contrasted to
people racialized as “white.” No one would say, except perhaps ironically, “Canadians want
white people to leave the country.” Taken-for-granted racialization of national categories was
evident in the summer of 2012, when the Bank of Canada announced plans for a new $100 bill
that would have had a sketch of an Asian woman scientist. Focus groups objected that the
Asian woman was not Canadian and so the bill was instead released with a sketch of a
racialized white woman on it (Beedy, 2012; see also Gilmour, 2012). Apparently a racialized
white person can stand for the nation, but someone else cannot.
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For many young people, name-calling is often the first direct experience of racism targeted
specifically at themselves that they encounter, and this first experience often takes place in
school. Racist name-calling is not only a common, everyday occurrence, but also, when
teachers and principals respond inadequately, directly leads to disengagement from school
(Varma-Joshi et al., 2004). Young people can also use racist name-calling strategically to win
out in specific situations (Troyna & Hatcher, 1992), while school is also a site for trying on
racialized ascriptions and self-definitions (Lewis, 2003). As the accounts of survivors of Indian
Residential Schools show, schools have enacted extreme physical and psychic violence upon
young people for no other reason other than their racialized identity (Legacy of Hope
Foundation [LOHF], n.d.). Historically, schools have also been the place where “scientific” race
classifications have been taught, while today they can be used to explore the complexity of
human genetic variation and to undermine biologistic conceptions of social difference (contrast
Stanley, 1990 to AAA, 2011). Thus, racializations can and should be challenged as part of an
overall strategy including the promotion of new language that acknowledges racialized
differences without re-inscribing the essentialized categories that are part of the problem in this
first place. For example, in my own work I attempt to avoid unreflective racial categorization and
am careful to specify how I use racializing terms. Thus I refer to “people racialized as white”
rather than “white people” and identify whether I am using the term “Chinese” as a racialization,
a national or ethnic identity or to refer to a civilization (Stanley, 2011). In classrooms,
challenging racializations can be as sophisticated as helping students to spot essentializing
language themselves or as simple as encouraging students to question whether all the people
in the racialized group actually share the group’s alleged characteristic such as by asking
whether Canadians, immigrants and minority groups are, in fact, mutually exclusive categories.
Racializations tend to be remarkably stable, even though the meanings associated with
racializations should slip as people engage with each other. In this respect, racializations are no
different that any other representations; once they enter into circulation their original meanings
change as people remake and rework them for their own purposes (Hall & Jhally, 1996/2002;
2002). Even if particular racializations go in and out of fashion over time, their underlying
grammars (Rizvi, 1993) remain the same (as with Canadian nationalist categories, see Francis,
1997). This suggests that racializations are not only anchored in representation, but in
processes of power. Here Goldberg (2009) reminds us that much antiracist effort goes into
challenging racializations, when the real effort needs to be addressed to the “too often
overlooked threats and manifestations of violence and violations, disease, death, and
destruction activated, represented, and rationalized in the name of race” (p. 28). This calls
attention to the second and key condition for racisms, that of exclusions.
Conditions for Racisms: Exclusions
Racisms organize racializations into exclusions. Racialized exclusions can take different forms
including: social, economic, political, territorial and symbolic. They can be exclusions from
certain social or institutional positions, from having one’s meanings seriously engaged (as in the
case of inadequate responses to name-calling). They can even be exclusions from life itself.
Racialized exclusions of one kind often act in and through racialized exclusions of other kinds
as well as in conjunction with the exclusions of gender, social class, sexuality, dis/ability and
age, but racialized exclusions are always purposive. They are made, organized into a fabric of
life (Arendt, 1973), even if the original circumstances of this organization have been lost to
memory. They are not necessarily the result of bad intentions, but are matter of fact; someone is
either excluded or not (Goldberg, 1993, p. 98). In the end, racialized exclusions are things that
one human being or group of human beings does to another or others. Finally, if someone is
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being excluded, someone else is being included. Therefore racist exclusions always exist in
conjunction with equally racist inclusions. Creating such inclusions is the point of racisms. E.g.,
in North American today, creating the dominance of people of European origins over the
territories of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people, of Native Americans and Mexicans, and
keeping others out of the dominant position is not a side effect of the dominant racism. Rather,
these exclusions exist in order to create that dominance (e.g., Leonardo, 2004). So too the
exclusions of the Ontario History/Social Studies Curriculum are not simply products of the
prejudices of the framers of the curriculum but reflect the wider articulations of dominance that
constitute the Canadian nation state.
If racisms are predicated on racialized exclusions, antiracisms need to engage with creating or
fostering deracialized inclusions. Creating inclusions that challenge large-scale exclusions is not
easy. For example, no single change will undo the exclusion of people from the quality of life,
the goods and services enjoyed by other people in the country for no other reason than that
they are racialized under the Indian Act (see Cannon & Sunseri, 2011).
However, the micro-spaces of the school offer a rich curriculum of possibility. Possibility is
especially evident when we consider how to respond to the ways in which racialized bodies are
located in and around schools. How young people experience racialized social geographies
plays an important role in their understandings of the world (Frankenberg, 1993). Carl James
(2007) has shown that, even in highly multicultural contexts, marginalized students can still be
excluded from most of the spaces of the school. In some high schools, marginalized boys take
control over the middle of hallways, making it difficult for others to move around in the school, a
situation that some teachers, especially women from the dominant group, find intimidating.
These students then become the focus of the policing efforts of the staff, leading to their being
bounced out of the school. However, as James points out, this grouping in the hallway reflects
the fact that these students are excluded from the rest of the spaces of the school, both the
symbolic ones of the curriculum and the physical ones of the classrooms. In effect, they belong
nowhere. The hallway becomes the one space that they can control. Racialized groupings of
this kind are not unique to urban schools, but affect First Nations children in schools throughout
Canada (Van Ingen & Halas, 2006). Defusing such situations begins by recognizing the
racialized mapping taking place, i.e., the material organization of racialized bodies within the
school, with documenting the exclusion to bring it to people’s consciousness, followed by a
series of projects to engage students and make all of the school’s material and symbolic spaces
welcoming. This may not end the larger organization of exclusion in the rest of the world, but it
can create a space that enables antiracist engagement.
Conditions for Racisms: Consequences
Racialization and exclusion alone do not make racisms. Historically many groups subject to
racism have found it necessary to come together separately from their oppressors to organize
resistance or survival (as with many First Nations organizations in Canada). Although these
groupings are racialized exclusions, it would do violence to the concept of racism to call such
actions in and of themselves racist (although eventually over time they might become such).
Thus, the third condition for racisms is that they must have significant negative consequences
for the excluded (Miles, 1989, esp. p. 134; Goldberg, 1993, Chapter 5). Among other things this
means that to determine whether a racism is present, the consequences of the racialized
exclusion on the excluded themselves must be considered. This in turn requires that the
meanings and self-representations of those who are racialized and excluded must be brought
into knowledge and engaged. Indeed, failing to do so re-enacts the very racialized exclusions
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Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices 8:1 2014
that are sought to be transformed (e.g., St. Denis, 2011). As a result this condition for racism
rapidly leads to a condition for antiracism.
This condition alone has enormous consequences for teaching practices. Antiracist
understanding necessarily starts with seeking out and bringing into knowledge the self-
representations of the excluded. We can see this reality in the case of name-calling. Teachers
and school officials need to engage with the actual hurt this behaviour does by engaging with
the feelings and experiences of those who are excluded through such behaviour. A similar
pattern is also evident in the effects of grouping. At a larger level, racist systems survive
because the relations of power at work ensure that the meanings created by the excluded do
not need to be engaged by those whom the racism empowers. Thus, the educational challenge
is to remake classrooms and teaching practices so that the meanings of the excluded can be
engaged and acts of power understood. Part of the challenge is to equip students to ask about
who and what is excluded, to help them find where these people are and to begin the process of
making sense of the meanings and experiences of those who are excluded. This is not just in
terms of the people in classroom, but is even more importantly about opening the classroom to
excluded knowledges.
No classroom can ever represent all of the meanings of all of the people of the world. However
it is possible to move beyond the Eurocentric limitations of official curriculum by using as many
spaces as possible to bring into our classrooms the meanings and experiences of as many
people as possible and to engage students’ complex connections to people and places
elsewhere in the world. Today as never before we have resources that allow young people to
directly engage with the meanings of others. Thus, even the Ontario Grade 10 History
Curriculum can be taught in antiracist ways. This involves meeting the curriculum’s expectations
by bringing young people into contact with the stories and life experiences of people who are
racialized and excluded. Today this can often be done through the internet. For example, the
testimonies of survivors of Indian Residential Schools (LOHF, n.d.), of Chinese Canadians who
lived through decades of institutionalized racism and forced separation from their families (e.g.
Chinese Canadian Stories Project, n.d.), or the histories of African Canadians (Historica
Canada, n.d.), can all be brought into any classroom.
A Strategy for Challenging Racisms
The strategies of challenging racializations, organizing inclusions and mitigating consequences
come together in multiple ways in specific situations. For example, they do so in developing
techniques to respond to what have been called racial micro-aggressions. These are the
everyday body languages, verbal behaviours and racializing assumptions that create categories
of children who feel welcomed in a school and those who feel that the school is not for them.
They can be as simple as failing to learn how to pronounce children’s actual names and failing
to ensure that students can see themselves in what is being taught (Kohli & Stolórzano, 2012).
Whether failing to learn some children’s names comes from laziness, lack of imagination or a
sense of linguistic inadequacy, it creates effects, making two categories of people, those whose
names the teacher knows (and hence are more likely to feel welcomed) and those whose
names the teacher does not. If this aligns with categories of socially imagined difference, the
naming practice racializes people into two categories, those whose names are worth knowing
and those whose names are not. This can rapidly become racialized exclusions. Thus, these
micro-exclusions of bad teaching practice articulate with the broader organization of racisms in
the world, reproducing them in the everyday experiences of young people. They reflect the lack
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Description:framework for analyzing racisms and identifying possibilities for antiracist It also builds on the author's own experience in teaching antiracism. The.
