Engaging Equity: New Perspectives on Anti-racist Education

Nanette Morton teaches English at McMaster University in Hamilton.

Engaging Equity addresses the realities of racism and oppression, and
attempts to provide strategies of resistance. As editor Leeno
Karumanchery notes in his introduction, the relationship between the
oppressors and the oppressed is “constructed through discourse,” as
institutional structures (such as schools and the media) subtly and
non-violently effect the subjugation of the marginalized.

In Part 1, essays describe the effect racial categorization has on
human relationships. While racial categorization is long-standing, it is
also ongoing. In “Nationalist Practices, Citizenship and Fantasy
Post–9/11,” Kayleen Oka writes that after 9/11 nationalist rhetoric
is explicitly racist, since “skin color and other cultural markers
(e.g., turbans, veils and ‘foreign’/undesirable accents) are all
used to frame certain bodies as less/un-American.” Notable too, is
Henry Giroux’s essay on the pedagogies of denial. Giroux writes that
neo-liberal discourse actually supports the racism it ostensibly
deplores because it “wraps itself in what appears to be an
unassailable appeal to common sense.” Economic oppression is blamed on
market forces, rather than on systemic racism, while the ideology of
colour-blindness allows whites to ignore the role race plays in power
relations.

The essays in Part 2 explore the impact oppression has in schools and
how it is minimized. In “Lessons in Civic Alienation: The Color and
Class of Betrayal in Public Education,” Michelle Fine and April Burns
note that marginalized youth “see, hear and live social arrangements
of class and race stratification every day, and ... come to understand
their ‘place in the social hierarchy.’” Given a substandard
education, these students are blamed for their own oppression. Fine and
Burns write, however, that poor and under-resourced schools can provide
rigorous education—and point to schools in New York, Philadelphia, and
Chicago that lead the way.

Finally, in Part 3, essays detail efforts to combat systemic racism.
George J. Sefa Dei encourages educators to “help students acknowledge
and respond positively to difference” and “to see difference as a
site of strength, power and agency” even as they recognize that
prevailing notions of excellence mask white privilege.

Engaging Equity is a must-read for those combating systemic racism.