Will Brehm  0:58
Janelle Scott and Monisha Bajaj, welcome to FreshEd.

Janelle Scott  1:15
Thank you for having us. Yeah, we’re excited.

Monisha Bajaj  1:17
Thank you for having us.

Will Brehm  1:18
Monisha, I wanted to ask you, were you surprised that this World Yearbook of Education was the first one that was specifically devoted to race?

Monisha Bajaj  1:28
I’m actually not surprised. I think what scholars like Arathi Sriprakash, Leon Tikly, Sharon Walker who have the first chapter in this volume and other scholars like Zeena Zakharia and Francine Menashy, who were on your podcast recently have shown us is that we do have what Charles Mills calls these epistemologies of ignorance, these erasures, these invisible forces in our field that are there, but not named and not acknowledged. And so, the World Yearbook of Education was first published in 1965. It’s come out annually since then focusing on issues such as church and state, higher education, rural development, gender and education, globalization. And while these are all pertinent issues to examine comparatively and internationally across contexts, it is telling that it’s taken six decades for the series to acknowledge race, racialization, anti-racism in a volume in global and comparative perspective. And you know, Janelle and I were privileged to take on this task six decades in and to put our vision to this volume. And I think it did come at a time when, in 2020, there was a global reckoning around race, we saw kind of the global reaction to George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police officers – state forces. And you know, I think a lot of movement in our field. The first Comparative Education Review issue focused on racial justice and Black Lives Matter just dropped earlier this week. And I think there’s a lot that’s happening in our field that is giving voice to these erasures, these silences, that are long overdue for us to examine.

Will Brehm  3:02
It’s definitely a timely topic. I was very happy to see it when it came out. What I noticed right away just from the title even is that you didn’t use the word race, you use the word racialization. And so, Janelle, could you tell me a little bit about what the difference is in your mind between race and racialization? And why you privilege the latter in the title?

Janelle Scott  3:24
Monisha and I agreed when we had our initial conversation about taking on this incredible project, that while we think it’s very important to continue to advance studies of race in social science research, what was much more interesting and conceptually generative, was the concept of racialization. So, really seeing what I think social science has tended – for the most part, not exclusively – social science has tended to treat race as a classification system to be studied, to be understood in terms of how groups fare in society, right? So, relatively fixed, even when sociologists and other social scientists understand that there are no biological bases for these categories, the classification systems are very powerful for things like measurement, or evaluation, or assessment of all sorts of things, educational systems, programmatic interventions. Racialization as a concept -in the book, we join racialization with racial formation, and I think there’s some disagreement in the literature about how either of those are different and what they afford if they are different. But together, I think the heft that they provide analytic gaze is they help us to see how people or groups come to be classified is not just about identity, it’s not just about these sorts of affinities that people might very legitimately have, but rather they’re connected to political, social, economic dynamics that need to be unpacked because racialization has had incredible consequences for people’s life opportunities. And this focuses on education, specifically, the kinds of education that people are allowed to enjoy is very segregated and stratified. And we believe that racialization as a concept and the study of racial formation specifically within that helps us to understand and unpack those dynamics and the similarities across the world that we see.

Will Brehm  5:23
And so, how would something like racial formation connect to something like ethnicity or even nationalism, which I guess is a bit more difficult to even found and understand and it maybe slips more into an identity in that sense?

Janelle Scott  5:38
If we think about ethnicity, as I think it’s traditionally thought about, it’s sort of shared language, shared cultural practices, sometimes shared religion, or just overall shared customs, there are ways in which people lean very deeply into that and are very invested in ethnic identity. But ethnicities are also created through these forces of colonialism and enslavement. They have historical legacies that in the words of Hartman, that sort of afterlives, we’re still making sense of and so I think when we think about ethnicity, and then related nationality, which is always I think, intertwined with citizenship and who gets to be counted as a citizen of any given nation, but it also raises the question of how nations come to be in the first place. And in many cases, we know that nations were formed through violence. And so, it’s hard to unpack, even when these categories bring people incredible joy and power in terms of their shared identity, it’s really important to unpack how we got to these places, and to attend to efforts within local communities, or in particular contexts to really undo and remake these categories.

Will Brehm  6:42
In the edited collection, you really emphasize the use of history in this sense to understand colonialism, to understand Empire and how that has contributed to these racial formations to look a particular way and to have a particular politics in a way,

Janelle Scott  6:59
Right! So that this idea that colonialism followed these very predictable patterns of invasion and settlement. And there’s sort of dispossession of language, of land, of culture, of history, but then also the creation of very specific racialized hierarchies that even when colonialism officially ends, the local context, local countries are still dealing with the vestiges of those hierarchies, when we think about contemporary issues.

Monisha Bajaj  7:26
To just add on to that, when we look at nationalism in the sort of nation-state formation that came out of colonialism, we have several chapters that touch on experiences in Brazil, and there’s this sort of concept of racial democracy that erases folks’ sort of racialization, in the attempt to say, well, we’re all part of this racial democracy, and these kind of color evasive attempts to de-race people in a way, like, erase these kinds of histories. And so, what we’re trying to do is bring that back into the conversation and look at these histories, look at these social processes that have created categories of racial formation, racialization across and not assume. I think, in the field of international comparative education, there’s this kind of belief that cross national comparisons are the kind of the gold standard of what the field is about. And we’re saying, well, actually, there’s a lot of distinction and differentiation and experiences within and among nation states as well. So, when you look at, for example, Brazil, you’re gonna have very different experiences across region, across different racial groups, across different histories and different moments. You know, the incentivizing of European settlement that displaced Indigenous folks that also denied Afro-Brazilians rights that were then being offered to European settlers who were being incentivized to come. And so, we see this in so many places where there are so many inter-lapping transnational histories that allow us to really question and interrogate some of the assumptions that have held in our field for a long time.

Will Brehm  8:50
I really like this idea of the afterlives of colonization and Empire. At least European colonization is over there are these sorts of ongoing legacies that continue to impact the present. And so, could you give a couple examples of how these afterlives actually impact education and comparative education in particular?

Monisha Bajaj  9:10
Well, I think that this concept is really useful in so much of the book and so much of our field as well. Western schooling, as it was set up, was set up to stratify and differentiate and to sort, right? Who’s useful to the colonial enterprise and who’s not? And you don’t see a huge challenging or radical transformation of that as the process of decolonization politically unfolded, as new systems were being set up. You see expanded access to Western schooling and mass expansion, but you don’t really see a radical transformation of the purposes and the logics that are baked into the system in a way that I think is necessary and needed. And in the chapter in the book that’s entitled Education for Subordination: Youth and the Afterlives of Coloniality and Racialization in Africa by scholars Krystal Strong, Rehana Odendaal, and Christiana Kallon Kelly, they do a great job of taking this concept and applying it to three settings that are former British colonies in Sub Saharan Africa: Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South Africa. And they look at these kinds of afterlives, these colonial vestiges and how youth are contesting this in different ways across the continent. They look at some of the protests to state repression in Nigeria, they look at the Rhodes Must Fall/Fees Must Fall movements in South Africa that have galvanized university campuses and really tackle how even among these different British colonies, how education was set up in different ways and how these afterlives in their own way are also distinct. And I think in other work, both that’s in this book and elsewhere in our field, we see these kind of bifurcated systems of how education was set up for an elite and then for masses or the denial of education to masses of people under colonial rule and who was privileged to be able to access and then gain access, perhaps, to a colonial language and the reproduction over time of those elite privileges and that access in certain communities and then that denial and the differentiation across in different settings. And I think the concept of the afterlife of colonialism is so fruitful for us to apply to the study of so many places. And in the book, because it’s a volume that is sort of one of the first to really take on these issues, we do in the conclusion offer a lot of research questions, if any of your listeners are graduate students looking for dissertation topics. We offer our ideas on what we think would be great topics of study to really examine these issues much more in the field because there is so much to look at in terms of applying these lenses and understanding different realities globally.

Janelle Scott  11:43
I think just to, if I could, tag on, I think one of the things that our book is attempting to push in a comparative way is to really take seriously the concept of whiteness and the power that whiteness holds in transnational contexts. And so, if we understand race to be a biological fiction, whiteness is also, right? And the idea of a white person is also a biological fiction. But the power of whiteness as a concept means that proximity to whiteness, however, whiteness is determined and racialized in any particular nation or across national contexts, means that those who are closest to whiteness tend to have better educational opportunities. And then because of that better educational and social outcomes. And so, the book is also really trying to encourage our field to think very seriously and take very seriously the concept and construct of whiteness, and how we think about it not only in terms of what we study but how we interrogate our own positionality.

Will Brehm  12:41
I like how whiteness is part of the racialization project. I mean, it’s sort of essential to it in a way. Yeah, it’s a really great point. And it does raise all these difficult questions that definitely need a lot more research. And to make things even more, I guess, complex, you also add in the issue of global capitalism, and in particular, racial capitalism, and how the economic system also contributes to this process of racialization. So, how do you see that process happening and unfolding?

Janelle Scott  13:12
Well, I think we were informed, like many who study racial capitalism, by the work of Cedric Robinson, who was really trying to argue that this idea of capitalism as a sort of modernizing force, really, that the idea that it was that force left out this question of race and racialization. And that you couldn’t talk about capitalism, from Robinson’s perspective, without talking about racism because capitalism, as it’s growing and expanding, is doing that in tandem with the expansion of colonialism. And colonialism is fundamentally based on racial dispossession, right? So, that it becomes very important to think about racial capitalism and its relationship to education because in education, we see so many applications of that in terms of funding, in terms of sorting mechanism, and more recently in terms of efforts to advance privatization of state systems. So, those are some examples, I think, where racial capitalism becomes very central to the role education plays in these dynamics.

Will Brehm  14:15
That last one, could you explain that a little bit more about how the role of the sort of privatization in the private sector and how that’s connected to issues of racial capitalism?

Janelle Scott  14:25
Well, I think we see many of these efforts to privatize what were formerly public or state-operated systems very much been in response to rights movements, right? The expansion of civil rights, the expansion of rights for disabled children, linguistic rights where a big part of our book in terms of if you think about the chapter on Black Lives Matter at school, or our chapter by Renato Emerson dos Santos on Brazil is that we really try and capture that these processes of racialization and racial formation have always been contested. They continue to be contested. And a part of that contestation have been rights movements to expand educational opportunity, to repair what has been done in the past through all sorts of interventions, right curricula interventions, but also fiscal interventions. And very much the rise of neoliberalization and privatization have pushed against those movements, right? These movements are instead pushing for a remaking of the state to create more private markets, to allow the private sector to deliver social services. And so, I think it’s very difficult to separate those movements from these broader trends that we’ve been talking about.

Will Brehm  15:38
And this book, in the field, let’s say, of comparative and international education, is the “World” Yearbook, right? It’s supposed to be global in orientation and has been in the field as Monisha said earlier for decades. I’m just wondering, some of the big institutions in our field, how does racialization sort of play out inside those institutions, or is connected to those institutions in any way?

Monisha Bajaj  16:02
I think racialization at its core is shaped by social forces that have ascribed a racial character to systems like education, as Janelle was talking about earlier. So, any processes of categorizing, ranking, marginalizing those are imbued with racialized logics, right? So, if you look at so many colonial settings, Rwanda, how Hutus and Tutsis were differentiated using race science and eugenics of the time – measuring people’s heads, their noses, etc. – to decide who would get colonial access and privileges. We have a chapter in the book on the racialization of castes in South Asia and how caste has existed for millennia. But that took on a different character under the colonial period where the British are taking censuses of people of different castes and kind of documenting them in a schedule of who was ranked higher and lower, et cetera. It didn’t mean that that practice didn’t exist earlier, but it just took on a different character under the colonial system. And so, these institutions that we have UNESCO, the World Bank, the United Nations, our academic organizations, CIES as a field, these are also imbued with racialized logics that existed at the time of their formation and the kind of baked in structures and ideas and ideologies that are there. And so, I think what we are calling for as many other scholars, as we mentioned, in the book and outside the book in our field is to make visible where those racialized logics exist and how they operate. So, if we think about the international development field, the distinctions between local and international or expatriate staff, right? Who has a big Jeep and is rolling around with their US dollar salary, and who’s doing the work on the local rate, and who’s allowed access to different things? If we look at the United Nations, who has veto power over efforts that are trying to be undertaken? You can have 195 countries vote for something but if it’s vetoed by one of the Security Council permanent members, it’s not going to happen. The IMF and the World Bank are – unlike the UN – not set up one country, one vote. They’re set up to be the size of the economy determines how much vote you have. So, the US and Western Europe are always going to be a major force in that. And we have so many examples of these structures of aid conditionality and things like that, that are racialized to their core, when you look at them. When we think about them through these lenses, you can’t unsee it once you see it. And I think for so long, our field has not wanted to look at these things. And when I think about work that Arathi Sriprakash and Leon Tikly and Sharon Walker and other folks are doing, it’s about these erasures that are deliberate in a way, right? It’s an obfuscation of naming ethnicity, or saying race is a U.S. issue, without wanting to name it, even though it’s there and it exists. And so much of how our field operates privileges people from the Global North going and taking up any role that they would like anywhere in the world, whereas someone from the Global South can’t just come to the U.S. and become an expert on gender in the U.S. as easily as a student from the Global North can go spend three months in Bangladesh and become an expert on that issue. So, I think these issues are definitely there and in the systems that we operate in, and that we have to consistently interrogate and put those critical lenses on to.

Will Brehm  19:17
Sometimes I feel like these institutions, the structures that they create, and the racial hierarchies they reproduce, it almost makes it feel impossible to try and change them. I mean, they have such sort of institutional logics and the white privilege just sort of gets reproduced over and over again. And these big institutions like the World Bank and UNESCO and it’s sort of like how on earth is this going to change? But then when you think about your focus of racialization, and sort of this notion of racial formation as a process, it actually made me a bit hopeful, because you realize processes can change, right? You can interrupt, you can adapt, you can alter a process. So, is there any examples or ways in which this racialization project can be interrupted? Can be changed away from some of the sort of power dynamics that we currently see playing out across the globe?

Janelle Scott  20:06
As you talk, Will, a Nelson Mandela quote comes to mind, ” It always seems impossible until it’s done”, right? So, I think there have always been efforts to resist racialization processes that are steeped in white supremacist logics. You know, in the U.S., it starts as early as the Dred Scott case, arguing for freedom and the right to citizenship. It’s further manifested in the Plessy versus Ferguson case where Homer Plessy, a mixed-race man is suing the U.S. government against this one drop rule about racial classification. And fortunately, that case went against Homer Plessy’s arguments, it upheld the construct of separate but equal until 1954. But what overturns separate but equal as a sort of state logic in the US is Brown versus Board of Education, right? So, as we think about these important moments of resistance, and what they manifest in terms of possibility, I think we have to think historically. And then, in more contemporary contexts, we started our conversation talking about the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin and his fellow officers in Minnesota in 2020. And the protests against racism in policing that ensued were not just in the United States, they were in at least 60 countries around the world. And they took on that particular tenor around social inequalities in those countries. And so, I think the social movements are really important examples of how processes of racialization and racial formation and their relationship to inequality in education and society are being taken up. And they are, I think, having some successes, but there are really critical and powerful forces working against that, right? And so, in the United States, where I am this moment where many state legislatures are banning the teaching of particular subjects and particular books. Florida being the sort of lightning rod for all of this where entire classroom libraries, teachers have been told to remove all the books from their classrooms and legislators are now wanting to allow people to sue teachers individually for teaching anything related to race and racism. But even in these moments, there are incredible social movements, youth-led movements, there’s a movement called Let Us Learn, where students are actively resisting this kind of racialization, or racial formation attempt to work against understanding these processes. And so, while I think there remain very deep and difficult challenges, the social movements that we see – the Black Lives Matter at school movement, for example, the movement to get rid of policing in predominantly Black and LatinX schools – these are all efforts, and some have realized some success, and some are still in progress. And we get to either witness or participate in those efforts as well.

Monisha Bajaj  22:57
And I’ll add that in the book, we do talk about resistance quite a bit. There’s several examples of resistance to these processes of racialization. And the inequalities that ensue from these processes. And so, there’s historical examples where this kind of global solidarity has also fueled movements. In the chapter that was mentioned about Brazil and the Afro-Brazilian movement, there’s mention of how some of these UN conferences where people can come together and share experiences such as the UN Conference Against Racism that was in 2001, in Durban, South Africa, it was a place in the chapter that Renato Emerson dos Santos talks about where a lot of kind of global linkages to the Black Brazilian movement were galvanized and really helped catalyze some of the inclusion of Black Brazilian history into the curriculum. It was also mentioned that same conference in the chapter on the racialization of caste where at that conference, nongovernmental organizations, activists, social movements, were arguing that caste is a racial category, and that the global community needs to understand it as such in order to be able to examine it and really be an ally to folks on the ground who were resisting these forms of discrimination. So, I think these global movements in different moments have different ways of being connected and in conversation, and something that the global community has allowed is a place where people can come together and say, Oh, it operates like this here. And here’s what we’re seeing over there. And to forge these solidarities that allow people to then put demands on the nation state for greater justice and equality. And so that’s something that I think comes out across chapters is how these social movements are innovating and organizing transnationally. And even in the chapter on Black Lives Matter at school, which is taking the concepts and the principles that they’ve developed and it’s mostly operating in the U.S. They do have schools internationally that are also taking on their agenda and doing the week of action the first week of February every year. And also, there’s an example from the chapter on Australia of how teachers in Australia were teaching content on Black Lives Matter and linking it to Aboriginal Indigenous struggles there and how both in the US and In Australia, there was tremendous right-wing backlash to this kind of educational efforts to talk about these issues.

Will Brehm  25:06
It’s quite amazing. I mean, on one level, it really does seem like the discourse has just radically changed. Just in like everyday conversation on the radio, you hear people talking about issues of racialization and Black Lives Matter and even in the UK where I live, since I’ve been here the conversation has just become so much more open in a way. And in a way, that’s hugely powerful. I know there’s a lot of sort of material issues that haven’t been resolved in overcoming the structural issues that need to be resolved. But discursively there seems to be this big change. I guess one of the things – because issues of race and racialization are being talked about so frequently across so many academic disciplines, in everyday language, it did make me wonder, what can comparative education offer this conversation on racialization?

Monisha Bajaj  25:58
Yeah. I mean, I think it goes both ways. I think comparative education can offer lenses because we’ve learned how to look at things kind of globally and cross nationally, which is so important for issues of race, racialization, anti-racist movements, and then reverse right? What can the study of racialization and these issues offer comparative education and international education as a field? I think it goes both ways. There’s a mutual learning that can happen. When we think about Pan-Africanism. I’m taking some students to the International Peace Research Association meeting in May in Trinidad. So, I’ve been assigning them some readings on C.L.R. James and reading his work again and looking at just how deeply Pan-Africanism was formed in this global conversation. You know, there’s conversations between him and Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana at the time of the nation’s founding, and his work on the Black Jacobins about the Haitian Revolution. There’s so much that historically, scholars have done comparatively, that we haven’t necessarily considered in the field of international comparative education as comparative work, because it’s not looking at the nation state as a unit of analysis, per se. And it’s not looking at sort of state reported data or international PISA, TIMMS comparisons, et cetera, right? So, I think there’s much we can learn from that. And we can look at what tools we have as a field and the fact that CIES and the global WCCS are such global organizations, how do we increasingly use those spaces that are not US centric, like the way that some of that is the AERAs and the others that really focus on the US? How do we use what we have to also advance these conversations? I do think that this volume, the new Comparative Education Review issue, I was delighted to see that at CIES. There’ll be several presidential sessions looking at racial justice, these conversations are coming more into the fold. Yeah, I mean, I think there’s so much that we can offer comparatively and draw on these legacies and traditions of some of these comparative solidarities and analyses that have existed. I think one of the chapters in the book that does this really nicely in looking at the possibilities and sort of the tensions in that work is by Susanne Ress, Miriam Thangaraj, Upenyu Majee, and Teresa Speciale, where they look at South-South internationalization projects in higher ed between Brazil and Lusophone African countries. And they examine these kinds of fragmented solidarities that are formed by assuming a similarity of experience without really attending to some of the differences that also come out. So, some of that work that’s happening in our field, I think really gives us the methodologies and the language to really do more of this kind of work and really examine how a comparative lens can be looked at. And I think that some of the other chapters in the book look at affirmative action programs in Brazil and India and the US from a comparative perspective. And a lot of those were drawn from each other, right? So, I think in India, they looked at the US and said, Okay, well, let’s implement some of this. And I think in Brazil as well, they’re informed by one another but yet operate completely differently with different processes of racialization that exist in each of those contexts. So, I think there’s a lot and that that mutuality and those conversations should continue to be nourished on both ends of having our field of international and comparative education really understand what scholarship and what work has existed around racialization and racial formation in education and having our methods and our conversations in our field also informed some of that work happening as well.

Will Brehm  29:23
Just a final question: how does that study that Monisha that you just sort of articulated two-directional study that can go on within our field, but also for our field? Can that say anything about reparations and reparative justice. These are ideas that are mentioned in the book, but I feel like I’m hearing more and more about in other fields and in other writing that I’ve been reading. And I’m just curious to hear your opinion on that. How does this study of racialization and education inequality and comparative and international education, how does it connect to reparations? How does it connect to reparative justice?

Janelle Scott  30:00
I think in several ways. You can’t have reparative justice if you haven’t acknowledged what has been done. And so, the study in a comparative way of racialization and racial formation processes and how they have related to schooling around the world helps us to see similar patterns. It helps us to see where there are important divergences. But once we see the patterns, we can appreciate the scale of the harm, and we can begin to think collectively, including the very people who have been harmed – too often those people have been left out of the conversation – and how we might remedy it. How we might make efforts toward repair. And I think we have some examples in the very recent past. Just in 2021, in the US, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary Haaland has announced a federal Indian boarding school initiative to look at the very troubled legacy of federal boarding schools of Indigenous children, where children were taken away from their parents, intentionally robbed of their language and their culture. Many children died in these schools under very mysterious and probably violent circumstances. And Secretary Haaland is saying we need to account for this and figure out how we can think about repair. But it’s importantly being done in collaboration with Indigenous nations and communities and similar efforts have happened in Canada around Indigenous education. And so, I think that’s just one example. I think, again, the analysis and the understanding of the harm that’s been done through racialization in education, I think we are still very early in accounting for that and discussing academically, analytically, but also in public discourse of what has happened and how we all bear responsibility for that, even if we are very distant historically in terms of time from what actually was done.

Will Brehm  31:50
Janelle Scott and Monisha Bajaj, thank you so much for joining FreshEd today. It was really a pleasure to talk and congratulations on your new co-edited volume.

Monisha Bajaj  31:58
Thank you, Will.

Janelle Scott  31:58
Thank you for having us.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Related Guest Publications/Projects

World Book of Education 2023 – Racialization and educational inequality in global perspectives

The politics of education policy in an era of inequality

How discipline and policing policies harm students of color

A kitchen-table talk on anti-oppressive and critical (immigrant) education

Decolonial approaches to school curriculum for Black, Indigenous and other students of color

Towards a praxis of educational solidarity

Mentioned Resources

White ignorance – Charles Mills

World Yearbook of Education

Racism in a racial democracy: The maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil

Racial capitalism

The erasures of racism in education and international development

Decentering the ‘white gaze’ of development

Missouri’s Dred Scott case (1857)

Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)

Brown vs. Board (1954, 1955)

Let us learn movement

Black Lives Matter at School Movement

Afro-Brazil:  The Black movement and community education

UN World conference against racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia

Reflections on Pan-Africanism – CLR James

Nkrumah and the Ghana revolution – CLR James

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint l’ouverture and the San Domingo revolution

US Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative

Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement

Related Resources

Resisting the movement to ban critical race theory from schools

Map: Where critical race theory is under attack

Racism in a racial democracy: The maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil

The road from “racial democracy” to affirmative action in Brazil

Tensions and contradictions for anti-racist education in Brazil

Fighting racism, 20 years after the Durban declaration

Transnational social movements

Education and the social construction of race

The antidemocratic power of whiteness

The wages of whiteness 

Theorizing race and racism in comparative and international education

A global critical race and racism framework

Restorative justice in education

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com