racial issues in education essay

Exploring Equity: Race and Ethnicity

• Posted February 18, 2021
• By Gianna Cacciatore
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Inequality and Education Gaps
• Moral, Civic, and Ethical Education
• Teachers and Teaching

The history of education in the United States is rife with instances of violence and oppression along lines of race and ethnicity. For educators, leading conversations about race and racism is a challenging, but necessary, part of their work.

“Schools operate within larger contexts: systems of race, racism, and white supremacy; systems of migration and ethnic identity formation; patterns of socialization; the changing realities of capitalism and politics,” explains historian and Harvard lecturer Timothy Patrick McCarthy , co-faculty lead of Race and Ethnicity in Context, a new module offered at the Harvard Graduate School of Education this January as part of a pilot of HGSE’s Equity and Opportunity Foundations course. “How do we understand the role that racial and ethnic identity play with respect to equity and opportunity within an educational context?”

>> Learn more about Equity and Opportunity and HGSE’s other foundational learning experiences.

For educators exploring question in their own homes, schools, and communities, McCarthy and co-faculty lead Ashley Ison, an HGSE doctoral student, offer five ways to get started.

1.    Begin with the self.

Practitioners enter conversations about race and racism from different backgrounds, with different lived experiences, personal and professional perspectives, and funds of knowledge in their grasps. Given diverse contexts and realities, it is important that leaders encourage personal transformation and growth. Educators should consider how race and racism, as well as racial and ethnic identity formation, impact their lives as educational professionals, as parents, and as policymakers – whatever roles they hold in society. “This is personal work, but that personal work is also political work,” says Ison.

2.    Model vulnerability.

Entering into discussions of race and racism can be challenging, even for those with experience in this work. A key part of enabling participants to lean into the challenge is being vulnerable. “You have trust your students,” explains McCarthy. “Part of that is modeling authentic vulnerability and proximity to the work.” This can be done by modeling discussion skills, like sharing the space and engaging directly with the comments of other participants, as well as by opening up personally to participants.  

“Fear can impact how people feel talking about race and ethnicity in an inter-group space,” says Ison. Courage, openness, and trust are key to overcoming that fear and enabling listening, which ultimately allows for critical thinking and change.

3.    Be transparent.

Part of being vulnerable is being fully transparent with your students from day one. “Intentions are important,” explains McCarthy. “The gap between intention and impact is often rooted in a lack of transparency about where you’re coming from or where you are hoping to go.”

4.    Center voices of color.

Voice and story are powerful tools in this work. Leaders must consider whose voices and stories take precedence on the syllabus. “Consider highlighting authors of color, in particular, who are thinking and writing about these issues,” says Ison. Becoming familiar with a variety of perspectives can help practitioners understand the voices and ideas that exist, she explains.

“Voice and storytelling can bear witness to the various kinds of systematic injustices and inequities we are looking at, but they also function as sources of power for imagining and reimagining the world we are trying to build, all while providing a deeper knowledge of the world as it has existed historically,” adds McCarthy.

5.    Prioritize discussion and reflection.

Since this work is as much about critical thinking as it is about content, it is important for educators to make space for discussion and reflection, at the whole-class, small-group, and individual levels. Ison and McCarthy encourage educators to allow students to generate and guide the discussion of predetermined course materials. They also recommend facilitating small group reflections that may spark conversation that can extend into other spaces outside of the classroom.

Selected Resources:

• Poor, but Privileged
• NPR: "The Importance of Diversity in Teaching Staff”
• TED Talk with Clint Smith: "The Danger of Silence"

More Stories from the Series:

• Exploring Equity: Citizenship and Nationality
• Exploring Equity: Gender and Sexuality
• Exploring Equity: Dis/ability
• Exploring Equity: Class

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A future we can all live with: How education can address and eradicate racism

by  Cecilia Barbieri & Martha K. Ferede

Today, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic that has exposed stark socio-economic inequalities and exacerbated hate speech, the world is also witnessing a global uprising against systemic, institutionalized and structural racism and discrimination.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible

These words spoken by Maya Angelou more than 30 years ago echo the injustices of the past, add gravitas to our turbulent present and show clearly that prejudice runs counter to what is needed, at the core, for us to become global citizens who promote and develop just and peaceful futures.

Today, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic that has exposed stark socio-economic inequalities and exacerbated hate speech, the world is also witnessing a global uprising against systemic, institutionalized and structural racism and discrimination. Protests are unfolding in nearly every continent – from North and South America to Europe and Australia. This is not only about yet one more senseless killing of an unarmed African-American man. It is about the senseless killing of millions over many centuries, the unequal and unjust treatment, the different forms of violence, the economic and social inequality, the lack of opportunity, the racial profiling, the marginalization, the micro-agressions and the countless daily indignities. 

Systemic racism and discrimination are rooted in the structure of society itself, in governments, the workplace, courts, police and education institutions. Racism can be explicit but often exists in implicit, subtle and insidious forms that can be hard to pin down. 

Global data on education points to the malignancy of racism:  

School disciplinary policies disproportionately impact Black students . In some settings, starting as early as preschool, Black children are 3.6 times more likely to receive out-of-school suspensions than White children, increasing to 4 times as likely in grades K-12. Black students are also more than twice as likely to face school-related arrests and be referred to law enforcement ( US Department Office for Civil Rights, 2016 ;  Fabello et al., 2011 ). 

Teachers’ expectations differ by students’ race . Many studies have found a correlation between teachers’ expectations and students’ educational outcomes including academic achievement and completion of higher education ( Boser et al., 2014 ). However, teachers’ expectations differ by students’ race, economic status and national origin. For instance, Eastern European students have experienced various forms of racism and low expectations in the UK school system ( Tereschenko et al., 2018 ).

Students from ethnic and racial minority groups are more likely to be labelled ‘at risk’ . For example, in Quebec, Canada, students with Caribbean backgrounds are three times more likely to be identified as SHSMLD (students with handicaps, social maladjustments, or learning difficulties) and placed in separate classes for “at-risk” students ( Maynard, 2017 ).

Education attendance and attainment correlate with race . According to the  2020 Global Education Monitoring Report , although there have been advances towards increasing access in recent decades,  enduring racial inequality remains in educational attendance and attainment in Latin American countries. For example, compared to their non-Afrodescendant peers, attendance rates are lower for Afrodescendants aged 12-17 ( ECLAC, 2019 ). Based on World Bank data ( 2018 ), Afrodescendants in Uruguay and Peru are also reported as less likely to complete secondary school than non-Afrodescendants. 

Racial discrimination takes place among students . In Australia, a study of primary and secondary Anglo-Celtic/European, East or Southeast Asian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island, Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander and African students’ backgrounds, found that one in three reported being the victim of racial discrimination by their peers ( Priest et al., 2019 ).

The returns to education differ by race .  In post-Apartheid South Africa, although opportunities for education have improved, there has been a divergence in the valuation of that education. In 2004, differences in the returns to education accounted for about 40% of the White-African wage differential ( Keswell, 2010 ). By 2018, the average Black South African earned five times less than the average White South-African ( Syed & Ozbilgin, 2019 ).

Racism is a violation of the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights  (1948) and it goes against UNESCO’s  Convention Against Discrimination in Education  (1960), the  International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination  (1965), the  International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights  (1966) and the  Convention on the Rights of the Child  (1989).

Systemic racism and discrimination are rooted in the structure of society itself, in governments, workplaces, courts, police and education institutions.

Education systems and educational institutions have an important role and responsibility in addressing and eliminating racism through: 

Supporting schools to implement education policies that support racially integrated schools . Such schools have been found to promote greater social cohesion and cross-race relationships ( Eaton & Chirichigno, 2011 ).  

Training and recruiting teachers that reflect the diversity of students . Studies show that when teachers reflect the student body, there are improved learning outcomes, higher expectations and fewer disciplinary actions ( Egamit et al. 2015 ). 

Examining the curriculum from multiple vantage points . First, schools should give history, social memory and human rights – as well as indigenous forms of knowledge – a place at the core of teaching.  This helps us to fully understand the past and its relation to the present and to break the perpetuation of stereotypes. Second, educators should reexamine and revise curriculum, and textbooks in particular, to eliminate racist depictions, misrepresentation, and historical exclusions. 

Addressing implicit bias .  All actors in education institutions from policy-makers, leaders, teachers, staff and students should receive training to become aware of their implicit bias – their unconscious bias and beliefs. Reflective teaching, fair discipline policies based on data and use of external feedback are some strategies schools can use to reduce implicit bias ( Staats, 2015 ). 

The injustice of systemic racism is a significant barrier to the type of education that is needed for preferred alternative futures for all - for a world where people are able to live together peacefully as global citizens in strong and just societies that value diversity. As educators, citizens and as a global community, we have much work to do to ensure that the solutions proposed to defeat systemic racism do not remain mired in the system that is being critiqued, so that the roots of oppression and inequality can be removed. 

And for that, a frank and bold approach is needed as affirmed in the recent message from the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, “The position of the United Nations on racism is crystal clear: this scourge violates the United Nations Charter and debases our core values. Every day, in our work across the world, we strive to do our part to promote inclusion, justice, dignity and combat racism in all its manifestations.” 

It is time for essential conversations and inspired and informed action. 

Our future depends on it. 

The ideas expressed here are those of the authors; they are not necessarily the official position of UNESCO and do not commit the Organization.

Cecilia Barbieri is the Chief of Section of Global Citizenship and Peace Education at UNESCO, coming from the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, where she was in charge of the Education 2030 Section. She has worked as an Education Specialist with UNESCO since 1999, mainly in Africa and Asia.

Martha K. Ferede is a Project Officer in the section of Global Citizenship and Peace Education at UNESCO. She is a former school teacher, researcher at Harvard University and lecturer at Sciences-po.

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A pandemic that disproportionately affected communities of color, roadblocks that obstructed efforts to expand the franchise and protect voting discrimination, a growing movement to push anti-racist curricula out of schools – events over the past year have only underscored how prevalent systemic racism and bias is in America today.

What can be done to dismantle centuries of discrimination in the U.S.? How can a more equitable society be achieved? What makes racism such a complicated problem to solve? Black History Month is a time marked for honoring and reflecting on the experience of Black Americans, and it is also an opportunity to reexamine our nation’s deeply embedded racial problems and the possible solutions that could help build a more equitable society.

Stanford scholars are tackling these issues head-on in their research from the perspectives of history, education, law and other disciplines. For example, historian Clayborne Carson is working to preserve and promote the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and religious studies scholar Lerone A. Martin has joined Stanford to continue expanding access and opportunities to learn from King’s teachings; sociologist Matthew Clair is examining how the criminal justice system can end a vicious cycle involving the disparate treatment of Black men; and education scholar Subini Ancy Annamma is studying ways to make education more equitable for historically marginalized students.

Learn more about these efforts and other projects examining racism and discrimination in areas like health and medicine, technology and the workplace below.

Update: Jan. 27, 2023: This story was originally published on Feb. 16, 2021, and has been updated on a number of occasions to include new content.

Understanding the impact of racism; advancing justice

One of the hardest elements of advancing racial justice is helping everyone understand the ways in which they are involved in a system or structure that perpetuates racism, according to Stanford legal scholar Ralph Richard Banks.

“The starting point for the center is the recognition that racial inequality and division have long been the fault line of American society. Thus, addressing racial inequity is essential to sustaining our nation, and furthering its democratic aspirations,” said Banks , the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and co-founder of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice .

This sentiment was echoed by Stanford researcher Rebecca Hetey . One of the obstacles in solving inequality is people’s attitudes towards it, Hetey said. “One of the barriers of reducing inequality is how some people justify and rationalize it.”

How people talk about race and stereotypes matters. Here is some of that scholarship.

For Black Americans, COVID-19 is quickly reversing crucial economic gains

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How an ‘impact mindset’ unites activists of different races

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For democracy to work, racial inequalities must be addressed

The Stanford Center for Racial Justice is taking a hard look at the policies perpetuating systemic racism in America today and asking how we can imagine a more equitable society.

The psychological toll of George Floyd’s murder

As the nation mourned the death of George Floyd, more Black Americans than white Americans felt angry or sad – a finding that reveals the racial disparities of grief.

Seven factors contributing to American racism

Of the seven factors the researchers identified, perhaps the most insidious is passivism or passive racism, which includes an apathy toward systems of racial advantage or denial that those systems even exist.

Scholars reflect on Black history

Humanities and social sciences scholars reflect on “Black history as American history” and its impact on their personal and professional lives.

The history of Black History Month

It's February, so many teachers and schools are taking time to celebrate Black History Month. According to Stanford historian Michael Hines, there are still misunderstandings and misconceptions about the past, present, and future of the celebration.

Numbers about inequality don’t speak for themselves

In a new research paper, Stanford scholars Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt propose new ways to talk about racial disparities that exist across society, from education to health care and criminal justice systems.

Changing how people perceive problems

Drawing on an extensive body of research, Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton lays out a roadmap to positively influence the way people think about themselves and the world around them. These changes could improve society, too.

Welfare opposition linked to threats of racial standing

Research co-authored by sociologist Robb Willer finds that when white Americans perceive threats to their status as the dominant demographic group, their resentment of minorities increases. This resentment leads to opposing welfare programs they believe will mainly benefit minority groups.

Conversations about race between Black and white friends can feel risky, but are valuable

New research about how friends approach talking about their race-related experiences with each other reveals concerns but also the potential that these conversations have to strengthen relationships and further intergroup learning.

Defusing racial bias

Research shows why understanding the source of discrimination matters.

Many white parents aren’t having ‘the talk’ about race with their kids

After George Floyd’s murder, Black parents talked about race and racism with their kids more. White parents did not and were more likely to give their kids colorblind messages.

Stereotyping makes people more likely to act badly

Even slight cues, like reading a negative stereotype about your race or gender, can have an impact.

Why white people downplay their individual racial privileges

Research shows that white Americans, when faced with evidence of racial privilege, deny that they have benefited personally.

Clayborne Carson: Looking back at a legacy

Stanford historian Clayborne Carson reflects on a career dedicated to studying and preserving the legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

How race influences, amplifies backlash against outspoken women

When women break gender norms, the most negative reactions may come from people of the same race.

Examining disparities in education

Scholar Subini Ancy Annamma is studying ways to make education more equitable for historically marginalized students. Annamma’s research examines how schools contribute to the criminalization of Black youths by creating a culture of punishment that penalizes Black children more harshly than their white peers for the same behavior. Her work shows that youth of color are more likely to be closely watched, over-represented in special education, and reported to and arrested by police.

“These are all ways in which schools criminalize Black youth,” she said. “Day after day, these things start to sediment.”

That’s why Annamma has identified opportunities for teachers and administrators to intervene in these unfair practices. Below is some of that research, from Annamma and others.

New ‘Segregation Index’ shows American schools remain highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and economic status

Researchers at Stanford and USC developed a new tool to track neighborhood and school segregation in the U.S.

New evidence shows that school poverty shapes racial achievement gaps

Racial segregation leads to growing achievement gaps – but it does so entirely through differences in school poverty, according to new research from education Professor Sean Reardon, who is launching a new tool to help educators, parents and policymakers examine education trends by race and poverty level nationwide.

School closures intensify gentrification in Black neighborhoods nationwide

An analysis of census and school closure data finds that shuttering schools increases gentrification – but only in predominantly Black communities.

Ninth-grade ethnic studies helped students for years, Stanford researchers find

A new study shows that students assigned to an ethnic studies course had longer-term improvements in attendance and graduation rates.

Teaching about racism

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Stanford scholar uncovers an early activist’s fight to get Black history into schools

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How disability intersects with race

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Access to program for black male students lowered dropout rates

New research led by Stanford education professor Thomas S. Dee provides the first evidence of effectiveness for a district-wide initiative targeted at black male high school students.

How school systems make criminals of Black youth

Stanford education professor Subini Ancy Annamma talks about the role schools play in creating a culture of punishment against Black students.

Reducing racial disparities in school discipline

Stanford psychologists find that brief exercises early in middle school can improve students’ relationships with their teachers, increase their sense of belonging and reduce teachers’ reports of discipline issues among black and Latino boys.

Science lessons through a different lens

In his new book, Science in the City, Stanford education professor Bryan A. Brown helps bridge the gap between students’ culture and the science classroom.

Teachers more likely to label black students as troublemakers, Stanford research shows

Stanford psychologists Jennifer Eberhardt and Jason Okonofua experimentally examined the psychological processes involved when teachers discipline black students more harshly than white students.

Why we need Black teachers

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Understanding racism in the criminal justice system

Research has shown that time and time again, inequality is embedded into all facets of the criminal justice system. From being arrested to being charged, convicted and sentenced, people of color – particularly Black men – are disproportionately targeted by the police.

“So many reforms are needed: police accountability, judicial intervention, reducing prosecutorial power and increasing resources for public defenders are places we can start,” said sociologist Matthew Clair . “But beyond piecemeal reforms, we need to continue having critical conversations about transformation and the role of the courts in bringing about the abolition of police and prisons.”

Clair is one of several Stanford scholars who have examined the intersection of race and the criminal process and offered solutions to end the vicious cycle of racism. Here is some of that work.

Police Facebook posts disproportionately highlight crimes involving Black suspects, study finds

Researchers examined crime-related posts from 14,000 Facebook pages maintained by U.S. law enforcement agencies and found that Facebook users are exposed to posts that overrepresent Black suspects by 25% relative to local arrest rates.

Supporting students involved in the justice system

New data show that a one-page letter asking a teacher to support a youth as they navigate the difficult transition from juvenile detention back to school can reduce the likelihood that the student re-offends.

Race and mass criminalization in the U.S.

Stanford sociologist discusses how race and class inequalities are embedded in the American criminal legal system.

New Stanford research lab explores incarcerated students’ educational paths

Associate Professor Subini Annamma examines the policies and practices that push marginalized students out of school and into prisons.

Derek Chauvin verdict important, but much remains to be done

Stanford scholars Hakeem Jefferson, Robert Weisberg and Matthew Clair weigh in on the Derek Chauvin verdict, emphasizing that while the outcome is important, much work remains to be done to bring about long-lasting justice.

A ‘veil of darkness’ reduces racial bias in traffic stops

After analyzing 95 million traffic stop records, filed by officers with 21 state patrol agencies and 35 municipal police forces from 2011 to 2018, researchers concluded that “police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias.”

Stanford big data study finds racial disparities in Oakland, Calif., police behavior, offers solutions

Analyzing thousands of data points, the researchers found racial disparities in how Oakland officers treated African Americans on routine traffic and pedestrian stops. They suggest 50 measures to improve police-community relations.

Race and the death penalty

As questions about racial bias in the criminal justice system dominate the headlines, research by Stanford law Professor John J. Donohue III offers insight into one of the most fraught areas: the death penalty.

Diagnosing disparities in health, medicine

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color and has highlighted the health disparities between Black Americans, whites and other demographic groups.

As Iris Gibbs , professor of radiation oncology and associate dean of MD program admissions, pointed out at an event sponsored by Stanford Medicine: “We need more sustained attention and real action towards eliminating health inequities, educating our entire community and going beyond ‘allyship,’ because that one fizzles out. We really do need people who are truly there all the way.”

Below is some of that research as well as solutions that can address some of the disparities in the American healthcare system.

Stanford researchers testing ways to improve clinical trial diversity

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Striking inequalities in maternal and infant health

Research by SIEPR’s Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater finds wealthy Black mothers and infants in the U.S. fare worse than the poorest white mothers and infants.

More racial diversity among physicians would lead to better health among black men

A clinical trial in Oakland by Stanford researchers found that black men are more likely to seek out preventive care after being seen by black doctors compared to non-black doctors.

A better measuring stick: Algorithmic approach to pain diagnosis could eliminate racial bias

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Stanford Medicine community calls for action against racial injustice, inequities

The event at Stanford provided a venue for health care workers and students to express their feelings about violence against African Americans and to voice their demands for change.

Racial disparity remains in heart-transplant mortality rates, Stanford study finds

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Finding the COVID-19 Victims that Big Data Misses

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Studying how racial stressors affect mental health

Farzana Saleem, an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education, is interested in the way Black youth and other young people of color navigate adolescence—and the racial stressors that can make the journey harder.

Infants’ race influences quality of hospital care in California

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Immigrants don’t move state-to-state in search of health benefits

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Excess mortality rates early in pandemic highest among Blacks

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Decoding bias in media, technology

Driving Artificial Intelligence are machine learning algorithms, sets of rules that tell a computer how to solve a problem, perform a task and in some cases, predict an outcome. These predictive models are based on massive datasets to recognize certain patterns, which according to communication scholar Angele Christin , sometimes come flawed with human bias . 

“Technology changes things, but perhaps not always as much as we think,” Christin said. “Social context matters a lot in shaping the actual effects of the technological tools. […] So, it’s important to understand that connection between humans and machines.”

Below is some of that research, as well as other ways discrimination unfolds across technology, in the media, and ways to counteract it.

IRS disproportionately audits Black taxpayers

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Automated speech recognition less accurate for blacks

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New algorithm trains AI to avoid bad behaviors

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Algorithms reveal changes in stereotypes

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Identifying discrimination in the workplace and economy

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“There is not one silver bullet here that you can walk away with. Hiring and retention with respect to employee diversity are complex problems,” said Adina Sterling , associate professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business (GSB). 

Sterling has offered a few places where employers can expand employee diversity at their companies. For example, she suggests hiring managers track data about their recruitment methods and the pools that result from those efforts, as well as examining who they ultimately hire.

Here is some of that insight.

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Race influences professional investors’ judgments

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Who moves forward in the hiring process?

People whose employment histories include part-time, temporary help agency or mismatched work can face challenges during the hiring process, according to new research by Stanford sociologist David Pedulla.

How emotions may result in hiring, workplace bias

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What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

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Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.

The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring—especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.

In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government’s role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.

School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.

Just what is critical race theory anyway?

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.

CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.

This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.

Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.

To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.

One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT , including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed.

(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)

Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn’t that racist, too?

The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

What does any of this have to do with K-12 education?

Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.

Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.

Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.

As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.

An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can’t coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practice s or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.

As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that “white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized”; that “achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness”; and that “the United States was founded on racism.”

Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students—especially white students—will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.

While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it’s not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.

What is going on with these proposals to ban critical race theory in schools?

As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses.

The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover.

Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism—like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces—be considered in violation of these laws?

It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.

It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.

As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law : “History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.”

The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and “action civics”—an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.

How is this related to other debates over what’s taught in the classroom amid K-12 culture wars?

The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.

In the early and mid-20th century, the concern was about socialism or Marxism . The conservative American Legion, beginning in the 1930s, sought to rid schools of progressive-minded textbooks that encouraged students to consider economic inequality; two decades later the John Birch Society raised similar criticisms about school materials. As with CRT criticisms, the fear was that students would be somehow harmed by exposure to these ideas.

As the school-aged population became more diverse, these debates have been inflected through the lens of race and ethnic representation, including disagreements over multiculturalism and ethnic studies, the ongoing “canon wars” over which texts should make up the English curriculum, and the so-called “ebonics” debates over the status of Black vernacular English in schools.

In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country’s history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other—between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.

A current example that has fueled much of the recent round of CRT criticism is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to put the history and effects of enslavement—as well as Black Americans’ contributions to democratic reforms—at the center of American history.

The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.

“It’s because they’re nervous about broad social things, but they’re talking in the language of school and school curriculum,” said one historian of education. “That’s the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations.”

Education Issues, Explained

The literature on critical race theory is vast. Here are some starting points to learn more about it, culturally relevant teaching, and the conservative backlash to CRT.

Brittany Aronson & Judson Laughter. “The Theory and Practice of Culturally Relevant Education: A Synthesis of Research Across Content Areas.” Review of Educational Research March 2016, Vol. 86 No. 1. (2016); Kimberlé Crenshaw, ed. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. The New Press. (1996); Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” American Educational Research Journal Vol. 32 No. 3. (1995); Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol 11. No. 1. (1998); Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez. “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America.” Heritage Foundation. (2020); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed. New York, NY: New York University Press. (2017); Shelly Brown-Jeffy & Jewell E. Cooper, “Toward a Conceptual Framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: An Overview of the Conceptual and Theoretical Literature.” Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2011.

A version of this article appeared in the June 02, 2021 edition of Education Week as What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

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Racial Discrimination and Justice in Education Essay

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The Impact of Racism in Schools and on the Mental Health of Students

Funding is one of the main factors that ensure racial segregation and exacerbation of the plight of the black population. Being initially in a more disastrous economic situation, racial minority populations fall into a vicious circle. Low-funded schools in poor areas have low academic ratings, which further contributes to the reduction of the material base. Due to their poor academic performance and the need to earn a living, many minorities are deprived of the opportunity to receive prestigious higher education. They are left with low-skilled jobs, which makes it impossible for their children to go to private school or move to a prestigious area with well-funded public schools. In institutions with little funding, unfortunately, manifestations of racism still prevail.

A significant factor in systemic racism in modern schools is the theory of colorblindness as the prevailing ideology in schools and pedagogical universities. The total avoidance of racial topics in schools has led to a complete absence of material related to the culture of racial minorities in the curricula. An example is the complaint of the parents of one of the black students that, during the passage of civilizations, the Greeks, Romans, and Incas were discussed in the lessons, but nothing was said about Africa. However, there were a few African American students in the class (Yi et al., 2022). The white director justified herself by saying that this was the curriculum and that it was not customary at school to divide people by skin color. In response, the student’s mother stated that children have eyes, and they see everything. And she would like them to see that we had a strong and fruitful culture. This state of affairs is justified by the proponents of assimilationism and American patriotism, built mainly around the honoring of the merits of white settlers and the founding fathers.

Meanwhile, the works of many researchers provide evidence that a high level of colorblindness among students correlates with greater racial intolerance. One study on race relations was conducted among young “millennials”. As a result, thousands of reports were recorded of openly racist statements and actions of white people from the field of view of these students (Plaut, et al., 2018). Another study on colorblindness found that white students who avoid mentioning racial issues were less friendly on assignments with black partners. This could be because they have less eye contact.

The shortcomings of the described situation affect not only black students but also white teachers who have not received proper training in their time on how best to take into account the characteristics of students from racial minorities. One researcher writes that in his entire experience in multicultural education, he faced the almost universal embarrassment that racial issues caused to white teachers. A common complaint is: I feel helpless. What am I, as a white teacher, to do? One educator remarked that he had never seen African-American teachers say that they did not distinguish between races (Mekawi et al., 2017). This is further proof that racism and the factors leading to it contribute only to the split of social ties at school. Students from racial minorities feel this burden the most, which leads to their feeling of constant alienation. During the school years, conflicts with children “not like the rest” are especially aggravated – the state of affairs described above provides the basis for constant skirmishes, fights, and tension in institutions.

Suggestions for Creating an Inclusive School Environment

Among the educational factors supporting the status quo of widespread structural racism are the following. This is the system of financing public schools and the dominance of the ideology of colorblindness in schools and pedagogical universities. In the opposite direction, there is such a factor as the peculiarity of keeping educational statistics (Welton, et al., 2018). By providing up-to-date information on the state of affairs of students of various racial and ethnic groups, statistics give rise to the search for optimal solutions in the field of school policy.

The inclusion of racial and ethnic dimensions in educational statistics is intended to provide an objective assessment of the current situation regarding racial differences in American society in order to develop and improve racially relevant policies. In recent years, the ideas of culturally relevant pedagogy have been actively promoted in the US educational sphere. American citizens are becoming more interested and enlightened in the field of racial issues, which can be seen in activist speeches and anti-racist public actions.

It is crucial to teach racism in schools so that all pupils may understand what it is, how it affects, and how to stop tolerating it. There are many publications and learning experience plans that address racism. It is essential to ask teachers and principals to integrate lessons on racism into the syllabus. One can also request that your teachers incorporate novels with a variety of subjects (Welton, et al., 2018). Then, it is important to request that the school draft an inclusion and zero-tolerance statement. Counselors can encourage the instructors and administration to implement these policies at the school if they do not already exist in the code of conduct or other policies (Pizarro & Kohli, 2020). It is critical that schools have clear policies about race and how individuals are treated on campus.

Resources for the School Counselor to Deal With Prejudice and Its Impact at the School

Mekawi, Y., Bresin, K. & Hunter, C.D. (2017). Who is more likely to “not see race”? individual differences in racial colorblindness. Race and Social Problems, 9 (1), 207–217. Web.

The authors claim that many Americans support a colorblind racial philosophy, which emphasizes sameness and the equitable allocation of resources without regard to race. The current study looked at the relationships between aggressiveness, and empathy in white undergraduates and three distinct types of racial colorblindness, including ignorance of racial privilege, ignorance of institutional discrimination, and ignorance of overt racism. The findings showed two distinct trends. In contrast to ignorance of overt racism and institutional discrimination, which were linked to poorer cooperativeness, cognitive flexibility, and empathic concern, ignorance of racial privilege was associated with lower openness and viewpoint-taking. These findings are addressed in light of a larger body of research on bias and personality.

Pizarro, M., & Kohli, R. (2020). “I stopped sleeping”: Teachers of color and the impact of racial Battle Fatigue. Urban Education, 55 (7), 967–991. Web.

According to the authors, an operational definition of racial battle fatigue (RBF) is the mental, emotional, and physical costs of fighting racism. RBF is employed in this article to examine the effects of racism on educators of color who work in a predominately “White profession.” The scholars share counterstories of urban academics of color who confront racism on a regular basis in their workplaces. This has a negative effect on their well-being and ability to stay in the profession. The authors also discuss their resiliency and resistance tactics since they depend on a supportive community to persevere and change their schools.

Plaut, V. C., Thomas, K. M., Hurd, K., & Romano, C. A. (2018). Do Color blindness and multiculturalism remedy or foster discrimination and racism? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27 (3), 200–206. Web.

This article gives psychology science’s perspective on the question of whether multiculturalism and colorblindness are more likely to prevent prejudice and racism than they are to promote it. The authors first concentrate on the results of a color-blind model. The study in this area reveals that while colorblindness may be appealing to certain people, it can also make people less sensitive to racism and prejudice. Additionally, according to the literature, color blindness generally has detrimental effects on intergroup relationships, minorities’ perceptions and results, and the promotion of diversity and inclusion in organizational settings. In the second section, the scholars look at the situations in which a multicultural perspective has beneficial or bad effects on intergroup relations, organizational diversity initiatives, and discrimination.

Welton, A. D., Owens, D. R., & Zamani-Gallaher, E. M. (2018). Anti-racist change: A conceptual framework for educational institutions to take systemic action. Teachers College Record, 120 (14), 1–22. Web.

In order to attain racial justice in education, people’s mindsets must also be changed to embrace a more anti-racist worldview. In order to investigate whether behaviors and leadership qualities could really encourage institutional change for racial justice, the authors review two sets of literature: studies on anti-racism and institutional transformation. However, they admit the constraints of each set of studies. The organizational transformation research often ignores equity concerns, notably racial conversations, while anti-racism research is more ideological and theoretical. The scholars combine essential ideas from the literature on organizational change and anti-racism to propose a conceptual framework that may be utilized to create a systematic anti-racist change at a wide level.

Yi, J., Neville, H. A., Todd, N. R., & Mekawi, Y. (2022). Ignoring race and denying racism: A meta-analysis of the associations between colorblind racial ideology, anti-Blackness, and other variables antithetical to racial justice . Journal of Counseling Psychology . Web.

The authors sought to comprehend how colorblind racial ideology (CBRI), or the rejection and minimizing of race and racism, can act as an obstacle to engaging in antiracist practice by relying on antiracism research. To find out if color evasion (ignorance of race) and power evasion (defiance of structural racism) CBRI were differently connected with anti-Blackness and mechanisms related to antiracism, the scholars specifically performed a meta-analysis. Results from 83 research with more than 25,000 participants and 375 effects reveal that varied effects depend on the kind of CBRI. The area of counseling psychology may be pushed by this meta-analysis to construct a bridge between different ideologies and the development of systemic reform.

Plaut, V. C., Thomas, K. M., Hurd, K., & Romano, C. A. (2018). Do color blindness and multiculturalism remedy or foster discrimination and racism? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27 (3), 200–206. Web.

Yi, J., Neville, H. A., Todd, N. R., & Mekawi, Y. (2022). Ignoring race and denying racism: A meta-analysis of the associations between colorblind racial ideology, anti-Blackness, and other variables antithetical to racial justice. Journal of Counseling Psychology . Web.

• Ethnicity Problem in the USA
• Anti-Racism in Shakespeare’s Othello
• Colorblind Society: Race and Skin Color in America
• Vertical Lines of Power or Authority
• Racism in the Healthcare Sector
• Unraveling the Science of Human Races
• Racism in Healthcare and Education
• Portrayal of Races: Content Analysis and Literature Review
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Racial Discrimination and Justice in Education." November 25, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/racial-discrimination-and-justice-in-education/.

How Racism Affects Children of Color in Public Schools

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Institutional racism doesn’t just affect adults but children in K-12 schools as well. Anecdotes from families, research studies, and discrimination lawsuits all reveal that children of color face bias in schools. They’re disciplined more harshly, less likely to be identified as gifted, or to have access to quality teachers, to name but a few examples.

Racism in schools has serious consequences—from fueling the school-to-prison pipeline to traumatizing children of color .

Racial Disparities in School Suspensions

Black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their White peers, according to the U.S. Department of Education.   And in the American South, racial disparities in punitive discipline are even greater. A 2015 report from the University of Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education found that 13 Southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia) were responsible for 55% of the 1.2 million suspensions involving Black students nationwide.  

These states also accounted for 50% of expulsions involving Black students nationally, according to the report, titled “Disproportionate Impact of K-12 School Suspension and Expulsion on Black Students in southern States.” The finding most indicative of racial bias is that in 84 Southern school districts, 100% of students suspended were Black.

Disproportionate Rates of Discipline in Preschool

And grade school students aren’t the only Black children facing harsh forms of school discipline. Even Black preschool students are more likely to be suspended than students of other races. The same report showed that while Black students make up just 18% of children in preschool, they represent nearly half of preschool children suspended.

“I think most people would be shocked that those numbers would be true in preschool because we think of 4- and 5-year-olds as being innocent,” Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the think tank Advancement Project told CBS News about the finding. “But we do know that schools are using zero-tolerance policies for our youngest also, that while we think our children need a head start, schools are kicking them out instead.”

Preschool children sometimes engage in troublesome behavior such as kicking, hitting, and biting, but quality preschools have behavior intervention plans in place to counter these forms of acting out. Furthermore, it’s highly unlikely that only Black children act out in preschool, a stage in life in which kids are notorious for having temper tantrums.

Given how Black preschoolers are disproportionately targeted for suspensions, it’s very likely that race plays a role in which children teachers single out for punitive discipline. In fact, a 2016 study published in Psychological Science showed that White people begin to perceive Black boys as threatening at just 5 years old, associating them with adjectives such as “violent,” “dangerous,” “hostile,” and “aggressive.”  

Consequences of Suspensions

The negative racial biases Black children face lead to high suspension rates that cause excessive absences in addition to preventing Black students from receiving education of the same quality as their White peers, both of these factors producing a stark achievement gap. Studies have shown that this can result in students falling behind academically, not reading at grade level by third grade, and eventually dropping out of school.   Pushing children out of class increases the chances that they will have contact with the criminal justice system.   A 2016 study published on children and suicide suggested that punitive discipline may be one of the reasons suicide rates among Black boys are rising.  

Of course, boys aren’t the only Black children targeted for punitive discipline in school. Black girls are more likely than all other female students (and some groups of boys) to be suspended or expelled as well.  

Low Representation in Gifted Programs

Poor children and children of color are not only less likely to be identified as gifted and talented but more likely to be identified as requiring special education services by teachers.

A 2016 report published by the American Educational Research Association found that Black third graders are half as likely as White third graders to participate in gifted and talented programs. Written by Vanderbilt University scholars Jason Grissom and Christopher Redding, the report, “Discretion and Disproportionality: Explaining the Underrepresentation of High-Achieving Students of Color in Gifted Programs,” also found that Hispanic students were also about half as likely as White people to be involved in gifted programs.

Why does this imply that racial bias is at play and those White students aren’t just naturally more gifted than children of color?

Because when children of color have teachers of color , the chances are higher that they will be identified as gifted.   This indicates that White teachers largely overlook giftedness in Black and brown children.

How Gifted Children Are Identified

Identifying a student as gifted involves a number of considerations. Gifted children may not have the best grades in the class. In fact, they may be bored in class and underachieve as a result. But standardized test scores, portfolios of schoolwork, and the ability of such children to tackle complex subjects despite tuning out in class may all be signs of giftedness.

When a school district in Florida changed the screening criteria for identifying gifted children, officials found that the number of gifted students in all racial groups rose. Rather than rely on teacher or parent referrals for the gifted program, this district used a universal screening process that required all second graders to take a nonverbal test to identify them as gifted. Nonverbal tests are said to be more objective measures of giftedness than verbal tests, especially for English language learners or children who don’t use Standard English.

Students who scored well on the test then moved on to I.Q. tests (which also face allegations of bias). Using the nonverbal test in combination with the I.Q. test led to the odds of Black students being identified as gifted rose by 74% and of Hispanics being identified as gifted by 118%.  

Lower Quality Education for Students of Color

A mountain of research has found that poor Black and brown children are the youth least likely to have highly qualified teachers. A study published in 2015 called “Uneven Playing Field? Assessing the Teacher Quality Gap Between Advantaged and Disadvantaged Students” found that in Washington, Black, Hispanic, and Native American youth were most likely to have teachers with the least amount of experience, the worst licensure exam scores, and the poorest record of improving student test scores.  

Related research has found that Black, Hispanic, and Native American youth have less access to honors and advanced placement (AP) classes than White youth do. In particular, they are less likely to enroll in advanced science and math classes. This can reduce their chances of being admitted to a four-year college, many of which require completion of at least one high-level math class for admission.  

Students of Color Overpoliced and Segregated

Not only are students of color least likely to be identified as gifted and enroll in honors classes, but they are also more likely to attend schools with a greater police presence, increasing the odds that they will enter the criminal justice system. The presence of law enforcement on school campuses also increases the risk of such students being exposed to police violence.   Recordings of school police slamming girls of color to the ground during altercations have recently sparked outrage across the nation.

Students of color face racial microaggressions in schools as well, such as being criticized by teachers and administrators for wearing their hair in styles that reflect their cultural heritage. Both Black students and Native American students have been reprimanded in schools for wearing their hair in its natural state or in braided styles.

Worsening matters is that public schools are increasingly segregated, more than they were in the 1970s. Black and brown students are most likely to attend schools with other Black and brown students. Students below the poverty line are most likely to attend schools with other poor students.  

As the nation’s racial demographics shift, these disparities pose serious risks to America’s future. Students of color comprise a growing share of public school students. If the United States is to remain a world superpower for generations, it’s incumbent upon Americans to ensure that disadvantaged students receive the same standard of education that privileged students do.

"Data Snapshot: School Discipline." Civil Rights Data Collection. U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, Mar. 2014.

Smith, Edward J., and Shaun R. Harper. "Disproportionate Impact of K-12 School Suspension and Expulsion on Black Students in Southern States." University of Pennsylvania Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, 2015.

Todd, Andrew R., et al. "Does Seeing Faces of Young Black Boys Facilitate the Identification of Threatening Stimuli?" Psychological Science , vol. 27, no. 3, 1 Feb. 2016, doi:10.1177/0956797615624492

Bowman, Barbara T., et al. "Addressing the African American Achievement Gap: Three Leading Educators Issue a Call to Action." Young Children , vol. 73, no.2, May 2018.

Raufu, Abiodun. "School-to-Prison Pipeline: Impact of School Discipline on African American Students." Journal of Education & Social Policy, vol. 7, no. 1, Mar. 2017.

Sheftall, Arielle H., et al. "Suicide in Elementary School-Aged Children and Early Adolescents." Pediatrics , vol. 138, no. 4, Oct. 2016, doi:10.1542/peds.2016-0436

Grissom, Jason A., and Christopher Redding. "Discretion and Disproportionality: Explaining the Underrepresentation of High-Achieving Students of Color in Gifted Programs." AERA Open , 18 Jan. 2016, doi:10.1177/2332858415622175

Card, David, and Laura Giuliano. "Universal Screening Increases the Representation of Low-Income and Minority Students in Gifted Education." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 113, no. 48, 29 Nov. 2016, pp. 13678-13683., doi:10.1073/pnas.1605043113

Goldhaber, Dan, et al. "Uneven Playing Field? Assessing the Teacher Quality Gap Between Advantaged and Disadvantaged Students." Educational Researcher, vol. 44, no. 5, 1 June 2015, doi:10.3102/0013189X15592622

Klopfenstein, Kristin. "Advanced Placement: Do Minorities Have Equal Opportunity?" Economics of Education Review , vol. 23, no. 2, Apr. 2004, pp. 115-131., doi:10.1016/S0272-7757(03)00076-1

Javdani, Shabnam. "Policing Education: An Empirical Review of the Challenges and Impact of the Work of School Police Officers." American Journal of Community Psychology , vol. 63, no. 3-4, June 2019, pp. 253-269., doi:10.1002/ajcp.12306

McArdle, Nancy, and Dolores Acevedo-Garcia. "Consequences of Segregation for Children’s Opportunity and Wellbeing." A Shared Future: Fostering Communities of Inclusion in an Era of Inequality. Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2017.

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• Unlearning Racism: Resources for Teaching Anti-Racism
• The Roots of Colorism, or Skin Tone Discrimination
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• Black Women Are the Most Educated Group in the U.S.
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Most AAPI Adults Think the History of Racism Should Be Taught in Schools, an AP-NORC Poll Finds

About 7 in 10 AAPI adults approve of K-12 public schools teaching about the history of slavery, racism and segregation

FILE - A row of school buses rests in a parking lot, April 7, 2020, in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. About 7 in 10 AAPI adults approve of K-12 public schools teaching about the history of slavery, racism and segregation, according to a new poll from AAPI Data and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. A similar share also support teaching about the history of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the United States, while about half support teaching about issues related to sex and sexuality. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. schools should teach about issues related to race, most Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders believe. They also oppose efforts to restrict what subjects can be discussed in the classroom, according to a new poll.

In the survey from AAPI Data and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research , 71% of AAPI adults favor teaching about the history of slavery, racism and segregation in K-12 public schools. The same share also said they support teaching about the history of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the United States, while about half support teaching about issues related to sex and sexuality.

AAPI Democrats are more supportive of these topics being taught in classrooms than AAPI Republicans.

Still, only 17% of AAPI adults think school boards should be able to limit what subjects students and teachers talk about in the classroom, and about one-quarter of AAPI Republicans are in favor of these restrictions.

The results indicate that efforts to politicize education through culture war issues have not gained strong inroads in Asian American communities, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a public policy professor at the University of California, Riverside, and founder of AAPI Data. Across the country, conservative members of state legislatures and local school boards have made efforts to restrict teaching about race and gender in classrooms.

“Even as parents are concerned and engaged in various ways with K-12 education, the culture wars are not something that resonate with AAPI parents,” he said. “I think that's important because there's so much news coverage of it and certainly a lot of policy activity.”

AAPI Americans are a fast-growing demographic , but small sample sizes and linguistic barriers often prevent their views from being analyzed in other surveys.

Glenn Thomas, a 53-year-old father to three children in public schools who identifies as a political independent and is Japanese and white, said that while he does not oppose classrooms covering topics like race and gender, he does not think they should be the sole focus of how curriculums are designed.

“I'm kind of old-school, reading, writing, arithmetic,” he said of how schools approach topics like gender and race. “I don't think it necessarily needs to be taught as separate curriculums.”

Thomas, whose family has lived all over the country because of his career in the military, said the influence of politics and external actors in public schools varied greatly depending on where they lived. In Florida, where he currently lives, he thinks the state government too heavily influences local schools.

Nationally, 39% of AAPI adults say that they follow news about their school boards, while just 13% say they have attended a local school board meeting and 18% have communicated in-person or online with a local school board member. When it comes to elections, 28% have voted in a local school board election.

While those percentages are roughly consistent with the general public, AAPI adults are slightly less likely to say they have voted in a local school board election.

Because a high percentage of Asian Americans are immigrants, Ramakrishnan said, many did not grow up in the same political system as the United States, where there is a high level of local control and influence over schools. A lack of outreach from mainstream institutions may also contribute to a lower level of engagement, he added.

“It takes a fair amount of effort to learn how the system works and how to have influence in that system," he said. “Given the high level of interest that (Asian American and Pacific Islander) parents place in education, you would expect higher rates of participation.”

Varisa Patraporn, a Thai American mother of two public school children in California, said that she is a consistent voter in local elections, given the importance of those individuals in making decisions that affect schools. In Cerritos, where she lives, candidates tend to host events and send out mailers during elections, reflecting a robust campaign for seats on the school board.

Patraporn said that while she has communicated with school board members, she has not attended a school board meeting. Part of that, she said, is because the meetings happen in the evening and are harder to attend for parents who have young children or other obligations. That means the parents who do attend and speak up can have a disproportionate amount of sway.

Patraporn said that she wants the school curriculum to be more diverse and inclusive, despite pushback from some parents who do not want discussions of race in the classroom. She said she often supplements her children's reading to expose them to a wider range of perspectives beyond what they get from their assignments.

“Those conversations have started, but there's a lot of resistance in our community to that,” she said. “There's a lot of resistance in terms of being fearful of what it means to actually talk about race.”

Ramakrishnan said the polling data indicates an opening to engage AAPI communities more intensely with their local educational institutions. According to the poll, about two-thirds of AAPI adults see the schools that children attend as extremely or very important to their success in adulthood. And about half say parents and teachers have too little influence on the curriculum in public schools, similar to the general population.

“This is a community that still sees college as a good deal, as an important pathway toward mobility and success, and is concerned about the quality of K-12 education as well,” he said. “We have a ripe opportunity to engage and boost participation in these Asian American Pacific Islander communities when it comes to educational policy.”

The poll of 1,068 U.S. adults who are Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders was conducted from April 8-17, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based Amplify AAPI Panel, designed to be representative of the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander population. Online and telephone interviews were offered in English, the Chinese dialects of Mandarin and Cantonese, Vietnamese and Korean. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

Copyright 2024 The  Associated Press . All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Most AAPI adults think the history of racism should be taught in schools, an AP-NORC poll finds

FILE - A row of school buses rests in a parking lot, April 7, 2020, in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. About 7 in 10 AAPI adults approve of K-12 public schools teaching about the history of slavery, racism and segregation, according to a new poll from AAPI Data and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. A similar share also support teaching about the history of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the United States, while about half support teaching about issues related to sex and sexuality. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak, File)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. schools should teach about issues related to race, most Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders believe. They also oppose efforts to restrict what subjects can be discussed in the classroom, according to a new poll.

In the survey from AAPI Data and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research , 71% of AAPI adults favor teaching about the history of slavery, racism and segregation in K-12 public schools. The same share also said they support teaching about the history of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the United States, while about half support teaching about issues related to sex and sexuality.

AAPI Democrats are more supportive of these topics being taught in classrooms than AAPI Republicans.

Still, only 17% of AAPI adults think school boards should be able to limit what subjects students and teachers talk about in the classroom, and about one-quarter of AAPI Republicans are in favor of these restrictions.

The results indicate that efforts to politicize education through culture war issues have not gained strong inroads in Asian American communities, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a public policy professor at the University of California, Riverside, and founder of AAPI Data. Across the country, conservative members of state legislatures and local school boards have made efforts to restrict teaching about race and gender in classrooms.

“Even as parents are concerned and engaged in various ways with K-12 education, the culture wars are not something that resonate with AAPI parents,” he said. “I think that’s important because there’s so much news coverage of it and certainly a lot of policy activity.”

AAPI Americans are a fast-growing demographic , but small sample sizes and linguistic barriers often prevent their views from being analyzed in other surveys.

Glenn Thomas, a 53-year-old father to three children in public schools who identifies as a political independent and is Japanese and white, said that while he does not oppose classrooms covering topics like race and gender, he does not think they should be the sole focus of how curriculums are designed.

“I’m kind of old-school, reading, writing, arithmetic,” he said of how schools approach topics like gender and race. “I don’t think it necessarily needs to be taught as separate curriculums.”

Thomas, whose family has lived all over the country because of his career in the military, said the influence of politics and external actors in public schools varied greatly depending on where they lived. In Florida, where he currently lives, he thinks the state government too heavily influences local schools.

Nationally, 39% of AAPI adults say that they follow news about their school boards, while just 13% say they have attended a local school board meeting and 18% have communicated in-person or online with a local school board member. When it comes to elections, 28% have voted in a local school board election.

While those percentages are roughly consistent with the general public, AAPI adults are slightly less likely to say they have voted in a local school board election.

Because a high percentage of Asian Americans are immigrants, Ramakrishnan said, many did not grow up in the same political system as the United States, where there is a high level of local control and influence over schools. A lack of outreach from mainstream institutions may also contribute to a lower level of engagement, he added.

“It takes a fair amount of effort to learn how the system works and how to have influence in that system,” he said. “Given the high level of interest that (Asian American and Pacific Islander) parents place in education, you would expect higher rates of participation.”

Varisa Patraporn, a Thai American mother of two public school children in California, said that she is a consistent voter in local elections, given the importance of those individuals in making decisions that affect schools. In Cerritos, where she lives, candidates tend to host events and send out mailers during elections, reflecting a robust campaign for seats on the school board.

Patraporn said that while she has communicated with school board members, she has not attended a school board meeting. Part of that, she said, is because the meetings happen in the evening and are harder to attend for parents who have young children or other obligations. That means the parents who do attend and speak up can have a disproportionate amount of sway.

Patraporn said that she wants the school curriculum to be more diverse and inclusive, despite pushback from some parents who do not want discussions of race in the classroom. She said she often supplements her children’s reading to expose them to a wider range of perspectives beyond what they get from their assignments.

“Those conversations have started, but there’s a lot of resistance in our community to that,” she said. “There’s a lot of resistance in terms of being fearful of what it means to actually talk about race.”

Ramakrishnan said the polling data indicates an opening to engage AAPI communities more intensely with their local educational institutions. According to the poll, about two-thirds of AAPI adults see the schools that children attend as extremely or very important to their success in adulthood. And about half say parents and teachers have too little influence on the curriculum in public schools, similar to the general population.

“This is a community that still sees college as a good deal, as an important pathway toward mobility and success, and is concerned about the quality of K-12 education as well,” he said. “We have a ripe opportunity to engage and boost participation in these Asian American Pacific Islander communities when it comes to educational policy.”

The poll of 1,068 U.S. adults who are Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders was conducted from April 8-17, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based Amplify AAPI Panel, designed to be representative of the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander population. Online and telephone interviews were offered in English, the Chinese dialects of Mandarin and Cantonese, Vietnamese and Korean. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org .

Teaching Race in Business Schools: The Challenges and Possibilities of Anti-Racist Education

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• Published: 26 May 2024

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• Helena Liu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4211-0932 1  

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This article explores anti-racist education in business schools amidst the backlash against critical race theory in an anti-Black world. I conduct an autoethnography of my experiences as a woman of colour and management educator who has attempted to bring critical discussions of race and racism into my classrooms. The article examines the barriers to anti-racist teaching in business schools and shows how they interweave individual/interpersonal, institutional, and ideological domains of power. Through my stories, I offer an account of the ways anti-racist education may be limited when it relies on the efforts of individual academics and reveal the tolls that anti-racist education can take on the educator, especially when they are navigating wider systems that are hostile to racial justice. By interrogating the challenges of anti-racist education, I also reflect on the practices and conditions that make meaningful anti-racist education possible.

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We learned your French

We learned your English

Your Spanish

Your Portuguese

You learned our nothing

You called us stupid

That’s white privilege

And I’m sure it probably hurts for you to hear those two words

Kind of like gunshots and explosions

From those commissioned to protect you

Whisking past your ears

What is white privilege?

— Kyla Jenée Lacey

Excerpt from White Privilege

Introduction

In 2021, critical race theory (CRT) turned into a political rallying cry in the United States when Republican legislatures campaigned to ban it from public schools as a supposedly ‘divisive’ subject (Schuessler, 2021 ). In the span of a few months, CRT went from a somewhat esoteric field developed by legal scholars in the 1980s to the subject of contentious media debate, with Fox News mentioning ‘critical race theory’ over 1,900 times in just four months (Power, 2021 ). Florida Governor, Ron Desantis, proclaimed that CRT is ‘basically teaching kids to hate our country and to hate each other based on race’ (Kruse, 2021 ). The campaign against CRT had material consequences for anti-racist educators around the country, with teachers like Matthew Hawn dismissed from his position after sharing with his students the poem by Kyla Jenée Lacey at the top of this article.

Despite the moral panic over CRT, few of its detractors appeared to be able to articulate precisely what it is, using the term instead as a dog whistle to derail anti-racist ethics. Many critical race theorists who developed the field to study and transform the relationships between race, racism, and white supremacy were perplexed by the sudden public outcry (Delgado et al., 2017 ). Central to CRT is the understanding that race is a fundamental organising principle of social life. Yet arguably, the fear, anxiety, and contempt elicited by the notion that public schools are discussing race, however misplaced, exemplify the importance of an anti-racist ethics in education. Specifically, this article located within the special issue on Racial Justice and Business Ethics, speaks to fellow business school educators and administrators about the challenges of anti-racist business education that is reflected in, yet extend far beyond, the recent furore over CRT. I conduct an autoethnographic inquiry of my own experiences as an anti-racist educator working in Australian business schools to answer the research question: What are the barriers to anti-racist teaching in business schools? To answer this question, I engage the storytelling traditions of CRT to share my own experiences as a management academic attempting to teach anti-racism in business schools within a world witnessing the depreciating value of Black lives (Andrews, 2018a ; Sharpe, 2016 ; Wilderson, 2020 ). My experiences illustrate how barriers to anti-racist education interweave individual/interpersonal, institutional, and ideological domains of power and thus require multilayered solutions to overcome in business schools.

While this article focusses on North American knowledges and practices, the imperative for anti-racist education is not confined to North America. At a Black Lives Matter demonstration in West Hollywood in 2020, a white Australian reporter asked a protestor to explain police brutality to her audience who she explained has no experience with Black death at the hands of police. Except that by 2021, at least 474 Indigenous people in Australia have lost their lives in custody while no police have been convicted in any of those cases (Mao, 2021 ). The reporter’s ignorance is shared among many white Australians who believe that racism is something that happens ‘out there’ in the U.S. and therefore irrelevant to us. White supremacy was exported around the world through European colonialism and thus education, globally, needs to attend to localised expressions of race, racism, and white supremacy.

I begin by offering an overview of the racialised nature of business to show why an anti-racist ethics is paramount to business. I then discuss the research around anti-racist education, including critiques of conventional teaching practices in business schools. This theoretical groundwork helps me make sense of my experiences as an anti-racist educator, which I illustrate through vignettes of my attempts to introduce anti-racism into my classrooms. Through the analysis of my experiences, I offer some reflections of the practices and conditions that make anti-racist teaching possible within business schools.

Race, Racism, and White Supremacy in Business

Despite its recent malignment by conservative politicians, CRT has long served as an anti-racist ethics to understand and change how race and racism function in society. Foundational to this movement was that idea that racism is ‘normal, not aberrant, in American society’ (Delgado et al., 2013 , p. 2). CRT has been immensely influential, and among its many pollinations include both business and education. Race is integral to business because capitalism is racist (Dar et al., 2021 ). The prevailing structure of the economy justifies the flow of capital towards white people and white institutions. Anti-racism therefore inheres an ethical imperative to redress the economic dispossession of Black people. An anti-racist ethics of business is transgressive and calls for a commitment to transform work, organisations, and the economy.

In 1992, Stella Nkomo ( 1992 ) advanced a pathbreaking critique of the silence of race in management and organisation studies in her article, ‘The emperor has no clothes: Rewriting “race in organizations”’. She argued that race is and has always been constitutive of organisations even though it has not been explicitly acknowledged in much of business scholarship. Nkomo’s review of the literature showed that the dominant psychologistic paradigm of management and organisation studies produced largely quantitative studies that saw racism as tantamount to measurable prejudicial attitudes. She argues that this research was primarily motivated by understanding how Black workers could assimilate into white institutions while ignoring the sociological dimensions of race. Nkomo called on the discipline to dethrone the emperor and decentre white men as the hegemonic producers and gatekeepers of knowledge. Her critique, now 30 years on, has challenged us to see racism as more than individual attitudes and interpersonal conflict, and to recognise it instead as a social and political phenomenon maintained within the broader system of white supremacy.

When I refer to white supremacy, I follow its conceptualisation in CRT as an ideology that confers unearned privilege onto people racialised as white and upholds the belief in white people’s physical, intellectual, cultural, and moral superiority (Bonilla-Silva, 2006 ; Yancy, 2012 ). White supremacy is distinguished from racism, as racism is understood as the mundane, everyday acts that maintain white supremacist structures and cultures (Gillborn, 2006 ). Where racism tends to focus on interpersonal relations as well as institutional practices, white supremacy focusses instead on the cultural norms and conventions that maintain racial oppression in society. Yet, despite concerted efforts in CRT to identify and challenge racial injustice over the past few decades, white supremacy remains ‘a pervasively malignant and malicious systemic illness’ (Yancy, 2018 , p. 1) and ‘as embedded in the fabric of North American society as ever, coded into the DNA of the system’ (Andrews, 2018a , p. xv).

The white supremacist ideology of business rationalised colonialism and chattel slavery, framing the arguments for these institutional practices primarily in terms of the economic benefits for the white propertied class (Harris, 1993 ). In the current age, business continues to be regarded as an apolitical phenomenon while the disproportionate flow of capital to white people and white institutions is rarely interrogated as an expression of racial inequity (Delgado et al., 2017 ). Nkomo’s ( 1992 ) intervention made way for more research that demonstrated how white supremacy is fundamental to management and organisational knowledge and practice. Bill Cooke ( 2003 ), for one, pointed out how the origins of management is overwhelmingly credited to the North American railroads project, yet prior to the railroads, plantations gave shape to contemporary managerial theories and practices through the ‘management’ of slaves. The legacy of antebellum slavery endures in management today with the commodification of workers and pervasive mechanisms of industrial discipline and control (Ruef & Harness, 2009 ). Meanwhile, the work of Joan Acker ( 2006 , 2012 ) was instrumental in extending an intersectional approach (Collins, 2019 ; Crenshaw, 1989 ) that recognised how organisational hierarchies are simultaneously racialised, gendered, and classed, in a framework she referred to as ‘inequality regimes’. At the same time, Eduardo Ibarra-Colado’s ( 2006 ) rich body of work around epistemic coloniality has shown how Anglo-American knowledges impose a neoliberal rationality that deems indigenous Latin American knowledges abnormal and illogical.

These interrogations paved the way for studies that traced the pervasive presence of race, racism, and white supremacy in business. This includes the public policies and financial practices of redlining, which refused to insure mortgages in and around Black neighbourhoods, enabled racial segregation throughout the 20th Century (Rothstein, 2017 ). Subsidised suburban homes designated for whites allowed white families to accrue wealth via their home equities while Black families were largely confined to urban slums (Rothstein, 2017 ). The creation of racially segregated neighbourhoods further drove spatialising practices of environmental racism that exposed people of colour to increased air, water, and noise pollution (Dickinson, 2012 ). Under the guise of servicing the financially starved Black neighbourhoods, the 1980s saw the rise of subprime mortgages that disproportionately devastated Black borrowers when the subprime market collapsed (Hernandez, 2009 ). The effects of these policies and practices are seen in the persistent economic disparity today where median Black wealth remained around 12 per cent of white wealth in 2019 (Fry et al., 2021 ).

Research has also shown that racism shapes recruitment, retention, performance management, and pay and promotion (Bell & Nkomo, 2001 ; Booth et al., 2012 ; Greenhaus et al., 1990 ; Härtel et al., 1999 ; Parker, 2005 ; Rosette et al., 2008 ; Van Laer & Janssens, 2011 ; Wyatt & Silvester, 2015 ). Black workers are persistently impeded in their ability to gain employment and progress in their careers, earning less money and concentrated in occupations with lower status compared to white workers (Whitaker, 2019 ). The everyday experiences of Black workers are also marked by insidious incidences of mistreatment and microaggressions (Deitch et al., 2003 ; Pierce, 2012 ; Puwar, 2004 ). When entrepreneurs of colour start their own companies, they are less likely to gain venture capital funding and are often regarded as less creditworthy by banks, even when they have a good credit history (Fairlie et al., 2022 ). The rise of Black entrepreneurial districts after abolition (known as Black Wall Streets) overcame considerable racial barriers and fostered funding access and the acquisition of business skills for Black businessowners. However, many of these districts that provided economic opportunities and a refuge from racial hostility were destroyed by both public policy and violence (Prieto et al., 2022 ). It is clear that race, racism, and white supremacy are integral to business yet despite their relevance to a range of business disciplines, they rarely feature in business school curricula.

Given these complexities, I apply a framework adapted from Collins and Bilge ( 2016 ) to navigate the multilayered expressions of race, racism, and white supremacy in business education. Specifically, I will examine the barriers to anti-racist education across three interconnected domains of power: (1) individual/interpersonal, (2) institutional, and (3) ideological. The individual/interpersonal level is concerned with people’s senses of self, their lives, and how they relate to one another. I have combined the individual and interpersonal domains in recognising that individual experiences of race are relationally constituted. The institutional level is concerned with how racism and white supremacy are organised and structured.

The ideological level addresses the white supremacist nature of business and society and attends to how cultural norms and conventions of anti-Blackness are normalised and legitimised in everyday life (Nkomo & Al Ariss, 2014 ; Ray, 2019 ). An important aspect of this domain is the recognition that white supremacy is produced, defended, and disseminated in the academy (Arday & Mirza, 2018 ; Dar et al., 2021 ; Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012 ; Muzanenhamo & Chowdhury, 2021 ). The research and teaching activities of universities play a key role in upholding white supremacist constructions of business knowledge and practice and therefore academics have an ethical responsibility to foster more inclusive and liberatory classrooms (hooks, 1994 ). As there have been comprehensive critiques of race scholarship in recent years, the focus of this article will be on the teaching activities of business schools. While there is an overlap between those who research and those who teach race, anti-racist scholarship and education present their own possibilities and challenges such as those relating to institutional support, industry partnership, funding, and student feedback. The next section will explore the literature on anti-racist education and its implementation in business schools.

Anti-Racist Education

Like business, education is an institution through which racism and white supremacy are normalised. In Gloria Ladson-Billings ( 1998 , p. 18) definitive analysis, she outlines three ways a ‘white supremacist master script’ is maintained in educational practices. First, the curriculum whitewashes history and builds domesticated images of happy multiculturalism (see also Ahmed, 2008a ). Second, instruction tends to assume a racialised and classed deficit model, where teachers expect failure from Black students and are exhorted to find ‘“the right strategy or technique” to deal with (read: control) “at-risk” (read: African American) students’ (Ladson-Billings, 1998 , p. 19). Third, racial biases are ingrained in standardised tests, where assessment design serves to provide a scientific rationalism for Black students’ supposed deficiency.

Alongside these educational practices, Ladson-Billings ( 1998 ) also recognises two institutional factors that compound Black disadvantage, including poor school funding in Black-dominated districts and desegregation policies that cater to white students and their families. In higher education, funding disparities are reflected in the underrepresentation of non-white students at elite institutions (Andrews, 2018b ). The underrepresentation of Black faculty, especially in higher-ranked positions, has further contributed to exclusionary curricula that neglect to reflect and engage the students. A 2020 report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that white people accounted for 75 per cent of full-time academic faculty in the U.S., rising to 80 per cent at the full professorial rank compared to just 4 per cent of Black professors (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020 ). Canadian studies similarly show that ‘visible minority’ and Indigenous faculty combined comprise 25 per cent of full-time academics, although more detailed data on race and rank are not collected (Universities Canada, 2018 ). In both cases, the racial diversity of faculty was far below the diversity of the student base, which is 46 per cent in the U.S. (Espinosa et al., 2019 ) and 43 per cent in Canada (Universities Canada, 2018 ). In response, students have launched campaigns like Rhodes Must Fall and Why is My Curriculum White? in 2015 to pressure universities to address the raciality and coloniality of higher education (Peters, 2018 ). At the same time, academics of colour and their allies are challenging white supremacy and helping to raise consciousness around the importance of anti-racism in business education (Liu, 2022 ).

Research of education policy has also revealed that white supremacy undergirds the sector. Examining the priorities that policy sets, the beneficiaries it privileges, and the outcomes it produces, Gillborn ( 2005 , p. 496) concluded that the norms and conventions of the education system ‘encode a deep privileging of white students and, in particular, the legitimisation, defence, and extension of Black inequity’. He specifies that with regard to policy priorities, racial equity has ‘been at best a marginal concern, at worst non-existent’ while the use of central reform strategies to boost educational outcomes have worked against racial equity yet are nevertheless promoted as ‘best practice’ (Gillborn, 2005 , pp. 496–497).

Even in the earliest interventions, education scholars committed to CRT foresaw the dangers of institutional co-optation. Ladson-Billings ( 1998 ), for example, recalls the radical pedagogical strategies that have been proposed to address racial injustice such as cooperative classrooms and multicultural education that were diluted into trivial and superficial activities. In more recent years, calls to ‘decolonise the university’ have rarely resulted in meaningful systemic change within universities and academia. So that while institutions such as Birmingham City University laid claim to being the first university in Europe to offer a Black Studies program in 2016, one of its professors, Kehinde Andrews ( 2018b ), considers that the program was in a large part supported by the university because of its marketing and revenue generation potentials rather than any sincere commitment to racial justice. Birmingham City followed in the steps of American colleges such as San Francisco State College, where the Black Studies program was founded in the 1960s after students and faculty protested for five months. Andrews ( 2018b ) suggests that American universities were eager to look proactive by hiring Black academics but stripped the revolutionary agenda from Black Studies curricula, ultimately curtailing Black education from becoming ‘the instrument for change’ it was intended to be (Hare, 1972 , p. 33; see also Cann & DeMeulenaere, 2020 ). Education institutions have thus long demonstrated Ahmed’s ( 2007 ) analysis of the ways organisations make performative gestures towards anti-racist ethics without a genuine commitment to change.

Critical scholars working in business schools have raised ethical awareness of the ways our teaching contributes to growing global inequities. Despite business schools becoming signatories of the UN Principles of Responsible Management Education and expanding their ethics courses in the wake of high-profile corporate scandals and managerial malfeasance in the 2000s, business schools continue to be complicit in upholding oppressive and exploitative regimes (Fotaki & Prasad, 2015 ). Fotaki and Prasad ( 2014 , p. 105) exhort business educators to ‘integrate their values of social justice into management education’ with greater critical reflexivity. Following Paulo Freire’s ( 1970 ) concept of conscientização, management education has the potential (and arguably the moral obligation) to use the classroom to deepen students’ sense of their social embeddedness and highlight the unjust systems in which we all live (Fotaki & Prasad, 2014 , 2015 ; Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012 ; Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021 ).

It seems then that anti-racist pedagogy is not confined to curricula and instructional designs that address race and racism, but also requires critical consciousness on the part of the educators, and institutions that are meaningfully committed to the liberation aims of anti-racist education (Cann & DeMeulenaere, 2020 ; Liu, 2023 ). To explore the multilayered practices and conditions that make anti-racist education possible, I draw on my own experiences as a critical race educator who has taught in a number of business schools over the last 14 years. In the next section, I will discuss how autoethnography as a research method allows me to engage storytelling to reveal insights about the challenges and possibilities for anti-racist education in business schools.

Autoethnography

Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of research and writing involving the study of the author’s personal lived experiences that offer insights into sociological phenomenon (Ellis, 1998 ; Ellis & Bochner, 2000 ; Reed-Danahay, 1997 ). In addition to their memories, autoethnographers may draw on diaries, memoirs, letters, and e-mails to help them build an understanding of their perceptions of themselves and their social reality in relation to the sociopolitical context (Haynes, 2011 ; Vickers, 2007 ). Although autoethnography prescribes no fixed form or format, autoethnographic writing enables the author and the readers alike to ‘make sense of their experiences and enter into dialogue through empathic understanding’, so that they may ‘analyse and understand personal experience as part of a larger social and political system’ (van Amsterdam, 2015 , p. 270). Autoethnography does not presume that research is about the objective discovery of ‘truth’ (Haynes, 2011 ) and instead, compels researchers to recognise themselves as inseparable instruments of their inquiry. By speaking from the self (Ellis, 1998 ), autoethnography resonates with CRT in the ways it engages storytelling to invite understandings of social reality from marginalised standpoints (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). This article adopts an autoethnographic approach to answer the research question: What are the barriers to anti-racist teaching in business schools?

Autoethnography has long offered rich insights into teaching. Autoethnographic studies from the perspective of teachers illuminate the complex processes navigating the relational dynamics inside the classroom as well as the sociopolitical dynamics of the university (Humphreys, 2006 ; Sinclair, 2007 ). Autoethnographic studies from students expose their visceral experiences of marginalisation in the academy as well as the institutional and ideological forces that promote uncritical knowledge (Blackwell, 2010 ; Prasad, 2013 ; Taylor, 2020 ). Autoethnography enables a deeper exploration of teaching sensitive, unconventional, or controversial subjects such as race and racism, and has the potential to elicit knowledge about the possibilities for anti-racist education in business schools.

Central to CRT is the technique of counter-storytelling to reveal understandings of society from the standpoint of marginalised peoples. Yet, frank and honest critiques of racism can be challenging and engaging in anti-racist scholarship remains risky. Critical race scholars in our field have often revealed that they have been dissuaded from researching race at some point in their careers (Liu, 2019 ; Muzanenhamo & Chowdhury, 2022 ; Nkomo, 2021 ). At best, race is seen as irrelevant and racism as obsolete, where the most extreme examples of slavery, genocide, and white extremism are deemed relics of the past (Bonilla-Silva, 2006 ; Delgado, 1990 ). At worst, discussions of race are experienced as tantamount to accusations of racism itself, triggering shame, denial, and rage among those who feel they are the targets of blame (Yancy, 2018 ). Commitments to and protections around academic freedom do not always extend as far as anti-racism and doing this work bears personal and professional risks (Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021 ). Doing autoethnography requires continual reflexive interrogation of ethics (Ellis & Bochner, 2000 ). Specifically, my accounts here invariably relate to others—my colleagues and students—who are being represented in particular ways by my words. As such, I need to emphasise that none of my accounts are indictments about the individuals involved. Indeed, to protect their anonymity, names and other identifying features are not mentioned and efforts have been made to disguise the people present in these interactions (Bottrell et al., 2019 ; Haynes, 2011 ; Sparkes, 2007 ; Watson, 2000 ). This practice is important because ultimately, anti-racist education extends beyond the actions of individual social actors. My writing does not pretend that I am an objective, detached observer but recognises instead that my knowledge moves through me, the flesh and bones of a woman of colour, and is invariably shaped by my standpoint. Like all autoethnographies, my accounts here should be understood as simply constructing personal stories ‘inspired by partial happenings, fragmented memories, echoes of conversations, whispers in corridors, fleeting glimpses of myriad reflections seen through broken glass, and multiple layers of fiction and narrative imaginings’ (Sparkes, 2007 , p. 522). I choose words to capture the visceral realities of everyday racism through the kinds of ‘expressive discourse that unsettle us, that make us uncomfortable with its daring frankness that pulls us in even as it unnerves’ (Yancy, 2012 , p. 30).

Research Context

The institutions in which the narratives of my teaching take place are mid-sized universities in Australia that boast racial diversity among both students and faculty. Indeed, all the universities at which I have taught avow diversity, inclusion, equality, and social justice among its values. Yet, racism is systemic and endemic in the settler-colonial nation of Australia. As in North America, Australia enforced immigration restriction since its federation in 1901, heralding the White Australia Policy (Ang, 2014 ; Hage, 1998 ; Jayasuriya et al., 2003 ). The Policy reflected the nation’s aspirations to maintain a homogenous white identity by outlawing the permanent settlement and deporting non-white migrants (Curthoys, 2003 ). The White Australia Policy was officially abolished in 1973 with the establishment of multiculturalism. Unlike the laissez-faire approach of the U.S., Australia resembles Canada in its deliberate management of state-sponsored diversity, touting an ‘amalgam of policies designed to supervise incorporation and address diversity’s consequences for communal relations and identity’ (Walsh, 2012 , p. 282).

Given Australian anxieties about our colonial past, constructions of race are usually euphemised as ‘ancestry’ or ‘culture’. Although Australia’s diversity is often hailed as a cornerstone of its ‘successful multicultural society’, it is described as being underpinned by our common values and commitment to ‘freedom, security, and prosperity’ (Department of Home Affairs, 2018 , p. 7); code for libertarianism, border controls, and capitalism. White supremacy thus undergirds Australian multiculturalism and in the present neoliberal context, non-white people are increasingly seen in terms of their economic value to a parochial and protectionist Australia (Liu, 2017 ; Stratton & Ang, 2013 ; Walsh, 2012 ). Multiculturalism serves as ‘an alibi against racism as well as a criterion of cultural capital through the consumption of difference without any apparent interrogation’ (Banerjee & Linstead, 2001 , p. 705). As Hage ( 1998 ) remarks, multiculturalism is not what Australia is , but what it has .

Teaching Anti-Racism

I began my PhD in 2008 and taught across a wide array of courses around management, including human resource management, performance management, international business, industrial relations, and management strategy. Early in my career, subject discussions of race were more modest, starting with a single lecture on business ethics (usually inserted at the end of the semester) that presented existing research around racial discrimination in organisations (e.g. Booth et al., 2012 ; Deitch et al., 2003 ; Rosette et al., 2008 ) for around 15 min. This limited acknowledgement belied CRT principles as the subtext of my curriculum was that racism is abnormal and aberrant (cf. Delgado & Stefancic, 2013). I stayed silent on the historical and structural contexts of this discrimination and thus implied that organisations should seek to stamp out discrimination under vague assumptions that equated diversity with goodness (Ahmed, 2008a , 2008b , 2012 ). I adopted this neoliberal approach to race as it was consistent with the hegemony of management pedagogy where discrimination is treated as the rare result of a few ‘bad apples’. Eliminating discrimination, was therefore, assumed to be a simple and routine task undertaken by managers for the greater good of both the organisation and its employees. In the final year of my PhD, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was fatally shot in Sanford, Florida. That following week when my students and I were expecting to discuss stereotypes, we shared stories of how our own lives had been marked by racial stereotypes. Students of colour talked openly about when they had feared for their own safety. Our classroom became a space where we could develop our collective consciousness around racism and grieve the loss of Black lives. The possibilities for more radical and meaningful anti-racist education were revealed to me.

In 2018, I redesigned my third-year undergraduate management subject to engage in critical interrogations of work and organisations. Each module of my 12-week curriculum weaves into one another. We learn about Mills’ ( 2000 ) concept of the sociological imagination first so students may appreciate how business is socially embedded and shaped by power. We then move on to understanding neoliberalism and capitalism through the history of management, organisational implications of gender and sexuality under patriarchy, race under white supremacy, culture under imperialism, so that by the end of the semester, they have developed an intersectional understanding of power. In the lecture on race under white supremacy, students and I spend an hour and a half exploring the social construction of race (Frankenberg, 1993 ), racialised organisations (Ray, 2019 ), white supremacy at work (Bonilla-Silva, 2001 ; Pierce, 2012 ; Puwar, 2004 ), intersectionality (Collins, 2019 ; Crenshaw, 1989 , 1991 ; Nash, 2019 ), anti-racist interventions (Liu, 2020 ), and solidarity and allyship (Dreher, 2009 ; Swan, 2017 ). Anticipating that students may be surprised by such an extensive exploration of CRT in a management subject, I share with my students why I am moved to bring social issues into the classroom.

I present hooks’ (1994) words from her book Teaching to Transgress in the first week of semester. I acknowledge that business education by default tends to be presented as apolitical but that student-led movements have demanded a moral reckoning that I feel called to answer. I also confess that while I was a student, I rarely saw myself reflected among my lecturers or reading lists, and came to believe racist presumptions of my incompetence (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012 ) until engaging with hooks’ (1994) work showed me that learning could liberate.

The following series of vignettes illustrate the barriers I have met in my attempts to introduce CRT into my classrooms. The first three stories show the different ways students resist or struggle with anti-racist principles. The fourth story recounts the response from a colleague who acted as a gatekeeper in deciding what was and what was not to be included in the degree. Finally, the fifth and last story highlights the psychoemotional tolls anti-racist teaching takes on the educator. In each of the proceeding vignettes, I apply the multilayered framework to show how the barriers to anti-racist business education interweave individual/interpersonal, institutional, and ideological domains of power.

The university distributes a student survey in the third week of semester, designed to provide early feedback for educators about students’ experiences of the subject. Some of the comments I receive include: ‘I honestly did not understand the purpose of this subject’, ‘this subject felt more like a sociology subject than a management subject’, ‘I expected to learn about how to make strategic decisions regarding management, all that happened in this subject was learning about social issues which are not relevant to a business degree’, ‘I am really disappointed in the university for having me study this subject… it feels like this subject was designed more for money making rather than educating management students about long-term impacts of their careers’, ‘I wish there was a greater focus on the real world implications of management, such as employment relationships, how management is relevant to businesses in the long term, how to adopt relevant management qualities in order to succeed as a management professional, balancing employee needs as well as business needs, legal implications of management, redundancy, termination, recruitment, etc .’ But the more certain students question the relevance of race to the ‘real world’ of business, the more urgent and important it feels to challenge the invisibility of white supremacy. And regardless of what students write in the surveys, every semester, a growing number of students of colour will linger after the last of their classmates file out of the lecture hall. They often murmur a ‘thank you’ and hold their gaze with a silent understanding between us that we recognise one another.

What may appear to be resistance to anti-racist principles from individual students is rooted in institutional and ideological domains of power. The neoliberal ideology of business schools is firmly embedded not only among faculty and administrators but also among the students. Many students are committed to their self-making as ‘professionals’. Inculcating themselves in capitalist logics is understood as tantamount to their ‘success’ in the ‘real world’. What counts as ‘success’ and what it means to be in the ‘real world’ are both discursive constructs that were previously developed in large part by universities. Graduate ideals ranged from a broad liberal education to more technical knowledge and skills in professional and vocational degrees with the overarching expectation that it was the employers’ responsibility to apprentice graduates into jobs (Boden & Nedeva, 2010 ). However, governments have played a major role in reshaping graduate ideals from the mid-1980s, transferring the onus of developing job-specific skills onto universities and passing training costs onto students (Boden & Nedeva, 2010 ). Higher education is increasingly seen by students as a product to be consumed in order to secure long-term financial returns, thereby constraining university agency over curriculum design and pedagogical practices (Boden & Nedeva, 2010 ).

Understanding these discursive struggles over graduate success can illuminate why a student perceived an alliance between my subject and the profit-making impetus of the university. My subject with its focus on social issues was ironically seen as a cynical money-making exercise on the part of the university while job-specific subjects with their emphasis on money-making are deemed for greater professional and social good. Dominated by an economic rationale, job-specific subjects are perceived as supporting students to secure employment (Boden & Nedeva, 2010 ) while a subject centred around social issues, deemed as promising little or no financial return, is the self-serving ploy of universities to steal student tuition. White interests and values are therefore maintained under the seemingly apolitical ideal of ‘employability’.

With the hope of cultivating conscientização ( Freire, 1970 ), I adopt autoethnography as an overarching framework for my subject. After introducing students to autoethnography in the second week of semester, they write a vignette each week, reflecting on how that week’s topic emerges in their professional and personal lives. For the week on race and white supremacy, I ask students to: ‘reflect on an arresting moment of when the racial identity of yourself or someone else became apparent to you. Consider how race was implicated in your social environment growing up such as how race was discussed (or not discussed) in your family, in your neighbourhood, in your community’. While this prompt elicits raw and insightful accounts of my students’ racial identifications and confrontations with white supremacy, there is also a common trope that emerges in the submissions of those who struggle to identify and name racism. Their accounts are startlingly similar. The story goes that the student works a part-time job at a retail store with a Black colleague. A white customer comes in one day and loudly remarks, ‘I don’t want to be served by this person.’ Hence, the student discovers racism for the first time in their life. They conclude their reflection by remarking on the importance of treating everyone with kindness and respect regardless of the colour of their skin.

How students conceptualise and articulate examples of racism are constrained by white supremacist ideology. Before enrolling in my subject, many of my students assume racism is an overt and intentional act of prejudice towards someone on the basis of their skin-colour, a narrow view that Nkomo ( 1992 ) critiqued 30 years earlier. CRT understandings of racism in both its institutional and ideological forms remain invisible, hence why CRT is sometimes seen as an overreaction, sowing division and discontent where there need not be. The trope of the ‘bad apple’ racist, so often caricaturised by someone who overly and explicitly proclaims their prejudices for the world to see, belies the reality of everyday racism as increasingly subtle and covert (Essed, 1991 ; Nkomo, 1992 ). Growing studies of microaggressions (Pierce, 1974 ; Torino et al., 2019 ) and benevolent racism (Esposito & Romano, 2014 ) underscore the ways racism has shifted over the decades as it has become less socially acceptable to express blatantly prejudicial views in many professional and public spaces. Contemporary forms of ‘racism without racists’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2006 ) tend to be expressed via ostensibly neutral or even complimentary attitudes that nevertheless uphold white supremacy. From this perspective, racism is condemned at the same time it is minimised as an anomalous practice that is ‘no longer an insurmountable—or even significant—obstacle to mobility and success’ (Esposito & Romano, 2014 , p. 73). So struggling to discuss race and see racism beyond these myths yet needing to fulfil institutional requirements to complete their degree, many students are compelled to tell stories about racist ‘bad apples’ when pushed at this prompt.

When we meet in the classroom, I attempt to fracture the construct of the ‘bad apple’ racist. I share with them my own vignette to illustrate the expectations for the assessment, choosing to recount an experience where a former student revealed that one of my unnamed white colleagues refers to her as ‘the Selena Gomez girl’ for their likeness after telling her that her ethnic name is too hard to pronounce. Many students are stunned after I read my vignette aloud as they begin to consider how racism can be casual, even seemingly jovial. Not least of all, my choice to show how a teacher can perpetuate racism prompts students to re-examine the incidences of everyday racism in their own lives, especially in imbalanced power relations.

The previous stories illustrated how students can resist and struggle with anti-racist analyses of business, respectively. These tensions presenting at the individual/interpersonal level in fact reveal institutional and ideological dynamics that shape the ways we understand race and racism in the context of business and impede our collective capacity to engage in anti-racist ethics in business education. The next story shows how even students who ostensibly embrace the critical principles of the subject can struggle with white supremacist ideology.

In one semester, four white women who have formed a group approach me at the end of my lecture on gender and sexuality under patriarchy to tell me how much they are enjoying the subject. They seek my advice on how they could make the topic the focus of their final assessments and I suggest various ways they could explore the intersectionality of gender and sexuality (i.e. the privileges and oppressions of being cisgender heterosexual women) or gender and capitalism (i.e. the rise of postfeminism). A couple of weeks later, they visit my office hours to show me their draft presentation where each of them shared stories of their gender disadvantage in the workplace, and I emphasise again the assessment’s focus on intersectional analysis. I’m dismayed that at their final presentation, it seems nothing has changed, and the presentation concludes with liberal exhortations for organisations to value women and individuated recommendations for women to be more confident at work and ‘lean in’.

With white feminism as the dominant frame in business studies over the last few decades, gender is often treated as tantamount to ‘diversity’ and gender inequality is assumed to be the most important, if not the only, form of social injustice in organisations and society (Bilge, 2013 ; Tomlinson, 2018 ). White feminism refers to the oppressive frame within women’s liberation movements that elevated elite white women’s needs, interests, and challenges above those of Indigenous women, women of colour, working class women, and queer, trans, and non-binary folks (Combahee River Collective 1983; hooks, 1994 ; Lugones, 2014 ; Taylor, 2017 ). White feminist ideologies reduce social justice to a liberal notion of cisgender, heterosexual, elite class, able-bodied, white women gaining the same power as privileged white men (Heizmann & Liu, 2022 ). Business is particularly pernicious in the ways radical, liberatory work is diluted into more conservative calls for ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’. For many of my students, I have come to accept that my subject on its own is inadequate to bring students through an awareness of interlocking systems of oppression (Combahee River Collective, 1983) and they require more opportunities for critical reflexivity before some are ready to grapple with the ways they benefit from or participate in domination.

A colleague tells me that they are looking for volunteers to develop online modules for the advanced MBA that will focus on cultural intelligence, ethics, the purpose of business, and diversity, ‘particularly gender’. She explains that the idea is that it will be a sort of ‘detox’ course that is designed to challenge established business conventions. She identifies the white male professors who have committed to contributing the first three topics and asks if I would be interested in delivering the diversity module, adding that her and her co-coordinators thought that my recently published research would fit the topic of diversity. I hesitate, doing the split-second mental assessment about whether I should comply or resist. I thank her for thinking of me but clarify that my publications have argued that diversity management treats people of colour as resources to be used for the benefit of white people and white institutions. My advice for thinking about and practising diversity differently would entail dismantling the interlocking systems of imperialism, white supremacism, capitalism, and patriarchy. I offer that my module may be suitable for her detox course, but there would be no hard feelings if she prefers to get a different take. The out I offer to my colleague is graciously taken. She adds that my angle on diversity management is ‘too confrontational’ at the start of the program for the students and thanks me for being so upfront.

White supremacist ideology is reproduced and reinforced via curricula when institutional gatekeepers specify the focus of business school degrees. The institution prided the course for being more socially conscious and set out with the aim of challenging conventional business thought and practices, but I inadvertently bumped up against the limits of this consciousness. My interest in race (and not just gender) and my insistence on naming the oppression of racism and white supremacy (and not just promote a happy concept of diversity; Ahmed, 2008b ) were judged as too confrontational.

These invisible barriers of epistemic respectability are erected throughout business schools. I have learnt over the years that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to engage in anti-racist education informed by institutional norms and shaped by the privilege and power of the educator. As a light-skinned, cisgender, straight, able-bodied, and neurotypical woman of colour, I am usually able to get away with much more radicality than my more marginalised peers. ‘You make intersectionality less scary’, said a white woman to me once after a workshop. It was intended as a compliment, but it highlighted for me the anti-Blackness that pervades anti-racist business education. I experience the difference between when I speak from marginalised and privileged standpoints, where my anti-racist lectures are more likely perceived as the biassed, self-interested whining of a person of colour but my lectures on queer and trans issues as a cisgender heterosexual person are lauded as generous, even heroic.

Inherent to the happy conceptualisations of diversity is that oppression is always something that happens ‘out there’ (Ahmed, 2008b ; Dar et al., 2021 ). Business convention of constructing racism as an overt and aberrant incident means that it can be treated as something created by a few ‘bad apples’ in organisations rather than something institutionalised and endemic to the culture. The institutional and ideological focus of my anti-racist education has repeatedly violated the invisible boundaries throughout my career. As Ahmed ( 2017 ) describes, when you name a problem, you become the problem. Anti-racist education holds up a mirror to individuals and institutions who often see themselves reflected in the critiques. Rather than address racism and white supremacy, institutions may blame the anti-racist educator as the source of institutional injury (Ahmed, 2018 ).

In a dark theatre, I am in the middle of my lecture on race and I begin explaining the concept of white supremacy while the slide behind me transitions to a picture of an advertisement for Pear’s soap from the 1890s, showing a moustachioed colonial general washing his hands at a basin while the border around this picture depicts British ships and a light-skinned fully-clothed figure giving a bar of soap to a dark-skinned half-naked figure sitting on the ground. Below the illustrations, the copy reads, ‘the first step towards lightening the white man’s burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness’.

The sea of students before me are enshrouded by the dark but slide projections at the front of the room cast their faces in an eerie glow. Three white students sitting together in one of the foremost rows elbow one another and I noticed for the first time in the lecture that one of them is discreetly propping his phone up on the desk and snapping pictures. I freeze. I imagine him sending my department chair a photograph of my slide with ‘WHITE SUPREMACY’ as the big bold header, complaining about being forced to learn about race. I try to keep talking but now I notice someone else a few rows behind extending their arms to snap a picture of the slide. I envision the lot of them marching into the school building, circulating a petition for my immediate dismissal. But they are smiling. As are the three students in front. I think of how they could post my slides on Facebook, shaming my institution for giving me a platform for ‘divisive content’ or even ‘reverse racism’. I stammer through the rest of my lecture and ask if there are any questions before I dismiss the class. A hand shoots up at the front of the theatre, ‘Will your slides be made available online?’ My face burns hot. It dawns on me that I forgot to upload the slides to our subject portal before the lecture this week. That’s why the students were taking photographs. I apologise profusely and promise the slides will go up the moment I get back to my office. The students file out the classroom, smiling, laughing, and thanking me for a great lecture.

This story shows how anti-racist educators grapple with internalised barriers. Fear is a constant companion to my work. Department chairs have physically recoiled at my mention of the term ‘white supremacy’, and co-teachers have removed the words from our joint lecture slides and later confessed their personal disdain as the rationale. Colleagues have declared that they do not want to be associated with me and my profile as a CRT educator. There have been material professional and personal consequences for my use of CRT in my teaching (Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021 ). I bring the trauma of backlash (Yancy, 2018 ) into my classrooms. In that lecture theatre, I was suddenly reminded of my vulnerability, of the risks to my career and livelihood as an untenured faculty member at the time if my superiors were to learn of the content of my curricula. Although CRT survives as an interdisciplinary movement forty years in the making, its frank discussions of race and racism still struggle to gain legitimacy in the academy. The principle of anti-racism is continually up for debate; its status as a ‘real’ area of study repeatedly called into question.

The preceding section examined the barriers to anti-racist business education through the analysis of five stories drawn from my personal experiences as an anti-racist educator. These stories show that the challenges to anti-racist business education interweave through individual/interpersonal, institutional, and ideological domains of power and thus require multilayered practices and conditions to overcome. Starting with the ideological level, business schools tend to assume the cultural norms and conventions of white supremacy and deny the role of race and racism in business and society (Arday & Mirza, 2018 ; Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012 ; Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021 ). Racism is often treated as irrelevant or obsolete, and where racism is acknowledged, it tends to be constructed as an overt but rare occurrence that ‘good’ managers can and should eliminate from their organisations. When racism is understood as systemic to white supremacist organisations and the society at large, it is often then experienced as too confrontational for a presumed white audience.

Students in higher education are no monolith. While student-led movements are calling for anti-racist curricula and pedagogy (Andrews, 2018b ; Arday & Mirza, 2018 ; Bhambra et al., 2018 ), many students in business schools find it harder to recognise race and racism as legitimate or relevant to their education. Institutions and individuals alike are enmired in both white supremacist and neoliberal ideologies that have seen education policy shift towards the social construction of education for employability. Some business students may enter their degrees with the expectation that their subjects provide job-specific training (Boden & Nedeva, 2010 ). Not only is business believed to be detached from society but for some students, bringing social issues such as race and racism into the classroom is seen as a wasted expense at the cost of their future careers. However, my students of colour are the least likely to experience classes on race and racism as irrelevant. For some, it is a powerful and validating avowal of what they struggle with in their personal and professional lives yet rarely have the opportunity to analyse and discuss. It is a reflection of institutionalised racism and white supremacist ideology that both the real and imagined comfort of white people are prioritised over the recognition and representation of people of colour who must continue to embody their racialised subjectivities amid marginalising and denigrating practices (Burke, 2018 ). An anti-racist ethics demands institutions provide marginalised students with the resources and opportunities to access privileged forms of knowing while cultivating spaces for transformation (hooks, 1994).

I may choose whose voices are included in my curricula and whose experiences are centred in my classroom, but one 12-week subject in their degrees may make little difference if their other 23 subjects, organisations, communities, and society reinforce what Ladson-Billings ( 1998 , p. 18) calls the ‘white supremacist master script’. Even for students who are not ostensibly resistant to the study of race and racism in their subject, they may struggle to conceive of race beyond dominant constructions of racism as explicit prejudicial attitudes and overt interpersonal violence (Bonilla-Silva, 2006 ). By only recognising these forms of racism as racism, they are unable to identify more subtle forms of institutionalised and ideological racism in organisations and society. These cultural controls around what ‘counts’ as racism mean that we can maintain the belief that racism is located in rare and aberrant cases of ‘bad apples’ and potentially divest of the ethical responsibility to challenge racism and white supremacy (Yancy, 2012 ). From a white feminist frame, racial and other forms of oppression are sustained by focussing on gender as the only site of diversity (Bilge, 2013 ; Collins & Bilge, 2016 ; Gutiérrez y Muhs et al., 2012 ; hooks, 1994; Tomlinson, 2018 ). Despite my attempts to explicitly trouble this ideology with intersectionality, many students struggled with fully recognising and respecting knowledge produced outside a white standpoint.

Individual academics attempting to adopt anti-racist pedagogical practices may make little difference without institutional support (Andrews, 2018b ). To teach about race and racism critically, meaningfully, and effectively, my experiences suggest that institutions would benefit from clear and consistent commitment to academic freedom (Hoepner, 2019 ; Orr, 2018 ). Institutions that espouse values of social justice and equity, diversity, and inclusion need to match those proclamations with policies and structures that resource academics to provide anti-racist education. This may also involve providing training and development programs around designing and delivering anti-racist curricula and pedagogical activities. I have devoted considerable time beyond my normal workload to researching education scholarship and experimenting with pedagogical practices on my own. I am privileged enough to have the capacity to do so given my secure employment in full-time ongoing positions that many of my more precariously employed colleagues do not, despite their personal interest and commitment to anti-racism.

Currently, anti-racist education relies primarily on the ethical will of individual academics (Fotaki & Prasad, 2014 , 2015 ; Liu, 2023 ). Critical scholars engage with considerations around race and power usually beyond (or perhaps even contravening) institutional expectations because we often feel a moral imperative to foster conscientização in our classrooms (Freire, 1970 ). Anti-racist educators assume a significant psychoemotional burden, tarrying with fear and anxiety of student and institutional backlash for presenting ‘confrontational’ ideas. The recent public outcry against CRT highlights the persistent precarity of anti-racism (Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021 ; Yancy, 2018 ). I choose to open myself to resistance and backlash because to stay silent is to reinforce white supremacy in the business school. I grieve the years in the academy where my health and wellbeing were eroded by racism and sexism, but I remain so that I may fight for the survival of other marginalised scholars. Even if institutions may not be hostile towards anti-racist education, anti-racist educators face the risk that public backlash may exert pressure on institutions to suspend or terminate the employment of individual teachers exposed for teaching CRT as growing examples in the U.S. have shown. The psychoemotional tolls of teaching anti-racism in a white supremacist world also means that academics developing anti-racist curricula and pedagogical activities may require mentoring, counselling, and other forms of care around resistance and backlash (Liu, 2023 ). While I understand that safety can never truly be guaranteed, a degree of security is needed in anti-racist education. Otherwise, the intellectual, emotional, and moral labour of anti-racist education ends up falling on those who are most harmed by racial injustice.

Institutions seeking to meaningfully support anti-racist education will need to be aware of the dominant norms and conventions of the discipline that may impede anti-racist education (Liu, 2022 ). For example, the neoliberal ideology of business and the dominant constructs of ‘employability’ in the field may pose hurdles for convincing some students why learning about social issues is worthwhile (Fotaki & Prasad, 2014 , 2015 ; Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021 ). How institutions communicate their values around justice, equity, diversity, and critical thought more broadly, reflected in the marketing and promotion activities that drive student recruitment for example, may help shape student expectations around the purpose of a business school education. As they need to do with staff, universities have a duty of care to students, and they need to recognise that Black students are particularly vulnerable to the harm caused by white supremacist policies and practices in higher education institutions and proactively work to mitigate those harms.

The overall lack of systemic change in the academy despite decades of political organising and the perpetual hostility against anti-racist ideas and interventions in the academy make some of these interventions seem out of reach. I often wonder if anti-racist education is possible within white supremacist institutions and an anti-Black world (Andrews, 2018b ; Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021 ; Sharpe, 2016 ; Wilderson, 2020 ). As the interventions of an individual anti-racist educator may be limited, so too might be even the most sincere and committed institutions within a wider sociopolitical culture scarred by white supremacy. Perhaps then universities are not necessarily the answer nor the only frontiers for anti-racist education. Grassroots political movements and collectives have long engaged in their own forms of education, hosting teach-ins (John, 2015 ) and consciousness raising circles (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983a , 1983b ; Sung, 2015 ; Taylor, 2017 ). These forms of liberatory education allow academics to leave the confines of the Ivory Tower and take a stance in the world beyond the academy (Bottrell et al., 2019 ; Burawoy, 2004 ). To do so is not merely an act of resistance against an anti-Black work but is necessarily an act of love for and solidarity with Black lives.

Summary and Conclusions

Summary of findings and possibilities for anti-racist education.

In this supposed time of racial reckoning, anti-racist education plays a critical role in connecting our activities in the academy with wider social issues (Burawoy, 2004 ). Whether or not individual academics or politicians believe race is important has become moot as growing numbers of students across increasingly diversified campuses are demanding programs that acknowledge racism and white supremacy through grassroots movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Why Is My Curriculum White? (Andrews, 2018b ; Arday & Mirza, 2018 ; Bhambra et al., 2018 ; Liu, 2023 ). The moral imperative to tarry with the past and present atrocities of racism cannot be ignored.

This autoethnographic inquiry of my experiences as an anti-racist educator working across business schools in Australia explored the implications of bringing CRT into the classroom. In answering the research question: What are the barriers to anti-racist teaching in business schools? my analysis highlighted the challenges that impede anti-racist business education interweave through individual/interpersonal, institutional, and ideological domains of power. So that while many individual academics may have the will to become liberatory educators, institutional constraints and oppressive ideologies can frustrate their efforts to build inclusive curricula and apply anti-racist pedagogies. That said, these challenges also point to the possibilities where the current social order may be transformed.

Individual academics can drive a degree of meaningful engagement with anti-racist principles and practices. While race and racism were scarcely acknowledged early in my teaching career, I have gradually introduced more substantial and sophisticated challenges to white supremacy (and its intersections with imperialism, patriarchy, and capitalism) in my classrooms. Year by year, I notice more of my colleagues doing the same and not shying away from frank and honest discussions about injustice in their teaching. I also receive a growing number of e-mails from business school educators around the world who share stories around the ways they are introducing CRT into their curricula and troubling the dominant assumption that business is somehow ‘neutral’ and divorced from social issues. I believe these efforts have cultivated spaces where students can find some recognition for their own lived realities with racism. Curricula that assume business is race-neutral tend to promote an ethics of whiteness that perpetuates the denial of racial oppression in everyday life (Yancy, 2012 ). In between student-led movements and the growing cases of anti-racist education, business students may gain a growing consciousness of the liberatory potential for intellectual and social transformation (Andrews, 2018a ; Arday & Mirza, 2018 ; Burke, 2018 ; hooks, 1994).

Institutions need to play a greater role in reinforcing stated values of equity, diversity, inclusion, and social justice with structures and resources that support anti-racist teaching. Training and development, mentorship, and psychoemotional care, alongside clear protections for academic freedom are vital dimensions of what is necessary to provide anti-racist education. Institutions cannot undo white supremacist ideology in business and society, but they may be able to shape students’ expectations around the purpose of higher education in ways that deepen students’ sense of their social embeddedness within the interlocking systems of oppression in which we all live (Collins & Bilge, 2016 ; Fotaki & Prasad, 2014 , 2015 ; Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021 ; Taylor, 2017 ).

The hegemony of white supremacy in the academy and society has remained in continual tension with anti-racist education. Although CRT was first introduced thirty years ago, it still triggers political outrage and moral panic today. My experiences as an anti-racist educator have often led me to question whether anti-racist teaching can even be fostered within the academy. I suggest anti-racist education needs to be imagined and practiced as a cultural project and political movement, where transformation is cultivated across ideological, institutional, and individual/interpersonal levels. The white supremacist master script inscribed in education policies and structures is unlikely to be dismantled by individual academics working alone or even by individual institutions committed to racial justice. Collective efforts around and beyond the academy like workshops, teach-ins, and consciousness raising circles may be better equipped to develop an anti-racist conscientização than standalone subjects in a conventional business degree. As the number of students, academics, and administrators committed to anti-racism grows, collaborative efforts between them will more likely generate the cultural and political shift necessary for meaningful anti-racist education.

Research Limitations and Future Research

As I began writing this article, news was emerging every week of educators who have lost their jobs because they brought issues of race and racism into their classrooms. The political malignment of CRT persists and many of us wonder if our livelihoods are also at risk. As an autoethnography, this study has limitations that may be addressed through future research. Centring on my own experiences, I cannot speak to wider patterns and trends of how anti-racist education is delivered across business schools. Further empirical studies can help canvass the diverse ways in which CRT is introduced in the classroom as well as the tactics or strategies by which educators navigate student or institutional resistance to anti-racist ideas. This research agenda can also showcase the curricula and instructional designs that integrate an anti-racist ethics into various business school subjects.

Given growing cases of academics who have faced disciplinary action or the termination of their employment due to teaching CRT, future research could delve more into the professional and personal risks of being an anti-racist educator and the implications of this for both individual educators and racial diversity in higher education institutions more broadly. This line of inquiry would also help us to understand the costs of doing racial justice work and the kind of resources and support needed for institutions and other community organisations who wish to make a meaningful commitment to racial justice and liberation.

Despite the backlash against CRT, it is more important than ever that business schools and universities in general engage honestly and meaningfully with the realities of racism and white supremacy in an anti-Black world. While Black people are targeted, harassed, oppressed, and murdered, we have a moral imperative to teach anti-racism, and even when there are no more losses of Black life to grieve, anti-racist education will serve as a collective memory of white supremacy and its violences.

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Majority of AAPI adults support teaching history of racism in schools, new poll finds

According to a recent poll, 7 in 10 AAPI adults approve of K-12 public schools teaching about the history of slavery, racism, and segregation. AAPI adults are slightly less likely than the general public to say they have voted in a local school board election.

• By Annie Ma and Linley Sanders Associated Press

May 29, 2024 | Washington

U.S. schools should teach about issues related to race, most Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders believe. They also oppose efforts to restrict what subjects can be discussed in the classroom, according to a new poll.

In the survey from AAPI Data and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 71% of AAPI adults favor teaching about the history of slavery, racism, and segregation in K-12 public schools. The same share also said they support teaching about the history of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the United States, while about half support teaching about issues related to sex and sexuality.

AAPI Democrats are more supportive of these topics being taught in classrooms than AAPI Republicans.

Still, only 17% of AAPI adults think school boards should be able to limit what subjects students and teachers talk about in the classroom, and about one-quarter of AAPI Republicans are in favor of these restrictions.

The results indicate that efforts to politicize education through culture war issues have not gained strong inroads in Asian American communities, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a public policy professor at the University of California, Riverside, and founder of AAPI Data. Across the country, conservative members of state legislatures and local school boards have made efforts to restrict teaching about race and gender in classrooms.

“Even as parents are concerned and engaged in various ways with K-12 education, the culture wars are not something that resonate with AAPI parents,” he said. “I think that’s important because there’s so much news coverage of it and certainly a lot of policy activity.”

AAPI Americans are a fast-growing demographic, but small sample sizes and linguistic barriers often prevent their views from being analyzed in other surveys.

Glenn Thomas, a father to three children in public schools who identifies as a political independent and is Japanese and white, said that while he does not oppose classrooms covering topics like race and gender, he does not think they should be the sole focus of how curriculums are designed.

“I’m kind of old-school, reading, writing, arithmetic,” he said of how schools approach topics like gender and race. “I don’t think it necessarily needs to be taught as separate curriculums.”

Mr. Thomas, whose family has lived all over the country because of his career in the military, said the influence of politics and external actors in public schools varied greatly depending on where they lived. In Florida, where he currently lives, he thinks the state government too heavily influences local schools.

Nationally, 39% of AAPI adults say that they follow news about their school boards, while just 13% say they have attended a local school board meeting and 18% have communicated in-person or online with a local school board member. When it comes to elections, 28% have voted in a local school board election.

While those percentages are roughly consistent with the general public, AAPI adults are slightly less likely to say they have voted in a local school board election.

Because a high percentage of Asian Americans are immigrants, Mr. Ramakrishnan said, many did not grow up in the same political system as the United States, where there is a high level of local control and influence over schools. A lack of outreach from mainstream institutions may also contribute to a lower level of engagement, he added. 

“It takes a fair amount of effort to learn how the system works and how to have influence in that system,” he said. “Given the high level of interest that [Asian American and Pacific Islander] parents place in education, you would expect higher rates of participation.”

Varisa Patraporn, a Thai American mother of two public school children in California, said that she is a consistent voter in local elections, given the importance of those individuals in making decisions that affect schools. In Cerritos, where she lives, candidates tend to host events and send out mailers during elections, reflecting a robust campaign for seats on the school board.

Ms. Patraporn said that while she has communicated with school board members, she has not attended a school board meeting. Part of that, she said, is because the meetings happen in the evening and are harder to attend for parents who have young children or other obligations. That means the parents who do attend and speak up can have a disproportionate amount of sway.

Ms. Patraporn said that she wants the school curriculum to be more diverse and inclusive, despite pushback from some parents who do not want discussions of race in the classroom. She said she often supplements her children’s reading to expose them to a wider range of perspectives beyond what they get from their assignments.

“Those conversations have started, but there’s a lot of resistance in our community to that,” she said. “There’s a lot of resistance in terms of being fearful of what it means to actually talk about race.”

Mr. Ramakrishnan said the polling data indicates an opening to engage AAPI communities more intensely with their local educational institutions. According to the poll, about two-thirds of AAPI adults see the schools that children attend as extremely or very important to their success in adulthood. And about half say parents and teachers have too little influence on the curriculum in public schools, similar to the general population.

“This is a community that still sees college as a good deal, as an important pathway toward mobility and success, and is concerned about the quality of K-12 education as well,” he said. “We have a ripe opportunity to engage and boost participation in these Asian American Pacific Islander communities when it comes to educational policy.”

The poll of 1,068 U.S. adults who are Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders was conducted from April 8-17, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based Amplify AAPI Panel, designed to be representative of the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander population. Online and telephone interviews were offered in English, the Chinese dialects of Mandarin and Cantonese, Vietnamese and Korean. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.

This story was reported by The Associated Press. 

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How Do You Respond to a Young Person Upset by Racist Jokes at School?

When you talk to students about social media radicalization, racism and bullying, you learn how desperate they are for some guidance.

By Dashka Slater

The sixth-grade boy who raised his hand was wiry and small. “People at my school make racist jokes,” he said, when I called on him. His voice had yet to change. “How do I get them to stop?”

I was sitting on a high school stage in Piedmont, Calif., where I had finished a conversation with two high school seniors about my new book, “Accountable,” which was adapted in The New York Times Magazine last August . Both the article and the book tell the story of the turmoil that befell a California high school and its community after some students created and shared racist material on an Instagram account. Since the article and book came out, I have spoken at schools around the country about the issues the story raises: social media radicalization, racism, humor, boy culture, the impacts of bullying and the vexing question of how to respond effectively.

This particular audience was made up mostly of adults, and they responded with applause, as if the boy’s mere desire to stop racist jokes was triumph enough. Perhaps it was. But this sixth grader wasn’t looking for approval. He wanted an actual answer , not the platitudes that adults fall back on when asked about the toxic social dynamics of middle and high school: “Be kind!” “Speak up!” “Be an upstander!” He wanted to know how to get people at his school to stop making racist jokes without becoming the butt of the jokes himself.

I talked about having a firm but nonconfrontational phrase ready, something like “Dude, that’s messed up.” I talked about how to identify which classmates had the social clout to influence their peers and how to approach those people. I talked about when to get an adult involved and how to choose the right one. But even as I spoke, I was thinking: “You know I’m just a journalist, right? I’m the one who asks the questions. What makes you think I have the answers ?”

This is both the joy and the terror of talking to young people about hot-button topics. I usually start by asking students to raise their hands if they’ve seen or heard hate speech online, whether it’s the use of slurs on gaming platforms; racist memes or videos on social media; or ugly remarks in the comment section of an article or video. They all have, of course. We all have.

If I’ve managed to engage their attention — tougher to do just before lunch or during first period, when they’re barely awake — students will respond to my presentation with questions that reveal both how pertinent the topic is to their lives and how eager they are for guidance.

Sometimes the questions are philosophical: “How do you know if someone is a good person or a bad person?” “You say that everyone has the capacity to transform, but what if it’s a mass murderer?”

Sometimes they are practical: “What should we do when we see something racist online?”

And often the questions are deeply personal. Usually, at the end of my presentation, there is a small group of students waiting to talk with me. With the sensitivity that is characteristic of their generation, they will keep some space between one another so that the person speaking with me won’t be overheard.

Within that small cocoon of privacy, I’ve had a young woman sob in my arms after saying: “Those girls you wrote about must have felt so heard. But nobody listened when it happened to me!” I’ve heard the stories of young people who were the targets of everything from racist remarks to violent bullying. I’ve fielded questions about free speech and the role anger plays in the emotional health of victims.

“I did not want to write about my experiences with racism,” Jeena Ann Kidambi, an eighth grader from Framingham, Mass., wrote in an essay about the girls, Ana and A., featured in the Times article because they were targeted by the racist Instagram account. Like A., she wrote, “I did not want to dwell on those memories. However, by writing this essay and embracing my emotions on the subject, I gained closure and released myself from anger’s chokehold.” (The essay won a contest in her school district sponsored by the Swiacki Children’s Literature Festival at Framingham State University.)

At one school, a girl spoke so softly that I had to lean close to hear her. Haltingly, with her eyes fixed on the ground, she asked how people could make amends for a harm they caused if the person harmed wouldn’t speak to them. She didn’t tell me what she had done, but I could see that it haunted her — both the guilt over the injury she had caused and the fear she would be punished in perpetuity.

I think about this girl often, wishing I had a better answer to give her. At every school I visit, I remind students that they are works in progress, that during their teenage years they will both be harmed and cause harm, and that they have the capacity to survive both. And each time, I walk away struck by how vulnerable they are to forces that they neither created nor control.

Dashka Slater is a writer in California with a focus on teenagers and criminal justice. Her book “The 57 Bus,” a New York Times best seller, was based on an article she wrote for the magazine in 2015 and went on to win a 2018 Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association.

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Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education

Subscribe to governance weekly, linda darling-hammond ld linda darling-hammond.

March 1, 1998

• 13 min read

W.E.B. DuBois was right about the problem of the 21st century. The color line divides us still. In recent years, the most visible evidence of this in the public policy arena has been the persistent attack on affirmative action in higher education and employment. From the perspective of many Americans who believe that the vestiges of discrimination have disappeared, affirmative action now provides an unfair advantage to minorities. From the perspective of others who daily experience the consequences of ongoing discrimination, affirmative action is needed to protect opportunities likely to evaporate if an affirmative obligation to act fairly does not exist. And for Americans of all backgrounds, the allocation of opportunity in a society that is becoming ever more dependent on knowledge and education is a source of great anxiety and concern.

At the center of these debates are interpretations of the gaps in educational achievement between white and non-Asian minority students as measured by standardized test scores. The presumption that guides much of the conversation is that equal opportunity now exists; therefore, continued low levels of achievement on the part of minority students must be a function of genes, culture, or a lack of effort and will (see, for example, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White).

The assumptions that undergird this debate miss an important reality: educational outcomes for minority children are much more a function of their unequal access to key educational resources, including skilled teachers and quality curriculum, than they are a function of race. In fact, the U.S. educational system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world, and students routinely receive dramatically different learning opportunities based on their social status. In contrast to European and Asian nations that fund schools centrally and equally, the wealthiest 10 percent of U.S. school districts spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest 10 percent, and spending ratios of 3 to 1 are common within states. Despite stark differences in funding, teacher quality, curriculum, and class sizes, the prevailing view is that if students do not achieve, it is their own fault. If we are ever to get beyond the problem of the color line, we must confront and address these inequalities.

The Nature of Educational Inequality

Americans often forget that as late as the 1960s most African-American, Latino, and Native American students were educated in wholly segregated schools funded at rates many times lower than those serving whites and were excluded from many higher education institutions entirely. The end of legal segregation followed by efforts to equalize spending since 1970 has made a substantial difference for student achievement. On every major national test, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap in minority and white students’ test scores narrowed substantially between 1970 and 1990, especially for elementary school students. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the scores of African-American students climbed 54 points between 1976 and 1994, while those of white students remained stable.

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Even so, educational experiences for minority students have continued to be substantially separate and unequal. Two-thirds of minority students still attend schools that are predominantly minority, most of them located in central cities and funded well below those in neighboring suburban districts. Recent analyses of data prepared for school finance cases in Alabama, New Jersey, New York, Louisiana, and Texas have found that on every tangible measure—from qualified teachers to curriculum offerings—schools serving greater numbers of students of color had significantly fewer resources than schools serving mostly white students. As William L. Taylor and Dianne Piche noted in a 1991 report to Congress: Inequitable systems of school finance inflict disproportionate harm on minority and economically disadvantaged students. On an inter-state basis, such students are concentrated in states, primarily in the South, that have the lowest capacities to finance public education. On an intra-state basis, many of the states with the widest disparities in educational expenditures are large industrial states. In these states, many minorities and economically disadvantaged students are located in property-poor urban districts which fare the worst in educational expenditures (or) in rural districts which suffer from fiscal inequity.

Jonathan Kozol s 1991 Savage Inequalities described the striking differences between public schools serving students of color in urban settings and their suburban counterparts, which typically spend twice as much per student for populations with many fewer special needs. Contrast MacKenzie High School in Detroit, where word processing courses are taught without word processors because the school cannot afford them, or East St. Louis Senior High School, whose biology lab has no laboratory tables or usable dissecting kits, with nearby suburban schools where children enjoy a computer hookup to Dow Jones to study stock transactions and science laboratories that rival those in some industries. Or contrast Paterson, New Jersey, which could not afford the qualified teachers needed to offer foreign language courses to most high school students, with Princeton, where foreign languages begin in elementary school.

Even within urban school districts, schools with high concentrations of low-income and minority students receive fewer instructional resources than others. And tracking systems exacerbate these inequalities by segregating many low-income and minority students within schools. In combination, these policies leave minority students with fewer and lower-quality books, curriculum materials, laboratories, and computers; significantly larger class sizes; less qualified and experienced teachers; and less access to high-quality curriculum. Many schools serving low-income and minority students do not even offer the math and science courses needed for college, and they provide lower-quality teaching in the classes they do offer. It all adds up.

What Difference Does it Make?

Since the 1966 Coleman report, Equality of Educational Opportunity, another debate has waged as to whether money makes a difference to educational outcomes. It is certainly possible to spend money ineffectively; however, studies that have developed more sophisticated measures of schooling show how money, properly spent, makes a difference. Over the past 30 years, a large body of research has shown that four factors consistently influence student achievement: all else equal, students perform better if they are educated in smaller schools where they are well known (300 to 500 students is optimal), have smaller class sizes (especially at the elementary level), receive a challenging curriculum, and have more highly qualified teachers.

Minority students are much less likely than white children to have any of these resources. In predominantly minority schools, which most students of color attend, schools are large (on average, more than twice as large as predominantly white schools and reaching 3,000 students or more in most cities); on average, class sizes are 15 percent larger overall (80 percent larger for non-special education classes); curriculum offerings and materials are lower in quality; and teachers are much less qualified in terms of levels of education, certification, and training in the fields they teach. And in integrated schools, as UCLA professor Jeannie Oakes described in the 1980s and Harvard professor Gary Orfield’s research has recently confirmed, most minority students are segregated in lower-track classes with larger class sizes, less qualified teachers, and lower-quality curriculum.

Research shows that teachers’ preparation makes a tremendous difference to children’s learning. In an analysis of 900 Texas school districts, Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson found that teachers’ expertise—as measured by scores on a licensing examination, master’s degrees, and experienc—was the single most important determinant of student achievement, accounting for roughly 40 percent of the measured variance in students’ reading and math achievement gains in grades 1-12. After controlling for socioeconomic status, the large disparities in achievement between black and white students were almost entirely due to differences in the qualifications of their teachers. In combination, differences in teacher expertise and class sizes accounted for as much of the measured variance in achievement as did student and family background (figure 1).

Ferguson and Duke economist Helen Ladd repeated this analysis in Alabama and again found sizable influences of teacher qualifications and smaller class sizes on achievement gains in math and reading. They found that more of the difference between the high- and low-scoring districts was explained by teacher qualifications and class sizes than by poverty, race, and parent education.

Meanwhile, a Tennessee study found that elementary school students who are assigned to ineffective teachers for three years in a row score nearly 50 percentile points lower on achievement tests than those assigned to highly effective teachers over the same period. Strikingly, minority students are about half as likely to be assigned to the most effective teachers and twice as likely to be assigned to the least effective.

Minority students are put at greatest risk by the American tradition of allowing enormous variation in the qualifications of teachers. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future found that new teachers hired without meeting certification standards (25 percent of all new teachers) are usually assigned to teach the most disadvantaged students in low-income and high-minority schools, while the most highly educated new teachers are hired largely by wealthier schools (figure 2). Students in poor or predominantly minority schools are much less likely to have teachers who are fully qualified or hold higher-level degrees. In schools with the highest minority enrollments, for example, students have less than a 50 percent chance of getting a math or science teacher with a license and a degree in the field. In 1994, fully one-third of teachers in high-poverty schools taught without a minor in their main field and nearly 70 percent taught without a minor in their secondary teaching field.

Studies of underprepared teachers consistently find that they are less effective with students and that they have difficulty with curriculum development, classroom management, student motivation, and teaching strategies. With little knowledge about how children grow, learn, and develop, or about what to do to support their learning, these teachers are less likely to understand students’ learning styles and differences, to anticipate students’ knowledge and potential difficulties, or to plan and redirect instruction to meet students’ needs. Nor are they likely to see it as their job to do so, often blaming the students if their teaching is not successful.

Teacher expertise and curriculum quality are interrelated, because a challenging curriculum requires an expert teacher. Research has found that both students and teachers are tracked: that is, the most expert teachers teach the most demanding courses to the most advantaged students, while lower-track students assigned to less able teachers receive lower-quality teaching and less demanding material. Assignment to tracks is also related to race: even when grades and test scores are comparable, black students are more likely to be assigned to lower-track, nonacademic classes.

When Opportunity Is More Equal

What happens when students of color do get access to more equal opportunities’ Studies find that curriculum quality and teacher skill make more difference to educational outcomes than the initial test scores or racial backgrounds of students. Analyses of national data from both the High School and Beyond Surveys and the National Educational Longitudinal Surveys have demonstrated that, while there are dramatic differences among students of various racial and ethnic groups in course-taking in such areas as math, science, and foreign language, for students with similar course-taking records, achievement test score differences by race or ethnicity narrow substantially.

Robert Dreeben and colleagues at the University of Chicago conducted a long line of studies documenting both the relationship between educational opportunities and student performance and minority students’ access to those opportunities. In a comparative study of 300 Chicago first graders, for example, Dreeben found that African-American and white students who had comparable instruction achieved comparable levels of reading skill. But he also found that the quality of instruction given African-American students was, on average, much lower than that given white students, thus creating a racial gap in aggregate achievement at the end of first grade. In fact, the highest-ability group in Dreeben’s sample was in a school in a low-income African-American neighborhood. These children, though, learned less during first grade than their white counterparts because their teacher was unable to provide the challenging instruction they deserved.

When schools have radically different teaching forces, the effects can be profound. For example, when Eleanor Armour-Thomas and colleagues compared a group of exceptionally effective elementary schools with a group of low-achieving schools with similar demographic characteristics in New York City, roughly 90 percent of the variance in student reading and mathematics scores at grades 3, 6, and 8 was a function of differences in teacher qualifications. The schools with highly qualified teachers serving large numbers of minority and low-income students performed as well as much more advantaged schools.

Most studies have estimated effects statistically. However, an experiment that randomly assigned seventh grade “at-risk”students to remedial, average, and honors mathematics classes found that the at-risk students who took the honors class offering a pre-algebra curriculum ultimately outperformed all other students of similar backgrounds. Another study compared African-American high school youth randomly placed in public housing in the Chicago suburbs with city-placed peers of equivalent income and initial academic attainment and found that the suburban students, who attended largely white and better-funded schools, were substantially more likely to take challenging courses, perform well academically, graduate on time, attend college, and find good jobs.

What Can Be Done?

This state of affairs is not inevitable. Last year the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future issued a blueprint for a comprehensive set of policies to ensure a “caring, competent, and qualified teacher for every child,” as well as schools organized to support student success. Twelve states are now working directly with the commission on this agenda, and others are set to join this year. Several pending bills to overhaul the federal Higher Education Act would ensure that highly qualified teachers are recruited and prepared for students in all schools. Federal policymakers can develop incentives, as they have in medicine, to guarantee well-prepared teachers in shortage fields and high-need locations. States can equalize education spending, enforce higher teaching standards, and reduce teacher shortages, as Connecticut, Kentucky, Minnesota, and North Carolina have already done. School districts can reallocate resources from administrative superstructures and special add-on programs to support better-educated teachers who offer a challenging curriculum in smaller schools and classes, as restructured schools as far apart as New York and San Diego have done. These schools, in communities where children are normally written off to lives of poverty, welfare dependency, or incarceration, already produce much higher levels of achievement for students of color, sending more than 90 percent of their students to college. Focusing on what matters most can make a real difference in what children have the opportunity to learn. This, in turn, makes a difference in what communities can accomplish.

An Entitlement to Good Teaching

The common presumption about educational inequality—that it resides primarily in those students who come to school with inadequate capacities to benefit from what the school has to offer—continues to hold wide currency because the extent of inequality in opportunities to learn is largely unknown. We do not currently operate schools on the presumption that students might be entitled to decent teaching and schooling as a matter of course. In fact, some state and local defendants have countered school finance and desegregation cases with assertions that such remedies are not required unless it can be proven that they will produce equal outcomes. Such arguments against equalizing opportunities to learn have made good on DuBois’s prediction that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line.

But education resources do make a difference, particularly when funds are used to purchase well-qualified teachers and high-quality curriculum and to create personalized learning communities in which children are well known. In all of the current sturm und drang about affirmative action, “special treatment,” and the other high-volatility buzzwords for race and class politics in this nation, I would offer a simple starting point for the next century s efforts: no special programs, just equal educational opportunity.

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• Chloe Zhang
• Queen's Gate School , London , UK
• Correspondence to Chloe Zhang, Queen's Gate School, London, London, UK; chloezhang20080228{at}icloud.com

This paper explores resource allocation complexities during health emergencies, focusing on pervasive racial disparities, notably affecting black communities. It aims to investigate alternatives to the Most Lives Saved approach, particularly its potential to exacerbate disparities. To analyse resource allocation strategies, the essay reviews the Dual-Principled System proposed by Bruce and Tallman (B+T) in 2021. B+T’s proposal critiques previous methods like the Area Deprivation Index and First Come First Serve while seeking to balance equity and utility by adjusting triage scores based on diseases displaying racial disparities. However, the study identifies inherent challenges in subjectivity, complexity and fairness, necessitating a careful examination and potential innovative solutions. The examination of the Dual-Principled System uncovers challenges, leading to the identification of three main issues and potential solutions. Furthermore, to address subjectivity concerns, it is necessary to adopt objective disease selection criteria through data analysis. Moreover, proposed solutions for complexity include real-time data updates, adaptability and regional considerations. Fairness concerns can be mitigated through educational campaigns and a lottery system integrated with triage score adjustments. The study emphasises nuanced resource allocation with objective disease selection, adaptable strategies and educational initiatives, including a lottery system, aligning with fairness, equity and practicality. As healthcare evolves, resource allocation must align with justice, fostering inclusivity and responsiveness for all.

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Systemic biases and historical injustices have made it so that some racial minority groups, including black communities in the USA (and elsewhere), disproportionately face certain health challenges. For example, policies that may not have been intentionally racist, but nonetheless have discriminatory effects, have led to many black communities having lower quality, subpar resources and being exposed to greater environmental threats to health. 1 In emergencies, limited medical resources, such as ventilators in the COVID-19 pandemic, are allocated according to the likelihood of success given current health status, with people with poor health less likely to get the resource. Therefore, someone who may already unfairly have poorer health will now be less likely to get a limited resource, 2 arguably compounding the original injustice. Currently, allocation decisions are typically governed by the principles of having Most Lives Saved (MLS). However, for the reasons just mentioned, this approach results in already disadvantaged communities facing further disadvantages, leading to various criticisms of the current MLS model. 3 4

On the MLS model, the way resource allocation works is that people are assigned a score that reflects their likelihood of survival which is based on a combination of factors, including medical urgency, expected treatment outcomes (‘life years’) 5 and the availability of resources. 6 The widely used SOFA score, initially designed for sepsis, may not be the optimal predictor for COVID-19. However, during the initial stages, it served as the primary tool available for such assessments. 7 These decisions can be influenced by subjective judgments, institutional policies and regional healthcare guidelines, leading to inconsistencies and potential disparities in resource distribution. For example, rather than always maximising MLS, various exceptions are sometimes made, such as giving priority to front-line healthcare workers out of a sense of reciprocity for putting themselves at risk to help others 8 (p4). This shows that fairness-based deviations from MLS are already considered acceptable in certain circumstances or in relation to certain groups. Should similar deviations be considered for groups, such as black communities in the USA, in response to both past and present unfairness (eg, racist policies), which contribute to current disparities in baseline health?

In this first section of the essay, this paper will explore the problem of resource allocation during health emergencies. Then this study will briefly overview the methods that were previously proposed to address historical inequalities, before discussing a recent paper that criticised those methods by Bruce and Tallman (B+T) in 2021. In the following section, this study will undertake a critical examination of B+T’s proposal (Dual-Principled Method) and its arguments against alternative methods. They argue that an adjusted triage score should be implemented while acknowledging that the proposal will be on the premise of rejecting the MLS model. This paper will also discuss three potential challenges in adjusting triage scores and offer innovative solutions to each of them. One of these solutions is a hybrid lottery approach. In the subsequent section, this paper will elaborate on that proposal separately. This solution that it proposes upholds ethical principles and promotes fairness for all individuals, irrespective of their background. The equitable distribution of limited resources in the midst of health emergencies poses a profound ethical challenge that requires a delicate balance between justice and practicality.

Main proposals criticised in B+T (2021)

In 2021, B+T argued in the Journal of Medical Ethics against previous methods to achieve equity in scarce resource allocation during a pandemic. In this context, equity refers to a situation in which people of all races/ethnicities are treated fairly. 9 The main previous proposals B+T discussed were the socioeconomic methods of allocating resources, the Area Deprivation Index (ADI) and First Come First Serve (FCFS), which this paper will explain in a moment along with their response to them. They then offered their own proposal to correct the problems they identified in the previous proposals which was the Dual-Principled System, as mentioned earlier. Other proposals (including the ADI and FCFS) that have been raised in the literature 10 along with strengths and weaknesses are summarised in table 1 (see table 1 in the online supplemental appendix for a full summary).

Supplemental material

The first proposal that B+T criticise is using the ADI to distribute scarce medications during COVID-19, favouring patients from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. The way this would work is by implementing a weighted lottery system where individuals from these communities are prioritised. This means that patients residing in areas with higher ADI scores (indicating greater socioeconomic disadvantage) may have a better chance of receiving scarce medications. However, B+T argues that this fails to address the complexities of racial disparities during the pandemic, as it does not account for the fact that racial minorities experiencing health disparities may not always reside in such disadvantaged communities. This argument highlights a crucial limitation of relying solely on such indices. While the ADI may provide valuable insights into the socioeconomic conditions of certain communities, it fails to capture the full complexity of racial disparities, particularly in cases where individuals from minority groups may reside in more affluent areas yet still experience significant health disparities. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge the imperfections of the ADI while also considering additional factors and measures that more comprehensively assess the multifaceted nature of racial disparities during the pandemic.

The second proposal is FCFS. It claims that allocating resources based on who arrives first can help address equity-based problems with current resource allocation during the COVID-19 pandemic by claiming to ‘possibly avert disadvantaging vulnerable groups’. 8 However, B+T argues that it has a problem related to potentially further marginalising racialised groups who may have less access to healthcare resources. Specifically, the problem is that FCFS grants a privilege to those who can access medical resources quickly, often individuals with more power, knowledge and social connections, and the likelihood of aggravating the exclusion of racial groups due to disparities in access to healthcare resources. This concern aligns with findings from Obermeyer’s project, 11 revealing biases in risk scoring algorithms, which may perpetuate and scale up the marginalisation of racial groups with less access to healthcare resources. 12 As highlighted in an article on California’s COVID-19 data, there is a stark contrast in infection and mortality rates among black populations. This issue is further compounded by the inadequate distribution of testing centres, initially concentrated in affluent, predominantly white neighbourhoods. The case of the CDU testing site in South Los Angeles demonstrates the importance of adapting healthcare systems to the needs of marginalised communities rather than expecting uniformity. 13

To address these issues, B+T proposed the Dual-Principled System, which combines the goal of saving the most lives with the goal of promoting racial equity by adjusting triage scores for patients with diseases showing racial disparities. Adjusting the triage scores is a method that aims to balance equity and utility; the proposal involves hospitals or regions selecting major diseases known for having significant racial disparities. Patients affected with these specified diseases, regardless of their racial background, would receive reduced penalties during triage. This means that it enables tailored responses to the specific racial groups most affected by COVID-19 within each geographic region, without creating competition among individual patients. Some opponents of this method might argue that B+T’s proposal does not directly address systemic issues responsible for these disparities. However, it intends to minimise the impacts of these disparities in health outcomes rather than solve the underlying issues. In the following section, this paper will argue that this proposal also has strengths and weaknesses and will suggest ways of addressing these weaknesses.

Problems with the Dual-Principled System and potential solutions

In this section, we will consider the Dual-Principled System proposed by B+T. This idea here is that it would help with mitigating racial disparities in access to medical resources during triage and to ensure that patients do not face compounding injustices due to their race, while still prioritising those who are medically eligible for treatment.

This approach, tailored to each region, seeks to mitigate substantial health disparities by going beyond mere socioeconomic disparities by reflecting the outcomes of racism. Nonetheless, there is some potential vagueness in the proposal and risks of exacerbating inequalities. Thus, this paper has highlighted three main problems and plausible solutions.

Problem: subjectivity

An inherent challenge lies in the subjective nature of allowing hospitals or regions to ‘thoughtfully choose’ the diseases subject to adjustment. This introduces subjectivity that could lead to biases and inconsistencies; moreover, people’s trust in the healthcare system will be largely dependent on these decisions.

Solution: objective disease selection

To address this, the best way is to construct a specific set of principles or criteria that are formalised to objectively determine the diseases warranting adjustment. This might require starting by analysing existing data (such as census data, annual reports and routine collection) to find diseases that show significant racial disparities in terms of how often they occur, how widespread they are and how well people can access treatment and the outcomes they achieve. Once we have identified these disparities, we choose diseases based on the size of these disparities, focusing on those where the gaps in health outcomes are largest and long-lasting, and where it is clear that action is needed. Furthermore, a wide range of data could be collected, including the patient demographics, socioeconomic factors (income, education, access to healthcare), medical history, treatment regimens and health outcomes. These data will be analysed to identify factors contributing to disparities, such as bias in healthcare delivery, cultural barriers, lack of access to quality care or socioeconomic disparities. And finally, if relevant, geographic factors that might contribute to disparities could be considered, such as healthcare deserts or variations in healthcare infrastructure. This means that healthcare disparities will be addressed, and it ensures that adjustments aim to provide equitable care to all communities. To streamline and enhance efficiency, it might be prudent to involve a federal task force, potentially within the CDC, which can offer a national perspective, uncovering patterns that may be overlooked at the local level and ultimately aiding in a more effective and equitable response. Furthermore, implementing innovative technological solutions, such as machine learning algorithms or data analytics tools, could enhance the speed and accuracy of data analysis, allowing for more efficient identification of disparities and targeted interventions.

Problem: the complexity of resource allocation

Introducing a complex decision-making process at the regional or hospital level may lead to delays and administrative challenges, potentially hindering the ability to respond effectively to the crisis. Moreover, considering the dynamic nature of healthcare settings, relying solely on presampling disease scenarios may limit the algorithm’s adaptability, potentially leading doctors to prioritise their perceived professional identity commitments. As a result, during the COVID-19 global pandemic, many settings relied on FCFS because alternative approaches were considered impractical. 14

The complexity of the allocation decision is evident, as seen in the calculation of the SOFA score, whether with or without a racial adjustment. However, this algorithm should be pre-sampled with disease scenarios and continuously updated with real-time epidemiological data, such as the rate of infection, hospitalisation and resource availability. In addition, it is important to know that the algorithm can be adapted to consider regional variations in healthcare infrastructure and population density. Furthermore, doctors and nurses might find triage roles challenging due to ethical dilemmas or emotional stress. To help them embrace these roles, staff training and support programmes can be implemented to prepare them effectively. Finally, regarding the practicality concern, if the above solution of disease selection is implemented, healthcare systems can overcome the limitations of the FCFS (see online supplemental appendix ) and create a triage approach that is both practical and adaptable. To support this process, cross disciplinary triage teams mentioned earlier could reduce the pressure on individual hospitals to make difficult decisions amid a crisis like the pandemic.

Fairness concerns

Patients from racialised groups with diseases not subject to score adjustment might (rightly or wrongly) perceive the new system as unfair. If the status quo is adjusted against the perceived interests of these groups, it may trigger distress or protest. It could also cause the patients benefiting from adjusted scores to be seen as unfairly privileged, fostering resentment and distrust in the healthcare system. I will elaborate on this idea in the following section. Moreover, if not carefully adjusted or balanced, it could result in patients consistently receiving priority access to resources while other diseases may also have racial disparities and are not chosen. This could create new disparities within the patient population. Indeed, another divisive allocation method is the ‘life stages’ argument, which emphasises prioritisation based on age. While this approach has historical significance, it raises ethical concerns, particularly regarding ageism. The increased mortality rates for older COVID-19 patients have prompted age-related considerations, yet age-based discrimination is contested, given the unreliable association between chronological and functional age. This idea reinforces the need for transparency and ethical justification in prioritisation protocols, cautioning against exclusive reliance on age as a determinant. 14

Solution: education campaigns

One solution is to accompany any shifts in the algorithm with educational campaigns that are not only, but also culturally sensitive and community oriented to mitigate potential adverse effects. Bottom up solutions like engaging community health workers and stakeholders alleviate distress more effectively than traditional top-down strategies. Moreover, by tailoring the educational content to the specific needs and perspectives of the affected communities, these initiatives can foster greater trust and understanding. Additionally, incorporating interactive elements, such as workshops, can enhance community cohesion and raise awareness about the necessity of triage, the complexities of resource allocation and the ethical considerations involved.

That being said, education campaigns might not be enough. There would still be the problem of ensuring that the procedure to allocate the resources is fair. Therefore, this study will suggest a further possible solution in the form of combining a triage score adjustment with a lottery.

Integration of triage score adjustment with a lottery

As mentioned, this proposal ensures that a balance could be struck by incorporating a threshold for including originally excluded diseases, while not affecting those already included. It reduces ambiguity as it is an objective criterion that reduces the influence of personal biases or subjective judgments and effectively mitigates potential oversights in disease-specific or demographic prioritisation by introducing an element of randomness, thereby ensuring an unbiased allocation process. Most importantly, this approach modifies the healthcare system to better address existing inequalities, fostering greater patient trust by minimising the likelihood of favouritism and racial discrimination.

First, priority categories can be established, using objective criteria such as age, health conditions and healthcare worker status to guide resource allocation. Additionally, adjusting triage scores to account for diseases that disproportionately affect racial groups acknowledges existing disparities while considering the urgency of medical care. Introducing a randomised allocation approach within each priority category helps prevent unfair advantages and promotes equitable distribution of resources. Just like the selection of disease, the threshold will be set with objective reasons. For instance, it may be based on statistical data showing the prevalence of a particular disease and its impact on various demographic groups. 15

Objection and replies

However, opponents may raise concerns about transparency and fairness in such a system. To address these concerns, involving healthcare professionals and bioethicists in the identification of diseases with significant disparities and historical impact can enhance the accuracy of the selection process. Critics might argue that relying solely on chance may not guarantee a fair distribution, potentially resulting in seemingly arbitrary outcomes rather than ethically justified ones. 16 Nevertheless, it is important to note that chance operates within a framework designed to rectify systematic disparities, aiming for a more equitable allocation of resources. Moreover, everyone in the lottery has already been deemed eligible; for instance, they would all benefit from the resource. Indeed, introducing an element of randomness is not about leaving things entirely to chance. Instead, it is about injecting a degree of unpredictability into the system to counterbalance existing biases and inequities. This is because randomness could mitigate the influence of personal biases, level the playing field and prevent the perpetuation of imbalances. However, it is crucial to acknowledge the reluctance of those in power to admit biases, which can be addressed by public commitments, algorithmic audits, research and continuous improvements.

By combining elements of both the B+T (2021) proposal and the randomised allocation with the priority categories approach, we can create a comprehensive strategy that prioritises fairness, equity and practicality. This hybrid approach addresses the multifaceted challenges presented by resource allocation during health emergencies, offering a nuanced solution that respects the principles of both ethical distribution and medical urgency. Incorporating the regional specificity as suggested by the B+T proposal, along with the objectivity of a randomised allocation system, enables us to tackle the subjectivity inherent in decision-making while ensuring transparency and impartiality in resource distribution. Moreover, the integration of priority categories acknowledges the diverse vulnerabilities within the population, 17 ensuring that those at higher risk and with essential roles receive the attention they require. As we continue to navigate the intricacies of health crises, our resource allocation strategies must evolve to align with evolving understandings of equity, ultimately fostering a more just and compassionate healthcare system for all.

Ethics statements

Patient consent for publication.

Not applicable.

Ethics approval

• Peters DH ,
• Bloom G , et al
• Luce JM , et al
• Farrell TW ,
• Francis L ,
• Brown T , et al
• Wilkinson D ,
• Palacios-Gonzalez C , et al
• racial equality
• Schmidt H ,
• Roberts DE ,
• Samorani M ,
• Blount LG , et al
• Goldstein A
• Laventhal N ,
• Dell ML , et al
• Tolchin B ,

Supplementary materials

Supplementary data.

This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.

• Data supplement 1

Contributors I, CZ, developed the concept for this paper and carried out all of the research, analysis and writing that appears here. Through a thorough assessment and a critical synthesis of existing research, the analysis of racial inequities in resource allocation—particularly in emergency scenarios like the COVID-19 pandemic—was produced. I agree with the conclusions of this manuscript and accept full responsibility for its content.

As the guarantor of this paper, I, CZ, take full responsibility for the work and/or the conduct of the study, had access to the data, and controlled the decision to publish.

Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests None declared.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Supplemental material This content has been supplied by the author(s). It has not been vetted by BMJ Publishing Group Limited (BMJ) and may not have been peer-reviewed. Any opinions or recommendations discussed are solely those of the author(s) and are not endorsed by BMJ. BMJ disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on the content. Where the content includes any translated material, BMJ does not warrant the accuracy and reliability of the translations (including but not limited to local regulations, clinical guidelines, terminology, drug names and drug dosages), and is not responsible for any error and/or omissions arising from translation and adaptation or otherwise.

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