Silencing and institutional racism in settler-colonial education

<p>Twenty years ago, Charles Mills argued that a Racial Contract underwrites and guides the social contract and assigns political, economic, and social privileges based on race. This thesis argues that a settler manifestation of the Racial Contract operates through processes and structures of silencing in the New Zealand education system. Silencing is a racial discourse aligned with state ideologies about biculturalism that supports ignorance and denial of the structuring force of colonisation. Within schools, a state narrative of biculturalism advances the notion of harmonious settler-colonial race relations by marginalising or denying violent colonial histories and their consequences in the present. Silencing in the education system is examined through the lived experiences of Māori teachers of English language as they teach New Zealand literature in secondary school classrooms. Interviews with nineteen teachers and observations of four teachers' classroom practices (with follow up interviews from the teachers and some of their students) reveal that everyday classroom interactions perpetuate silencing through a hidden curriculum. This hidden curriculum appeals to settler sensibilities by: drawing on teaching pedagogies that soften or mute historical harm, validating “lovely” knowledge about Māori society and assessment approaches that privilege settler-colonial imperatives. This thesis identifies that harmonious notions of biculturalism circulate through the spatial and temporal dimensions of secondary schools because epistemological structures (policy, curriculum, and pedagogy) silence the meanings and effects of colonisation. In this way, a Settler Contract operates to sustain institutional racism in the New Zealand education system and white supremacy in settler-colonial societies.</p>

Silencing and institutional racism in settler-colonial education

<p>Twenty years ago, Charles Mills argued that a Racial Contract underwrites and guides the social contract and assigns political, economic, and social privileges based on race. This thesis argues that a settler manifestation of the Racial Contract operates through processes and structures of silencing in the New Zealand education system. Silencing is a racial discourse aligned with state ideologies about biculturalism that supports ignorance and denial of the structuring force of colonisation. Within schools, a state narrative of biculturalism advances the notion of harmonious settler-colonial race relations by marginalising or denying violent colonial histories and their consequences in the present. Silencing in the education system is examined through the lived experiences of Māori teachers of English language as they teach New Zealand literature in secondary school classrooms. Interviews with nineteen teachers and observations of four teachers' classroom practices (with follow up interviews from the teachers and some of their students) reveal that everyday classroom interactions perpetuate silencing through a hidden curriculum. This hidden curriculum appeals to settler sensibilities by: drawing on teaching pedagogies that soften or mute historical harm, validating “lovely” knowledge about Māori society and assessment approaches that privilege settler-colonial imperatives. This thesis identifies that harmonious notions of biculturalism circulate through the spatial and temporal dimensions of secondary schools because epistemological structures (policy, curriculum, and pedagogy) silence the meanings and effects of colonisation. In this way, a Settler Contract operates to sustain institutional racism in the New Zealand education system and white supremacy in settler-colonial societies.</p>

Em busca da "redenção de Cam": racialidade e interseccionalidade numa prisão de mulheres

<p>O artigo tem como objetivo discutir os atravessamentos do constructo racial no Brasil e sua configuração em espaços intramuros, reconhecendo a prisão como um dos lócus que permanece pouco permeável ao processo de construção da identidade negra vivenciado nas últimas décadas no país. Discute-se os elementos formadores do racismo moderno, levando em conta as especificidades do contexto brasileiro frente à experiência fundante do sequestro e da escravização africana no período colonial e seus prolongamentos, através dos conceitos branqueamento, contrato racial e dispositivo da racialidade, como categorias de inteligibilidade do racismo contemporâneo e suas reinvenções em sociedades que vivenciaram a escravidão moderna. Tais categorias são analisadas a partir dos relatos sobre relações inter-raciais elaborados por uma mulher cisgênero e um homem transgênero, reclusas (os) numa prisão em São Paulo, e revelam como as opressões vividas de modo interseccional, pelas presas racializadas, lhes impõem dificuldades adicionais ao processo de reconhecimento da identidade negra.</p><p> </p><p>Looking for the “Redemption of Cam”: Raciality and Intersectionality in a Women’s Prison</p><p>This article discusses the overlap between racial constructs in Brazil and their configuration in intramural environments, recognizing the prison as a relatively impermeable locus in the process of Black identity construction in Brazil during recent decades. The paper discusses the formative elements of modern racism, taking into account specificities of the Brazilian context in the face of foundational experiences of African kidnapping and enslavement in the colonial period and their legacies, the concepts of whitening, racial contract and raciality device, as intelligibility categories of contemporary racism and its reinventions in societies that have experienced modern slavery. These categories are analyzed based on the reports on interracial relations elaborated by a cisgender woman and a transgender man, inmates in a female penitentiary in São Paulo, and show how the oppression experienced in an intersectional way, by racialized prisoners, imposes additional difficulties on them in their process of recognizing a Black identity.</p><p>Interracial relations | Intersectionality | Whitening ideology | Gender | Prison</p>

Creative extraction: Black towns in white space

This article interrogates the “anomalous” case of Black-founded towns, so-called because of their relative absence from discourse on Black place, their unique struggles for self-determined development, and their externally ascribed narratives of absent or dysfunctional governance, frequently invoked to explain their lack of access to basic infrastructure. We propose illuminating some of these so-called anomalies through Charles Mills’ “racial contract,” which we argue structures space at a deeper level than traditional legal arrangements and allows us to look relationally at Black towns in “white space.” We also rely on Cedric Robinson’s “racial capitalism” to demonstrate how white space develops through extraction of value from places racialized as nonwhite. Through the case of Tamina, Texas, we argue that Black towns specifically, and Black places more generally, experience racially predatory governance and resource extraction, often by nearby white places, under the guise of following mundane rules of legal jurisdiction, standard economic planning, and development. To illustrate this, we focus on three overlapping mechanisms of “creative extraction” that reinforce white spatial, political, and economic power at the expense of Black places: theft, erosion, and exclusion. These mechanisms are tied to the environmental harms inflicted on Black towns, as some of the existential threats they face.

Conceptions of Race Beyond North America: The Subversion of the Colonial Racial Contract in The Bahamas

In his work Ethnic groups and boundaries, Frederick Barth argues that applying definitions to group of peoples has less to do with emphasizing a shared culture than with defining the sentiments of communality in opposition to the perceived identity of an ‘other’ (Barth). In applying Barth’s framework, modern Bahamian identity has developed—and is largely understood—in comparison to a Haitian ‘other.' Therefore, this essay will argue that, having gone through multiple iterations of the racial contract, policies of subjugation initially intended for black colonial subjects (e.g. uneven development and colonially encouraged distrust) have been subverted for use by The Bahamas’ post-independence government against those with Haitian ancestry. It will demonstrate that Bahamian sentiments towards Haitians are contextualized historically and based on a long-standing colonial tradition of discrimination and social control that pitted West Indian immigrants against them. While this subjugation is no longer enforced along phenotypical lines, elements of privilege connected to the racial contract are now adjudicated along different lines that may prove harder to distinguish, perhaps making the privileges attached to the dominant identity different from a North American context.