Disobeying the Neoliberal Model: Dare We Decolonize Antiracism in Teacher Education?

• In Event: Writing Against Racism: BIPOC Faculty and Graduate Students in Teacher Education Imagining New Pathways for Collective Justice

Abstract

Introduction
Antiracism has become unavoidable in teacher education. At the same time, however, it shows signs of veering toward complacency or ossifying into commodification (Mehra, 2021). This autoethnography examines some of the ways antiracism simultaneously provides resistance to racism while also generating complicity with white supremacy. To move toward a different possibility for antiracism, one that honors its original purpose, this study by an assistant professor highlights new possibilities for antiracism from a decolonizing perspective (Mbembe, 2016). Accordingly, this study asks: how does organizational antiracism (Menashy & Zakharia, 2022) deal with BIPOC faculty who question the underlying logics of white supremacy endemic to the university?

Background/Context
If we understand anti-racism as a process rather than a product, then clearly it should not follow a single trajectory. In practice, however, antiracism has become anchored in the logics of white performativity and organizational systems of measurement. I argue that we must reimagine, deconstruct, reassemble, and ultimately decolonize antiracism. For many, the term antiracism has come to refer only to a narrow collection of policies gathered under diversity, equity, and inclusion. Otherwise known as DEI, these polices reduce antiracism to the acceptance of all people. While particular approaches to DEI might vary, typically they focus on removing barriers to recruitment and retention of people from racialized groups.
Attempts to make higher education more inclusive through DEI seem laudable, however, they remain rooted in a problematic conception of inclusion (Author, 2021). In this conceptualization, inclusion is understood as a process where by those already inside of the academy agree to include “others” into their sphere without actually making substantive changes to the purposes and processes of the university that sustain white supremacy (Author, 2023).

Theoretical Framework/ Significance
Neoliberal universities and teacher education programs demand standardization, classification, and marketability. These logics apply to antiracism. Decolonizing antiracism, however, requires delinking it from the systems of impersonal, audit-culture measurement. If we are to do this, then the voices and experiences of BIPOC faculty must be centered and heard. Using autoethnography, this paper explores how pursuing antiracism as a business goal, in order to marketize programs, deters BIPOC faculty from openly pursuing Indigenous thought, anticapitalism, or other non-western epistemologies as lines of inquiry and knowledge production. A recurring theme in the findings, which will be discussed in detail, shows that the privileging of organizational antiracism in the neoliberal university suppresses the voices of BIPOC faculty. This paper provides a new way of understanding why decolonizing antiracism requires that BIPOC faculty have the room and autonomy necessary to recover their subjugated knowledge and ways of being, while also having a space to mourn the material and spiritual pain inflicted upon them by colonization (Author, 2023). By affirming modes of existence valued and honored by people from historically racialized groups, a decolonizing antiracism strengthens our ability to imagine new vistas and possible pathways for collective actions. This autoethnography documents the efforts of one BIPOC faculty member working against the neoliberal logics of the university.

Author

• Ramon Vasquez, University of Minnesota