Unveiling Power, Privilege, and Resistance: Interrogating Whiteness, Internationalism, and Black Feminist Activism in the Context of Racial Capitalism

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This group panel emerges from discussions following the Queens' College Education Society book talk from Arathi Sriprakash on "Learning Whiteness" (November 2023). In "Learning Whiteness," the domination of Whiteness, coloniality and racial capitalism are unveiled as unnatural and instead understood as manufactured. We understand racial capitalism as an in “cahoots” project that subjects non-White and poor people to the worst material and psychological violence and is maintained by the illusion that racism and capitalism are independent projects that do not interact (Robinson, 1983; Gilmore, 2002). Both being rooted in an imperialist logic, it is paramount to recognise that they are also interconnected with other social violences including patriarchy, homophobia, and elitism. Here, we focus on how racial capitalism is created through and maintained by and for power and privilege and how resistance to racial capitalism comes to be.

Whilst many theorizations of power have been developed within educational research, this panel conceptualizes power through a combination of a hegemonic (Gramsci, 1971) and co-formational lens (Bacchetta, 2010). As this project is about unveiling structures that maintain racial capitalism, it also understands power as a play on visibilities that fades into the background, to be ignored and forgotten. When power becomes untraceable, ungraspable, and unidentifiable, it makes racial capitalism's unnatural marginalizations and dominations appear natural and feeds into the illusion of racial capitalism's ahistorical nature. Power's invisibility is ironically maintained by hyper-visible narratives about the creation of the liberal state, the foundations of settler colonialism and myths surrounding the necessity of Whiteness (Spivak, 1988). Within the field of comparative and international education, the study of power has often focused on unitary and binary angles of power, but this panel confronts power as being disseminated through multiple axes and micro-circulatory movement (Derrida,1974-1994; Ahmed, 2007). This means that while a power maintains racial capitalism, there is too a power that resists it.

Privilege attends to both the material and affective benefits of racial and socioeconomic power, as well as complicity in maintaining systems of inequality (Alicea, 2022; Sriprikash, Gerrard, Rudolph, 2022). Through the creation of ‘in’ groups and ‘out’ groups, divisions based upon race, class, and gender horde opportunities and resources for the places and people in power. Privilege depends upon inequity, but this panel illustrates that the categories of inclusion and exclusion which govern privilege are both historically contingent and malleable, subject to redefinition and reconfiguration with changing coalitions of power. Racial capitalism, like American Whiteness, operates through ignorance as well, obfuscating the interrelationship between both racism and capitalism, and disinterring the benefits of both racial oppression and capitalist exploitation from those complicit in their maintenance (Mills, 2007). Through this panel we interrogate the active forces of ignorance underpinning racial capitalist power and its associated privileges.

The mechanisms of power and privilege operate to exclude and criminalize those who combat the forces which oppress them. Engaging in resistance is a vital component of challenging racial capitalism and its effects which degrade, dehumanize and destroy the lives of those on the margins of society. Acts of resistance do not follow a formula and will manifest themselves differently depending on the people who are engaging in them. The same way that systems of oppression do not exist in isolation, so too it is impossible to dismantle them individually in this white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy (hooks, 1984). Whilst each of our individual projects have their specific lenses, we are collaborating together on this panel to demonstrate that we must work together in order to facilitate change and build safer and more just societies for all, especially those who have been the victims of violent systems of domination and subordination.

This panel brings together three distinct research projects that shed light on the dynamics of power, privilege, and resistance within the context of racial capitalism in the field of comparative and international education. These studies delve into the intricacies of internationalism as a space of privilege, the historical, social, and cultural dimensions of White hegemonic power in the US, and the resistance of Black feminists activists in elite university settings.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Sohane Inès Mousseid Yahya, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• We love, We rage, We desire: Black feminist activism and community at 'elite' universities as an act of healing and reclamation - Tyra Edwina Amofah-Akardom, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Educating Into Whiteness: Citizenship Education Curriculum and the Consolidation of White Racial Hegemony in Post-WWII New York - Connor Middleton, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Co-forming an international elite: theorising the partnerships of global politics, capitals, and international schools in maintaining global structures of power. - Sohane Inès Mousseid Yahya, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge