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ABSTRACTThis article explores notions of spatiality, race, and productive disruptions of whiteness; focusing on two dinners which were one component of a mixed method study on racism, teaching, and implicit race bias with secondary teachers in Toronto, Canada. The dinners were focused on cross race dialogue. White teachers experienced the dinners as uncomfortable, motivating, and in one case upsetting. The dinners offer a unique look at White experiences of racial spatial disruption. Drawing on reflections, interviews, and dinner transcripts, this article sketches a messy typology of these experiences to flesh out connections between White teachers’ racial (dis)engagements with/in race dialogue, and related (dis)engagements with antiracism. The paper theorises three distinct but related postures of White self-location, and takes up the implications of each for teacher self-identity and engagement with antiracism. Critically engaging the notion of spatiality, this work is guided by critical race theory, and critical phenomenological approaches.

Background/Context: Unconscious racial bias (URB) can be a pernicious form of racism. In light of increased awareness of and research on the subject, URB work has become a key focus of equity work in health care, education, and corporate contexts as part of broader calls for racial justice. In Canada, targeting URB in education has become a policy priority at the national, provincial, and school board levels. The role of individual and organizational URB is now widely recognized in policy as central to equitable outcomes in schooling; however, research is limited on how to engage these forms of racism in educational contexts. Prevailing approaches to URB work in schools often include truncated one-off workshops, which leave unaddressed the connections between the individual racial biases, and the operations of white supremacy and racism at the institutional, systemic, and structural levels.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: While URB is increasingly well-understood by social psychologists, there has been limited engagement from critical scholars working in areas such as critical race theory (CRT), anti-colonialism, and critical whiteness studies—despite the popularity of interrogating URB as an anti-racism strategy in education. CRT in education has laid bare and problematized the central function of schooling in the safeguarding and management of white supremacy. This project emerged from a dual recognition of URB as a productive entry point for racial awareness and anti-racism work, alongside a significant concern about the failure of mainstream URB discourse to address structural racism and white supremacy—masking at times the deeper ways that Euro-colonial racism underpins social relations in contemporary U.S., Canadian, European, and other contexts. This work seeks to address these limitations in the design of the study through deep work with participants. Specifically, the study sought to understand better the impacts of reading critical texts focusing on systemic, structural, and institutional racism on teachers’ understandings of their own racial biases, as well as teachers’ perspectives on the impacts of reading critical texts in terms of their professional practices.Research Design: This article reports on the findings of a 10-month study with secondary teachers in Toronto, Canada, focusing on critical approaches to racial bias mitigation in education. In addition to asking participants to enact a series of URB mitigation strategies developed in the field of social psychology, this study also required participants to read and reflect on one of the following critical anti-racism nonfiction texts: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racismby Robin DiAngelo (2018); Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada From Slavery to the Presentby Robyn Maynard (2017); Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School, edited by Mica Pollock (2008); Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canadaby Paulette Regan (2014); and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjectsby Christina Sharpe (2010). The project was designed using multiple data sources from participants, including electronic survey responses, ongoing journaling/reflection, a midpoint check-in questionnaire, and a final interview. These multiple entry points, as well as the duration of the project, aimed to go beyond the taken-for-granted and toward deeper understanding over time.Conclusions/Recommendations: Findings suggest that reading these works impacted teachers’ understandings of race and racism in terms of their teaching, as well as in terms of their personal relationships to race and racism, increasing their inclination and ability to address race and anti-racism. This work allowed for critical reflection to seep into the most intimate and invisible moments of operationalized whiteness in the professional and personal spheres of participants. This suggests an important complementarity between teacher intervention practices emerging from social psychology, and the introduction and engagement of critical anti-racist and anti-colonial texts in terms of teachers’ work for racial justice.

Background/Context Cuba's education system has been the focus of academic study by researchers on and off the island who frequently cite the comparative success of Cuban students on measures such as the UNESCO math and language assessments. Few studies, however, consider the significance of race within Cuban education generally or the home–school relationship in particular. Indeed, there has been no empirical work made available on these topics for nearly a decade. Significant sociopolitical changes are underway in Cuba, with implications for the role of the state in the cultural life of the nation. Education is a key transmission point between the state and its people, with teachers as frontline cultural workers.Purpose This article examines the way Cuban teachers address racism in their professional practice, with a specific focus on teacher home visits to address racism with parents/guardians. The author analyzes the relationship between Cuban teachers and the families of students they teach (an under-researched form of teacher practice in an under-researched context). Little is known about teachers reaching and teaching parents directly about issues such as racism. Further, there is limited research on the ways in which understanding of citizenship and professional responsibility impact teachers’ work and pedagogy in their interactions with parents.Setting Havana, Cuba.Participants All interviewees were teachers from downtown Havana. Twenty-two male and 23 female teachers participated. Fifteen of the teachers were Mestizo (of mixed race), one was Chinese-Cuban, 21 were Afro-Cuban, and eight were White. Survey participants were drawn from across Havana's 15 boroughs. Among respondents, 67.4% were female and 32.6% were male. As far as race, 57.8% identified as Mestizo, 18.9% identified as Afro-Cuban, 22% identified as White, and 1.3% identified as Chinese.Research Design This is a mixed-method study using qualitative interviews (N=45 participants), and a quantitative survey (N=150 respondents).Conclusions/Recommendations Teachers regularly enter the homes of parents in an effort to promote diversity and to counter perceived racism among parents/guardians. The fact that teachers have the authority and sense of entitlement to do so points to possibilities for a significant retooling of the ecology systems framework. Many teachers undertake this work with parents/guardians just as they would when addressing student academic performance. This race-work is supported by state-generated social capital that, in Cuba, embeds conceptions of race within a larger public context, as opposed to treating race as a private matter to be subjectively and privately understood. As quasi-curriculum, antiracism is something everyone is expected to learn. This suggests that a careful consideration of the way concepts of nation, citizenship, and professional responsibility inform teacher preparation and practice in Cuba may deepen our understanding of teachers’ race-work in North American contexts.

The author reflects on the plan of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) to implement the Africentric school concept. According to the author, the Black-focused school initiative signifies that society is leaping forward for progress and is inclusive, integrated and has no dirty secrets. He expresses that the Africentric concept allows the learner to explore his own culture, experience, history and complex identity as a starting base to engage broader knowledge critically.

The article discusses the common mischaracterizations of the Black-focused schools in Ontario. In the segregation issue, no student will be forced to attend a Black-focused school and all will be there by choice. It notes that while the proliferation of Black-focused schools may be a part of a wider trend in contemporary education, focused schools are by no means the flagship of a new generation of special interests groups.