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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 Racism by Robin DiAngelo" (2018); "Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada From Slavery to the Present by 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 Canada" by Paulette Regan (2014); and "Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects" by 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.

This 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite massive gains in racial equality over the past 50 years, racism persists in twenty-first century Cuba. One of the key tools for the preservation and maintenance of racism is the discourse of racelessness through which the relevance of race is denied and silenced. Paradoxically, the racelessness frame has also been a guiding anti-racist force for over a century; an effective tool for challenging racism on the island since the late eighteenth century. Based on interviews with 41 Cuban teachers conducted in the Havana area, this article investigates teacher understandings of race and racelessness in Cuban society generally, and with regard to the schooling context in particular. Conversations with teachers reveal a paradoxical formation in which teachers using the racelessness approach, are indeed doing race work in their classrooms following an anti-racism derived from the larger Cuban race narrative as well as from their own experiences with race and racism. (Contains 3 notes.)

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contextualise historically transnational labour experiences within guest worker programs in Canada and to provide a conceptual foundation for analysing work, learning and living relations with special attention to agricultural workers. Design/methodology/approach: The research is based on a critical review of the literature as well as secondary analysis of existing research on agricultural guest workers in Ontario, Canada. Findings: The authors argue that the structural conditions for these particular forms of work, learning and living relations have a long historical trajectory that dates back in North America to the nineteenth century. They outline a long trajectory of convergence of American and Canadian policies in this regard. In terms of work, learning and living experiences we show how shaped by race, class and citizenship relations, as well as by the learning that infuses their reproduction, intensification and contestation. Originality/value: The article sheds light on a system of transnational labour that is emerging in a wide range of economies around the world, but which has not, to date, been widely analysed in work and learning literature. (Contains 11 notes.)

Professor George Sefa Dei has written and taught extensively in the fields of anti-colonialism and anti-racism. His latest work on the subject is "Anti-Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Resistance," co-edited with Arlo Kempf for Sense Publishers (2006). Dei and Kempf are also co-authoring a forthcoming volume on anti-colonial theory. Arlo Kempf works in the areas of anti-colonial historiography and anti-racism in education. Their interest in anti-colonial politics influenced and shaped this intellectual project. The dialogue presented in this article was recorded in January of 2006 in Toronto, Canada. The motivation for the conversation arose out of a desire to develop and extend the anti-colonial discourse as articulated by various African and Latin American anti-colonial thinkers, to and for a contemporary context. Given the prominence of "post" discourses in the academy, a resuscitation of the anti-colonial discourse is necessary in order to provoke action-oriented, resistance-based responses to modem colonial practices. A contemporary articulation of the anti-colonial discourse allows for a nuanced rendition and reading of colonizing relations. The focus on agency and resistance, which together lay at the heart of anti-colonialism, is particularly relevant as people everywhere struggle with and through the internal and external processes of colonization. People are living in a time of empire. Nothing can be gained by remaining silent on this issue. For the most part, their conversation is presented verbatim.

This article argues for a critical intervention in the popular discourse surrounding the analysis of implicit race bias as an anti-racism strategy. Also called unconscious race bias, implicit race bias provides a corporate-friendly lens for understanding the functions and operations of racism at the individual level. Based primarily in social psychology, the study of implicit race bias relies on the assumption that our unconscious negative and positive associations with people of different races are formed through various processes of socialization and can correspond with and impact our conscious race-based interactions. Recognizing the danger of popular understandings of race which neither consider nor account for race beyond the level of the individual, this article calls for the use of critical race theory (CRT) and critical pedagogy as tools to disrupt, interrogate, and deepen implicit race bias approaches. By bringing attention to questions of race power and inequity at the institutional, structural, and systemic levels as a precursor for taking up race at the individual level, I offer that CRT and critical pedagogy are indeed necessary for those looking to critically engage teaching and learning con-cerning implicit race bias. The article concludes by describing a recent study with Canadian teachers which attempts to bring critical perspectives and practices into dialogue with implicit race bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although  Cuba is among the world’s most racially egalitarian countries, racism exists on the island despite years of progress and struggle for racial equality. One of the key concepts used by Cuban teachers to explain race and racism on the island is the discourse of post-racialism, through which the contemporary significance of race is denied. While a silencing tool at times, Cuban post-racial discourse has also been an effective strategy for countering racism on the island for well over a century. Based on a mixed method study (survey and interview) conducted in the Havana area, this article investigates teachers’ understandings of race and post-racialism in Cuba with a focus on education, schools and teachers’ work using a critical race theory framework. The findings reveal that teachers understand themselves as frontline race workers and vanguard anti-racists. At the same time, the pedagogy and practice in which they are engaged relies heavily on a color-blind, post-racial approach which is derived from the larger Cuban race narrative as well as from the teachers’ personal and communal experiences with race and racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]