Erasures of Racism in Education and International Development

In this chapter, we argue that despite pervasive forms of racism on a global scale, the field of education and international development continues to fail to substantively engage with the production and effects of racial domination. Instead, considerations of racism remain silent, or indeed, erased, within research, policy, and practice, often in favor of colorblind and technocratic approaches to “development.” This ignores not only the sector’s historical links to systems of racial domination but also the current ways in which the field is implicated in producing unequal outcomes along racial lines. We consider the “global learning crisis” – as the dominant discourse of recent educational development agendas that has renewed significance in the context of the global pandemic – to demonstrate how its framings operate as a “racial project” (Omi & Winant, 2015). In doing so, this chapter offers theoretical and methodological resources with which to interrogate the field’s entanglements in systems of racial domination and challenge its erasures of racism.