Primary First Journal Issue 41 - Anti-Racism
When we put out a call for papers on anti-racist education, we were looking for experiences of leading anti-racism efforts across a setting including barriers, struggles, triumphs, hopes and fears. Anti-racist education is not a ‘job’ to be ‘done’, nor only a concern for schools that serve racially minoritised communities. Therefore, we present this as a collection of pockets of hope and possibility (Smith & Lander, 2022; Joseph-Salisbury & Connelly, 2021) to be read with a critical eye and an enquiring mind.
What is anti-racist education?
To have a grasp of anti-racist education means starting with understanding how racism is the structural and organising principle of modern capitalist life, including our schools (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). At the same time, we need to understand what education is for. In its very basic form, compulsory schooling is about preparing young people to be units of production in a modern capitalist system (Leonardo, 2017). If you put these two together, anti-racist education practice becomes about unlearning, dismantling dehumanising ideologies rooted in colonialism and exploitation, and a lens rather than an activity (Lander & Rabiger, 2025). It becomes a permanent praxis of resistance to the ongoing reproduction of racism in policy, process and procedures in our schools and beyond.
It is for this reason that building basic racial literacy must be the starting point of all anti-racism endeavours. Over the past 75 years, there has been much research on race and education, and yet at the same time, deliberate policies of silence and obfuscation mean that race and racism as a policy concern have been ‘systematically downgraded’ (Gillborn et al., 2016). Instead, schools promote notions of meritocracy, disregarding the intersectional, raced, classed and gendered deficit ideologies which construct some learners as potential successes, and others as not.
So, where better to start this special issue than with Katie Bayley’s overview, Developing Racial Literacy:
What are the barriers? Here, Katie exposes how, while schools like to think of themselves as ‘not racist’, this will always fall short in place of bridging educators’ knowledge chasm concerning race and racism. This vital knowledge is being excluded from children’s schooling and at every stage of professional development, from initial teacher education to in-school training.
Dr Penny Rabiger was a teacher for ten years in Primary and Secondary schools. She is a freelance researcher and consultant. Penny is an Associate at The Centre for Race, Education and Decoloniality, where she is Lead Coach for the Anti-Racist School Award. Penny completed her PhD in 2025 with her thesis entitled Unlearning Structural Racism in a School Context.