What if racism is a permanent feature of this society?: Exploring the potential of racial realism for education researchers

What if racism is a permanent feature of this society?: Exploring the potential of racial realism for education researchers

Race critical education research is often undertaken as a response to inequitable schooling. Consequently, education researchers and those who use their publications to inform policy and curricula tend towards solutions designed to address aspects of racially discriminatory practices or policies. Regular deployment of piecemeal ‘solutions’, often on a large scale (e.g., within national curricula or policy deployment), can be erroneously used by proponents as evidence of transformative social progress and indicative of significant efforts to address inequality (Bell, 2004; Curry, 2008). Implementation of such policies can be similarly used by conservative commentators who find in them reason to denounce apparently rapid and significant cultural shifts that undermine interests of traditionally powerful racial groups for the benefit of traditionally ‘minoritised’ (Harper, 2012, p. 9) people (Salter & Maxwell, 2015). A common thread of this research and its conversion into policy or curricula is the focus on the partial and the incremental, on the various components of education systems that contribute to or encapsulate inequity. Consideration of the whole is less common.

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