Dysconscious Racism

King (1991) introduced the term dysconscious racism to foreground a discussion about the biases of whiteness embedded in teacher education specifically as well as childhood pedagogy and educational policies and practices more broadly. The “miseducation of teachers” suggests King (1991, p.133) contributes to the persistent perpetuation of “dysconscious racism”. According to King “dysconsciousness is an uncritical habit of mind… that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as given” in a manner that has a profound impact on the relationships amongst students and teachers (1991, p.135). She outlines how her work educating teachers exposed both the implicit and explicit biases of whiteness that continued to read and perpetuate the narrative of black students and their families as disadvantaged and struggling (King, 1991). King also attends to the reluctance of her predominantly white students to identify, confront and question their own racial prejudices that enable the structure of racial inequality to be sustained (King, 1991). According to King (1991, p. 135–136), “the ability to imagine a society reorganized without racial privilege requires a fundamental shift in the way white people think about their status and self-identities and their conceptions of Black people.” For the purpose of the argument I am trying to put forward in this paper, King’s insights are useful here in emphasizing the tension between the current socio-cultural conception of the subjective self and the relationship of the self to both sustaining and resisting unjust educational policies and practices. King’s insights are also useful in helping me to wonder about how the story of the self has come to be embedded in the lived realities of racism and the subsequent preservation of white privilege. How do our teaching and learning practices amidst each other work to sustain racism despite the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion so common place in current education curriculum and policy documents? How might we harness education as a tool to not only recognize and resist how the self is implicated in dysconscious racism but also begin to as King (1991, p. 135–136) suggests “imagine a society reorganized without racial privilege”?

King’s (1991, 2006) attempts in her work to shake educators out of their complacency by confronting implicit and explicit biases through the concept of dysconscious racism represents here a specific example of numerous interventions and contributions of scholars of Critical Race Theroy (crt) and the proponents of Culturally Relevant and Responsive Pedagogy (crrp). One of the intentions of interventions such as those proposed by King (1991, 2006) has been both to reject the dehumanization of racism as well as to insist upon a set of emancipatory pedagogies that foreground the rich and diverse capacities of black students and their knowledges. One of the strengths of interventions such as those articulated by King (2006, p. 337) is how they point towards “the ways ideological distorted knowledge sustains societal injustice particularly academic and school knowledge about black history and culture.” King (2006) here points to the implicit structure of exclusion embedded in the hegemony of western epistemologies within education policies and practices. The intervention of dysconscious racism allows for both a recognition and confrontation with the narrow path of access to success within the current educational structure that continues to sustain white privilege (King, 1991, 2006). The concerns King outlines in her work remain relevant. Statistics across numerous school boards in North America continue to show the impacts of structural racial inequality in the disproportional representations of Black and Hispanic students labeled as “at risk” or struggling with meeting learning goals and curriculum expectations (Gaztambide-Fernández & Parekh, 2017; Brown & Parekh, 2013; Annamma et al, 2013). Thus, despite the contribution of the term dysconscious racism over twenty-five years ago, the concept continues to remain relevant as a way of resisting and questioning inequitable school policies and practices.

Dysconscious Ableism

Along with dysconscious racism, I also want to consider here the term dysconscious ableism (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017, p. 894) in relation to the dilemma of the subjective self and its relationship to inequitable education policies and practices. The term dysconscious ableism meets at the intersections of the work of scholars in crt and Disability Studies to suggest the hopeful possibility of working both within and against scholarly fields in order to find new ways to question, resist and reimagine how we might enact becoming human differently. Inspired by the work of King (1991), Broderick and Lalvani (2017, p. 895) define dysconscious ableism as “one that tacitly accepts dominant ableist norms and privileges.” In following King (1991) and conducting their own research as it relates to teachers and how their perceptions of race and disability sustain dysconscious racism and ableism, Broderick and Lalvani (2017) question current rhetoric in both educational policies and practices about inclusion. Their qualitative analysis was based upon the written responses from fifty graduate students on coursework focused on inclusion (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017). According to the qualitative research study conducted by Broderick and Lalvani (2017, p. 902), “explanations which euphemistically celebrate diversity in the absence of any apparent awareness of the structural inequalities in the social order of schooling would seem to be just as firmly grounded in dysconsiousness.” In their qualitative research with dysconscious ableism Broderick and Lalvani (2017) along with King’s work on dysconscious racism (1991), convey their concerns between the rhetoric of inclusion educational policies and practices and its persistent lack of substantive implementation. Students labeled ‘at-risk’ due to their race, gender, disability and/or low socio-economic status, tend to disproportionally encounter schooling through its mechanisms of conditional inclusion or outright exclusion.

The concerns raised here by the work of King (1991) and Broderick and Lalvani (2017) are substantiated by numerous scholars in disability studies, crt as well as those whom meet at the intersection between these two fields (Annamma, 2015; Annamma et al, 2013; Adjei, 2016; Baker, 2010, 2012; Campbell, 2008; Hodge & Runswick-Cole 2013; Liasidou, 2014; Moore & Slee, 2012; Vaught & Castagno, 2008). While it is not possible to offer an exhaustive review of this literature here, I would like to focus on two key insights for the purposes of this paper. First, I intend to use the intersection of disability studies and crt to wonder about how dysconscious racism and dysconscious ableism continue to be sustained despite or perhaps because of the implementation of inclusionary policies as best practice. Second, through suggesting a different reading of inclusion, I intend to trouble the contention that inclusion as it is currently implemented in both policies and practices, also represents a movement toward social justice and equity. Rather, it is my contention that inclusion is inextricably linked to sustaining coloniality through structural racism and ableism that scholars such as King (1991) and Broderick and Lalvani (2017) refer to as dysconscious racism and dysconscious ableism.

Inclusion/ Exclusion

Calls for inclusion amongst educators and in inclusionary policies and practices are commonplace and ubiquitous. In my own region of Ontario Canada, numerous policy documents have been produced in the last decade outlining a commitment to inclusion as well as recommended best practices to ensure the implementation of policies (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2013a, 2013b, 2014a, 2014b, 2017). These documents represent inclusion as positive and integral to progress and student achievement. They also emphasize the importance of frequent assessment and evaluation of progress towards inclusion by foregrounding the import of data collection in determining the success rate of how policies and practices are being implemented. For example, in outlining the goals of equity and inclusive education one recent policy document states: “The equity and inclusive education strategy aims to close student achievement gaps by identifying and eliminating any biases, barriers, and power dynamics that may limit students’ prospects for learning, growing, and contributing fully to society” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014a, p. 12). Elsewhere, in the most recent policy document focusing on equity and inclusion (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2017), there is a recognition that barriers remain and require continued monitoring and data collection to address student needs. “We continue to observe poorer outcomes for disproportionate numbers of students from low-income environments, racialized students, Indigenous students, students who identify as lgbtq or Two-Spirited, children and youth in care, students with disabilities, and students with special education needs” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2017, p14). These documents consistently acknowledge the existence of barriers and the subsequent need to measure progress by the removal of barriers via the use of assessment and evaluation of individuals as monitoring mechanisms.

If as equity and inclusion policies and practices emphasize, the project of inclusion represents a commitment to the story of individuals overcoming barriers, then the story of inclusion depends on simultaneously sustaining and overcoming barriers of exclusion. It seems that the barriers remain ever-present and the need to overcome them remains the goal to be oriented towards as a disproportional number of students who find themselves amidst the intersections of disability, race, gender, class and heteronormativity are repeatedly portrayed as potentially benefiting from overcoming. This is exemplified in how documents such as Ontario’s Education Equity Action Plan (2017), use quantitative data to emphasize their own progress while also pointing toward the persistence of barriers. In the most recent report on inclusion and equity (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2017, p. 13–15), the disproportional presence of low-income, disabled, and racialized students in applied level high school courses that either drop-out or do not pursue post-secondary education is described as an “unintended consequence.” This is evident as well in statistical data collected by District School Board’s such as Toronto who demonstrate the ongoing impacts of labelling practices that disproportionately impact low-income, racialized and/ or immigrant communities (Brown and Parekh, 2013). For example, outlined in their statistical data is a disproportional impact of special education labelling practices on students who identify as Black and/or Spanish, male, and/or are from low socio-economic backgrounds (Brown and Parekh, 2013, p. 44–50). When placed in the context of ongoing systemic injustices, it becomes evident that the inclusive classroom is a part of a mechanism that remains complicit in sustaining the status quo. Similarly, one of the key components in sustaining this status quo is sustaining the taken for granted belief that achieving inclusion is something that individuals achieve in their struggle to overcome.

Though described as an “unintended consequence” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2017, p. 13–15), conditional inclusion or outright exclusion remain a consistent feature of inclusionary policies and practices in education. Despite the distance in time between King’s (1991) contribution of dysconscious racism and Broderick and Lalvani (2017) contribution of dysconscious ableism both terms are tethered together for the ways they point towards the implicit and explicit biases embedded in educational policies and practices. Meeting at the intersections between crt and disability studies, is a relatively new intervention that holds fruitful possibilities for generating an interdependent network of scholarly work with the aim of troubling inclusionary policies (Adjei, 2016; Annamma, 2015; Annamma et al, 2013, Campbell, 2008; Liasidou, 2014). According to Annamma (2015), inclusion continues to exclude because it remains routed/rooted through white privilege. “Whiteness as property has historically and continues to function as a tool to confer social benefits from the intangible to the material on those who possess it, and punish those who do not” (Annamma, 2015, p. 298). Annamma’s (2015) insight here is made within the context of her own research with black teenage girls with disabilities and their teachers in a juvenile detention centre. She works to expose what is referred to as the school to prison pipeline as a form of exclusion that impacts youth at the intersections of race and disability (Annamma, 2015). Thus the “unintended consequence” of inclusion remains the practice of exclusion as the lived realities of children and youth with disabilities. In this sense white privilege is conceptualized as the barrier that requires overcoming by individuals embedded within the western colonial logics of current schooling practices.

Thus far, I have considered how both dysconscious racism (1991) and dysconscious ableism (2017) remain ever-present despite or perhaps because of inclusionary policies and practices. Inclusion requires barriers to eliminate, monitor, assess and evaluate thus generating the hopeless hope of individuals overcoming exclusion for possible inclusion. Inclusion tacitly assumes that progressing towards white able-bodied privilege is the goal thus, perpetually sustaining barriers of exclusion as an “unintended consequence.” Within what some scholars refer to as the hegemony of western colonial logics (Annamma, 2015; Mignolo 2009, 2011; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Titchkosky & Aubrecht, 2009), injustice is a pernicious feature which depends upon exclusion to sustain inclusion of a few into a sphere of white able-bodied privilege. For example, the qualitative research of Hodge & Runswick-Cole (2013), describe the impossibility of inclusion for disabled children when striving toward the normative abled-body is the measure that persists in sustaining exclusion. “So powerful is the acceptance of the ableist premise that normal is the best and only option, that the expectation that disabled children should spend all of their time chasing normal is rarely challenged” (Hodege & Runswick-Cole, 2013, p. 313). In focusing on a more systemic analysis Moore & Slee (2012) and Baker (2012, 2010) contend that inclusionary policies in education are embedded in a western colonial logic of valuing neo-liberal able-bodied subjects. “Education policy follows the neo-liberal moral compass. Competitive individualism is both ethos and practice…The imposition of a national curriculum that embraces particular cultural class and gender values excludes many of the students destined to experience it” (Moore & Slee, 2012, p. 228). The small everyday moments of the exclusion of disabled children described by Hodge & Runswick-Cole (2013) along with the analysis of conditional inclusion of schooling at the systemic levels by Moore & Slee (2012) as well as Baker (2012, 2010), indicate that dysconscious ableism and dysconscious racism are preserved through the mechanisms of inclusion.

I return here to the question I asked at the start of this paper: What does it mean to teach and learn about becoming human amidst disability and race in the elementary classroom? In the current configuration of inclusionary policies and practices in education, dysconscious racism (King, 1991) and dysconscious ableism (Broderick & Lalvani, 2017) continue to sustain exclusion as an “unintended consequence” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2017, p.13–15). Within this context, the possibility of overcoming barriers on the path that sustains rather than disrupts white able-bodied privilege, is the hopeless hope that conditional inclusion offers. Another significant element of the analysis that has been undertaken thus far has been to focus on how these inclusionary policies and practices foreground the ways individuals encounter, question, resist, sustain and/or overcome barriers. While the studies from King (1991, 2006), Broderick and Lalvani (2017) among others, invite a visceral and necessary confrontation with the implications of sustaining the status quo within the daily lived realities of individuals who are embedded within dehumanizing and marginalizing schooling practices, these studies paradoxically reinforce a conception of the self that remains steeped in western colonial logics. By learning with and from decolonial studies and its application within Global South disability studies, the next section of this paper seeks to question the ways western-centric conceptions of the self continue to form the basis of critique and analysis. By engaging in this analysis the aim is to disrupt western colonial logics and their grip on conceptions of selfhood. By finding points of convergence between mechanisms of resistance within the Global North and those in the Global South, the aim is to provoke a consideration of our interdependencies in a manner that eschews the hegemony of the neoliberal normative subject.

Lesson #1: The Dependencies on Injustice for the Sustenance of Neoliberal Independent Western-centric Subject

In his detailed analysis and critique of the ongoing hegemony of Western modernity, Mignolo states: “coloniality is constitutive of modernity- there is no modernity without coloniality” (2011, p. 3). Significant here for the purposes of this paper, is the point that the mythical independent subject of Enlightenment thinkers, has been and remains a subject, dependent on the work, resources and stolen lands of countless human beings (Mignolo, 2009, 2011). Western modernity and the Global North remains tainted by a past and complicit in present power knowledge systems that are sustained through an objectification and theft of land, resources as well as the impositions of dehumanizing hierarchies of oppression and marginalization (Mignolo, 2009, 2011). While decolonial studies scholars such as Mignolo, exclude disability from their conceptual frame, disabilities studies scholars such as Grech (2015) and Meekosha (2011) apply decoloniality to their own work and encourage other scholars to do so as well. Both decolonial studies and disability studies offer developers and implementers of educational policy and curriculum a potent and undeniable reminder of the non-existence of the independent human. The work of these scholars serves as a reminder that, every human is bound to other humans in ways that often require a confrontation with our own complicities with injustice. To put it differently, while the concepts of dysconscious ableism and dysconscious racism demonstrate the everyday material impacts on individuals, decoloniality stretches and provokes educators to critically examine the very conditions for inclusion in a manner that questions supposed standards and norms for learning.

Lesson #2: Consumer Choice in the Global North Sustain Conditions of Exploitation in the Global South

One of the key insights from Global South disability studies draws our attention to the ways the Global North is fundamentally dependent on sustaining the structural inequalities that provide much needed resources (both material and human labour) from the Global South (Grech, 2015; Meekosha & Soldatic 2011; Meekosha, 2011). For example, Meekosha (2011) starkly outlines how the Global North’s capitalist economy of extraction and consumption has generated wars in some of the poorest nations, polluted the air, water and land in much of the Global South while, exploiting and objectifying other humans. Meekosha (2011) also points to how the flow of products and resources that are largely consumed by the Global North, generates disability in the Global South through the polluting effects of industry as well as the ravages of war that result in the loss of limbs, the spread of infections and diseases as well as increased incidences of chronic ailments. Thus, the practice of excessive consumption of residents in the Global North that are often masked as enactments of individual free choice, are directly implicated in sustaining injustice globally. This insight from the work of scholars and activists in Global South disability studies offer fruitful and productive pathways of intervention for questioning how dysconscious ableism and dysconscious racism are global in their reach. This reach is concealed in discourses of individual consumer choice that sustain a commitment to a western-centric self and western colonial logics.

Lesson #3 The Necessity of Disrupting the Global Flows of Power/Knowledge that Presume a Unidirectional Flow from North to South

Attending to the ways we might learn with and from decolonial studies and Global South disability studies, is also intended here to question and disrupt the assumptive flow of power/ knowledge in a unidirectional manner from the Global North to the Global South. In his call to reorient unjust configurations of power, Grech (2015, p. 13) reminds us, “Colonialism matters because it is not simply a historical event that has come and gone but, as history itself has shown us, it is an event that continues to provide the ideological- cultural and material foundations for continuing domination.” Grech’s (2015) contention here about the import of colonization is significant, as it points to the ongoing generation of unbalanced power relations that negatively impacts the lives of disabled peoples as well as other humans who are placed in the category of the ‘unwanted other.’ According to Meekosha and Soldatic (2011, p. 1383), “More than a billion people in world today live with disability” and “80% percent of the world’s disabled people” reside in the Global South (p. 1389). Disabled people comprise a significant portion of the world’s population yet, their modes of dependency amidst other humans remain signifiers of ‘lack’, ‘backwardness’ and ‘pity’ (Grech, 2015; Meekosha & Soldatic 2011; Meekosha, 2011). These kinds of descriptors are intended to both diminish humans labelled with disability as well as diminish entire regions of the globe who are assessed and evaluated as not good enough. Similarly, they valorize nations in the Global North whose example, nations in the Global South are encouraged to follow so that they too can ‘catch up’ and progress (Grech, 2015; Meekosha & Soldatic 2011; Meekosha, 2011). For example, Meekosha and Soldatic (2011) demonstrate how the call for universal human rights is a knowledge system that flows from the Global North to the Global South in ways that impede locally organized collectives to establish their own terms and claims to networks of social support. Meekosha and Soldatic (2011) suggest, the knowledge-power nexus intends to portray the Global North as a saviour whilst disabled people of the Global South are invariably cast as powerless subjects in need of saving.

By attending to important provocations from decolonial studies and its applications within Global South disability studies, educators, scholars and activists within the Global North might consider both the local and global consequences of conditions of inclusion/ exclusion within education policies and practices. What is particularly relevant here and returns us to the local concerns with education policies and practices with which this paper began, is the striking ease through which this insight parallels concerns of disability studies scholars in the Global North who justifiably lament the ways disabled children are depicted by assessment and evaluation practices as being perpetually behind (Annamma et al, 2013; Baker, 2002, 2015; Brown & Parekh, 2013). There are numerous quantitative and qualitative research studies in the Global North that substantiate the work of disability studies scholars in the Global South. These studies repeatedly critique special education for its disproportional representation of black and/or children from low socio-economic backgrounds (Annamma et al, 2013; Baker, 2002, 2015; Brown & Parekh, 2013; Collins et al, 2016; Erevelles, 2013). Despite the use of seemingly pleasantly sounding words like inclusion, to describe current policy reformations in education, the view of disability as a failing of the individual that requires excessive monitoring, rehabilitation and/or cure persists (Moore & Slee, 2012). Equity and inclusion policy documents produced over the last decade serve as mechanisms that sustain the myth in the independent subject. Inevitably embedded in these practices are countless human embodiments that never seem to measure up. Within this framework that tethers local teaching and learning practices to global structural injustices, disability remains associated with a condition of lack and dependence while the independent subject conceals its dependence on systemic injustice in order to preserve its hegemonic status. In this sense by learning with and from decolonial studies and Global South disability studies, educators can seek new and provocative pathways to disrupt dysconscious ableism and dysconscious racism in a manner that refuses to valorize the neoliberal independent subject so deeply embedded in western colonial logics.

Seeking Transformation Through Embracing Our Interdependencies

If it is indeed no longer feasible to keep sustaining a path toward the independent subject that remains complicit in racist colonial logics that reject or merely conditionally include varying human embodiments, how might elementary educational policies and practices consider needed transformation rather than reformation? Dolmage (2009) places for reconsideration what modern Western philosophy has selectively borrowed from ancient Greek philosophy to justify its claims of mental superiority and subsequently makes a case for re-storying the past with support from feminist, indigenous and disability studies. He uses the concept of Metis to stich together and engage in a “remythologization” of differing bodies of knowledge in order to evoke the import and value of the survival and thriving of varying embodiments (Dolmage, 2009, p.13). For Dolmage, “Metis never goes forward in a straight line but is always weaving from side to side and looping back on itself” (2009, p. 6). Significant in Dolmage’s (2009) contribution here, is his insistence on the enmeshment between mind and body as well as bodies amidst other bodies. Dolmage (2009) here offers the possibility of another story and another perhaps more tangled path with one another. In this provocation our embodied interdependencies invite power and knowledge to circulate between people in a manner that refuses the hegemony of the normative body (Dolmage, 2009). A move towards our interdependencies rejects the hegemony of the western-centric self in a manner that foregrounds the complex entanglement of our relationships.

Similarly, in keeping with Mignolo’s (2009, 2011) provocations to pursue other trajectories, the work of decolonial and postcolonial scholar Walcott (2016, p. 49) considers the fruitful possibilities in transforming our teaching and learning practices in a “multiculturalism on its way to creolization”. Here Walcott (2016) invites educators to think about the ways colonialism in its current neoliberal iteration of globalization has created urban spaces, communities and neighborhoods in the Global North that embody the entanglement of immigrants, migrants and refugees from all over the world. Walcott (2016, p. 49) defines creolization “as the result of multiple differences and their intimate encounters producing ‘mutual mutations’.” For the purposes of disrupting the western modern conception of the independent self and its subsequent hegemony in shaping schooling policies and practices, Walcott’s concept of creolization, embodies the importance of foregrounding our interdependences for two specific reasons. First, creolization offers opportunities to confront the persistent abuses of western colonial logics in a manner that viscerally and tangibly demonstrates the direct links between local policies and decision making practices and their global repercussions. According to Walcott (2016, p. 50): “creolization takes place in the context of unequal and brutal power arrangements alongside forms of severe cultural dominance.” Walcott’s (2016) insight serves as a reminder that evoking our interdependencies simultaneously evokes a need to address past and present injustices. Second, Walcott also (2016) suggests that in confronting injustices that there are the possibilities in “mutual mutations” to produce different kinds of relations through our interdependencies. In seeking the “mutual mutations” of a creolization that foregrounds our interdependencies, we might mitigate if not eliminate entirely the lived realities of dysconscious racism and dysconscious ableism.

When read alongside one another Dolmage (2009) and Walcott (2016) do not offer a panacea in finding different ways to teach and learn how to become human with one another. Rather, the work of these scholars in decolonial and disability studies suggests that, confronting our dependencies leaves us enmeshed amidst the ethical dilemmas of choosing to help each other thrive amidst our differences and through confronting the effects of structural inequality that continue to impress upon and oppress human lives. Ultimately, endeavouring to tell different stories about what it means to be dependent on human and non-human life, may reconfigure teaching and learning in ways that reimagines the world through embodied differences that are integral to our teaching and learning. In quoting Glissant’s work, Dolmage (2009, p. 19) emphasizes “‘the world’s unforeseeable variations’, emphasizing the importance of mixture and underscoring the idea that we live in a world of chance and change.” Walcott (2016, p. 52) also draws upon Glissant to attend to the “‘unimaginable turbulence of relation’… and the hopefulness of living together in moments of mutual recognition that are the signs that provide movements and thus possibility for something else to come.” The mode of interdependencies being evoked here withing the work of Dolmage (2009) and Walcott (2016) foregrounds circulations of power and knowledge that are multidirectional, uncertain and precarious while also potently disruptive and potentially transformative of the hegemony of the western modern independent subject and its western colonial logics.

Decolonial studies offers educators multiple pathways to both resist and seek the transformation of the ways current educational policies and practices continue to reinforce a focus on striving toward the western-centric neoliberal independent self as the ideal. From Global South disability studies, educators can consider the taken for granted assumptions of where and how power, knowledge, resources, consumer goods and human labour circulate in a manner that foregrounds the material realities of ableism, racism, classism and heteropatriarchy. Connecting the existence of dysconscious ableism and dysconscious racism within schooling systems in the Global North, to broader patterns of systemic injustice within the Global South also demonstrates the unviability of the western-centric self as the condition for inclusion within schools. As a way to dismantle this hegemonic force within schooling practices both decoloniality and disability studies invite us to engage in the transformative potential of our interdependencies.