Chapter 3: Beyond Coloniality: Embracing Critical Whiteness, Co-conspiratorship and Racial Literacy in Comparative and International Education

Various racial awakening moments, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in South Africa, and the question “Why is My Curriculum White?”, have shaken the foundations of educational systems around the globe. These efforts promote the decentering of Western-centric knowledge systems, which coloniality upheld, and the recentering of non-Eurocentric paradigms that now influence comparative and international education (CIE). Until recently, race and, by extension, its relationship to coloniality, have historically been one of the most understudied areas in CIE (Peterson, 1971), and over time, CIE scholars have come to walk on eggshells when discussing race (Scott & Bajaj, 2023; Takayama et al., 2017). It is crucial to differentiate between colonialism and coloniality. Colonialism refers to the economic and political domination and extraction of land and labor by Europeans starting in the 15th century for profit. In contrast, coloniality refers to the enduring and pervasive effects of colonialism that continue to shape all aspects of today’s global capitalist economy. While there have been calls to contest the geopolitics of knowledge in the field of CIE and investigate the epistemological legacy of colonialism, little attention has been paid to the problematization of whiteness in the field. Whereas CIE scholars have examined the rise of erasure and “white ignorance” (Menashy & Zakharia, 2022; Mills, 2007), we expand this analysis by drawing on a decolonial-aligned framework commonly used in the United States, critical whiteness studies (CWS), to investigate the implications of whiteness and racial literacy within the field of CIE. We demonstrate that CIE operates as a colonial project that perpetuates racism, coloniality, and structural inequality due to its failure to adequately address these constructs (Menashy & Zakharia, 2022; Sriprakash et al., 2020). Specifically, we highlight how white ignorance is not merely a passive lack of knowledge about the social world but also a form of knowledge that actively protects systemic racial injustice from being challenged and dismantled. In summary, scholars have engaged in “meta-ignorance” (Medina, 2013a, 2013b) and resist learning about their complicity in social injustice.