




































Suturing the Break: An Anti-Racist Pedagogy Column


Volume 3, Issue 1 

2020 

Allies for Education 2020, 3, 1 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 

 

Suturing the Break: An Anti-Racist Pedagogy Column 

 
Raquel Baker 
 

What kind of education will it take to grow the society we want to have? 
One that is as collaborative as it is liberatory. 

 
Centering anti-racist teaching practices is a necessary part of growing the society we want to have. In 

this column, I offer some of the issues that animate my thinking about anti-racist pedagogy. I am trying 

to cultivate an anti-racist pedagogical practice that is 

Collaborative 
This one is hard! See Decolonial here. Because students and faculty -- and humans in a society -- operate 

within uneven power relations (and histories and institutions and systems) that operate outside of us 

but that also allow us to make sense to each other, centering an analysis of power is necessary when 

creating anti-racist pedagogical approaches. Collaborative methods aim to create multivocal, generative 

spaces. Interdisciplinary, and in other ways multiple, perspectives allow us to center different questions; 

consider different entry points; and use different reference texts and methods among other generative 

synergies, disruptions, and co-creations. Collaboration that contributes to anti-racist transformation 

requires constant reflection on how decision-making occurs within a project. Anti-racist pedagogy is 

relational work in which you have to co-build embodied languages and spaces in which people can do 

heart work and be vulnerable with themselves and be open to others and engaging across differences in 

power and awareness of how oppression operates in the everyday – which is already embedded in 

economic systems and everyday decisions about how resources are used and invested within academic 

spaces. Collaborative work is relational work in which we interrogate power dynamics and build new 

languages and spaces of belonging. Which is to say interpersonal dynamics are related to structural and 

institutional power, and creating dialogic spaces with students in age appropriate ways means asking 

hard questions about how we share power and changing teaching practices to redistribute power and 

reinvest in marginalized communities that are targets of oppressive power.  

Inquiry-Driven 
I aim for an antiracist pedagogy that is process-driven, relationship-building centered, and aimed at 

developing a mindset—even to the point of not setting the topic and encouraging students to research 



Suturing the Break: An Anti-Racist Pedagogy Column 
Raquel Baker 

Allies for Education 2020, 3, 1 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 
 

what stokes their intellectual curiosity. Within this frame, education becomes about checking in, getting 

to know each other, and developing processes to allow us to speak and listen deeply when we are tired, 

confused, anxious, bored, uncomfortable emotionally or physically, or something else. Such an 

educational environment is not a test-driven environment nor one in which I even see myself as 

delivering content. We, my students and I, are learning methods—how to find resources in a library 

database, how to skim articles to see if they would be useful to read more deeply—to help us develop 

better analysis on which to make claims and form knowledge based on what we find and then think 

through in discussion with each other. Our work together should transform my original aims or 

questions and values and desires as a teacher – our work is multidirectional, not just something I “give” 

to “students” but ways of understanding the world, ideas, and texts that we have thought through 

together. My anti-racist pedagogy is grounded in a Freirean frame: Knowledge itself is a collaborative 

process that changes you and the world. I aim for an anti-racist pedagogy that engages students in that 

process in meaningful ways and moves education from a disciplinary process about limits to a 

collaborative process of examination that allows students to construct new possibilities, identifications, 

and ways of being.  

Decolonial 
Anti-racist pedagogy aims to disrupt, deconstruct, and provide methods to heal from the structures of 

minority rule that constrict us. The everydayness of enslavement and settlement lives in our bodies and 

informs our knowledges of our selves and the world. The material practices and cultural institutions of 

our contemporary slave-enabled, settler colonial world inform the identifications we move through the 

world with. I speak as a Black educator in the United States of America, living and unlearning on land 

with integral ancestral and ongoing historical relationship to Chumash peoples. Anti-colonial thinker and 

psychiatrist Frantz Fanon writes about internalized inferiority—the way that colonized peoples come to 

internalize the lack of value they have within their cultural own milieu. A robust anti-racist pedagogy is 

about structural critique and healing, constructive transformation. It involves working toward changes in 

policy outside of the classroom. Inside the classroom, it requires acknowledging the material damages 

caused by our contemporary identifications and ways of being and creating space to reflect on and 

transform that violence. Anti-racist pedagogy is one tool with the space of the classroom. It works inside 

to prepare us emotionally and materially in terms of building languages, spaces of inquiry and 

engagement, and knowledges together. It works with policy and systemic change. Such change includes 

rethinking the model of how education is financed, how it is invested in (which is a matter 

of educational policy), as well as the broader economic practices and institutions in which we as larger 

national and global cultures are situated within. Which is to say that that the graduation gap, outcome 

gap, completion gap, success gap, opportunity gap in education is related to the extractive histories of 

settler colonialism that ground ongoing divestment based on racialized modes of knowledge and 

inequitable spatial practices (think apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s or in the USA in 2020, the icon 

of Jim Crow in the American South, or La Colonia in Oxnard). A decolonial approach to anti-racist 

pedagogy centers radical investment in healing from fracturing institutional, cultural, state, economic, 

spatial, and educational practices. A decolonial anti-racist pedagogy requires making practices that 

support systemic oppression visible and developing new practices, which, it turns out, is always related 

to developing new modes of identification.   

  

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Suturing the Break: An Anti-Racist Pedagogy Column 
Raquel Baker 

Allies for Education 2020, 3, 1 
https://journals.library.csuci.edu/ojs/index.php/afe 
 

Future-Oriented 
An anti-racist pedagogy aims to teach toward our futures – to help to create the conditions of possibility 

for more sustainable and equitable futures. It seeks to transform oppressive, maladaptive, negating 

practices, identifications, and imaginaries that our racialized practices give rise to. It seeks to help 

transform racialized trauma. The investment of anti-racist pedagogy seeds our entire academic 

community: our students, faculty, staff, groundskeepers, service workers, contract workers, food 

workers, and the larger communities in which we are all situated. Our histories, migrations, and family 

and community stories are sources of knowledge that help us become who we need to be to build 

meaningful and ethical ways of being together. Anti-racist pedagogy is part of the project of creating 

new selves because education as a project is deeply imbricated with identity.   

About the Author 
Raquel Baker is an assistant professor of postcolonial and transnational literatures in the English 

program at California State University Channel Islands and will be teaching a course on reparations and 

reconciliations in black and indigenous literatures in Spring 2021.  

 


	Suturing the Break: An Anti-Racist Pedagogy Column
	Collaborative
	Inquiry-Driven
	Decolonial
	Future-Oriented
	About the Author

