Confessions of racism in anti-racist education: Political,affective and pedagogical concerns

Introduction

To be an antiracist is a radical choice in the face of this history, requiring a radical orientation of our consciousness. Being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism and regular self-examination. (Kendi, 2019: 23)

The recent proliferation of anti-racist manuals, guides and training programs, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, has been built upon a multi-billion dollar industry of “awakening sessions,” “racial sensitivity trainings,” and “self-reflection workshops” that offer “cathartic tools to fight our inner demons” (Dean and Zamora, 2023: 82). As Dean and Zamora argue, anti-racist books, courses and trainings on how we can confront our implicit bias, complicity and privilege are framed as a struggle against oneself, against our “inner enemy,” whether it be racism, sexism, or colonialism. Unlike social movements (e.g. Civil Rights movement) or political struggles to change unjust social policies (e.g. housing inequalities), write Dean and Zamora, “the reduction of politics to a therapeutics of the self has transformed anti-racism into endless personal commitment and introspection and public avowal” (ibid., 83).

Boland and Moore-Ponce (2024) explain that the tendencies towards introspection and self-purification within contemporary anti-racist discourses—as shown, for example, in popular anti-racist texts such as DiAngelo’s (2018) White Fragility and Kendi’s (2019) How to be an Antiracist— generate confessions of internalized racism. Foucault’s (2001, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014a, 2014b, 2019) work on the genealogies of self and the politics of truth demonstrates how confession and public avowal have become prominent modes of subjectivation, discipline and pastoral power in Europe since early Christianity. It is precisely this mode of confession, according to Boland and Moore-Ponce (2024), that has been co-opted by contemporary anti-racist discourses, distracting energies for political action against structural racism with demands for critiques of oneself. It is, therefore, crucial to analyze and discuss the political and educational implications of confessions of racism in anti-racist education, particularly how and why such confessions may depoliticize racism and undermine struggles for social change.

Recent works in the field of education have raised similar concerns about the depoliticizing dynamics of anti-racist efforts such as: the tendency to intellectualize whiteness in depoliticized forms as a response to acts of racism (Saul and Burkholder, 2020); the use of ‘good intentions’ by white academics to hijack anti-racism work and undermine efforts to bring transformation (Amos, 2023); and, the psychologization of anti-racist education by focusing on white students’ emotions of discomfort and fragility (Matias, 2016; Matias and Zembylas, 2014; Zembylas, 2022; Zembylas and Matias, 2023). Ahmed (2004) warns us that declarations of white privilege or admissions of racism do not do the anti-racist work they intend. In fact, it is argued, individual declarations and admissions reproduce rather than challenge the racist status quo, because white people are enabled to refrain from acknowledging that they have social and political responsibility for structural racism (see also, Ahmed, 2015; Sullivan, 2014). Declarations of white privilege or admissions of racism allow white people to do this, because the focus of the conversation is on white people as individuals and their personal transformation, rather than on the ongoing structures of racism and the role of white people’s individual and social responsibility in the reproduction of these structures (Ahmed, 2004, 2015).

It is worth asking, then, why admissions of internalized racism have still so much currency in public life, when they do not actually do the anti-racist work they intend (Lockard, 2016). Both Dean and Zamora (2023) and Boland and Moore-Ponce (2024) suggest that it is important to analyze the tendencies towards “persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism and regular self-examination” (Kendi, 2019: 23) in terms of Foucauldian confessions. Confessions of racism make white people feel as though they have purified and transformed their core selves, which is why they/we think that these admissions work up to combat racism or privilege (Lockard, 2016). It is remarkable to notice the coincidence of the purification that confessions promise to white people and the language of purification that racist science and white supremacy promote. ¹

This theoretical paper proposes to expand our understanding of ‘confessions of racism’ in the context of anti-racist education through the lens of ‘affective governmentality’. The concept of affective governmentality—which turns our attention to the governing of people’s conduct by (non-coercive) affective means (Ashworth, 2017; Bjerg and Staunæs, 2011; Penz and Sauer, 2020; Sauer and Penz, 2017; Zembylas, 2023)—can be used to theorize confessions of internalized racism as forms of governmentality that make white people feel good about themselves. In other words, confessions of racism function in affective ways that govern whites to feel they are ‘good people’ because of making these personal confessions. Herein, then, I both follow and expand upon the idea of confessions as modes of affective governmentality in anti-racist education, exposing the affective, pedagogical and political limitations of confessions and exploring ways of reframing them so that they turn away from their obsession on self-criticism and self-purification towards paying attention to structural racism and transformative action.

Rather than outrightly dismissing confessions of racism, given their probable persistence in popular and educational discourses of anti-racism, I contend that it is more productive to gain a deeper comprehension of how and why a culture of therapy rooted in Christian confession works. Importantly, the contemporary turn to confessions of racism focused on self-transformation needs to be understood within the broader therapeutic culture of self-obsessions, reminiscent of Christian rituals of expiation of guilt and acts of purification (Dean and Zamora, 2023). This understanding could actually provide students and educators engaged in anti-racist education with a more effective path ahead, because it would enable them to recognize and address the affective, political and pedagogical consequences of confession. Hence, instead of ‘rejecting’ confessions of racism in the anti-racist texts of high-profile writers (e.g. Kendi, Di Angelo and others) or more generally dismissing admissions of internalized racism for espousing a problematic confessional mode, I suggest that educators and students use them to re-frame these accounts to foreground the impact of structural racism and the importance of transformative action.

To advance this argument, the paper is divided into four sections. In the first section, I discuss how Foucault analyzes confession and its implications for the constitution of subjectivity and the production of truth in Western societies. The next section focuses on how the technique of confession is manifested in popular anti-racist texts oriented towards educating and transforming the readers; this part highlights the political limitations emerging from confessional versions of anti-racism. The third section of the paper discusses how the concept of affective governmentality enables scholars and educators to identify further limitations pertaining to affective subjectivation and discipline. Finally, the last section of the paper suggests that anti-racist texts and admissions of racism may be re-framed and used pedagogically in the classroom to revitalize attention to issues of structural racism and transformative action rather than to foreground self-criticism and self-purification.

Understanding confession through Foucault’s work

Foucault’s concept of ‘truth-telling’ and its relation to subjectivity, discipline and pastoral power entails two distinct modes: confession and parrhesia (Clements, 2021). Parrhesia is largely associated with Athens and politics, whereas confession with Christian monasticism and sacraments (Lorenzini, 2015). According to Lorenzini, both modes require practices of truth-telling that have the capacity to transform the self; however, these practices are manifested in very different ways. Parrhesia or “frankness in speaking the truth” (Foucault, 2001: 7) is about truth-telling that counters some hegemonic discourse, hence its fearless quality. In other words, it is “the courage to speak the truth in spite of some danger” (Foucault, 2001: 16) such as the risk of unpopularity or punishment. As Foucault writes, parrhesia can “critique, correct and reform the people’s opinions, the people’s desires” (2019: 128). In other words, parrhesia is a social practice that aspires to transformative truth-telling; it is in this sense that truth-telling and subject formation are entangled (Boland and Moore-Ponce, 2024).

Confession emerges from early Christianity and personal testimonies of guilt and then is gradually transferred to other realms of personal and public life in later centuries, turning the Western subject into what Foucault (1976) calls “a confessing animal” (59). Within Christianity, confession took two modes, according to Foucault (2014a): exomologesis and exagoreusis. Exomologesis entails techniques of fasting and self-mortification; the sinner renounces themselves by engaging in practices that mark the sinner self as dead or as dying (e.g. pouring ashes on one’s head; scarring one’s body). Exagoreusis, which is the dominant mode, is the practice of verbalizing the truth of the subject to a superior, a confessor. In other words, exagoreusis is about admitting thoughts and actions that declare one’s sinfulness; the aim of verbalization of sinful thoughts and actions is to transform one’s self through self-purification.

As Foucault (1976) puts it, confession in Western societies has long been and still is “one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth” (58) and from its original religious framework it has since spread its effects far and wide, in medicine, education, family and love relations, and in almost every aspect of our everyday life (Lorenzini and Tazzioli, 2018). In this respect, confession might be regarded as a technique of power for the production of truth, that is, a mechanism through which the ‘conduct of conduct’ is produced:

One does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile. (Foucault, 1976: 62).

Whether to a confessor in the times of early Christianity (e.g. a priest) or a contemporary auditor (e.g. a social media public), the subject is instructed to examine themselves and confess thoughts and actions that admit their transgressions (Boland and Moore-Ponce, 2024). As Foucault explains how verbalization works to connect power, truth and subjectivity:

In an avowal, he who speaks obligates himself to being what he says he is. He obligates himself to being the one who did such and such a thing, who feels such and such a sentiment; and he obligates himself because it is true. (2014a: 16)

In other words, confession is inscribed at the heart of the process through which power relations are formed, precisely because the individual is constituted as a subject who bonds to the truth they verbalize (Lorenzini and Tazzioli, 2018). As Boland and Moore-Ponce (2024) explain, if the subject engages in an avowal and verbalizes their sinful thoughts and actions, “they can purify themselves and transform their subjectivity […] Truth is the price of transformation, and transformation the route to the truth, a circular, recursive motions of self-examination” (46). In this sense, suggest Boland and Moore-Ponce, confession is indeterminable, required until death as a perpetual examination of every thought and action and the verbalization of sins.

Foucault, then, draws a connection among the exercise of power, truth-telling, subjectivation and the government of individuals. It is precisely the entanglement of these processes that produces the Western subject—confession being a fundamental social practice that takes place within power relations—enabling the exercise of power over the one who confesses (Lorenzini and Tazzioli, 2018). However, Foucault tells us, the ‘extraction’ of truth, when the individual is required to tell the truth about themselves in order for a certain mechanism of power to govern them, is not the only option. Individuals can engage in ‘counter-conduct’—that is, they can engage in struggles and forms of resistance against the processes implemented for conducting oneself as a subject.

In particular, Foucault (2009) locates the emergence of counter-conduct practices within Christian pastoral history (e.g. in movements of asceticism, mysticism and Reformation efforts). ‘Counter-conduct’ denotes dissent against pastoral ‘governing’ practices that aim to regulate religious conduct. In other words, counter-conduct refers to forms of resistance or refusal that deviate from the established norms of practice. The objective of counter-conduct is to contest a given governmental mechanism of power trying to impose a specific form of conduct and to conduct oneself differently (Davidson, 2011). As Foucault explains:

I do not mean by that that governmentalization would be opposed in a kind of face-off by the opposite affirmation, “we do not want to be governed, and we do not want to be governed at all.” I mean that, in this great preoccupation about the way to govern and the search for the ways to govern, we identify a perpetual question which could be: “how not be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them”. (2007: 44)

While never fully free from power relations and governmentality, counter-conduct practices point to the possibilities for the subject to become otherwise, formulate counter-narratives, and conduct themselves differently. This is precisely what Foucault (2007) calls ‘critical attitude,’ namely, “the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth and power” (ibid., 47). This critical attitude may take different manifestations (Lemke, 2011) that “challenge, redirect or modify techniques of power that govern our conduct” (Odysseos, 2016: 189). In this sense, the notion of counter-conduct suggests that confession can be resisted through practices that challenge and even subvert the mechanisms of power that govern individuals. By turning attention to the constitution of the self as the main battleground for their governmentalization, Foucault attempts “to conceptualize the multiple dimensions and inter-relationalities of both practices of resistance and practices of governance” (Rossdale and Stierl, 2016: 159). For Foucault, according to Rossdale and Stierlt, the processes of conducting oneself differently imply different ways of living life in ‘the everyday’ (Demetriou, 2016). Hence, it is interesting to examine how confession is manifested in different realms of everyday life—e.g. in anti-racist texts, admissions of racism etc.—and explore practices through which confession can be resisted or subverted.

Problematizing confession in anti-racist discourses

The tendency of many contemporary anti-racist texts to slide into self-critique is described by Dean and Zamora (2023) as the ‘translation’ of politics into confession. In this sense, politics degenerate into a struggle for self-criticism rather than a battle for social change—a tendency that is also found in other manifestations of contemporary lifestyle economy and its individualized (neoliberal) sensibilities. As Dean and Zamora explain:

Contemporary mainstream anti-racism is therefore no longer, as it was for the Civil Rights movement, about reshaping economic structures and building mass movements to struggle against exploitation, but is oriented towards endless individualized efforts at re-education about prejudice so as to transform structural forms of inequality. (2023: 90)

Similarly, Boland and Moore-Ponce (2024), who analyze some popular anti-racist texts, target specifically the confessional mode of self-critique that is present in these texts. As they suggest: “[C]onfessional critique principally orients its accusations against the self, implicitly the privileged powerful self, implicitly in need of transformation. Modelled upon confession, critique is reduced to the demand that others confess and purify themselves” (48).

It is argued, then, that critiquing and transforming the self becomes the most salient way to deal with social and political problems such as racism (Dean and Zamora, 2023), with popular anti-racist writers such as Kendi and DiAngelo coming to dominate and restructure the field, espousing a confessional version of anti-racism (Boland and Moore-Ponce, 2024). Rather than focusing on the analysis of structural or institutional forms of racism—which might be challenged through policy initiatives or political action—confessional critiques of racism shift the battleground to the ‘inner enemy’, that is, an internalized racism, which re-channels efforts away from politics and towards self-purification (Boland and Moore-Ponce, 2024; Dean and Zamora, 2023). In this sense, anti-racist struggles are individualized, psychologized and depoliticized, because it is assumed that each person should be able to struggle with the forces of racism as long as they fight their own racial inwardness.

Take, for example, the critique by Boland and Moore-Ponce (2024) of DiAngelo’s White Fragility (2018) and Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist (2019) that these anti-racist texts espouse a confessional version of anti-racism. Boland and Moore-Ponce are not alone in their critique; other academics have also critiqued the ways that social justice activism is co-opted by neoliberal agendas (e.g. Táíwò, 2022) or highlight the damage that is caused to anti-racist politics by what McWhorter (2021) calls ‘woke racism’ and its backlash against social justice activism. The important contribution of Boland and Moore-Ponce’s analysis is precisely that it turns our attention to the ways that confessional elements work in DiAngelo’s and Kendi’s texts—e.g. how the authors confess their internalized racism and then invite readers to do the same in order to ‘clean’ themselves from internalized racism. It is worthwhile to delve deeper into the confessional elements of these texts to understand how they work.

In particular, Boland and Moore-Ponce (2024) identify numerous passages in Kendi’s book in which he “describes how he stops, admits, confesses, accepts and acknowledges his own racism, in a continuous struggle for self-purification” (51). For example, Kendi writes that, “A mission to uncover and critique America’s life of racist ideas turned into a mission to uncover and critique my life of racist ideas which turned into a lifelong mission to be antiracist” (2019: 226). The inward turn and the power of confession is also evident in a New York Times article that Kendi wrote in January 2018 in which he says: “the heartbeat of racism is denial, the heartbeat of antiracism is confession” (Kendi, 2019: 235). Boland and Moore-Ponce (2024) explain that:

Kendi’s work recapitulates the dynamic of confession –whereby a sin is characterised by the difficulty of admitting it and if racism is denied, this proves it exists. Speaking about racism is difficult, yet this modality of telling the truth about the self is transformative: confession positions the past self as an ‘other’, noncontinuous with the speaking subject, rendering the critique accurate yet peculiarly wielded by a subject who accuses and judges themselves. (Boland and Moore-Ponce, 2024: 51)

Similarly, DiAngelo’s (2018) White Fragility, according to Boland and Moore-Ponce (2024), “comprises sociological diagnosis, personal confession and a training manual for those who wish to change and become less racist – a struggle described as interminable, merely moving people along a continuum from more to less racist” (52). For example, DiAngelo writes that, “Everyone has prejudice and everyone discriminates” (2018: 21), and “I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color” (2018: 5). White Fragility presents racism as a struggle of white people with their fragility to talk about race and unless they engage in self-examination and public confessions, they will not overcome their racial prejudices, because “White identity is inherently racist” (2018: 149).

Kendi and DiAngelo are not alone in using confession as a means of recognizing one’s ‘unexamined racism.’ In my research for this article, I discovered other popular works that demonstrate the same tendency towards a confessional mode—one that individualizes racism—essentially promoting a ‘public pedagogy’ of racial inwardness. For example, consider the following excerpts from another bestseller book and a handbook with practical activities, respectively:

You have to get over the fear of facing the worst in yourself. You should instead fear unexamined racism. Fear the thought that right now, you could be contributing to the oppression of others and you don’t know it. But do not fear those who bring that oppression to light. Do not fear the opportunity to do better. (Oluo, 2018: 214)

As Boland and Moore-Ponce (2024) observe, anti-racist manuals, texts, and guides that use a confessional mode of racism assume that readers are “inhabitants of a racist society have presumably internalized racism and must confess it to others – whether in private conversation or public social media posts – but always to others who stand as proxy judges, secularised figures of ‘divine judgement’” (54-55).

By turning the critique inward, and constituting the self as the main battleground for politics, these anti-racist manuals, texts, and guides give the impression that subverting structural racism (which is not denied by these authors) can happen by acting at the micro level of everyday life (Dean and Zamora, 2023). Needless to say, the battleground of the micro level of everyday life is crucial and should not be underestimated or downplayed; this is why, as I argue later in the paper, the struggle with the inner self should not be abandoned in anti-racist education. However, these efforts should not fall into the trap of abandoning the political struggle against structures of racism, while reducing politics into a matter of confession and self-transformation. What is problematic with confessions of racism is thinking that by transforming one’s (racist) subjectivity, it is possible to transform the racist status quo itself. In the next part of the paper, I want to add another dimension to the confessional mode of anti-racist discourses that has not been explored so far in the literature, namely, how confessions of racism function as mechanisms of affective governmentality.

Confessions of racism as mechanisms of affective governmentality

Governmentality, as described by Foucault (2009), pertains to the ‘conduct of conduct,’ encompassing both external influences (e.g. state policies, social institutions, interpersonal relations) and internal self-regulation (Gordon, 1991). In particular, Foucault’s (2009) description of governmentality refers to

the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculation, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument. (108)

In other words, from a Foucauldian perspective, governmentality consists of ways to govern others (e.g. through norms and regulations) and oneself (e.g. through reflection and self-management). Hence, governmentality is manifested in the form of self-understandings and practices that encourage subjectivity to conduct themselves in particular ways. Importantly, individuals and populations are not ‘manipulated’ into behaving in these ways; they choose to embrace these ways, because it makes them feel ‘good’. In this sense, confessions of racism, as described earlier in the paper, can function as mechanisms of self-management, “a purifying test of oneself conducted by oneself” (Foucault, 2019: 292).

Affective governmentality, in turn, offers a conceptual framework to describe how individuals’ feelings and emotions become targets and modes of others such as state politics, social institutions, cultural and political norms, or other individuals (Ashworth, 2017; Bjerg and Staunæs, 2011; Penz and Sauer, 2020; Sauer and Penz, 2017). As Sauer and Penz (2017) explain, affective governmentality points to the fact of governing oneself and others in the mode of affectivity, that is, “by mobilizing affects, by modulating affects, by doing and undoing affects” (47). This concept broadens Foucault’s concept of governmentality by establishing connections between affectivity, power, and the process of subject formation. Affective subjectivation, then, as outlined by Saur and Penz (2017), entails a process wherein individuals and populations learn to manage their emotions—with confession being one such practice of self-management.

Penz and Sauer (2020) contend that within the context of contemporary neoliberal societies, the mechanics of governmentality involve the shaping of affective relationships, including the emotional attachment or detachment from specific concepts and practices such as democracy, justice, and anti-racism. In this sense, explain Penz and Sauer, affective governmentality accomplishes the affective subjectivation of individuals and populations—by shaping individuals as emotional and rational beings, while also exerting control over them. In other words, affective governmentality underscores that power and control—which are central in practices such as confessions—function within an emotional framework that is manifested by both external governance and self-regulation. Importantly, as I have argued earlier, mechanisms of affective governance also provoke resistance or refusal (i.e. counter-conduct). Hence, analyzing confessions of racism (e.g. admissions of racism or declarations of privilege) in terms of affective governance and counter-conduct opens up possibilities for political action and change, that is, ways of moving beyond self-transformation as the primary battleground of anti-racist struggles (I come back to this idea in the last part of the paper).

Earlier in the paper, I have pointed out that a Foucauldian explanation of why confessions of racism are so appealing is that truth-telling constitutes the price of self-transformation; in other words, confession functions as a governing practice for self-purification. Here, I want to add another layer in the analysis of why confessions of racism are so appealing: they make those who confess feel ‘good’ about themselves. Confessions of racism are hard to resist, because they make white people feel they are being effective when they make these confessions (Lockard, 2016). In a sense, these confessions function as ways of affective self-governance—affecting others that anti-racist work is done, while also affecting the self who performs the ‘right’ emotions towards anti-racist work (e.g. shame, guilt, courage etc.).

I argue, then, that the notion of affective governmentality provides scholars and educators an additional lens as well as another ‘explanation’ as to why white people engage in confessions of racism as a means of doing anti-racism. Whites are doing so, because it makes them feel they are ‘good’ people; this is precisely what makes the confessional mode so powerful. Under the confession model, explains Lockard (2016), white people are revealed as racists, and through this revelation, they are purified and made into non-racists, which produces pleasure: “In coming to know ourselves as racists, we paradoxically become non-racist and even anti-racist” (ibid.: 16). Affective governmentality, then, is a powerful lens to understand how and why confessions of racism gain so much affective power from self-criticism and self-purification.

Several recent studies in education have shown how rituals of ‘goodness’ or feelings of ‘good whiteness’ play a central role in confessions of racism, thus functioning as mechanisms of affective governmentality. For example, Amos (2023) describes how ritualized demonstrations by white academics of their goodness and anti-racist stance—e.g. confessing one’s ignorance in public—can hijack the essence of anti-racism work. As she writes:

By confessing one’s ignorance, one declares that one did not know that others were committing racist transgressions. Since one acknowledges one’s ignorance, one automatically moves from the past (I was ignorant of the racist transgressions being committed by others), to the guilt-free present where one has overcome one’s ignorance. Within Judeo-Christian traditions, by confessing their past ignorance and announcing their present state of enlightenment, people feel “saved.” […] In anti-racism work, this type of confession or declaration evidences that a white academic has become a better person because he/she has overcome his/her past wrongdoings, thus passed a qualifying exam to be engaged in the work. (2023: 1460, added emphasis)

Also, Saul and Burkholder (2020) analyze the reactions of their academic community to a racist poster, critiquing the tendencies to intellectualize whiteness in depoliticized forms as a response to acts of racism. After describing the reaction of a white, female professor who reads Kendi’s book and urges her colleagues “to question their need to feel good about themselves for resisting these posters” as well as “to question their complicity” (1637), Saul and Burkholder question the feelings of satisfaction by the white professor as well as the (mostly white) audience, wondering:

Wouldn’t someone […] who came to recognize the problematic of feeling good about themselves for their opposition to racism, but then felt satisfied in doing so – re-inscribe the same positioning they were aiming to contest? Wouldn’t they also be doing the work of repositioning “good whiteness” at the centre of their deliberations […]? (ibid.)

Similarly, in the work of Matias as well as my own work (e.g. see Matias, 2016; Matias and Zembylas, 2014; Zembylas, 2022; Zembylas and Matias, 2023), we demonstrate that confessions of racism by white students and educators often entail a variety of emotions, not always pleasurable ones, but also discomfort, shame, fear, disgust, melancholy, and anger. In these different manifestations of emotionalities of whiteness, it may be argued that affective governmentality operates by fomenting these emotions toward race and racism. Sometimes these emotions are used by white students and educators to project a ‘good whiteness’, while other times they describe a ‘whiteness in struggle’ to make sense of race and racism. In either case, emotionalities of whiteness function as mechanisms of affective governance; faced by critique, the white subject must confess (or be condemned as denying culpability) and thereby enters an interminable process of self-purification. It is precisely through this endless process of self-purification that affective governmentality operates; although it does not make everyone ‘feel good’ or ‘saved’, this mechanism mobilizes affects and emotions that govern oneself and others.

All in all, analyzing confessions of racism through the concept of affective governmentality highlights three broad concerns in anti-racist education: The first, a conceptual concern, contests the notion that confessions of racism are merely intellectual injunctions, but rather function in deeply affective ways that have crucial implications on the affective governance of individuals and populations. The second, a political concern, considers the political consequences of confessions of racism in educational settings and the broader public, which I suggest gives rise to an impoverished approach towards anti-racism that foregrounds self-criticism and self-purification. The third, a practical concern, considers what a worthwhile response to confessions of racism might entail in educational settings, given the criticisms identified here. In the last part of the paper, I will attempt to sketch a speculative ‘response’ to these three concerns by exploring how confessions of racism may be re-framed in anti-racism education—in the hope of revitalizing attention to structural racism rather than foregrounding self-purification.

Beyond the confessing individual in anti-racist education

What might a worthwhile response to confessions of racism, as manifested in anti-racist texts and declarations of privilege and racism, look like in educational settings, given the criticisms I have identified? Should confessions of racism be ‘rejected’ or ignored as banal manifestations of self-criticism? Alternatively, should we explore ways to salvage these confessions in ways that are pedagogically, politically and affectively productive? How? In this last part of the paper, I will argue that despite the critique against confessions of racism, it is important to explore how to move away from a monolithic branding of these confessions as ‘problematic’ and instead make them an object of anti-racist education and scholarship. In this sense, confessions of racism may be used for research, analysis, and education, brought to bear on action-oriented approaches to anti-racism in the classroom, thus forming the basis for activist work that can re-inscribe individual and social conditions of privilege and racism.

My point of departure is Boland and Moore-Ponce’s (2024) suggestion that confessional critique might serve as “a prelude to political engagement” rather than merely “a short-circuit […] into relentless self-purification” (55, added emphasis). We need to recognize, explain Boland and Moore-Ponce, that many contemporary activist discourses are confessional in their critique of denial of racism and the exhortation of those who admit it. This is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ in and of itself. Pedagogically and politically speaking, the problem is not confessions as such, but rather how confessions are used in the classroom. For example, are they used to create a much-needed affective space for students and educators to take transformative action (i.e. alternative and impactful formulation of action) and develop more effective anti-racist practices in their everyday lives? Or, are these confessions used to make the classroom audience ‘feel good’ momentarily and then simply move on with their everyday lives? Hence, it is worth attempting to locate a personal stake for students and educators in matters of anti-racism (see also, Saul and Burkholder, 2020) that carves out alternative possibilities than the ones that have been criticized throughout the paper, so that students and educators can engage in practices of refusal (counter-conduct) of the racist status quo.

In this regard, we can now ask, for example, how to use confessions of racism as points of departure to move away from confession as self-purification towards engaging in transformative action: How can confessions of racism be taken differently in the classroom? When someone begins a confession or when students read a confessional text, perhaps there is a way to shift the self-centeredness of the narrative by asking: How could you (or the author of the text) change your language (and actions) in the future to move beyond declarations of privilege and racism to how you could use that privilege to refuse the racist status quo in practice (cf. Lockard, 2016)? White people armed with a Foucauldian understanding of confessions of racism, writes Lockard, “have a better shot at recognizing and undermining their own confessional tendencies” (2016: 19). We can ask, then: How can educators create intellectual and affective spaces in the classroom that cultivate a Foucauldian understanding of confessions of racism and their implications?

Similarly, Saul and Burkholder (2020) suggest a number of provocative questions at the level of institutional planning in universities:

Are we taking opportunities to include ourselves on programming committees in order to advocate for anti-racism and anti-discrimination in ways that might otherwise be absent on planning agendas? Are we taking initiatives to sit on hiring, admissions, and scholarship committees that support the nominations of candidates who will advance intersectional anti-racist teaching, learning, scholarship, and service? Are we applying administrative and collegial pressure toward anti-racism goals? Are we making attendant pedagogical and curricular decisions in the courses we teach, and supporting others in doing the same? […] In sum, in the accumulation of our decision making, are we taking the kinds of actions that will support the kinds of conditions that work to decentre whiteness in the academy? (1647)

Questions like these, as well as the ones I raised earlier, are essentially attempts to re-frame the use of confessions of racism in education in order to turn them into opportunities for transformative action rather than as events that exhort the ‘self’ who makes the confession and suggest that everyone should engage in self-purification. Whether these confessions inspire more effective activism within a (classroom/school/university) community or divert energy and attention from other practical political actions (e.g. protest, campaigns, coalition-building, policy changes) is an empirical question which cannot be answered here (cf. Boland and Moore-Ponce, 2024). However, re-framing the use of confessions of racism in education and exposing their limitations enable scholars and educators to redirect anti-racist efforts away from self-purification towards structural or organizational possibilities for change.

The detachment of the confessing subject from their self-purification mode is not only posited as a viable possibility here, but can also be strategically played by students and educators to open up new spaces of affective subjectivation for both the confessors and those who witness confessions. In particular, looking at confessions of racism through the lens of affective governmentality contests superficial ideas that admissions of privilege alone can challenge whites’ affective attachments to their privilege (Ahmed, 2004). Therefore, nurturing anti-racist pedagogies that identify and critique the ways that confessions of racism reproduce psychologized understandings of racism to make us ‘feel good’ or ‘saved’ means challenging the affective grounding of such confessions, suggesting new ways of speaking and acting before others.

This discussion asks readers and listeners of confessions of racism to consider how admissions of racism derived from “managerial and therapeutic technologies are designed more to regulate than to transform subjectivities, work more to reproduce institutional stability than to enact new social possibilities” (Binkley, 2023: 133). By calling attention to the ways in which affective subjectivation of individuals and populations is sustained through an ongoing process of self-criticism and self-purification, it is possible to make visible how structural racism is reproduced, enveloping subjectivation in governmental mechanisms. Confessing one’s racism is not enough to extricate oneself from the structural racism that defines contemporary racial order around the world (Ahmed, 2004). The challenge for educators is how to inspire students to transform one’s habits and engage in actions that make a difference in the everyday life of others (Zembylas, 2023).

A fully developed anti-racist program, then, would only use confessions of racism as the prelude of anti-racist education. Calls to engage in anti-racist education differently, would have to consider more than confessions of racism, no matter how powerful they are affectively. Importantly, we need to remember, points out Lockard (2016), that there are many other ways to engage in anti-racist work without confessions of racism. To put this differently: an anti-racist education that foregrounds confessions of racism—or, to reverse this, an anti-racist education that simply critiques this mode of racial being in order to undermine and reject confessions altogether—is missing the crucial challenge of creating new affective, pedagogical and political modes of racial being that replace the old. This task is much more challenging and entails a productive break from the affective governmentality mechanisms that constitute the norm.

Finally, recalling my earlier discussion on the challenges to anti-racist work of tendencies to ignore or background systemic racism, I believe it is crucial to also examine more critically the current push for the use of ‘positionality statements’ in research and scholarship (Savolainen et al., 2023) as an ‘entry card’ to participate in discussions of racism, sexism and colonialism. Positionality statements, argue Boveda and Annamma (2023), must be more than a listing of (essentialized) identities or a claim on authority through the naming of professional proximity to marginalized communities. I would further add that positionality statements may often entail elements of confessional mode, raising many questions about the political value and pedagogical impact of these statements such as: How do positionality statements support academic policies or practices that decenter privilege and challenge racism, sexism and colonialism beyond the symbolic level? In which ways do positionality statements support an ethics and politics of anti-racism besides making the author/presenter and audience ‘feel good’ that they ‘checked in the box’? Do these declarations of positionality create solidarities with others (with whom, how and why?) that make a difference in challenging structural inequalities? And, finally, can scholars and educators engage these positionalities in anti-racist work in ways that move beyond the confessing mode?

Concluding remarks

My analysis of confessions of racism in this paper has attempted to expose the pedagogical, affective and political limitations of confessions as mechanisms of affective governmentality and as ways of reproducing individualized, psychologized and depoliticized understandings of racism. It is clear that confessions of racism constitute a challenge: politically, they undermine structural forms of racism by foregrounding self-criticism and self-purification; affectively, they are techniques of affective subjectivation and pastoral power; and, pedagogically, they fetishize personal admissions of racism that run the risk of backgrounding how to engage in transformative action that challenges structural racism. I have argued that the uncritical use of confessions of racism in education is limiting, distracting and depoliticizing (cf. Boland and Moore-Ponce, 2024). But as Boland and Moore-Ponce remind us, this confessional mode has to be understood within the contemporary culture of neoliberal individualism and self-responsibilization that focuses on an endless struggle for self-purification; hence, it would make little sense to ‘reject’ confessions of racism in anti-racist education. It is for this reason that I have suggested to re-frame confessions of racism as a prelude to other anti-racist education efforts that move beyond self-centered approaches towards approaches that recognize structural racism and foreground transformative action.

Importantly, this paper has turned attention to how confessions of racism work affectively by reproducing the affective power of self-purification. Much more work—politically, conceptually and empirically—needs to be undertaken in anti-racist education to find alternatives to the affective subjectivation that takes place through confessions of racism, and especially how educators and students may ‘refuse’ the disciplinary power of these confessions and move beyond them. Almost two decades ago, Ahmed (2004) has urged scholars of racism and whiteness to “stay implicated in what they critique” (54) in order to clear “some ground, upon which the work of exposing racism might provide the conditions for another kind of [anti-racist] work” (59). Seeking new types of anti-racist work in education entails exploring how best to move beyond the problematics of confessions of racism.