Toward a Theory of Race,Change,and Antiracist Education

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework for this article begins with Antonio Gramsci. A Gramscian approach to race may come as a surprise to some readers since the most prominent theories on race in adult education are critical race theory (CRT; e.g., Closson, 2010b; Johnson-Bailey, Ray, & Lasker-Scott, 2014; Peterson, 1999; Schwartz, 2014); Africentric or Afrocentric philosophy (e.g., Colin, 2002; Merriweather Hunn, 2004), Whiteness Studies (e.g., Bohonos, 2019; Lund & Colin, 2010; Manglitz, 2003; Shore, 2001), Black Feminist Thought (e.g., Johnson-Bailey, 2001a), and Polyrhythmic Realities (e.g., Sheared, 1999). Moreover, Closson (2010a), unfortunately drawing on a highly distorted paraphrasing of Gramsci by Stanfield (1988), ¹ raises doubts about the critical theory foundations of CRT because critical theorist Antonio Gramsci supposedly held “deeply racist beliefs.” Nevertheless, numerous scholars have also looked to Gramsci for an understanding of race. Probably the most well-known effort to draw on Gramsci for an analysis of race was Stuart Hall’s (1986) article “Gramsci’s Relevance for a study of Race and Ethnicity.” Like Hall, I do not look to Gramsci’s specific writings on race, ethnicity, and nationality, but rather to his more general approach to analyzing social phenomena. There are, however, scholars such as Carley (2013) who argue that Gramsci’s writings on race do provide “a discrete relevance” for understanding race in contemporary societies. Moreover, other scholars, particularly those of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group have drawn on Gramsci for analysis of race, caste, and (post)colonialism (Srivastava & Bhattacharya, 2012) in the development of the broad field of Subaltern Studies.

There are two main theoretical premises from Gramsci that I draw on for my analysis and that lead me to incorporate the theoretical work of other scholars beyond Gramsci. First, as I will detail below, for new approaches to an understanding of race and antiracist education, I draw on the work of U.S. organic intellectuals and scholar activists. I do this based on Gramsci’s admonition that to understand social reality, one must look to and understand the ever-changing lived sociopolitical economic realities of a society’s majority. Gramsci made this point in 1920 at the highpoint of the revolutionary upheavals in Italy that he was intimately involved in. This was a period of social upheaval throughout Europe and Asia in the wake of the Russian Revolution. In the Americas, this was the period of the Mexican Revolution and the Harlem Renaissance in the United States. I think Gramsci (1977) is worth citing at length on this point.

[T]he masses . . . are the only genuine and authentic expression of . . . historic development. . . . By the spontaneous and uncontrollable movements which spread throughout their ranks and by the relative shifts in the position of strata due to changes in intellectual outlook, the masses indicate the precise direction of historical development, reveal changes in attitudes and forms, and proclaim the decomposition . . . of society . . . If one becomes estranged from the inner life of the working class, then one becomes estranged from the historical process that is unfolding implacably, in defiance of any individual will or traditional institution. (pp. 173-174)

In short, what Gramsci is telling us is that to understand social reality, one must understand the working-class majority of societies. The history, development, and (trans)formation of the working-class majority is the history, development, and (trans)formation of society as a whole. It is working-class organic intellectuals and scholar activists who are not “estranged” from working-class realities, and who are, therefore, best situated to help us understand the dynamics and nature of social constructs such as race. There is ample adult education literature on Gramsci’s conceptualization of organic intellectuals (e.g., Allman, 2001; Brookfield, 2005; Coben, 1998; Mayo, 1999); in brief, by working-class organic intellectuals, Gramsci was referring to those individuals who are formed in their political outlook by and through organizations dedicated to the liberation of their class. They are the revolutionaries or activists who, through their political work, build a consciousness among working-class people of their shared interests as a class and the need for fundamental social transformation to secure their liberation. In drawing on the work of working-class organic intellectuals and scholar activists, I am providing an affirmative answer to the question that Gouin (2009) raises in terms of antiracist feminist work when she asks, “Can activists’ learning and experiences help us understand how systems of domination ‘give content to one another’” (p. 172). Moreover, in terms of the working class in the United States, I draw on Zweig’s (2012) work which demonstrates that the U.S. working class constitutes over 60% of the U.S. population. It is the majority of people in the United States and it is disproportionately made up of people of color and women.

The second premise I draw on from Gramsci is the need to understand any social phenomenon such as race through a dialectical analysis of the subjective and objective conditions which constitute any social totality. As Almeida (2014) clarifies, Gramsci understood the objective as the structural or material conditions of reality and the subjective as the will, organization, and agency of people. Drawing on Peery (2002), I would add to Almeida’s analysis of the subjective to say that this also includes our ideas, understandings, and social constructs such as race. A dialectical understanding of the subjective and objective must, as Paula Allman (2001) argues, see these as internally related in such a way that the nature of one cannot be explained outside the relationship with the other.

So, in my analysis of race, I will be drawing on the work of U.S. working-class organic intellectuals and scholar activists and I will be arguing that the subjective, or a social construct of race, must be understood dynamically and in continuous dialectical relation with the ever-changing nature of the objective conditions of society.

How Do We Understand Social Constructs Such as Race?

In this section, I will address the social construct of race from a theoretical standpoint. In my analysis from here forward, I draw significantly from the work of organic intellectuals, such as Nelson Peery (2002), Willie Baptist (2010), Claudia Jones (2011), and Jerome Scott (Katz-Fishman, Scott, & Gomes, 2014) and scholar activists such as Brooke Heagerty and Peery (2000), Walda Katz-Fishman, Scott, and Gomes (2014), Bill Fletcher (2005), Howard Zinn (2003), Bob Wing (2018), Ronald Takaki (1993), and W. E. B. Du Bois (1989, 1998).

If we lived in an idealist world, concepts of antiracism could replace racism through educational intervention. Let us stop and think about that for a moment because this has serious implications for educators interested in fighting and ending racism, implications I will detail toward the end of the article. In an idealist world, we could replace racist ideas with antiracist ideas through education. We do not, however, live in an idealist world, but rather a materialist and dialectical world in constant motion and change. In our ever-changing materialist world, social constructs or ideas emerge at particular times and places and flourish or perish based on their relation to the prevailing material or objective conditions (Peery, 2002). Therefore, in considering a social construct, we need to think of it in terms of the subjective or the idea construct itself, and the objective, or the prevailing material conditions of specific people in specific times and places. Social constructs are subjective in the sense they have to do with how and what we think, and they only emerge and stay around with actual impact under given objective contexts (Heagerty & Peery, 2000). The creation of race as an idea or social construct was about the control of labor (Wing, 2018) and has served that role throughout history. As the historical studies above show, the contemporary social construction of race came about in the particular objective context of the development of capitalist relations and in particular the wealth accumulation of Atlantic slavery that made capitalism possible. This intimate relationship between the development of the idea of race, capitalism, and slavery is shown quite definitely in the historical and sociological studies by Marable (2000), E. Williams (1994), Du Bois (1998), Takaki (1993), Zinn (2003), Fox-Genovese and Genovese (1983), Blackburn (2013), and Stampp (1989) to list just a few. Katz-Fishman et al. (2014) posit a key lesson for today’s movements that in the United States “the ruling class early on developed a strategy based on white supremacy and race to control the multiracial working class and to justify forms of wealth accumulation” (p. 267). Bill Fletcher (2005) echoes this same idea in his foreword to the book Poor Workers’ Unions when he says,

the [U.S. American] colonial ruling classes had to put in place a mechanism to ensure the long-term stability of the system that we have come to know as capitalism. The solution was largely found in the concept and operationalization of race. (p. xii)

W. E. B. Du Bois (1998), made the control of labor, both Black and White, a central tenet of his analysis of race, slavery, and reconstruction in the United States.

Howard Zinn (2003), drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois’ (1989) concept of the color line, has a chapter called “Drawing the Color Line” in his People’s History of the US, in which he provides ample evidence and examples of exactly how this color line was created and drawn. It is with these historical studies, such as Zinn’s, Takaki’s, and Stampp’s, where we can see the “construction” aspect of a social construction such as race. As all these scholars emphasize, in the early years of the colonies that would become the United States, Black slaves and White indentured servants lived objectively quite similar lives. They often did very similar if not the same work under the same horrendous working conditions. They lived in close approximation and socialized together occupying a “common social space” (Takaki, 1993, p. 55). As Stampp (1989) states, “the Negro [sic] and white servants of the seventeenth century seemed to be remarkably unconcerned about their visible physical differences. They toiled together in the fields . . . [and] fraternalized during leisure hours” (p. 22).

Beyond working and socializing together, colonial Black slaves and White indentured servants also resisted and rebelled together. This, as Zinn (2003) argues, was the greatest fear among the wealthy planters. To prevent this unity, laws and policies were steadily put in place (Stampp, 1989) to accomplish three interrelated goals: create the social constructs we understand today as races, Black, White, Indian; separate the races so as to create social distance between those living objectively similar lives to prevent them from joining together to resist and rebel; and to create objective differences in the lives of Black slaves and White indentured servants by granting certain privileges to White servants. What we understand today as White privilege did not always exist, it was created to solidify support for the enslavement of Africans and African Americans.

How Do We Fight Social Constructs Such as Race?

In the previous section, I addressed social constructs theoretically by focusing primarily on their subjective aspect. In this section, I will focus more on the objective aspect of social constructs, how and why they can flourish and how and when they become unstable. Recall in the introduction, I discussed the origins or beginnings of the word race. Thinking dialectically, it is important to affirm that everything that exists has a beginning, a period of development, a period of decay, and an end; the social construct of race, as imperviable as it may seem (Closson, 2010a; Johnson-Bailey, 2001b; Sealy-Ruiz, 2010), does not escape this ontological trajectory.

In the previous section, I discussed how race was a tool created and promoted by ruling classes to divide people (Blackburn, 2013; Stampp, 1989; Wing, 2018), particularly Black and White workers in the United States. Today, this may seem rather simplistic given the widespread pervasiveness of racism. We do, however, have to think historically and dialectically and realize that the past was not like today nor will the future be. Racism was originally a ruling class project; White people had to be miseducated (Woodson, 2000) about Black people. Nevertheless, it did not take too long for this operationalization of race from above to be taken up from below as well. What Du Bois (1998) called the psychological wages of whiteness miseducated into Whites, and particularly White workers, soon became a weapon for Whites to secure subjectively and objectively higher status than African Americans.

But we have to consider this process from the objective side. In other words, it is important to understand that race, racism, or racial supremacy as social constructs only take hold, flourish and have staying power when there is an objective basis for them to flourish. In other words, there has to be actual material benefits, winners, and losers, in the operationalization of race; today, we generally speak of this in terms of privileges. Moreover, there has to be an expanding accumulation of wealth from which these material privileges can be drawn. Economists have supplied ample evidence of the economic returns of racism for those on the winning end of it and the brutal costs of racism for those on the losing end of it. Income, wealth, wages, employment, and all the corollary social indicators associated with these are disproportionately disturbed along racial lines in the United States and have been for centuries (Economic Policy Institute, n.d.).

Heagerty and Peery (2000) make the important observation that it is impossible to have subjective unity among people who live objectively unequal lives. Bonilla-Silva (2005) echoes this observation when he states,

Insofar as the races receive different social rewards at all levels, they develop dissimilar objective interests. . . . In general, the systemic salience of class in relation to race increases when the economic, political, and social distance between races decreases substantially . . . even when class-based conflict becomes more salient in a social order, the racial component survives until the races’ life chances are equalized and the mechanisms and social practices that produce those differences are eliminated. (pp. 12-13)

We can make this argument more concrete if we look at the history of social movements in the United States, where we can find ongoing attempts by progressives and revolutionaries to build unity across racial lines and these efforts have only been partially successful. Roediger (2014) documents these efforts from the Abolitionist movement to the end of reconstruction. Using Du Bois’ (1998) terminology regarding the Abolitionist movement, Roediger (2014) highlights how the self-emancipation of the slaves through their general strike in the U.S. Civil War period, created what Roediger calls revolutionary time in which multiple groups united in a broad-based, multiracial movement for freedom in the period of abolition and reconstruction. Nevertheless, as subjective unity was fought for and found temporarily, the objective conditions of inequality eventually thwarted efforts to build a lasting multiracial movement. Peery (2002) discusses a similar situation in the 1930s when the slogan “Black and White unite and fight” was put forth as a way to build subjective unity across the color line among Black and White workers in an era when once again they were living objectively unequal lives. Peterson (1999) mentions Black and White unity in the Civil Rights movement and the transformation this meant for both, yet this unity did not last. Peery (2002) succinctly summarizes the problem when he says that only equals can unite. What he means is that only people living similarly objectively lives can have lasting subjective unity. In a materialist world, ideas or social constructs cannot overcome the objective lived realities of people. Here, we face the limits of educational intervention or conscientization or consciousness raising. Calls for unity, education for unity, antiracist education can only work when and among people living objectively similar realities.

I am very cognizant of the fact that the argument I am putting forth here runs against the grain of adult education scholarship on teaching about race and antiracist pedagogy (e.g., Bowman, 2014; Brookfield, 2014; Brookfield & Associates, 2019; Wagner, 2005) and the power of personal experiences or counterstories (e.g., Alfred & Swaminathan, 2005; Drayton, Rosser-Mims, Schwartz, & Guy, 2016; Lopez Marcano, 2001; Rosser-Mims, Schwartz, Drayton, & Guy, 2014; S. E. Smith & Colin, 2001) within CRT. I also believe it runs against the grain of the social justice sentiment of adult educators who want to put their skills to the service of ending racial oppression. My argument is not, however, an effort to negate this work, nor do I believe is it in opposition to this work; rather, I believe it is complementary to this work. It is precisely the understanding of the relationship between the subjective and the objective when considering a social construction of race that I think is fundamental for us to advance our antiracist educational practices.

New Possibilities

In the previous section, I made the argument that racial privileges have an objective basis in the political economy of societies; in other words, the staying power of race as a social construct is fundamentally related to the objective possibilities of having real material winners and losers. But the political economic bases for privileges, just like everything else, can and do change. As these objective conditions change, ideas or social constructs aligned with the old conditions lose their staying power. Old ideas, however, do not disappear on their own; there is a central role for adult education to play in challenging old social constructs and creating space to develop and consider new ones. Changing objective conditions merely create the space for new ideas corresponding to the new conditions. In contrast to the last section, we can say that here we face the possibilities of educational intervention or conscientization, or consciousness raising. Calls for unity, education for unity, antiracist education that I referenced earlier can work today, with an important caveat I will mention in the next section, because we have, as Heagerty and Peery (2000) argue, a growing multiracial sector of society living an objectively similar reality.

New Realities

So, what are these objective changes? First, let me present some basic premises on which I base my analysis. At the most general level, the objective conditions of societies are made up of the constantly changing and developing forces (technology) and relations of production. Of these two broad elements, technology is the most dynamic. As we change our technology, we change our selves and the objective conditions in which we live (Noble, 1977). Social, political, and economic relations are slower to change because (mis)education creates subjective inertia and resistance also known as hegemony (Gramsci, 1971), habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), or colonization of the lifeworld (Habermas, 1987).

The objective changes we face today center on the introduction of qualitatively new technology that is not just labor saving, but labor replacing (Peery, 2002). This new robotic, microchip-based, automating technology is creating a growing precariousness of labor and access to steady, full-time, living wage employment in the United States and globally (Heagerty & Peery, 2000). As increasing numbers of people find themselves unable to get consistent, living-wage employment to buy the necessities of life, they find themselves increasingly outside the prevailing form of distribution in a capitalist society: you get a job to get a wage to buy what you need. This objective process is class formation in the making. We are witnessing the birth of a new class, outside of capitalist relations (Peery, 2002). More precisely, this birth of a new class is the transformation of the working class and increasingly people from the middle class into a dispossessed class. ² Moreover, and central to the argument of this article, this new class, despite being disproportionately made up of women and people of color due to long-standing racial and gender discrimination, is a multiracial class. Because this new class is increasingly dispossessed of access to the basic relation of capitalism as I discussed above, it is also increasingly outside of the reach of the mechanisms historically employed to create the objective divisions along lines of race (Heagerty & Peery, 2000). This new class is cutoff from what I outlined earlier: the disproportionate distribution of income, wealth, wages, employment, and all the corollary social indicators associated with these that provided the objective basis for racial divisions and inequalities. This makes growing sector of society the most objectively open to antiracist pedagogy. Here too, I realize that I am running against the grain of adult education scholarship on race and antiracist pedagogy. The argument I am making is not against antiracist pedagogy, but, rather, that antiracist pedagogy must be strategically deployed. We can and should do antiracist pedagogy everywhere. Yet a theory that guides our understanding of the nature of social constructs within the prevailing objective and subjective condition of society, informs us that the social construct of race is weakest among those who live objectively similar lives. It is here where the ideas of antiracism can actually replace the ideas of racism; where antiracism has the most explanatory power for understanding the objective conditions.

There are affinities in my argument with major tenets of critical race theory (Closson, 2010b; Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, & Thomas, 1995). Critical race theorists argue for the centrality of history in understanding race, they focus on the development of racial categories and racist practices through law, and Bell (1995), in particular, raises the idea of “interest convergence” in the fight against racism. Bell uses the concept of interest convergence to try to show how Whites only fight racism when it is in their interests to do so. What I am arguing is that the changing objective conditions of the growing multiracial class is creating these conditions. So, it is not a process of self-interest on the part of whites within this class, but rather, objective realities and interests of the class as a whole.

New Approaches

Despite the fact that we can say that the new and growing multiracial class is generally a class of objective equals, this in no way means that it is a sector of society devoid of the subjective, social construction of race or racism. It is, however, a class for which the social construction of race has decreasing explanatory power for understanding the objective equality of immiseration that prevails within it. It is here that the prospects for fighting racism begin and from which we must start. But we have to realize that the way we have often conceptualized this fight needs to change. Here is how Peery (2002) challenges us:

Racism cannot be fought with anti-racism. It has to be fought with practical political activity of unity. Radicals are quick to say that race is a myth, but then they accommodate it by fighting against it as if it were a real thing. The practical fight for unity where there is economic equality is the way to deal with this myth. (p. 112, italics added)

Much of the literature in the areas of race and education, and particularly critical pedagogy and adult education, centers on challenging the blind spots around race in our fields (e.g., Au, Brown, & Calderón, 2016; Grande, 2004; Leonardo, 2005; Sheared et al., 2010; ; Sheared & Sissel, 2001). Scholars have highlighted the contemporary and historical contributions of people of color to the theory and practice of education (e.g., Au et al., 2016; DeVaughan, 1986; Grant, Brown, & Brown, 2016; Humphrey Brown, 2001; Peterson, 2002). They have provided contemporary and historical examples of and strategies for challenging racism in our fields and classrooms (e.g., Bohonos, 2019; Bowman, 2014; Brookfield, 2014; Brookfield & Associates, 2019; Delpit, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Lund & Colin, 2010; Merriweather Hunn, 2004; Sheared et al., 2010; Wagner, 2005). They have identified the role of education in the self-emancipatory efforts within the freedom movements of people of color (e.g., J. L. Davis, 2013; Payne & Sills Strickland, 2008; Peterson, 2002; Rickford, 2016; H. A. Williams, 2007). They have documented how race has shaped the historical development of adult education (e.g., Cain, 2004; Chapman, 2001; Johnson-Bailey, 2001b; Neufeldt & McGee, 1990) and schooling (e.g., Watkins, 2001).

Peery’s approach is in contrast to but not wholly in contradiction with much of this literature on race and education. In-line with much of the literature on race and education and in contrast to Peery, I would say racism can be fought with antiracism, but it must be based in the practical political activity of unity Peery argues for and it must be principally based in the growing dispossessed sector of society he identifies. Here is where antiracist educational work has its greatest potential. Indeed, we can see practical political activity of unity in many of the most important and dynamic social movements of today. As others have argued (Shiva, 2015), many movements today are movements of survival, precisely because of the growing precarious access to the basics of life I described above. In the United States, The Poor People’s Campaign, the movements around access to water, and the Fight for $15, living-wage movements are all based in the growing, multiracial new class and these new movements fight for practical political demands of the most basic nature. These movements build racial unity while fighting for the practical political and economic demands held in common by the growing class of dispossessed. This process of antiracist education through practical political struggle for unity has been documented in the Moral Mondays and now Poor People’s Campaign by Reverend William Barber (2016). Through what he calls fusion politics, the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina has been able to build sustained multiracial and multi-issue unity. This happens through educational work that is embedded in practical political struggles. This does not happen in classrooms cutoff from social movements.

Willie Baptist (in Baptist and Rehmann, 2011) provides further evidence of the importance of practical political work in fighting racism. Cognizant of the growing multiracial sector I identified above, he shows how in the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU) in Philadelphia, they “were able to overcome racial divisions through struggling around common class concerns of homelessness and poverty” (p. 137). In detailing this work that is antiracist and antipoverty and must be both at the same time, he comments on how college students would want to do antiracist workshops for them without understanding that KWRU had bridged the racial divide not in classroom workshops but through practical political struggle that consciously built unity around the objective conditions lived in common by the multiracial, yet disproportionately of color, communities in and around Kensington.

These movements show us how a social construct, such as race, can be challenged if we understand it in its subjective and objective dialectical totality. For educators, therefore, a theory of change capturing the dialectic of subjective and objective conditions is necessary so that we can plan when, where, how, and with whom our work can be most effective.