ABSTRACT
While the world’s populace consists predominantly of people of color, education across the globe has applied whiteness to school design, curriculum, and pedagogy. Indeed, despite the multilingual nature of the world’s incredibly diverse communities, Western languages and ideologies are preferred in schools across the reaches of the (former) colonies. This chapter examines this global commitment to education as white-framed schooling, and situates historical and contemporary critiques of this commitment. As anti-imperialist historical American scholars Richard Wright and James Baldwin have argued, whiteness as foundational knowledge continues an intellectual, social, and economic investment in whiteness as a way to continue the global devaluation of communities, countries, and continents of color. Although alternative models exist within and across many countries and regions, such alternatives are often the exception to the rule, suggesting that whiteness has pervaded (and invaded) the global definition of education. The ongoing global commitment to white schooling, supported by Western governments, the aid-industrial complex, and corporate-informed economic systems, results in a valuation of learning limited to colonial framed classrooms, with texts and teaching processes based entirely on white-models of learning. This commitment leads to global disparities for low-income people in every country, while continuing a forced global diaspora of communities of color. The chapter concludes with a framework for indigenous education based upon Rendón’s sentipensante pedagogy that intentionally resists such investments in whiteness, and instead reinvests in globally diverse educational systems through personas educadas, who empower and foster local indigenous and multi-faceted cultural knowledges.
