ABSTRACT
Readers wondering why there is reference to ‘race’ in a book targeting educators must realise that global justice education is not a simple, neat, and comfortable area. Rather, as the authors in this book have shown, the reality is laced with questions of power, domination, and racial stereotyping. Many chapters in this volume show how the outcomes for people from the Global South, particularly of African descent, mirror the value we place on products in trade and are echoed in the kinds of representations found in school books and are also reflected in messages conveyed by the media. These examples show that the present is not devoid of imperialist histories and impositions, but that unequal power relationships between North and South have become established and ingrained and that they persist to this day. The most urgent and recurring strand running through this book relates to how messages about Africa and African people in the Global North are predominantly situated in deficit thinking with roots in colonial processes and the privileging of Northern epistemologies. Another key conceptual idea in the book situates race at the heart of the colonial matrix of power; therefore, discussions about race are central to calls for change in the discourse.
