Youth of Color Living and Learning in the Age of Racial Paranoia

Abstract

We are faced with the undeniable pivotal modern history of resurgent White supremacist ideology and practices fueling fear of “others.” As such, as educators, we ought to take concrete actions toward greater social justice education while engaging in critical dialogue toward healing. The current culture and racial war in schools and society at large and its effects on youth of color particularly indicates the need for a new anti-racist education, and implicates the key spaces of schools and education as sites of struggle in battling for a multicultural future free of all forms of bigotry. As an increasing number of Whites in the United States self-identifying as racially blind claim to have broken from the United States’ long history of racism, young people from all backgrounds are taking concrete action against all forms of bigotry, including capitalist ideology that blames the poor for their poverty and xenophobic tendencies that aim to dehumanize the LGBTQ community. Indeed, more and more young people, of all backgrounds, are realizing that claiming to be colorblind, classblind, or genderblind as an individual does nothing to confront systemic racism, classism, sexism, and other forms of oppression occurring in schools and society at large.