Being and Becoming Well in the Most Transparent of Times: The Limits of Racialized Healing Strategies in Educational Research

Abstract

This article examines the possibilities and limits of strategies directed toward racialized healing amidst declarations of pandemics and legislative attacks on public school teachers. We question what these strategies take as a self-evident truth: that race and racism can be conceptualized in terms of health and transparently addressed through research and practice focused on racialized healing. To complicate this assertion, we locate the strategies within a race-health nexus, a form of biopower. This nexus establishes norms, categories, and classifications that justify ranking and comparing, dividing and differentially intervening on some in the name of the health and wellbeing of all. We historicize how this nexus became integral to schooling in the United States in the 19th century, normalizing populations according to civilizational values that doubled as health standards. We argue that this nexus makes possible biopolitical strategies of “tailoring treatments” and “cultivating potential” that continue to undergird health and healing strategies in educational research and pedagogical practice today, thereby reconfiguring, rather than overturning, hierarchies of human difference. The analysis demonstrates that racialized healing strategies provide no ontological guarantee for reducing racialized harm. Instead, such efforts must be reflexively situated within the interplay of biology, coloniality, and education that makes “healing” seem necessary and urgent in the first place.

In memoriam

Dr. Ryan Ziols passed away during the writing of this article. He is mourned by his family and friends, and his memory lives in his work as well as in all who knew and loved him.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As of this writing, 42 states have enacted legislation aimed at prohibiting or chilling the discussion of historical facts about slavery and racism, gender identities and expression, and so-called controversial topics amid ongoing concerns related to racism, misogyny, transphobia, and xenophobia (Contorno, 2022; see also Kim, 2022).

2 To distinguish the two forms of “race” at play in our analysis, we use the term “ethno-specific” to refer to those approaches to health and healing that are directed toward a taxonomy of racialized identities.

3 For an earlier instantiation of a “therapeutic turn,” the mental hygiene movement in education beginning in the 1920s offers a notable parallel in presuming that all children were maladjusted. Mental hygiene (e.g., Burnham, 1924) emphasized the development of personality in school subjects through increased attention to the emotions. It also called for studying children within a “social context” to aid in their “adjustment” to prevailing social norms and values (see Ziols & Kirchgasler, 2021; Cohen, 1983). While rarely discussing racial differences, mental hygiene’s universalizing physiological, psychological, and social norms emerged in a context that presumed extant forms of racial segregation and oppression as status quo and thus “natural.”

4 We note “health” has always been a multifaceted and ambiguous concept theorized from a multiplicity of incommensurable perspectives and cosmologies (see Ober, 1997; Yuan, 2017), many of these often pejoratively labeled as “traditional” or “alternative.” to the norms and values of biomedicine.