Our Separate Struggles are Really One: Building Political Race Coalitions for Educational Justice

ABSTRACT

In this article, we explore political race theory as a framework for building coalitions between Black and Brown communities as part of a shared struggle for educational justice and community power amid neoliberal reform. Inspired by the Black and Brown alliances for economic justice of the 1960s and 1970s and informed by previous scholarship on the conceptualization of political race and the lived experience of being raced in America and its relationship to power, we draw from the experiential knowledge of African American and Mexican American superintendents to better understand how they interpreted and navigated the politics of race as school district leaders in their advocacy for students raced black or brown. We then discuss how political race, and the racialization of power in schools requires more theorizing in education leadership research and provide examples of how the field can deepen future analyses by recasting educational inequality as a political problem rather than instructional or cultural and valuing the experiential knowledge of those who have been raced.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.