The Coloniality of False Racial Binaries: Intersectional Consciousness as Antiracist Expectations for Multiracial Coalition-Building

Abstract

The racial awakening stemming from the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Black police brutalities, and unaccounted hate crimes against Asian Americans has captivated the world’s attention regarding the insidious realities of white supremacy. Yet many educators’ efforts to purposefully and pedagogically work toward building multiracial coalitions have been criminalized through policies banning the use of critical race theory and other curricula promoting equity and racial justice. Through the methodology of self-narrativization, this paper draws on intersectional studies and decolonial frameworks of heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity to disrupt the Black-White framing of racialized experiences in research and policy agendas. In doing so, this paper calls for educators to reject reductive logics of social justice in perpetuating racial order and to advance anticolonial agendas through intersectional and interconnecting points of political struggles across communities in recasting the next generation of transformative antiracist resistance.