Expanding the Frame: Building Transnational Alliances for Racial and Educational Justice

Abstract

U.S. educational policymakers and equity advocates often frame the negative ramifications of racial inequality in schools in terms of worries about the nation's future global economic competitiveness. This article draws on frame theory (Snow & Benford, 1988) and education organizing theory (Warren & Mapp, 2011) to argue that educational policymakers and advocates must expand this national competitiveness frame to advance racial and educational justice. By outlining the emergence and reification of the national competitiveness frame in contemporary U.S. education policy, this article demonstrates how the national competitiveness frame can successfully build domestic alliances and create urgency for education reform. However, it can also risk co-opting racial justice goals. Further, this U.S.-centric frame ignores the global experience of racialization and educational injustice shared by marginalized groups around the world. The article closes by suggesting that educational equity advocates build on these transnational connections and use a collaborative frame to build collective power among historically marginalized groups worldwide to advance racial and educational justice in both the United States and abroad.

Notes

1 This article will use the phrase “U.S. American” in order to recognize that there are multiple “American” identities, including Native, Central, and South American.

2 In this article, transnational will be used to describe processes and linkages across nation-state boundaries, whereas global will refer to phenomena that occur in multiple nation-states.

3 In addition to the hierarchy of racial categories, a hierarchy of shade of skin color exists within each racial category. The hierarchy of skin tone within each race is commonly referred to as colorism, or preferential treatment of same-race people based solely on their relative shades of skin (Norwood, 2014). Examples throughout history include the higher social standing of mulatto, or mixed-race, people in Latin America and the privileges given by the Belgians to the Rwandan Tutsi tribes over the darker skinned Hutus.

4 Some scholars argue that early forms of racism existed as long ago as the Greco-Roman era (Isaac, 2004), although most suggest that the modern concept of race, and racism in its pseudo-scientific and biological form, did not emerge until the 18th and 19th centuries because these ideas relied on Enlightenment thinking (Fredrickson, 2002).

5 For example, consider the dynamics of racialization and racism in Cuba as compared to the United States. Both countries share a history of African slavery that underpins the contemporary marginalization of both Afro-Cubans and African Americans from the upper echelons of social and political life in each country (Moore, 2008). But racial segregation was not legally enforced in Cuba as it was in the United States, and the United States' black-white binary racial system is much more nuanced in Latin American countries (Bonilla-Silva & Dietrich, 2008).

6 The denial of access to formal schooling and to literacy more generally was also used as a tool for the maintenance of racial dominance in the United States and in some nations abroad (Spring, 2016).

7 There are further questions as to whether nations such as China actually test any or all of their migrant and other economically disadvantaged children.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Taylor

Amanda Taylor is a professorial lecturer at American University in Washington, DC, and Director of the Masters of Arts in Intercultural and International Communication program. Her research and teaching focus on the intersection of culture, power, and education in international and domestic contexts. She is particularly interested in the role of race in shaping educational policy and practice and community organizing for school reform.