Winter 2022 Issue »
White Ignorance in Global Education
Francine Menashy and Zeena Zakharia
In this qualitative research essay, Francine Menashy and Zeena Zakharia advance Charles Mills’s concept of White ignorance for understanding racial power hierarchies in global education governance. They reveal how global education organizations “sanitize racial inequities and silence conversations on race” and how in global education racism has been largely considered a US-based problem, which denies the fact that White supremacy is a global system. The authors argue that White ignorance has inhibited structural change in global education policies and practices. And while the Black Lives Matter movement has called for a global reckoning with entrenched racism and White supremacy, limited attention has been paid to racial inequities in global education circles.
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Francine Menashy (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1185-5891) is an associate professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research explores global education governance, international education policy, and aid to education in development and humanitarian contexts. She is the author of International Aid to Education: Power Dynamics in an Era of Partnership (Teachers College Press, 2019).
Zeena Zakharia (https://orcid.ord/0000-0002-1238-1985) is an assistant professor of international education policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research examines conflict and peacebuilding in education and advances a critical approach to refugee studies in the Middle East. These interests stem from over two decades of educational research, teaching, and school leadership in war-affected contexts.