Systemic racism in education: Teacher training alone cannot dismantle structural bias without anti-racist policy, funding, and community accountability
Original framing: “Training, not silence: With support, teachers can address racism, xenophobia in any classroom” — Phys.org
Students of color, particularly Black girls and Indigenous youth, report that 'anti-racism training' often centers white fragility and avoids addressing their lived experiences of surveillance, microaggressions, and erasure. Migrant students face additional barriers, as xenophobic policies (e.g., English-only laws, ICE collaborations with schools) are rarely addressed in teacher training. The voices of disabled students of color, who experience intersectional discrimination, are systematically excluded from these discussions, despite evidence that inclusive education reduces bias.
The University of Michigan’s framing of teacher training as the solution to classroom racism exemplifies how neoliberal education reform depoliticizes structural oppression, shifting blame from institutions to individuals.
This narrative obscures the historical continuity of racialized curriculum design, from 19th-century eugenics to 21st-century standardized testing, which systematically devalues Black, Indigenous, and migrant knowledge. Indigenous pedagogies, such as Māori land-based learning or African Ubuntu, offer alternatives that reject the extractive logic of 'training' in favor of relational accountability and sovereignty. The trickster’s lens reveals the absurdity of expecting teachers—already overburdened and under-resourced—to dismantle systems designed to fail their students. True systemic change requires abolishing the school-to-prison pipeline, redistributing resources through weighted funding, and centering community-led curriculum that treats racism not as a pedagogical flaw but as a feature of colonial education. Without these shifts, 'anti-racism training' becomes a performative bandage, masking the deeper mechanisms of oppression that produce the very conditions it claims to address.