Sessions

Unveiling Racism in TESOL: The Caribbean Perspective

The recent and continuing demonstrations dotted throughout the world provoked by the murder of George Floyd unveil the dirty truths of systemic racism and its deleterious impacts on Black communities and other communities of colour. Over the last two decades, there have been growing enquiries into race and racism in the TESOL fraternity that have illuminated that English language education is not neutral and absolved from the manacles of racism but, in fact, complicit in being gatekeepers of oppression, supporting white supremacy and sustaining coloniality. This theoretical presentation contributes to the burgeoning discourses on racism in language education by focusing on the first tenet of Critical Race Theory, the ubiquity of racism, as articulated by critical legal scholar Derrick Bell. By explicating the corporeal experiences and professional mobility of Anglophone Caribbean teachers, this talk magnifies the centrality of racism calcified in the Asian TESOL contexts.