Note #3

Complicity and Critique: Being an ‘anti-racist’ educator

This Note reflects on a tension that sits at the heart of my work: the uneasy relationship between critique and complicity. It considers what it means to teach, research, and deliver anti-racism training while operating within institutions shaped by the very systems that such work seeks to challenge.

These Notes vary in tone and focus. Some are short reflections grounded in practice; others pause to think more explicitly with theory. This one leans more heavily into the latter. It is longer and more academic in orientation because the tension it explores warrants sustained attention.

We are all, to some extent or another, complicit in what we critique. I think about this a lot, especially in the context of who I am and what I do as an academic focused, amongst other things, on issues of anti-racism.

Whiteness is, at its core, a means of understanding how colonial histories and processes continue to operate in contemporary society. Historically, in the West, these hierarchies were rooted in European expansion and in the racial classification of people of European descent as superior, civilised and fully human. The concept of whiteness allows us to trace how that alignment between “European” and “human” became normalised and institutionalised. Used analytically, it helps us notice how particular logics surrounding reason, property ownership, innocence, and competence have repeatedly been treated as the (often invisible) standard. Beyond referring simply to skin colour, whiteness becomes a way of examining how certain norms come to occupy the centre, and how other identities are measured against them.

Kehinde Andrews book on the Psychosis of Whiteness has a whole chapter on what he calls the ‘anti-racism industrial complex’. He argues that much of the anti-racism training is overly individualised at the expense of paying attention to the systems of whiteness in which we all exist. For him, the fact that diversity training is seen as a solution to whiteness is, in effect, part of the wider problem in which its structural, systemic, and psychotic nature is diluted to focusing on the actions of individual white people.

Andrews’ argument is echoed elsewhere. Emma Dabiri addresses this problem in What White People Can Do Next, where she is critical of (individualistic) white allyship (that focuses on what white people can do to ‘help’ Black people rather than what we all can do together to challenge the system). She instead asks us to draw attention to the wider systems of capitalism and the more fundamental nature of whiteness as politically produced and institutionally secured. She writes that:

we need to shift the focus away from the ‘good’ individual and their personal privilege, moving the emphasis from focusing on racist actions to challenging racist systems.

These arguments have obvious implications for someone like me who regularly delivers anti-racism training. There is clearly a risk in what I do in perpetuating the problem rather than being part of the solution.

In truth, I have been well aware of this for some time. My colleague Simon and I wrestled with this tension in our paper together. While we were keen to engage in anti-racist work together, I was acutely aware that a collaboration between a Black academic and a white practitioner writing about race risked sliding too easily into familiar roles: the reflective, well-meaning white ally demonstrating his growth; the Black scholar positioned as the embodied authority on racism. That script is readily available in contemporary anti-racist discourse. It is culturally legible, professionally rewarded, and structurally convenient. It reassures institutions that the work is being done, while carrying the risk of leaving deeper power arrangements intact. I’ve added the link to how we sought to think-otherwise from that script below.

I think some arguments against focusing on individuals miss the precise nature of education as an intimate, relational, and social activity, particularly with young children. There is plenty of research on the character, pervasiveness, duration and importance of teaching as a form of sustained human interaction.

Teaching is not a discrete intervention delivered to a passive recipient; it is a patterned, iterative and affectively charged practice that unfolds over time. In early childhood settings especially, educators spend long hours in close proximity to children, responding to their questions, conflicts, silences, curiosities and uncertainties. These encounters accumulate and shape not only what children know, but how they come to feel about themselves, about others, and about the world.

Of course, structural transformation is necessary. But children do not encounter “structures” in the abstract. They encounter adults, rooms, language, expectations, gestures, and pauses. The work that happens there is certainly not revolutionary in any grand sense. It does not in itself dismantle racial capitalism. It does not undo coloniality. But neither is it irrelevant.

Education is deeply entangled in neoliberal and capitalist projects. It prepares children for participation in economic life. It sorts, measures, categorises and renders them legible to systems of accountability. These mechanisms are inseparable from the project of whiteness. Standards of development, expectations of behaviour, linguistic norms, and ideas of readiness have been historically informed through racialised assumptions about civility, reason, and competence.

And yet it’s also true that education has always also carried other aspirations: democratic participation, collective flourishing, ethical formation, the cultivation of imagination, the possibility of shared life beyond competition. These purposes sit uneasily alongside one another.

This tension makes early childhood settings distinct from many other institutions that receive equality, diversity and inclusion training. In corporate contexts, EDI often functions as an adjunct to existing structures. In education, the structure itself is relational. Adults are not simply employees delivering policy; they are participants in children’s emerging sense of self and world. Their interpretations, hesitations, disclosures, and silences become part of the curriculum.

It is perhaps for this reason that so many anti-racist texts I read begin with personal narratives. Authors recount formative encounters with race because is lived and felt. In early childhood, that lived dimension is amplified as young children are already making sense of difference through atmosphere, representation, and interaction.

The challenge, then, is how to act within this entanglement. Andrews and Dabiri are right to caution against reducing racism to individual attitudes or imagining that training alone can undo structural whiteness. But if we focus only on systems at the level of abstraction, we risk overlooking how those systems are enacted, felt and reproduced in everyday educational encounters. The question becomes: what kind of practice is possible in the midst of this?

This is where Erin Manning’s concept of the minor gesture becomes useful. Manning develops the idea to describe how change operates within dominant systems - and by “systems” she does not mean only institutions or policies. She is concerned with the broader structuring forces that organise life itself: majoritarian discourses that stabilise what counts as normal, rational, productive, neurotypical, civil, coherent.

Drawing on Deleuzian philosophy, she distinguishes between the “major” - the stabilising, norm-producing forces that organise experience - and the “minor,” which works within those forces at the level of process. Majoritisation, for Manning, is the process through which certain ways of being become default, naturalised, and unquestioned — neurotypical rhythms of communication, particular forms of literacy, specific modes of bodily regulation. The minor gesture does not dismantle the major order. Instead, it intervenes in its unfolding. It shifts tendencies, modulates relations, and redirects momentum from inside the situation itself.

In early childhood settings, anti-racist practice often operates in this minor register. A practitioner pauses before attributing behaviour to a familiar stereotype. A book is chosen that unsettles a narrow narrative. A child’s question about difference is stayed with rather than deflected. A discomfort is acknowledged and worked through. These gestures do not dismantle racial capitalism. They do, however, alter how its logics are lived in the room. They recalibrate belonging, authority and recognition at the scale where children are forming their earliest understandings of self and other.

It is precisely at this scale that the minor gesture becomes significant. It acknowledges complicity within larger systems while attending carefully to how those systems are enacted and modulated in everyday practice. Anti-racist work in early childhood might therefore be read as a series of minor gestures - modest in scale, relational in force, and cumulative in their effects.

Overall, this framing does not resolve the tension between critique and complicity; it makes it liveable. I remain situated within universities and funding structures that can easily commodify anti-racism and render it measurable, certifiable, and palatable. I am implicated in that economy.

But the spaces where I meet educators are rarely reducible to that economy alone. In training rooms and online sessions, conversations frequently move beyond practice into wider questions: about migration policy, about housing, about exclusions, about media narratives. Educators begin to recognise connections between what happens in their setting and the broader political conditions shaping children’s lives. The work does not always stay neatly contained within the professional sphere.

This is not systemic transformation in the revolutionary sense that Andrews demands, nor does it escape the structural critique Dabiri articulates. But it is also not merely cosmetic. The task for me is not to claim purity but to remain critically alert to the scripts available - the “good” anti-racist academic, the ‘authoritative’ voice on race - and to resist settling too comfortably into them. The minor gesture offers a way of thinking about how to continue acting without disavowing the structures that make that action possible. If anti-racist practice in this field operates as a minor gesture, it does so in full awareness of the major structures that exceed it — and with a commitment to staying in the tension between critique and participation.

Works cited

Andrews, K. (2023) The Psychosis of Whiteness. London. Allen Lane.

Dabiri, E. (2021) What White People Can Do Next. Great Britain: Penguin Books.

Manning, E. (2016) The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Tembo, S. and Bateson, S. (2022) 'Liminal relationalities: on collaborative writing with/in and against race in the study of early childhood', International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 37(2), pp. 530–544.