How has Black Lives Matter affected racism in education?

This lecture examines racism in education. It explores how post Black Lives Matter has made little if any difference to the experiences of ethnic minority students in schools and higher education. Instead, the lecture argues that racism has deteriorated and whiteness shapes educational spaces which perpetuate structural, institutional and individual racisms. Consequently, education works to deliberately reproduce white supremacy. The lecture will focus on empirical research to examine how this takes place, as well as offering ways forward for a socially just education system.

Meet the speakers and chair:

Kalwant Bhopal is Professor of Education and Social Justice and Director of the Centre for Research in Race and Education at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of multiple books, including the highly influential White Privilege, which helped to popularize the term. Race and Education is her first trade book.

Suki Ali is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at LSE. Her main theoretical interests focus upon feminist postcolonial theory, research methodologies, visual culture, and processes of identification and embodiment.

Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa is a Belgian/Rwandan International Relations scholar and former journalist and Senior Research Fellow of the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies (JIAS), South Africa. 

Suzanne Hall, Professor of Sociology at LSE, explores the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation, and focuses on racialised frameworks of citizenship and inequality and their contestations. She is author of The Migrant’s Paradox: Street Livelihoods and marginal citizenship in Britain (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary (Routledge, 2012), and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of the 21st Century City (Sage, 2018).

Kalwant Bhopal headshot credit © Tony Olmos.