Coloniality of Power and the Curriculum of Violence: Understanding Contemporary Educational Racism in the Americas

Abstract

This study shows how the notion of coloniality of power unveils the existence of a curriculum of violence by considering two contemporary cases in the U.S. and Mexico. Current restrictions on the types of content and activities allowed in civics education concerned with race in the U.S., as well as attacks on normalistas’ bodies and educational institutions in Mexico, show how racism as an international project is attached to a capital system that strategically attempts to disappear (in material and symbolic terms) educators, institutions and curriculum as part of the project of modernity underwritten by a process of coloniality. These two cases are key examples of how certain educational projects are seen as obstacles to the modern/capitalist/clean ethos that coloniality longs for but has not yet achieved. As the official scholastic condensation of knowledge, curriculum legitimizes this injury and secures neoliberalism as a rationality of racism at the level of the truth. Thus, unpacking coloniality is key to exposing racism as a formation that justifies the progress of modernity in education since, as the notion of coloniality of power reveals through these two cases, the goal has been to eliminate that which reminds us as a society that we are not, yet, the ideal Western one.