Diversity: Whiteness in the Art and Design Classroom

If you think it is difficult to talk about racism, it’s ten times more difficult to talk about white privilege. (Bhopal 2021)

In this piece, two anti-racist art and design educators explore their experience of whiteness and white privilege in art and design education. We offer this to deepen and embolden your own work. You will learn about how we have seen whiteness colonise young people’s experience, resulting in disengagement and racist harms for those of the global majority and the normalisation of white privilege across students and educators. We also talk about how we attempt to disrupt it.

Learning to speak across difference is important here: one of us specialises in fashion, is ‘brown’ and middle-class from a Muslim background, and the other specialises in fine art, is ‘white’ and middle-class from a secular background. We come together because we are passionate that all children and young people are entitled to the wonders of making and experiencing art, craft and design across global cultures. We are committed to confronting injustice, privilege and prejudices that gatekeep art and design, and keep our field elite.

After setting the scene in the introduction, we present our answers to four questions we asked ourselves on whiteness and racism. The format is an invitation to ask the same questions to support self- and co-inquiry. In discussing our answers, we encourage the practice of listening to each other, strengthening the capacity for ‘race talk’.

1. When did you first realise that white privilege existed in art and design education?
2. When did you first experience the racist harms of whiteness in art and design education, in your schooling, art college, teaching etc?
3. How do you subvert, resist or arrest the harms of whiteness in art and design education?
4. How do you embed or embody non-Eurocentric and pluriversal art, design and craft into your day-to-day work as an educator, bringing on ‘pedagogies of hope’ (Freire 1997; hooks 1994)?

In our conclusion, we propose pluriversal approaches to art and design education as ways to repair the abuses of whiteness and racism and to reinvent the future (Escobar 2017; 2020; Kothari et al. 2019; Noel 2020). The Mexican revolutionary Zapatistas’ term pluriverse is increasingly being used in art and design contexts, refocusing status on the worlds of those who have been historically oppressed and excluded. Pluriversality rejects the assumed universality that descends directly from imperialism and colonialism imposed by ‘white’ Europeans’ historical and ongoing dismissal/erasure/extraction of culture and resources from peoples across the world.