Global Racialization, Class, and the Politics of Nation: Education as a Site of Racial Formation and Resistance in the United States, South Korea, and Iran

Abstract

This study examines the applicability of Critical Race Theory (CRT) beyond its U.S. American origins by analyzing the intersections of state, nation, race, and education in two distinct sociopolitical contexts: South Korea, and Iran. This manuscript explores how education functions as a genealogical site of power mediating relations among the state, nation, race/ethnicity, and social class in the construction and contestation of national identity. In South Korea, historical and contemporary student movements, from anti-colonial struggles and democratization to the Sewol Ferry protests, illustrate how education has served both as a means for producing normative citizens and as a site for cultivating democratic participants through civic resistance. In Iran, educational institutions intersect with gender, ethnicity, and political authority; within a tightly centralized system, CRT and intersectionality illuminate both possibilities and constraints of critical engagement. By situating these two cases within global debates on racialization, class inequality, and nationalism, this paper contributes to a comparative understanding of education as a contested arena where nations are imagined, challenged, and reconfigured. It contributes to scholarship at the intersection of race, class, and nationalism by offering insights into how the state structures and civic actors co-construct the politics of national identity through education in the 21st century while also highlighting the role of racial experiences in these processes.

1. Exploring Education, Nation, and Society

“Racism doesn’t exist in my country.”—overheard by most critical scholars.

This intellectual project refers to a critical inquiry into how education, as both a system and a discourse, participates in constructing racial, national, and social classes. In other words, it is a scholarly endeavor to explore education as a site where race, nation, and class are produced together, as well as a setting in which resistance and reimagination can occur. This study began with the premise that, as both a field of study and a set of institutional practices, education functions as a site of racial formation and resistance. It has evolved to address broader, more urgent structural issues, such as power, inequality, and belonging. While this inquiry emphasized the agency of individuals or groups, it became clear that such perspectives were insufficient to explain the complexity of educational struggles, particularly when utilizing a comparative approach on an international scale. We argue that an intersectional approach that simultaneously considers national context, racialization, and class structures is necessary to understand both the formation and the limits of resistance in education. As critical scholars situated in the United States (the Global North), we are trained in academic discourses/theories that have historically been privileged within the academy. However, three of the four authors on this paper have ties to the Global South (Iran and South Korea), which has led to inquiry across our unique positionings.

Across the world, the project of the nation is sustained through systems of power that define who belongs, who is excluded, and whose knowledge counts. Education plays a central role in this process: it is through classrooms, curricula, and state institutions operate as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) (Xi and Ng 2021) through which dominant national identities are reproduced and normalized. Schools do not merely transmit knowledge. They discipline bodies, regulate conduct, and cultivate compliant national subjects through surveillance and routinized practices (Harris 2011). From state-controlled textbooks and standardized testing to patriotic rituals and censorship of critical perspectives, education is a key instrument through which nations cultivate loyalty and regulate dissent. Yet these same institutions also generate “cracks” where students can recognize, negotiate, and resist the limits of the mono-narrative (Ettlinger 2011).

Recent scholarship highlighted the structural violence embedded in educational systems and their role in reproducing social hierarchies (Phillips and Gichiru 2021). Studies of multiracial identities emphasize the importance of intersectional frameworks in analyzing educational experiences (Habimana-Jordana and Rodríguez-García 2023). While contributions to the Genealogies of Healing Special Issue demonstrate how marginalized communities mobilize education as a space of resistance and transformation (Isler et al. 2021; Orozco-Figueroa 2021). Building on this scholarship, this paper examines how a nation is racially formed through education and how processes of schooling are entangled with the state’s efforts to maintain control over racialized and classed hierarchies. Drawing on comparative cases of South Korea and Iran, we analyze how education becomes a political technology of governance. This political technology shapes citizens’ moral identities, regulating which bodies are visible or marginalized, and reproducing the symbolic boundaries of the nation. In each context, we also attend to how students, teachers, and communities engage in acts of resistance that unsettle these hegemonic national narratives, exposing the fragility of state power and the contested nature of belonging.

Grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT), intersectionality, racial experience, and Omi and Winant’s (2014) theory of racial formation, and extending through the lens of global white supremacy, this article conceptualizes education as a genealogical site of power. Omi and Winant’s (2014) notion of racial formation provides a framework for understanding the nation as a racial project-a state-driven process through which social structures and cultural meanings produce racialized hierarchies that appear natural or inevitable. While the concept of racial formation explains the structural production of race, racial experience (Torres and Colón 2015) highlights how individuals internalize and embody these structures in their daily educational experiences, bringing racialization to life. CRT and intersectionality further illuminate how these hierarchies intersect with class, gender, religion, and geopolitical position to organize the distribution of privilege and oppression. Together, these frameworks reveal how education not only reflects but actively constructs the racialized nation through daily practices of governance, discipline, and exclusion.

While education systems often operate under state-imposed constraints, schools are never entirely subsumed by those powers. As shown in teachers’ experiences navigating politicized climates around CRT and multicultural education, classrooms also serve as spaces of resistance, where educators and students co-construct alternative pedagogies and counter-narratives that disrupt dominant ideologies of race, merit, and citizenship (Kheirkhah and Aronson 2025). These moments of refusal and reimagination illustrate how the nation is continuously being remade through both the imposition and the disruption of racialized order.

Through this comparative analysis, we argue that understanding education as a site of racial formation provides a critical lens for examining how global white supremacy operates through local mechanisms of control, while also revealing the possibilities of resistance that emerge within them. Across diverse political systems from liberal democracy to democratizing society to theocratic authoritarianism the logic of racialized nation-building is remarkably consistent, and education remains both a mechanism of hierarchy and a terrain of struggle. Accordingly, this inquiry is guided by a single research question: How is the nation racially formed through education, and how are bodies positioned, regulated, and resisted within the production of national identity?

2. A Global CRT: Intersectionality, Racial Formation, Racial Experience & Global White Supremacy

Our argument draws on Critical Race Theory (CRT), intersectionality, the concept of racial formation and racial experience, and global white supremacy to create a Global CRT. Together, these frameworks allow us to interrogate how education operates as a key site in the racial formation of the nation—that is, how states construct, institutionalize, and contest racial meanings through educational systems that define belonging, positioning, regulation, and identity. Education is one of the most powerful institutions through which these racial projects are materialized. Curriculum, policy, and pedagogy serve as technologies of the nation-state that construct idealized citizens while disciplining or excluding others. In this sense, the concept of racial formation and racial experience extend the scope of CRT and intersectionality by situating education within the historical genealogy of nation-building and the global circulation of racial meanings.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) provides the analytic foundation for examining how racial inequality is produced and sustained through systemic power structures rather than individual prejudice (Delgado and Stefancic 2023). CRT clarifies how laws, policies, and institutional practices often framed as neutral or meritocratic organize and legitimize racial hierarchy. Within educational settings, CRT reveals how schooling functions as a racialized state apparatus: a site where curriculum, discipline, language, and national narratives are used to naturalize particular forms of knowledge, regulate bodies, and delineate the boundaries of citizenship (Leonardo 2017).

Intersectionality, a core tenet within CRT, deepens this analysis by examining how race operates in relation to class, gender, religion, and national identity (Crenshaw 2013). This framework makes visible how individuals experience domination and marginalization through multiple, overlapping structures of power. Together, CRT and intersectionality enable a nuanced understanding of how education shapes national identity while simultaneously reproducing racialized and classed hierarchies.

Using these frameworks transnationally allows us to compare how different nation-states mobilize education to construct the “ideal citizen” and to enforce normative visions of the nation. In the U.S., CRT exposes how contemporary anti-CRT legislation seeks to safeguard white nationalist imaginaries of national identity. In South Korea, it illuminates how the state sustains a mono-ethnic ideal rooted in purity and homogeneity despite rapid demographic change (Kim and Jung 2021; J. K. Kim 2017). In Iran, CRT helps reveal how ethnicity, religion, and language—particularly Persian, Shi’a, and Aryanized narratives of belonging—are fused to define authentic citizenship. Across these contexts, CRT and intersectionality demonstrate that educational resistance is not incidental; it emerges in response to state efforts to regulate identity, enforce hierarchy, and construct the racialized nation through schooling.

Omi and Winant (2014) conceptualize race (with a U.S. lens) as a sociohistorical process—racial formation—through which social, economic, and political forces create and transform racial categories. While their framework has primarily been applied to the U. S., we extend its insights by integrating Jada Benn Torres’s concept of “Racial Experience,” which emphasizes how individuals and groups experience race in everyday life, rather than focusing solely on the formation of racial categories (Torres and Colón 2015). Racial projects link representations of race to the organization of social structures; they define who counts as a member of the polity, who is excluded, and how difference is managed or erased. Within this framework, the nation itself can be understood as a site where racial experiences intersect with class, citizenship, and national belonging. Omi and Winant explain, “the commonsense view of ‘the nation’ has always been explicitly inflected by race. The United States was perceived as a ‘white man’s country,’ a herrenvolk republic” (p. 77). While their theorization centers on the U.S. racial state, integrating the racial experiences lens allows us to examine how South Korea and Iran construct and contest racialized experiences, revealing how local practices are shaped by, yet distinct from, the broader global system of white supremacy (Allen 2001; Stohry et al. 2021).

While this study draws heavily from CRT, we also acknowledge the limits of applying a framework rooted in U.S. legal and sociopolitical contexts to global settings. CRT emerged from struggles within U.S. jurisprudence and education to expose the permanence of racism in U.S. institutions; its conceptual vocabulary—race, whiteness, and Blackness—reflects specific historical trajectories of slavery, settler colonialism, and segregation. When extended internationally, these categories cannot be transplanted wholesale without obscuring the local histories, colonial legacies, and cultural logics through which racial meaning and hierarchy are produced elsewhere. The U.S. imagination of race often assumes a Black–white binary that inadequately captures the entanglement of ethnicity, Christian supremacy (Stohry et al. 2021), caste, colorism, citizenship, and nationalism in shaping oppression and belonging around the world.

The transnational circuits of power that structure modernity provide the conditions through which global white supremacy emerges and racial formation becomes intelligible. Charles Mills (1997) conceptualizes white supremacy not as a distortion of Western democracy but as its organizing architecture—a global political system that has historically ordered the world through racial domination. In this view, white supremacy functions as a transnational racial order, shaping hierarchies of value, knowledge, and citizenship through the intertwined legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism. While Omi and Winant’s (2014) racial formation theory explains how nations construct and negotiate racial meaning within their own borders, Mills extends this analysis to the planetary scale, demonstrating how national racial projects are produced within—and continually reshaped by—a global racial contract. This contract positions proximity to whiteness as the benchmark of modernity, morality, and even humanity itself, revealing how local articulations of race are always embedded in broader, world-systemic structures of power. As Kumar (2021) demonstrates in the context of Islamophobia, racism can operate as a structural, institutional logic that creates and reproduces new racial categories. Applied to non-Western settings such as South Korea and Iran, this suggests that racialization may emerge through intersections of nationalism, culture, and religion, producing racialized experiences and hierarchies without formal racial categories. Within this theoretical framework, it is crucial to distinguish between the state as a political apparatus and the nation as a cultural and ethnic community. Education remains one of the most enduring mechanisms through which this global racial order is naturalized. From colonial schooling to contemporary curriculum reforms, educational systems have long been deployed to reproduce epistemic and cultural dominance. In the U.S., schooling continues to protect a white-centered national narrative through bans on CRT and other equity-based frameworks. In South Korea, the pursuit of global competitiveness has been tethered to Westernization, English-language imperialism, and aesthetic hierarchies that privilege whiteness. In Iran, Eurocentric norms and colonial legacies inform both theocratic discourse and secular resistance movements, demonstrating the complex entanglement of whiteness, religion, and national legitimacy. Across these cases, global white supremacy is not a static structure but a circulating logic of power manifesting differently within distinct national histories yet consistently reinforcing the racialized foundations of global order.

Bringing CRT, intersectionality, racial formation, racial experience, and global white supremacy into conversation allows us to articulate what we term Global CRT—an analytic framework that examines how race is constructed, operationalized, and contested across diverse geopolitical contexts. Global CRT asserts that racial meaning is produced simultaneously at national and transnational scales: while states enact their own racial projects through education, these projects are always shaped by the global racial order that privileges proximity to whiteness as the measure of modernity and humanity. Intersectionality clarifies how these racialized projects are lived through classed, gendered, ethnic, and religious hierarchies, while racial formation theory explains how nations institutionalize these distinctions through curriculum, discipline, and civic narratives. Global white supremacy situates these national processes within the broader architecture of colonial modernity, revealing how even non-Western contexts reproduce or resist the global color line.

Together, these frameworks form the theoretical architecture of Global CRT, enabling us to understand education as a genealogical site of power—a space where the racialized nation is produced, embodied, and contested. This approach prompts the guiding questions of our study: How is the nation racially formed through education? How are bodies positioned, read, regulated, and disciplined within these projects? And where, within these systems, do acts of refusal and resistance emerge to unsettle dominant national imaginaries?

3. Disclaimer! Contextualizing the Use of a U.S. Theory Globally (The Global North)

The U.S. context provides a foundational context for understanding racialization and the development of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Emerging from legal scholarship and social justice movements that confronted the enduring legacies of slavery, segregation, and institutional racism, CRT names what had long been experienced by Black communities, Indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups, illuminating how racial hierarchies are structurally embedded in law, education, and everyday life (Bell 1992; Crenshaw 2013; Ladson-Billings 1998). Within the U.S. educational system, race functions as a central organizing principle, shaping access, curriculum, and opportunity while reinforcing broader narratives of meritocracy, neutrality, and color-evasiveness that obscure systemic inequity (Gillborn 2005; Bonilla-Silva 2006). From colonial schools that disciplined Indigenous and Black bodies into “civilized” subjects to the segregated public school systems of the Jim Crow era, education has long operated as a site for producing racialized hierarchies under the guise of equality. The institutionalization of whiteness within policy, pedagogy, and assessment continues to determine who is recognized as knowledgeable, capable, or deserving (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995), and contemporary debates over CRT reveal how education remains an arena where racial meaning is actively constructed, contested, and politicized (Au 2012).

At the same time, the U.S. is not the world’s template for race. Extending CRT beyond the U.S. requires both caution and methodological flexibility. Theories developed in the Global North do not automatically map onto societies where ethnicity, language, religion, caste, imperial domination, or colorism—not U.S.-style racial binaries—structure social hierarchy. Without care, applying CRT internationally risks reproducing U.S.-centrism and the epistemic dominance that CRT itself critiques. For this reason, we do not universalize U.S. racial categories; instead, we use CRT’s analytic commitments to examine how racialization, domination, and resistance operate across diverse national contexts.

While CRT originated in the U.S., its central tenets, challenging the permanence of racism, exposing structural inequity, and amplifying counter-narratives, resonate across global contexts shaped by their own histories of colonialism and modernity. Extending this lens to the Global South, particularly to Iran and South Korea, enables a more nuanced understanding of how education functions as a site of both racial formation and resistance within non-Western nation-building projects. The U.S. case anchors this comparative inquiry by illustrating how the racialized nation is continuously produced, contested, and reimagined through schooling, a process mirrored in distinct yet interconnected ways across these diverse contexts, where ideologies of purity, progress, and belonging are similarly reproduced and resisted in classrooms, curricula, and broader educational practices.

For example, the recent wave of anti-CRT and anti-DEI legislation, including Florida’s 2023 bans and mandates (Najarro 2023; Waite 2023) and the broader mobilization of conservative campaigns such as Moms for Liberty (Throne and Stewart 2025), exemplifies how the state seeks to discipline knowledge, control narratives of national identity, and produce depoliticized, compliant citizens. These efforts illuminate the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality in educational governance, as marginalized students are surveilled, disciplined, and silenced for embodying threats to the heteropatriarchal racial state. Understanding these dynamics through CRT, intersectionality, and the global white supremacy framework exposes how the struggle over education in the U.S. is not merely domestic but planetary in scope, a contest over the meaning of justice, democracy, and human value in a world structured by the afterlives of colonialism (Mills 1997; Al-Natour 2024).

Thus, the U.S. provides a historical and conceptual grounding for Global CRT but does not serve as a primary empirical site in this article. Instead, our focus on Iran and South Korea allows us to examine how racialized national identities are constructed and contested in contexts that lie outside the traditional scope of CRT scholarship—and where research on race, education, and national formation remains notably underdeveloped. In shifting attention to these two countries, we do not displace the U.S., but rather resist framing it as the universal or original template for racial analysis. Instead, we position the U.S. as one influential site within a broader global racial system, while Iran and South Korea offer distinct and urgently needed cases that expand CRT’s reach, challenge its assumptions, and demonstrate its relevance to the Global South. We selected these two countries because education played a central role in their nation-state formation; because each has a strong national homogeneity project; and because race is experienced and produced through intersecting regimes of ethnicity, religion, class, and gender that differ from U.S.-centric racial categories.

4. Comparative Analysis of Iran and South Korea

This project compares Iran and South Korea to examine how nation-states construct, regulate, and contest racialized and gendered national identities through education. Although both are often positioned outside dominant Western racial paradigms, each country demonstrates how racial formation operates globally through locally specific histories, ideologies, and state projects. By placing these two contexts side by side, we highlight how different political systems—ranging from democratizing states to enduring authoritarian regimes—mobilize education as a tool for producing national subjects, disciplining marginalized communities, and policing the boundaries of belonging.

South Korea represents a democracy forged through protracted civic and student-led uprisings. Its education system has historically served both as a mechanism for cultivating loyalty and meritocratic citizenship and as one of the most powerful sites of collective resistance. In contrast, Iran exemplifies a centralized authoritarian state in which education is tightly intertwined with religious nationalism, linguistic hierarchy, and moral regulation. While South Korean democratization was shaped by youth-led protest throughout the 20th century, Iran’s contemporary revolutionary movements—including those led by women, ethnic minorities, and students—demonstrate ongoing struggles against state control in the 21st century.

Despite these differences, both nations reveal how the racialized nation is not only constructed through formal state institutions but also contested through educational protest, cultural production, and embodied acts of refusal. By comparing these two cases, this study illuminates how racialization and global white supremacy shape national imaginaries even in contexts that do not use “race” explicitly as a category and how education becomes a critical terrain where marginalized groups confront, reinterpret, and resist the ideological work of the nation-state.

4.1. South Korea: Student Activism, Educational Protest, and Social Change

South Korea’s education system has long served not merely as an academic institution, but as a cornerstone of national identity formation and state-building. Rooted in Confucian traditions and later molded by rapid modernization, schooling became a key mechanism for producing disciplined, achievement-oriented citizens (Lee 2025). Education has operated as a tool in Korea for democratization (L. Kim 2021) and nation-building, from the Japanese colonial period to the present. Although the Korean state does not formally recognize “race” as a legal or social category, racialization operates implicitly through the ideology of ethnic homogeneity. Without formal racial classifications, racial experience becomes the primary site through boundaries of belonging are produced and enforced. This national project also created racialized experiences of Koreanness based on exclusion and control.

Recent research collectively shows that Korea’s education system has historically aimed to cultivate citizens aligned with national goals of loyalty and discipline (J. E. Kim 2023; Moon 2013; Seth 2012). During the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945) in Korea, education was utilized as a means to enforce loyalty to the Japanese Empire (Seth 2012). Thus, before becoming an arena for resistance, Korean education functioned as a national project to cultivate loyalty, meritocracy, and collective sacrifice for the state.

Korean racial identity was formed during the precolonial period, where national identity is formed and dependent on an anti-Black racial hierarchy in which Korea is triangulated as “other” between white and Black communities, and survival from Japan and other colonizing influences is dependent upon national allegiance and a formalized mono-ethnic identity (C. J. Kim 1999; J. K. Kim 2015, 2017; J. W. Kim 2022; N. Y. Kim 2022; Shin 2013). These practices teach Koreans who belongs, who threatens the nation, and who must be disciplined or excluded.

From the late 19th to early 20th century, South Korea’s educational system shifted from the Confucian, hierarchical traditions of the Joseon dynasty toward a more formalized and state-controlled structure. During Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), this transformation accelerated as the colonial government imposed a system influenced by both Japanese and Western models of modern education. After liberation, Korea expanded state-led education focused on discipline and academic achievement to build an educational nation. It is visible that student activism in South Korea has made a move and has played a role in driving political changes within South Korea. Thus, before it became a site of resistance, South Korean education functioned as a national project, cultivating loyalty, meritocracy, and collective sacrifice in service of the state. Thus, education served as a genealogical site of power that continuously reconstituted who belonged to the nation and who did not.

Despite its role in reinforcing national ideology, Korean education has simultaneously nurtured some of the most enduring traditions of student-led resistance in the modern world. Students repeatedly transformed classrooms into political arenas, contesting authoritarianism, colonialism, and state power. The Korean student resistance movement began during colonial rule in Korea (late 1800s) as highlighted by Song et al. (2003). It arose in reaction to the enforced education by the Japanese Imperial Government and the emergence of a student social class in Occupied Korea. During this period students not only resisted colonial education within schools but also led movements against the Japanese regime across various segments of society. These student-led anti-Japanese movements resulted in events like the March 1st Movement in 1919 (which is a national holiday that is observed every year), the Student Independence Movement in 1929 and the April 19th Revolution, in 1960 (Song et al. 2003).

During a moment of student resistance, Korean students played an important role in challenging the oppressive military rule that dominated much of the country’s recent history. Their activism was instrumental in driving the democratization movement in South Korea (Song et al. 2003). Song further highlights that examining these instances of student protest, such as the April 19 Uprising led by students the awakening to contradictions and anti-military movements in the 1980s and the ‘87 Uprising, along with more recent anti-American demonstrations and unity displayed during presidential elections reveals a consistent trend of resistance within Korean student body and academic circles.

In South Korea, the student resistance movement has persisted into the century stemming from anti colonialism and calls for democratization (Democracy Movement), like in the 1987 Gwangju Uprisings where students and laborers demonstrated against martial law and authoritarianism (L. Kim 2021). Following the Sewol Ferry (세월호) on 16 April 2014 where 304 high school students and teachers lost their lives a powerful movement emerged known as the “Yellow Ribbon Movement,” utilizing protests like candlelight vigils. This movement played a role in the impeachment of and change in government due to corruption by then-president Park Geun Hye (daughter of dictator Park Chung-hee during the 1960s and 70s) in 2016.

As of February 2024, young doctors and medical students are currently taking a stand against government policies by staging walkouts from schools and medical facilities to oppose proposed changes to the healthcare system regarding an increase in medical school seats. Over time student protests in South Korea have been characterized by marginalized groups expressing discontent with structures or governmental decisions through means such as “candlelight vigils (촛불 집회)”.

Student protests in South Korea have consistently transformed education into a forum for educators, parents, and the wider community to engage in advocacy for social and institutional reform (The Academy of Korean Studies 2019). As these movements extend beyond classrooms to influence multiple sectors of society, they generate rich, systematically documented data that can be analyzed numerically and statistically, including participation rates, organizational involvement, arrests, survey responses, and media coverage (Jung 2020). These educational spaces, operating as sites of surveillance and social regulation rather than merely neutral learning environments, also produce “cracks” in which students can challenge the dominant narratives and exercise forms of resistance (Ettlinger 2011). The country has gathered data for analysis focusing on aspects like participation, in rallies, protester numbers, arrests, organizational involvement, forced recruitment cases, survey responses, media attention, disciplinary measures and the overall scale of engagement (Jung 2020). Across generations, these student movements redefined citizenship not as obedience to the state, but as a moral responsibility to challenge injustice.

In the present era, South Korea faces a new transformation not necessarily from dictatorship or colonization, but from the pressures of multicultural reality and global discourses on race and equity. Unlike prior struggles rooted in nationalism, the emerging challenge centers on inclusion, diversity, and racial justice, which extend from national identity issues. In this shifting context, CRT in South Korea must expand beyond the realm of education to examine how racialized national identity is shaped by immigration policies, multicultural family governance, media discourse, and social movements that advocate for broader civic inclusion. As such, we have witnessed remarkable student engagement and resistance in South Korea. However, in this global post-pandemic era, we are now seeing the fourth wave of cultural change in the needs of Korean education and social justice. South Korea has a Ministry of Gender Equality and Family (여성가족부) and within this ministry exists a Multicultural Family department (다문화 damunhwa “multicultural” is oftentimes used interchangeably with “multiracial”), indicating policy efforts and educational programming (through Multicultural Family Support Centers) that address the challenges of a multicultural growth in Korea (MOGEF n.d.). This organization is aimed at migrant women and their children with Korean men, the educational programming and teacher training deserves a closer look. Importantly, the number of multicultural students in South Korean schools has nearly doubled in the past decade, highlighting the increasing need to address racialized hierarchies and inclusion within education (Ji 2023).

Alongside these shifts, South Korea is undergoing a demographic transformation that unsettles its self-conception as a “single-ethnic nation.” The decline in the school-age population contrasts with the rapid growth of students from multicultural families, who nearly doubled between 2014 and 2023 (Ji 2023). Despite policy efforts through the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family’s Multicultural Family Support Centers, such students are often subjected to assimilationist frameworks that reinforce rather than dismantle racialized hierarchies. The persistence of the term “multicultural students (다문화가정)” signals conditional belonging, in which non-Korean or mixed-race bodies are included only under the logic of integration into a “pure” Korean national identity. These intersectional dynamics are evident among North Korean refugee youth and the children of migrant families who married Koreans. Their racialized positioning results in conditional inclusion and assimilationist forms of multicultural education (다문화교육). These students fall between institutional categories, demonstrating how multiple axes of inequality shape racialized belonging in education. They also reveal how educational systems produce and reproduce the cracks through which racialized bodies are positioned as incomplete members of the nation.

Consequently, this is the “new paradigm shift” that is urgently needed in South Korean society and education. It is the possible inevitability of “multicultural education.” Gyeonggi Province implemented antiracism ordinances (이주민 권리 보장), the first of its kind in Korea, which “ban racial discrimination, institutionally guarantee the rights of refugee applicants and help undocumented children of foreign nationals” (JoongAng Daily 2025). Yet how these ordinances will be implemented remains uncertain, particularly given that officials within Gyeonggi’s education system reportedly claimed that racism does not exist in schools. This statement underscores the depth of racial denial and the challenges of institutional accountability. At the same time, Korea continues to experience significant social and political upheavals, including the legacy of martial law, the impeachment and imprisonment of elected presidents, and labor unrest at Hyundai factories. These developments highlight the ongoing entanglement of education, governance, and national identity. Moreover, the reach of U.S.-based racism informs Korean national identity and the acknowledgement of how Korea understands its positioning as inferior on a global scale, positioned as proximate to whiteness yet superior to Blackness (Stohry et al. 2021).

This demographic and cultural shift highlights the urgency of rethinking education not only as a site of civic resistance but also as a field where racialized national identity is contested. Critical race theory, though originating in the U.S., offers a valuable lens for examining how Korean education regulates and racializes bodies within a national project that historically privileged ethnic homogeneity. Emerging scholarship demonstrates the relevance of CRT in South Korea, from studies of Black educators’ experiences to analyses of “multicultural students” (N. Y. Kim 2022), race consciousness (Lee and Yoon 2020), and doctoral student awareness of racialized hierarchies (Qiu and Cheng 2023). Applying CRT in the Korean context exposes how educational structures reproduce systemic inequities and offers strategies for amplifying marginalized voices within schools.

The Korean case demonstrates how the state has reproduced a national identity centered on a ‘single ethnic group’ through education and state institutions, and how student and citizen resistance has disrupted this process. For a long time, South Korea has defined itself as a ‘single ethnic nation’ that marginalizes multicultural groups, immigrants, and non-Korean others, or accepts them only conditionally. However, student movements and civic resistance have repeatedly challenged this nationalist definition of citizenship. The Yellow Ribbon Movement that emerged after the Sewol ferry disaster asserted the right to safety and life, attempting to shift national identity from one of state loyalty to a community of care and responsibility. Even now, actions like the medical student strike demonstrate a new form of resistance, where professional groups challenge state policy and actively participate in constructing national identity.

Amidst a global multicultural transition, South Korean society is entering a new phase of racialization. Despite a surge in students from multicultural families, they remain targets for assimilation under the banner of multiculturalism. This is not merely an educational issue but reveals the racialized hierarchy inherent in the definition of citizenship. In South Korea, CRT must be reconfigured beyond educational theory into a tool for critiquing racialized national identities. Thus, South Korea can be read as a global case study of how people challenge a nation defined by a single ethnicity and work toward a more diverse, multicultural sense of national identity.

4.2. Race, Education, and National Formation in Iran: Constructing and Contesting Belonging

Racial formation in Iran is deeply intertwined with educational processes that delineate who is imagined as part of the national community and who is marginalized, a dynamic rooted in the Persian-centric nationalist ideologies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that continue to shape cultural hierarchies and state narratives of belonging (Mohammadpour 2024b). Following Omi and Winant’s (2014) conceptualization, racial formation involves the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed. In the Iranian context, racial formation unfolds not through explicit racial laws or overt biological discourses, as often seen in the Global North, but through intertwined systems of nationalism, religion, and language embedded within education, structures that sustain Persian and Shia-centric hierarchies and render non-Persian communities as conditional citizens within their own homeland (Mohammadpour 2025). Schools, curricula, and examinations serve as instruments through which the state delineates moral and cultural boundaries, marking Persian, Shi’a, heteronormative, and middle-class identities as the normative center of the nation (Hassanpour et al. 2023). In doing so, education naturalizes hierarchies among ethnic, religious and linguistic groups, reproducing the illusion of cultural homogeneity while erasing difference (Hassanpour 2022; Hamidi 2023).

Although race is rarely explicitly discussed in Iranian scholarship, concepts such as ethnicity and culture often stand in for racial differences (Kashani-Sabet 2019). To grasp this process, race must be reframed not as a biological category but as a sociohistorical construct through which cultural, linguistic, and moral distinctions are racialized within Iran’s nationalist and educational discourses (Mohammadpour 2024b; Mohammadpour 2025). Alongside the culturalization of race, Iranian racial identity formation is also shaped through nationalist and nativist discourses that mobilize mythic narratives of civilizational endurance and perpetual threat. As Mirfakhraie (2008) shows, school textbooks consistently draw on themes of external enemies and heroic self-defense to articulate who counts as a legitimate member of the nation. These narratives intensify during moments of geopolitical crisis, most prominently the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), which is framed not simply as a military conflict but as a moral struggle between a righteous Iranian Self and an illegitimate, invading Other. Through depictions of martyrdom, sacrifice, and divine protection, textbooks elevate Iranian fighters as guardians of a sacred homeland while portraying Iraqis, often implicitly racialized as Arab, foreign, and morally suspect, as agents of aggression shaped by outside forces. This binary representation reinforces a nativist ideology in which Persianness, Shi’a devotion, and national loyalty form the normative center of Iranian identity, while Arabness is cast as threatening, inferior, or incompatible with the national body. By embedding the war within a broader narrative of Iran as a besieged but enduring civilization, the curriculum strengthens a racialized sense of collective belonging and legitimizes state projects that define inclusion and exclusion through both cultural and moral hierarchies. In doing so, the Iran–Iraq War becomes a key racializing project within schooling, one that naturalizes boundary-making, reifies Persian Exceptionalism, and situates Iranian identity within a story of continual defense against hostile Others (Mirfakhraie 2008). This “culturalization of race” (Goldberg 2009) manifests through curricular narratives that privilege Persian language and history while relegating Kurdish, Baluchi, Arab, Lur, and Turkmen identities to peripheral or folkloric status (Ahmadrash and Mostafazadeh 2019; Sepehri 2011).

Persian Exceptionalism refers to a nationalist ideology that positions Persian language, culture, and ancestry as the normative core of Iranian identity, framing Persianness as the primary marker of civility, modernity, and national loyalty (Mojdehi 2019; Kashani-Sabet 2019). Rooted in early twentieth-century state-building efforts, this discourse drew upon the Aryan myth to construct Iranians, specifically Persian Iranians, as a distinct civilizational lineage with imagined proximity to European whiteness (Baghoolizadeh 2018). This narrative elevated pre-Islamic Persian empires as the symbolic origin of national greatness while obscuring Iran’s histories of racial diversity, slavery, and Afro-Iranian presence (Baghoolizadeh 2018). Through this historical reframing, difference became recoded as deviation from the national norm: non-Persian ethnic groups, darker-skinned populations, and regional or religious minorities were positioned as culturally less modern, folkloric, or peripheral to the nation (Kashani-Sabet 2019; Mojdehi 2019).

Within education, Persian Exceptionalism functions as a racial project that organizes belonging and exclusion through curricular narratives, language policies, and moral regulation (Omi and Winant 2014). History textbooks center Persian heritage as the civilizational benchmark while marginalizing Kurdish, Baluchi, Arab, Lur, Turkmen, and Afro-Iranian histories or representing these communities as passive recipients of Persian leadership (Soltan Zadeh 2012; Hassanpour et al. 2023). Persian becomes the sole legitimate language of intellectual and civic life, while Indigenous languages and dialects are excluded from schooling, limiting epistemic participation for minoritized students (Ahmadrash and Mostafazadeh 2019). Although framed through a discourse of cultural unity and meritocracy, these practices reproduce racialized hierarchies that privilege proximity to Persianness, often correlated with urban status, linguistic fluency, and lighter skin, while masking inequality beneath claims of raceless nationalism (Mojdehi 2019; Kashani-Sabet 2019). In this way, Persian Exceptionalism sustains a system of “color-evasiveness,” where racial power operates through culture rather than biological race, normalizing hierarchy while denying its racial foundations (Annamma et al. 2017). These practices produce what Omi and Winant (2014) call racial projects, where state institutions organize social differences through symbolic and material means. Drawing on theories of global white supremacy (Mills 1997; Leonardo 2009), Iran’s educational structure mirrors transnational hierarchies of power that privilege proximity to whiteness, rationality, and dominance, locally reconfigured through Persian exceptionalism and the Aryan myth (Mojdehi 2019; Baghoolizadeh 2018).

Drawing on Bonilla-Silva’s (2006) theory of racialized social systems, the Iranian case illustrates how education sustains a structure of racial meanings without explicit racial discourse. Bonilla-Silva’s notion of color-blind racism, the denial of racialized power while reproducing inequality through cultural or moral explanations, echoes in Iranian education’s emphasis on national unity and meritocracy. By claiming cultural sameness through Persianization, the state masks deep racialized hierarchies that privilege Persian-speaking, urban, and lighter-skinned populations. This form of “Persian color-evasiveness” parallels global practices of color-blind racism (Annamma et al. 2017), legitimizing inequality while disavowing the existence of race itself. Through these intertwined dynamics, Iran’s educational system mirrors what Mills (1997) terms the racial contract, an epistemology that normalizes exclusion while presenting itself as universal. Iranian racial formation thus draws upon both local and transnational ideologies, including global white supremacy and colonial notions of Aryan superiority (Mojdehi 2019; Baghoolizadeh 2018). The myth of Persian exceptionalism situates Iranians as culturally superior yet racially ambiguous, positioned between proximity to whiteness and distance from Blackness. This dual positioning reinforces the illusion of a raceless nation, where racial meanings are displaced onto culture, class, and morality, producing an internalized hierarchy of belonging.

Education thus functions simultaneously as a technology of governance and a site of exclusion. As Giroux (2010) reminds us, schools are ideological apparatuses that both reproduce and legitimize dominant power relations. Understanding education in Iran requires situating it within broader processes of internal colonialism and epistemic violence. Through Persian-language instruction and nationalist curricula, schools reproduce a racialized order of knowledge that defines who belongs to the nation, erases non-Persian histories, and normalizes the subjugation of minoritized bodies and epistemologies (Mohammadpour 2024a; Mohammadpour and Soleimani 2022). In Iran, the policing of women’s bodies, languages, and behaviors reflects intertwined systems of racialized nationalism and patriarchal control. Ethnic minority and working-class women face intensified surveillance through dress, language, and moral expectations that reproduce Persian and Shia norms as the standard of national purity and femininity (Mohammadpour 2024a). The disciplining of women bodies through mandatory hejab, for example, and the suppression of regional dialects within classrooms reveal how educational institutions regulate identity performance (Ahmadrash and Mostafazadeh 2019). Through these mechanisms, the state exercises biopolitical control (Foucault 2012), shaping not only what students learn but how they inhabit and display their identities.

Yet racial formation is never static; it is continuously negotiated and contested. Drawing from Critical Race Theory (CRT) and intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991; Bell 1992), in Iran resistance emerges in everyday acts of refusal and counter-storytelling to disrupt stereotypes like Aryan myth and Persian Exceptionalism). Educators and students who challenge official narratives of Persian centrality or who question the erasure of ethnic diversity participate in what Delgado and Stefancic (2017) describe as counter-narrative praxis. Such acts of intellectual and pedagogical resistance demonstrate that education in Iran is not merely a tool of state domination but also a contested terrain of meaning-making, where marginalized communities and scholars challenge Persian-centric narratives and reclaim silenced epistemologies (Mohammadpour 2024b; Mohammadpour and Soleimani 2022; Mohammadpour 2025). Movements such as Woman, Life, Freedom (Zan, Zendegi, Azadi; زن، زندگی، آزادی) back in September 2022, exemplify this resistance, where women, students, and ethnic minorities mobilized educational literacies to rearticulate national belonging through an intersectional lens linking gender, ethnicity, class, and religion (Hamidi 2023). These protests, slogans, and cultural productions became living curricula, embodied pedagogies of freedom that disrupted patriarchal and racialized hierarchies within Iranian society and connected them to broader global struggles against systemic oppression.

By situating education within a global racial framework, it becomes evident that Iran’s schooling system is not isolated from transnational power relations but participates in them. Through the reproduction of hierarchies prioritizing lightness, urbanity, and Persianness, Iranian education echoes the logics of racial capitalism and global white supremacy (Leonardo 2009; Mills 1997). However, the same educational spaces that reinforce these hierarchies can also cultivate critical consciousness (Freire 2009; Au 2012). Highlighting how CRT in Iranian pedagogy represents a transformative rather than reformist project, this approach centers critical agency, disrupts color-evasiveness, and acknowledges intersectional experiences of oppression (Hamidi 2023). Ultimately, the racial formation of Iran, as mediated through education, illustrates the dual role of schooling as both an instrument of hegemony and a site of potential liberation. By foregrounding critical agency and human dignity as foundations of belonging, Iranian educators and students can transform education into a space of resistance, solidarity, and reimagination.

5. Comparative Analysis: South Korea and Iran

This study explored how the nation is racially and culturally formed through education and how bodies are positioned, regulated, and resisted within the production of national identity. In both Iran and South Korea, state power seeks to institutionalize and protect a specific national image, while citizens and students resist through attempts to reconfigure multiracial, multicultural, and multigendered national identities. Each nation reveals a distinct but interconnected racial formation. These formations are contested by marginalized groups in each context, including South Korea a mono-ethnic national identity, and Iran, a Persian Shia centered Islamic national identity. In each case, state institutions, particularly schools, function as key mechanisms for reproducing these identities. At the same time, these systems produce distinct forms of racial experiences that students must navigate in their daily lives at school.

Yet, marginalized groups contest these narratives. Students, citizens, social movement organizations, and diasporic intellectuals challenged the state-defined national identity and proposed new imaginaries of citizenship. The Candlelight and Sewol Ferry movements in South Korea, and the Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement in Iran exemplify how citizens and students resist state-defined notions of nationhood and propose multiracial, multicultural, and multigendered reconfigurations of belonging.

Across these cases, Critical Race Theory (CRT), combined with an intersectional lens, provides a crucial analytic framework. While CRT originated in the U.S., its insights into the workings of race, power, and state control resonate globally when interpreted through local histories and epistemologies. In Iran and South Korea, CRT functions as a strategic tool beyond the educational sphere, analyzing state power and national justice while exposing structural inequality. Both countries attempt to reconfigure state-defined hierarchies through education and social movements: South Korea through multicultural education initiatives, youth activism, and feminist movements; Iran through feminist, ethnic, and labor activism within and outside educational institutions. In both cases can be read as implicitly engaging with the insights of CRT to analyze state power and the definition of national identity, employing it as a strategic tool for resistance. This allows us to understand the tension between the racialized national identity produced by the state and the resistance of citizens/marginalized subjects from a global perspective. Thus, a global critical race emerges not as a universalized or exported theory of race but rather as a critical framework capable of exposing racial domination and illuminating how local articulations of race sustain global white supremacy.

In Iran, education has long been central to shaping the national imaginary and reproducing Persian-centric hierarchies. School curricula, media representations, and historical narratives collectively naturalize Persian identity as the normative national form, marginalizing ethnic minorities such as Kurds, Baluch, Arabs, and Afro-Iranians (Baghoolizadeh 2018; Mojdehi 2019). These racialized logics intersect with gender and class, creating layered exclusions that shape access to education and social mobility. At the same time, Iranian educators, students, and activists engage in acts of resistance that challenge these hierarchies. The WLF movement, for instance, illuminates how opposition to gendered oppression intersects with broader struggles against racialized and class-based marginalization (Hamidi 2023). Educational spaces, formal classrooms, study groups, and digital platforms, become arenas where alternative knowledge is produced and solidarity across ethnic and gendered lines is fostered. These dynamics show how racial hierarchies in Iran are both locally specific and connected to global structures of racial capitalism and white supremacy.

South Korea presents a parallel yet distinct configuration of racialization and national identity. The ideology of 단일 danil minjok (single-blooded nation) historically underpins Korean identity, positing ethnic homogeneity as central to modernity. Education reproduces this ideology, valorizing meritocracy, conformity, and civic discipline while subtly positioning whiteness and Westernization as aspirational markers of progress. Migrant, mixed-race, and foreign-born populations are marginalized through curricular and social norms, reflecting how racial hierarchies operate implicitly. Resistance in South Korea emerges through youth activism, feminist organizing, and advocacy for multicultural education, which challenge the contradictions between national homogeneity and a diversifying society. Educators integrating anti-racist perspectives encounter structural and cultural barriers, yet they demonstrate how schooling can serve as a site of critical consciousness and intersectional justice.

By situating Iran and South Korea within a Global CRT framework, we can see how local educational institutions serve as both instruments of state power and sites of resistance. In Iran, schools and curricula reproduce Persian-Shi’a hierarchies while marginalizing ethnic minorities and shaping gendered and classed access to knowledge and citizenship. Yet, movements such as Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) demonstrate how activists, educators, and students contest these hierarchies, creating spaces for alternative knowledge and collective solidarity. Similarly, in South Korea, the ideology of 단일 danil minjok is reinforced through education, valorizing ethnic homogeneity and meritocratic ideals while marginalizing migrant and mixed-race populations. Grassroots movements, youth-led activism, and multicultural education initiatives challenge these exclusionary narratives, revealing the potential of schooling as a terrain for critical consciousness and intersectional justice.

Together, these cases illustrate that racialization is neither solely local nor a unidirectional export of Western racial logic. Instead, hierarchies of belonging are continuously produced and contested within global circuits of power, including white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and coloniality (Aronson and Stohry 2023). These cases from Korea and Iran expand on global CRT by showing that racialization operates beyond Western legal categories and remains embedded in social and educational hierarchies. They reveal how race experiences and emerges through language, religion, and national origin. These cases establish education as a critical arena where global racial power is both perpetuated and challenged, thereby strengthening the position of Global CRT as a framework capable of analyzing the varied regional constructions of race. Education becomes a central mechanism through which national identity is articulated, reproduced, and reimagined, and bodies, racialized, gendered, and classed, serve as both instruments and sites of this process. Applying Global CRT in Iran and South Korea enables us to trace the intersections of race, nation, and power, highlighting the ways in which resistance emerges locally while engaging with broader global structures. This lens underscores that challenging racialized and exclusionary national imaginaries requires attention to both context-specific hierarchies and their entanglement with global power dynamics.

Ultimately, education in Iran and South Korea, as we argue, is never merely a local institution. It is a global mechanism of racial governance, yet simultaneously a site where resistance, solidarity, and epistemic transformation can occur. Our article demonstrates how education is a key site through which racialized national identities are produced, contested, and reimagined. Through schooling, knowledge production, and citizenship formation, states determine who belongs, whose knowledge counts, and which bodies are rendered visible or excluded. A globalized, intersectional CRT allows us to see how national projects of identity formation are fundamentally connected through shared structures of racial power. Recognizing these connections compels us to expand CRT beyond its U.S. origins not to universalize it, but to pluralize its application. Only by situating race within global circuits of power can we dismantle the intertwined systems of nationalism, coloniality, and white supremacy that continue to shape our educational and political worlds.

To understand these processes, we need an analytic framework that can reveal how race, nation, and power intersect beyond local boundaries. CRT offers a vital analytic framework for understanding global racial dynamics, moving beyond a purely local context. The concept of race is always contextual, yet a global structure of white supremacy, coloniality, and modernity entangles nations worldwide. Global CRT foregrounds racialized experiences as the primary site of racial operation in contexts without official racial classifications. By applying CRT, we can articulate the specific racial formations within South Korea, and Iran while simultaneously revealing their shared involvement in these global systems of power. This expands CRT past the U.S. projection of race, challenging its ethnocentric binary mentality of race (which is a function of white supremacy culture) and acknowledges specifics of sociocultural, historical, and global contexts. Intersectionality lens highlights both shared and context-specific dynamics in South Korea, and Iran, showing that race is always contextual, education functions as a national and social project through which certain groups may become racialized, bodies serve as sites of curricular and social regulation, and that a Global CRT cannot be reduced to a universal theory of race. It analyzes regional racialization beyond American-centered perspectives and further reinforces that education is a genealogical site of inquiry.

Ultimately, the body is a contested terrain of national regulation and global circulation. In various contexts, racialized, gendered, and classed bodies become symbolic representations and actual targets in the construction of national identity. Critical race theory (CRT), especially when combined with intersectionality, is crucial for showing how these targeted bodies resist, reframe, and reimagine the very notion of belonging. Instead, it seeks to utilize the analytic capacity of CRT to expose racial domination and the functions of state control. This capacity must be reinterpreted through the unique local histories and onto-epistemologies of each context. It is imperative that we see that the insidiousness of context-specific racism and global white supremacy depend on our local-specific conceptions of race to maintain our globalized subjugation for true systemic change to even be possible.