Review Reports - 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

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is an ambitious article that seeks to theorize how to apply CRT's insights related to education beyond the United States. It is exciting to think about CRT in relation to other national histories! The piece has a lot of potential to influence both theoretical discussions of CRT and its practical application in a number of countries. I do believe that the article would benefit from revision prior to publication. (As an Americanist, I can only offer some general comments about the piece's discussion of Korea's and Iran's educational systems.)

Some more significant concerns that must be addressed:

The more I read of this piece, the more I wondered if what the piece was really arguing how to re-imagine CRT through the lens of caste as way to globalize the theory. As the authors point out, race is an imperfect fit for many nations. Caste, coming from anthropology (and Wilkerson's book), might offer a more nuanced way to capture how racialization is a way of producing caste in the United States (rather than seeking to transform other caste-like differences into race). The other benefit of caste as a theoretical underpinning is that the concept already has a certain amount of intersectionality within it. (At some points, the article reads like intersectionality is not already a part of CRT). The question I am still thinking about is whether there is a "global caste system" and how it is constructed. (This would be the analogy for "global white supremacy") in the article. A global caste system could explain how different configurations of ethnicity, class, religion, ability, etc. work to place folks in a global hierarchy.
The piece uses both the "state" and the "nation." This grows confusing as the states largely control education in the U.S. but not in other countries. These words are not exact synonyms. While all this seems to matter is that some states in the US have been much more active in suppressing CRT than others. The Federal government has also played a role. It also entirely omits the role of publishers and the "free market" in shaping the content and goals of the educational system. This piece does not capture piecework nature of the ideological battle within countries. At least for the US, it seems to oversimplify the forces that shape educational policy and practice.
the paper could go further in explaining why the authors selected the countries they did to focus on. As the article currently reads, it seems somewhat random or idiosyncratic when I think it may be quite purposeful and smart.
It seemed to this reader like the discussions of resistance and the construction of subjects and bodies was drawn more from Foucault than Bourdieu, with a far amount of Althusser's concept of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) thrown in. There is a lot of talk of surveillance which tracks more with Foucault and Althusser than Bourdieu.In other words, the paper seems to arguing that the more people try to use the education system to enforce a single national identity and narrative, the more resistance it will generate as the ideological contradictions and falsehoods will reveal themselves. The challenge for both students and teachers though is to find the cracks in that mono-narrative. I think many readers of this piece will want more strategies about finding those cracks. Using the three case studies to highlight the various cracks would be helpful.
I don't understand line 653 that claims education is a global racial project. At its most expansive, I think educators, politicians, and parents might say education is about creating national citizens. They might focus more on helping kids succeed in the economy. That seems like a pretty big claim and one that would be a shock to many participants in education. It doesn't make it wrong, just needs to be explained more fully and demonstrates through concrete examples. Once again, I wonder if the idea of caste is better and more accurate in how education systems tend to seek to funnel students in a caste system, which relies on intersectionality.
I was not a big fan of the idea of "Global CRT" because CRT, in its name, focuses more on race than on other axes of difference that shape the global hierarchy of people.

Some smaller issues or questions.

I was confused by the references to "our project" in the first paragraph. It wasn't clear what the project was or how this specific article fit within the broader research trajectory. I am not sure if the reference to the broader project is necessary.
It seems like more evidence was needed to support the case of the globalization of anti-CRT political activity if the piece wants to focus on that. I am not sure though it really matters to the larger point about how CRT's main ideas could be applied to the world under the rubric of caste.
I was intrigued by the idea of globalizing Charles Mills' "racial contract" but it seemed like the subject of another article or essay. The idea of the racial contract would need to be explained further and then mapped against some the world racial system.
Something is missing, I think, from lines 426-429
capitalize Critical on line 479
It seems like the essay would benefit from a few examples of how to move CRT beyond education in Korea and explain what that reconfigured national identity would be.
Line 526 should be revised.
The section on Iran seems brief and lacks the specificity of the other sections. Add more, perhaps, about Persian exceptionalism.
I think the bibliography cites the same Crenshaw article twice. The piece uses the term intersectionality a lot, but does not give many specific examples of how it describes how educational systems are allowing certain groups to fall in between the cracks.

This is going to be a very good article and look forward to seeing a revised version.

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript. Please find the detailed responses below and the corresponding revisions/corrections highlighted/in track changes in the re-submitted files. Below, we provide a point-by-point response.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Review of 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

There is much good quality in this manuscript, the set-up is promising, and I want to recommend it for publication with some revisions.

(four authors, three with roots in the Global South, but only two countries are mentioned. This is unclear)

My overall concern is the overwhelming use of mega-general categories throughout the manuscript. CRT, education, black, white, white supremacism and Confucian tradition. They lack simple explanation.

I want to praise authors for the awareness of not automatic extending the USA-based theories on racism onto the Global South. This gives me hope for the authors in the future. However, that said, it needs to be more carefully addressed – and shown. With these reservations, authors still take all the analytical and theoretical baggage from US context and apply them to the non-Western cases – precisely what they warned about earlier.

Omi and Winant claims racism is a master narrative of American history. The US historical trajectory is unique, still they themselves project this on to the rest of the world, but without having research to back it up. Most racism researchers criticize the black-white binary opposition so long prevailing in North America. The categories of black and white are not. Are Cajun’s white? Italians were considered people of color until at certain point in history, when they changed legally to white. These two categories must be addressed by authors in some problematizing depth. Each have histories

Not until the Korean case are we told about the social construction of the concept of race, which moves white and black from biology to ideology – if racism was ever about biology and phenotypes. The social construction view has rightfully been criticized, see Jada Benn Torres on “Racial Experience”, which may be relevant for author’s more general project.

Authors need to address the usefulness and limitation of using “black” and “white” in Korea and Iran. Likewise, it is not obvious to use global white supremacism in that regard. Authors use this early on.

Authors find it difficult to identify clear uses of race in Korea (and Iran). On the one hand, they turn to ethnicity rather than race but does so without discussing it. On the other hand, authors decide to use Bonilla-Silva from a US context to explain this as color-blindness. These issues need to be dealt with in some depth.

Authors move rhetorically from USA to Global South ignoring intra Euro-American differences and different racism scholarship. US is part of the Global North, but it is not equal to the Global North. Many European racism scholars and historians regard (neo)nationalism as a master narrative rather than race. Racism needs a vehicle; nationalism is that vehicle. Moreover, and do not misread this, the primary goal of exerting racism is seldom, because technically amd historically it was the quest and creed for cheap or free labor that made racism explode. Not the other way around. Today, we do see racism begins to take an independent life of its own. Anti-Asian racism to name one. Ref for this could be Deepa Kumar.

Schools are the nation’s local agent, almost everywhere. (Exception not mentioned: private schools). In the coverage of Korea and Iran nationalism, the nation-in-danger, the enforcement of the nation-state and its interests is all over the place. But authors seem to have engaged themselves to US theories straitjacketing them on to the case studies. That hurts. While there are references to local scholars and maybe some scholarship on Korea and Iran, the important (even ‘superior’ sources as chosen by authors) ones are not local.

Korea: for comparison reasons. The idea of the soul – build up through millennia – and the “lack” of a soul in a young state like US. Unlike, what is written in the manuscript, there is also a great sense of superiority in the national self-understanding and national pride, right?

Also, for Korea, my sense is that the even if the student movements are influential, it is still opposed to the nation-state, which is bigger and stronger. It is perfectly possible to co-exist and have influence, but isn’t the student movement’s influence exaggerated in the manuscript?

Iran: I am missing part of the nationalist or nativist ideology. On occasions when Iran has been most pressure, the origin of an ancient Islamic myth from the earliest days is evoked and re-used in modern times: the US as the Great Satan (Khomeini). This nationalist card is an efficient mean to garner support even seeing Iran as lone and the whole world being against, like the historical myth.

One of the biggest identity clashes was instated from above: the protracted inter-religious was between Iran and Iraq 1980-1988. How is this taught in schools? You may argue it is unimportant, but the scale seems to impose its will on the project.

Authors write about an different phase of their project, where intersectionality was used at the individual level of experience. However, this level is not really playing a role in the manuscript but intersectionality still appears ‘as if’ it is being used. Like CRT it is still present, and assigned a role, but readers do not see what how you work CRT after being employed and on the ground.

Personally, I would rework the manuscript for two tasks. First edit out some redundancy, repeating what is found or will be shown again and again. Instead, of over-relying on the analytical concepts, let the case studies speak on their own terms and see where it leads. ONCE this is done, you will have a neat bases for an informed discussion about the employability of terms like black, white, supremacism and so on.

Logic: Once we see the local cases we can begin to ask theoretical question: is this white supremacism – and part of a global white system, how is it not, is their local supremacism, is it nationalist bases, racist based or other?

Author Response

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I like this revise version a lot better. The paper's effort to explain how racialization operates in South Korea and Iran addresses my main concern that the paper was undertheorized in its discussion of race. While I still wonder if the paper's approach to CRT is stretching the U.S's emphasis on race too far, the authors now specify the mechanics and content of racialization in other countries. The paper provides a compelling argument for a global CRT.

I also appreciate the effort to respond to the rest of my feedback.