Historically, the idea has been promoted that racism is more related to individual actions than to laws, regulations, protocols, or bureaucratic procedures. This open educational resource, designed to be adaptable to various educational levels, invites a broad and systemic approach to racism, breaking with the narrow conception that limits it to individual acts or moral problems. The aim of this resource is to contribute to a structural understanding of the phenomenon and to provide tools to combat it through education.
The toolkit is organised into ten thematic areas that explore how structural racism operates in everyday life, creating ongoing obstacles and harm for certain people and profoundly affecting their access to rights, work, health and education.
Each section of this resource offers teachers conceptual tools, concrete examples and practical activities to bring critical reflection on racism into the classroom. The activities are designed to be used from secondary school to university and include research tasks, mapping, analysis of fictional or real cases and guided debates. Teachers are encouraged to adapt the activities and vocabulary to the level of the group they are working with. The aim is not to point out racist opinions in the classroom, but to dismantle a narrow view of racism by providing theoretical and practical tools for students to develop a critical view of structural inequality.
The ten themes that make up the resource are:
- Structural racism: understood as a series of institutionalised mechanisms that continuously disadvantage people of ‘other’ ethnicities, religions, origins or skin colours. This theme is introduced through Cristina Piffer’s work 300 actas, which exposes the structural violence of a system of classification and identity erasure.
- Institutional racism: considered the fundamental force of structural racism, it manifests itself through policies, norms and procedures incorporated into the functioning of institutions, which disproportionately affect certain groups. Priscila Rezende’s performance Laços helps to visualise the symbolic and material violence inscribed on racialised bodies.
- Epistemic racism: addresses the question of what is meant by knowledge and how it is constructed, pointing to the fact that Western thought has established itself as the only legitimate tradition capable of producing universal, objective and neutral knowledge. Salmi López Valbuena’s illustration connects memory, resistance and intergenerational transmission.
- Hidden rationalities of racism: examines the normalisation of racism in common sense, which is hidden under arguments considered rational (such as political-legal discourses) to avoid its racial nature. The Library of Missing Datasets, by Mimi Ọnụọha, proposes a reflection on information gaps that are not neutral.
- Multiple borders: analyses borders not only as rigid walls, but as a complex set of practices that operate both outside and inside nation states, functioning as key technologies of differential inclusion and the production of inequality. The installation Something to Hold Onto honours the migrants who have lost their lives on routes interrupted by border control.
- Racial capitalism: argues that capitalist development cannot be understood without colonialism, with racism being a foundational element that intensified racial hierarchies to make the exploitation and accumulation of capital more efficient. Marilyn Boror’s performance Living Monument denounces extractivism and structural violence.
- Intersecting oppressions: addresses how the intersection of systems of domination (race, gender, class) generates specific and contextualised situations of oppression, following the reflections of black feminism and intersectional theory. Estudio de color (Study of Colour) by Adriana Tomatis reflects on the invisible hierarchies that traverse class, race and gender relations.
- Digital racism: analyses how contemporary racism manifests, reproduces and amplifies itself through digital technologies, such as algorithms, databases and artificial intelligence. Digital racism is not limited to hate speech on social media, but constitutes a structural logic that participates in the production and management of racial inequalities. Technology, falsely presented as ‘objective’ or ‘neutral’, renders the built-in racial bias invisible. This theme is introduced with My Word, by Carme Puche Moré, an audiovisual project that highlights the ideological biases produced and reproduced by artificial intelligence.
- Racialisation of educational exclusion: examines the trajectories of school expulsion, where the hidden curriculum or low expectations of certain students normalise marginalisation. This theme is introduced with the animation A World of Difference, created by the feminist independent film collective Leeds Animation Workshop.
- Critical anti-racist pedagogies: proposes to reconfigure education, valuing difference as a political and epistemic force capable of transforming the classroom into a community. A culturally relevant pedagogy must start from the lived experiences of students and directly confront power structures. This requires politicising the classroom and naming structural racism as an act of epistemic and pedagogical disobedience. Ana Cebrián’s installation Afro in progress denounces the silencing of Black communities in formal education, highlighting the urgent need to build collective memory.