More than race? Mills, ethnicity, and education

Abstract

Building on the careful racial analyses of Charles W. Mills, this article uses the example case of Black ethnics to illustrate the general plausibility of ethnic identity as a useful political analytic category, suggesting that the absence of ethnic identity in racial analyses mutes important aspects of the lived experiences of racialized persons as individuals and in aggregation. The article establishes the possibility of ethnicity as an identity modifier, providing additional specificity to racial identity narratives. Building on these positions, the article turns to educational contexts to explore the ways in which ethnicity (as introduced in the preceding sections) stands to offer additional specificity to justice-oriented analyses of educational policy and practice.