‘Race had never been an issue’: examining white supremacy in English language teaching

This paper explores the ways in which white monolingual and monocultural English teachers articulate racial issues and conceptualise the racial identities of multiply-marginalised students in the classroom context. Drawing on the work of Charles Mills, this contribution aligns with an understanding of white supremacy as a means to historically dispossess, assimilate, and eliminate negatively racialized and language- minoritized communities, through mechanisms of Western settler-colonial hegemony and English language teaching. The authors present a qualitative case study of discursive practices of white English language educators who, despite their intentions to be inclusive, often (re)produce white supremacist values, language, and knowledges. Finally, this paper supports a more critical approach to the field of English language teaching, which recognizes and contends with whiteness and white supremacy in the co-construction of negatively-racialized and language-minoritized identities.