Guest editorial: Thickening solidarities through dialogue: the role of languaging on intracultural discourses of racialization Free

Discussing race in multicultural education/research, though important, has in many ways displaced discussions of cultural specificity. This editorial provides an overview of the special issue entitled, “Thickening Solidarities through Dialogue: The role of languaging on intracultural discourses of racialization.” It further outlines the value in recognizing cultural nuance within racialized groups on the road to enduring solidarities across and among them.

To celebrate Kwanzaa one year, we came together as a group of Black families alongside the local community, in support of a local Black bookstore while filling our coffers with new literature for the year to come. For Ujamaa, or the day during the weeklong cultural holiday in which we pay special attention to cooperative economics, a Jamaican scholar kicked off the bookstore convening by elucidating her gratitude to Black Americans for making the path tenable for her and her family as im(migrants) before launching into her research and book which was available for purchase.

This sister’s decision to honor Black Americans left me speechless. It was disarming – and interestingly enough, alerted me to the fact that I was, in fact, defensive in the first place. This statement was a foundational recognition that all liberties racially minoritized and otherwise marginalized folks have in the USA have been won on the backs of Black Americans. As a boiler plate recognition (which I noted based on this Jamaican scholar’s tone of voice and the fluidity with which the statement rolled off her tongue) and particularly one offered without prompting, it shifted the entire room and conversation that followed. It spoke directly to intraracial tensions that remain unspoken in front of company and diffused colonial and imperial boundaries represented by citizenship status and linguistic hierarchies (among other tools of division). These selfsame tools are acutely on display particularly within today’s political landscape.

Through this framing, those cultural distinctions among the Afrodescended were placed in earnest conversation making way for a depth of solidarity among groups racialized as Black. By reaching deep into her unique positionality as a Jamaican American, this sister reached across the African diaspora in a powerful way, to Black Americans and beyond to create meaningful dialogue. – Author 2’s Reflection

In 2025, for the first time, I visited both the village in China (father) and the city in Taiwan (mother) where my parents grew up before migrating to the USA in the 1960s. As a child of diaspora, in talking with transnational migrant (first generation immigrant) friends, I was often asked why it took me 47 years to visit the birthplaces of my parents. As an Asian American, people came to understand and empathize with the choice to distance myself from my ancestral homelands, partly out of shame at a lack of greater knowledge about the contexts of my parents’ migration and the loss of my own heritage languages which (could have) provided roots to these distant lands; additionally, out of fear that I would be rejected by my heritage communities, for my lack of language and for not being Asian enough; and finally, due to concern that the conditional and tenuous acceptance I had worked so hard to try to find in my own national and cultural contexts in the USA would not be understood or contribute in a Chinese and Taiwanese context. When I began talking about these things in community, I started multiple overlapping journeys to discover a greater sense of my identity, my ancestors and my place in diaspora.

What I found in my journeys was the importance of cross-diasporic connections, nuance, openness and community. The clearer I became about my identity and place in diaspora, in who I was as Taiwanese American (with Chinese cultural roots), the more I could engage with my colleagues on both sides of the Pacific and both sides of ongoing transnational tensions which are often erased in American consciousness. I also came to recognize that the more I could understand about what structural invisibilization, deficit positioning and erasure had cost me, the better I could do my work as a multicultural educator and come alongside other communities in solidarity work. – Author 1’s Reflection

As humans, chosen family, mothers and scholars, with deeply held shared commitments, we came to this special issue as co-editors, in community and grounded in our own deep relationality, seeking to confront cultural essentialism and highlight the ways in which diversity within racialized groups has been erased within a white supremacist global context. We did this to address with loving critique specific criticisms faced by multicultural education, including its tendency to homogenize dissimilarities between and among groups, and prioritizing race as a unifying force in lieu of culture as evolving experiences. Both of these tendencies result in overlooked histories and cultural particularities which humanize those within minoritized groups. Granted, racialization within a US context predominates in structural and systemic issues of inequity particularly in education. Nevertheless, displacing cultural realities as we have witnessed in favor of racial flattening perpetuates the harms of white supremacy and invisibilizes the humanity of racially minoritized groups. As such, we came to this issue through conversations about reclaiming our cultural selves to uplift dialogue, which grounds action, and so it felt fitting to begin with our parallel reflections, in conversation with one another as we introduce this special issue.

Our goal in bringing together the voices in this special issue was not to say that specific communities have been ignored within multicultural education contexts. Indeed, much multicultural education research has explored particular ethnic, linguistic and racially minoritized communities to indicate nuances of their education journeys and structural impediments to their successes. In fact, according to Banks and Banks (1989), “The first phase of multicultural education emerged when educators who had interests and specializations in the history and culture of ethnic minority groups initiated individual and institutional actions to incorporate the concepts, information, and theories from ethnic studies into the school and teacher-education curricula.” (p. 12). Over time, those ethnic and cultural particularities have ceded space to (rather than been in conversation with) racialized group generalizations which can obscure the nuance initially animating the work. In fact, there is far less research representing intra-group (Asian/Asian American, Black Caribbean/Black American) diversity that explores overlaps and tensions among varied experiences related to languaging and solidarity discourses, and how these unique positionings impact intra-group and intergroup relationality. Dialogic processes that foreground listening, witnessing and relationship-building make this issue unique in centering the humanity of minoritized peoples through their voices and experiences. In this special issue, we do not ignore the construct of race, but rather, we foreground the voices, tensions and cultural realities of those who experience racialization, displacing the dehumanizing impact that race discourses have normalized. Unique cultural groups merit careful and meticulous study in their path-making within ongoing systems of imperially and colonially-imposed scapegoating of subjugated groups that obfuscate the hegemonic powers that rightfully warrant such criticisms. Finally, narratives that engage tensions, surfaced through homogenizing forces of racialization among similarly racialized groups with distinct linguistic and cultural histories, remain superficial. This issue seeks to offer nuanced accounts of intracultural diversity among said groups, creating an opening for deeper interrogation of experiences that often are silenced because there are few spaces to be in conversation around intraracial difference.

Essentialist racialized demographic categorization of minoritized and transnational communities has become increasingly prevalent in this current moment in our shared national context of the USA. The essentialization of racialized groups reifies dehumanizing forms of fracture within, among and between families and racialized communities, and we continue to bear witness to the horrific implications of cultural essentialism that places diasporic communities’ lives in danger and scapegoats them for structural and socio-political mechanisms of control. One clear example of this is in the current targeting of minoritized racial groups in relation to immigration policies. Both through Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids which have been sanctioned to racially (and linguistically) profile “suspected” undocumented immigrants (including US citizens who are “suspect” purely by race, ethnicity or language), and through the introduction of “travel bans” and new visa restrictions and requirements for people from a large number of (African and Asian) Muslim majority countries and subsequently, for highly skilled immigrant workers regardless of national origin; these policies target large cultural groups, dehumanizing their existence and refusing to make space for their stories.

Education has been far from immune to the politics of essentialization. In this time, during which the federal Department of Education is being systematically dismantled, numerous previously awarded grants targeted toward minorized people have been suspended or canceled, including those that provide supports and teacher training for linguistically minoritized children. In addition, the status of degrees largely populated by women and women of color like those within education and counseling, have seen their professional designation revoked setting the stage for employment scarcity, further pay inequity and a loss of student loan and other funding for those who aspire to these fields. With the recent national US election ushering in less federal protection and resources for minoritized learners (and a reversal of previous understandings of the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion) alongside a “free market” approach to education, the inequitable distribution of resources among racially minoritized groups will likely increase. Resources for authentic multicultural and multilingual education are threatened in ways that call for in-depth explorations of historical, existing and possible future solidarities from which bottom-up collective solidarities might be forged (Author 2 and Colleague, 2024).

Acknowledging our present contexts and with a goal of “thickening solidarities” (Liu and Shange, 2018) both across racial and cultural groups, and within them, we present this special issue, a collection of peer-reviewed articles that interrogate intracultural diversity to help us better consider possible futures that build from our collective solidarities. We use this introductory essay to unpack several of the thematic conversations which take place within each article, across articles in regional diaspora groups and across the entire special issue. We then return to the idea of collective solidarity across diaspora and what it means to come from a place of radical diasporic hope in this moment.

Dialogic exchanges among members of the African diaspora open the issue reflecting how generational and class-based distinctions, as well as ethnic and cultural particularities are detrimentally de-centered both driven by and as a response to anti-Black oppression. The papers are authentic and time-bending contributions demonstrating real-time grappling with discourses of and relationships to Blackness that are stubbornly loving, unresolved and ripe for reckoning.

Lakeya Afolalu, Patriann Smith and Author 2 (2026) recast discourses of Blackness across the diaspora in, This is Where We Go: The Quantum Healing Possibilities in Languaging Black Humanity. The facilitated dialogue creates a healing space among the invited scholars and moderator wherein the power of Black art and creation, youth insight and a willingness to confront the harmful, hierarchical and divisive categorizing processes of empire are surfaced and acknowledged. Furthermore, the scholars reveal their own personal journeys of navigating racialization across national, linguistic and various other borders and the wisdom of both youth and elders, which serve as guiding lights in their language and literacy research with Afrodescended communities. Finally, the piece honors the ingenious linguistic practices of Africa/ns and her diaspora through recounting the fugitive languaging Black diasporic peoples have and continue to invoke in the face of systemic oppression (Author 2, 2025). This vulnerable exchange sets a precedent for healing through gathering and honoring the semiotic transmission of ancestral memory among African peoples towards joyful and liberated futures.

Privette (2026) continues this conjuring of communal knowledges with, You Can Trust Me, I Love You: Recovering the Counterstory of Black Language in Education Research, which explores an intergenerational dialogue among Privette’s parents and herself. As a retrospective on her journey toward becoming a speech and language therapist, this work challenges Black education researchers in particular to reinforce their commitments to the beauty and power of Black Language by highlighting the “diversity of educational experiences among Black American students.” Through counterstory, Privette displaces the errant engagement with Black Language as a commodity and reminds readers that it is rather “a place of joy, a source of sustenance, and a method that refuses to silence the truth of our fullness.” Taken together, the two works that begin the special issue draw into focus the ways in which the nuance within Blackness, as manifested through space and time, is precisely where Black humanity thrives, while rejecting the pressure to conform to a racialized standard largely enforced from entities outside of Black diasporic membership.

In representing AfroCaribbean, continental African (specifically Nigerian) and Black American realities across the two works, this section refuses the blanket racialization that has been wielded against the Afrodescended particularly in the USA. For example, rather than affirming president Biden’s assertion that “[u]nlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community,” the two articles highlight how weighty class, linguistic and ethnic/cultural distinctions can be, while directing those invested in multicultural education towards methods and resources that celebrate this intraracial diversity all while strengthening solidarities across the Black diaspora (Barrow, 2020, para. 2).

The next two articles in this special issue focus on nuance related to the complex relationship among Indigeneity, mestizaje and Latinidades. Situating their studies in conversations around these racialized groupings, the authors consider relational solidarities that resist homogenization, which often invisibilizes Indigenous communities, and the violence, displacement and invisibilization enacted against them on their homelands in the Americas.

Méndez (2026) in Against Homogenizing Latinidad and Indigeneity: A Chicana’s Reflexión on Thickening Solidarities, uses autohistoria-teoria and poetic inquiry to consider the “tensions, opportunities, and incommensurabilities of Chicana solidarities with Maya Mam communities.” Méndez considers the importance of nuanced understandings of the racializing force of Latinidad as a means of consciousness-raising among Indigenous “Latinx” communities. Her autohistoria offers reflections on her own journey, as a proud Mexicana-Chicana who comes into relationship with Maya communities in the Central Valley and is confronted by erasure of Indigenous communities on their homelands and histories of government endorsed genocide and land dispossession. Méndez’s contribution locates her as someone who must situate her own privileges (e.g. nationality, language, scholarly), through critical praxis, in ways that allow her to develop thicker solidarities.

In related ways, Erika Garcia and Ymasumac Maranon-Davis (2026) engage in Duoethnographic Platicás: Examining Indigeneity and Mestizaje realities through an Entre Mundos Praxis. They note how explorations of complex mestizaje, indigenous knowledge production within and across communities, highlight onto-axio-epistemological diversity in and across racializations of Latinidad. They challenge blanket terms like “Hispanic” within policy-implicated formations like Hispanic-Serving Institutions, with calls for specificity, asserting the question, “[w]ho’s culture are we sustaining?” Through dialogue, the authors transmute the importance of engaging in “root work” (or deep reflection) to offer concrete recommendations for personal and pedagogical practice, with important implications for multicultural teacher preparation programs.

There is power in refusing to choose. These works compel educators and education researchers to step outside of western conceptions of hierarchy and conceive of abundance where binary discourses would otherwise indicate lack. Whether refusing the limitations of academic parlance and opting for poetic incursions that better depict the unruliness of Latinidades (Méndez, 2026) or deciding to derive empowerment rather than pain from how colonial borders have repeatedly crossed and dissected communities (Garcia and Maranon-Davis, 2026), this section argues for the centrality of trusting in cultural intuition to forge intraracial solidarities.

We wonder about what it means for multicultural education when Asian diasporic people who are a part of the global majority (demographically and geographically) and incredibly diverse, comprising over 2300 cultural and linguistic groups, continue to be essentialized into a few narrow racialized tropes. Asian diasporic peoples experience invisibility and illegibility even within spaces that purport to be inclusive but are too often reductionist, constraining who Asian diasporic people are allowed to be. The four articles and two book reviews in this special issue which focus on people of the Asian diaspora contend with remembering, transposing, finding, understanding, wrestling with and navigating spaces while accessing one’s full humanity. As with the pieces across other diasporas, the voices amplified by these articles push back against essentialization that robs them of their full humanity.

In Norova’s (2026) piece, Exploring Racial Literacies: International Asian students’ Perspectives on Asian Americans, Asian international students wrestle with their own biases toward Asian Americans and clearly distinguish themselves from their Asian American counterparts. At the same time, when given a vignette that illustrated racism against an Asian American woman, all three students identified the racism that occurred and noted that even if Asian Americans considered themselves as “fully American,” they were still racialized or positioned as foreign and victims of “Asian hate.” Norova points to ways that initial dichotomization between their international Asian identities and Asian American people around them, on the part of the three international Asian students, was challenged when the students recognized a shared external positioning within a racialized society, which essentialized all people of the Asian diaspora as the same. Norova offers that shared experiences of marginalization may allow for flickers of intraracial solidarity across immigrant generations for Asian diasporic peoples but notes that Asian international students need more opportunities to develop racialized understandings within a diverse society to challenge their own perceptions of Asian Americans and to better understand racial logics.

A similar call for the development of racialized understanding can be found when Norova’s piece comes into dialogue with the piece by Tairan Qiu and Guofang Li (2026), An Intergenerational Love Letter to New East Asian Transnational Migrants: Race, Im/migration, and Care. In this self-described “love letter” from two Chinese transnational scholars to fellow East Asian transnational im/migrants, Qiu and Li provide an initial orientation to racial literacy for their im/migrant audience, sharing their experiences but integrating theory and research findings in ways that provide a schema for other East Asian diasporic im/migrants to understand shared experiences through lenses of racial literacy. They ground their article in four dimensions of love: love for our ancestors; love of other allies in the form of racial solidarity; love for our broader Asian community; and love for our collective liberatory racial future (Qiu and Li, 2026) each of which deeply humanizes and contextualizes East Asian im/migrant experiences and how they come into conversation with Asian American histories and experiences, as well as the broader experiences of racially minoritized communities in the USA. In some ways, Qiu and Li take up the call, which Norova makes, to scaffold racial literacy for first generation international/transnational Asian im/migrants, and respond with the urgency of unlearning, learning and building toward collective futures that honor individual and shared experiences and histories within diasporic contexts.

Yang-Hsun Hou and Taiji Nelson (2026), in “Our Back-and-Forth Lets Me Feel Safe and Seen”: Transnational Solidarities Across Asian and Queer Illegibility approach this diasporic conversation with a lens of transnational illegibility which brings in issues of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989; Matsuda, 1996), specifically around race, culture/nationality, and queerness. Hou and Nelson (2026) reveal to readers through their conversations the challenges of being fully seen, by one another and by others, and the importance of vulnerability and spaces of authentic dialogue to allow for transnational identity development and collective movement forward. Amidst not being fully seen in spaces, which should ostensibly recognize or make space for their full identities, Hou and Nelson consider the importance of storytelling as a tool within multicultural education, which reveals nuance and allows for identity construction, navigation and negotiation. Hou and Nelson emphasize the critical nature of agency, of choosing who can receive our stories as a way to move past assumptions and build together across diaspora.

The idea of making authentic space to move past cultural essentialism also is brought forth in an Indonesian context in Cosmas Haryono’s (2026)Between Exoticism and Stereotypes: Cultural Essentialism Toward Papuan students on Urban Javanese Campuses. Within a diverse Javanese higher education context, Haryono unpacks how higher education institutions, which purport commitments to inclusivity and multicultural education, can often perpetuate stereotypes and existing forms of inequality. Haryono points to “symbolic legitimacy” or surface level forms of representation such as cultural performance, which reinforces cultural essentialism and fails to make substantive integration efforts in relation to cultural and linguistic diversity. In this way, Papuan students on Javanese campuses become “illegible” and illegitimate members of the campus community, their existence reduced to essentialized and exoticized stereotypes, and their exclusion reinforced and internalized through institutional norms.

Across these four articles, themes of essentialization, which result in dehumanization, and calls for multicultural educators to consider how to authentically make space and connections among diverse experiences without erasing very real dynamics of cross-group power (oppression) and context emerge. Similar considerations of diverse experience within the Asian diaspora are evident in the two book reviews included in this special issue. What Already Exists Within Us: Reclaiming Hmong Knowledge in Education (Collison, 2026), a review of Bic Ngo’s (2024) Remembering Culture: Erasure and Renewal in Hmong American Education centers on the dual pitfalls and possibilities for Hmong Americans in US schools. Highlighting both epistemic injustice and hegemonic narratives, the book (and its review) highlight the hope and possibility of resistance and reclaiming culture. The second book review (Zhao, 2026) of The Rise of Chinese American Leaders in US Higher Education: Stories and Roadmaps (Yang and Xu, 2023) focuses on a very different population: Chinese American leaders in higher education. Yet, the review also challenges essentialist notions of “Chinese-ness” and illustrates the ways that culture beyond stereotypes (and, in fact, navigating those stereotypes) can give rise to the type of leadership that challenges discursive limitations.

This special issue was co-envisioned by scholar-sisters across racialized, cultural and linguistic particularities with one goal in mind– to thicken solidarities intraracially as a precursor to reinforcing similar solidarities across racialized groups. Vulnerable, authentic and difficult conversations about how distinct cultural groups experience racialization particularly within a context of US education represent the type of loving labor that can fundamentally anchor action-based changes in our research and community-based efforts. Rightfully, education research, inclusive of multicultural education, has yielded to the pressures of confronting various racisms as they harm learners across levels and contexts nationally. The thrust of this issue is to rejuvenate the need to humanize those struggles by simultaneously asserting the linguistic and historic particularities of these groups beyond their racialization by highlighting their cultural realities and affirming their lived experiences.

Ultimately, the scholarly offerings compiled in this issue represent the hope of reclaiming our cultural selves and preparing for the future for which we so doggedly fight – a future whereby race does not define us. There is so much more to who we are than being in conversation with whiteness. Focusing on culture does not minimize the harms of race, it rather restores those problems to their rightful place and reminds us that we must be prepared for a future where cultures collectively strive to advance humanity rather than infighting for the necessarily limited space at the bottom of a contrived racial hierarchy.

In recognizing that racializing discourses originate outside of the nuanced, cultural communities they objectify and flatten, we can choose to disengage from perpetuating the selfsame harms those discourses create upon one another. We hope this issue reminds multicultural educators and researchers that reaching across requires first reaching deep to fasten our solidarity-work to the beauty of who we are so that our pursuit of justice can emanate from the type of strength only community can offer.