As educators it is our job to challenge racist ideas

6 June 2026

Read time: 3mins

‘Racisms are ideological reservoirs. Rather than condemning people as racist, as educators it is our job to challenge racist ideas.’

Camila Bassi

‘My book Outcast: How Jews Were Banished from the Anti-Racist Imagination (2023) explores how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has impacted on our ability to recognise anti-Jewish racism. This matters to us as geographers when we consider how racism, in all its forms, impacts on communities in the UK, in the Middle East and beyond.

Racisms are ideological reservoirs. Rather than condemning people as racist, as educators it is our job to challenge racist ideas.

In a consideration of Islamophobia and antisemitism, old and new, the late academic Pnina Werbner (2013: p.451) astutely explores their ideological intersection with the politics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, noting how these racisms are ‘entangled with each other in mutual recriminations’ that invoke a range of tropes, including ‘Zionism, Islamism, racism, colonialism, apartheid, genocide, terrorism, Nazism, orientalism, occidentalism’. She continues that extremist actions on both sides conjure up racialised ‘archetypal demonic figures’ of Jews and Palestinian Muslims (Ibid: p.455).

Anti-Jewish racism and anti-Muslim racism are racialisations of prior European representations of Self and Other. Both racisms cannot be fully understood without a comprehension of how the idea of ‘race’ reworked earlier portrayals in response to changing conditions of existence. The early depiction of Islam as violent, hostile and threatening, which peaked during the Crusades, resurfaced – revived and reconfigured – in the post 9/11 racialisation of Muslims.

Here, Miles and Brown (2003: p.164) suggest, ‘an amalgam of nationality (“Arab” or “Pakistani”, for example), religion (Islam) and politics (extremism, fundamentalism, terrorism)’ comes into play in the contemporary racialisation of the Muslim Other. Similarly, there is a blending of Israel, Zionism and Jewishness with the idea of a cunning and scheming global network of Jewish capitalist and imperialist power (where the invisible wandering Jew is a threat to corporeal existence and world peace) in the contemporary racialisation of the Jewish Other.

The recent rise of anti-Jewish racism in this country undoubtedly intersects with the destruction of Gaza by Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government. As such, we should be mindful in our decolonisation and anti-racism work that ‘the Jewish question’ – the idea that Jews are harmful to humanity – does not ideologically creep in and, when it does, to challenge this racist idea. After all, it is possible to oppose the destruction of Gaza and to challenge the related co-constructions of both anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish racisms.

References

• Miles, Robert and Malcolm Brown (2003) Racism (Second edition), Routledge: London.
• Werbner, Pnina (2013) ‘Folk devils and racist imaginaries in a global prism: Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in the twenty-first century’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (3), pp. 450–467

Written by Camila Bassi, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Sheffield Hallam University.

© Camila Bassi and the Geographical Association, 2026.