Decolonial Citizenship Education: Confronting Global White Supremacy With Human Rights

This study explores the complementary potential of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) and human rights education (HRE) to promote justice-oriented global citizenship in social studies classrooms. By centering decoloniality and praxis, these frameworks build critical consciousness essential for democratic citizenship in an increasingly interconnected world. After outlining the ability of CWS and HRE to confront White supremacy, this article offers curricular connections that historicize racism in American and global contexts. Neo-Confederate ideologies, anti-Asian xenophobia, and the genocide of Indigenous people around the world are explicitly connected to tenets of CWS so that critical forms of HRE can challenge these ever-present dynamics. To illustrate the relationship between theory and practice, explicit connections are made to social studies standards and organizations that seek to foster democratic citizenship education and human rights advocacy. Additionally, this conceptual framework is a response to calls by scholars for decolonizing forms of HRE that draw on critical theory to advance anti-racist civic education.