Shortlists on shortlists (judge’s version): part 8 - Race and Education

We asked judges for the 2025 Bread and Roses Award to reflect on a book from this year’s shortlist and to recommend a book which has been shortlisted for the award in the last five years - and we're thrilled to share their thoughts.

Our eighth and final blog post comes from Dr. Agomoni Ganguli-Mitra, senior lecturer in bioethics and second-time judge for the Bread and Roses Award, who wrote about Race and Education: Reproducing White Supremacy by Kalwant Bhopal.

Here is Agomoni's contribution...

Kalwant Bhopal’s Race and Education: Reproducing White Supremacy in Britain joins an increasingly urgent body of scholarship exposing the entanglements of race, racism, and structural inequality in the UK. It stands alongside works formerly judged by the Bread & Roses award panel, such as Kojo Koram’s Uncommon Wealth, shortlisted for the 2023, and Annabel Sowemimo’s Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare, winner of the 2024 prize.

Kojo Koram questions the notion of empire as past, tracing how colonial practices (debt, privatisation, extraction) have continued to shape both post-colonial states and Britain itself. Rather than following the cosy narrative of linear development, Koram’s “boomerang effect” reveals how practices experimented in colonies resurface in the neocolonial global order, entrenching austerity and systemic precarity. Annabel Sowemimo similarly examines medicine’s eugenic and colonial roots as well as its ongoing complicity in sustaining racial hierarchies, where racism continue to structure diagnosis, access, and care.

Focusing on an equally important area, Bhopal's analysis reveals how race determines education in Britain. Based on empirical research, her work interrogates the intersection of power, privilege, and institutional racism within British educational systems, including the marginalisation of black and minority ethnic staff, their exclusion from decision-making, frequent micro-aggressions, implicit bias and open prejudice. This book encourages a critical examination of how educational spaces and structures reproduce white supremacy.

Together, these texts explore the deep continuities of empire, structural inequalities, and institutional complicity, urging us to confront how racial hierarchies are not only reproduced but also normalised within education, healthcare, and other key institutions.