Invisible Ceiling

In/Visible POC: Narratives of a Brown Professor in Teacher Education

“…In this essay, I narrate experiences of invisibility as a Brown (or South Asian) teacher-educator in Toronto, Canada, to make visible the invisible experiences of Brownness in teacher education. Brownness is often characterized by hypervisibility in the racist objectification, appropriation, and exotification of accent, phenotype, food, cultural and religious practices, and more, and experiences of Brownness are often characterized by “invisibility” (Bakhshaei et al, 2021; Thatchenkery & Sugiyama, 2011) and ambiguity (Harpalani, 2013; Kibria, 1996) in the material, political, socioeconomic, and psychic effects of racialization that are maintained by intersecting systems of oppression—neo/colonialism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism. As Upadhyay shares, “As non-Indigenous, non-Black, and non-white persons in the white-settler state, our presence here is often ambiguous, contested, and contradictory” (Patel et al, 2015).…”