About Me

Racial competence is a skills-based competence; it can be learned

                                                                                                                                                                     -Ali

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Ali's Bio
As the Co-Director of the Race Institute forK-12 Educators, Ali Michael, PhD, works with schools and organizations across the country to help make research on race, Whiteness, and education more accessible and relevant to educators. Fall 2022, Ali released her two most recent publications, including Our Problem, Our Path: Collective Anti-racism for White People, co-authored with Dr. Eleonora Bartoli (Corwin, 2022). Her other new release is the young adult adaptation of White Fragility, co-adapted with Toni Graves Williamson, entitled White Fragility: Why Understanding Racism Can be so Hard for White People (Beacon Press, 2022). Ali is the author of Raising Race Questions: Whiteness, Inquiry and Education (Teachers College Press, 2015), winner of the 2017 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award. She is co-editor of the bestselling Everyday White People Confront Racial and Social Injustice: 15 Stories (2015, Stylus Press), the bestselling Guide for White Women who Teach Black Boys (2017, Corwin Press), and Teaching Beautiful and Brilliant Black Girls (2021, Corwin Press). Ali sits on the editorial board of the journal Whiteness and Education. She teaches in the Diversity and Inclusion Program at Princeton University and the Equity Institutes for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. When she is not writing, speaking, or training, Ali is striving to be an anti-racist co-parent to two amazing kids.

When she first graduated with her Ph.D., Ali explicitly veered away from teaching full time in the academy because of her commitment to improving classrooms and schools by working with in-service teachers and administrators.  In 2012, she co-founded the Race Institute for K-12 Educators to provide a space for educators to do the deep personal work of developing their own racial identities, on the premise that a teacher cannot support a student in their process of identity development if the teacher isn’t already immersed in their own racial identity journey.  The Race Institute is a growing network of more than 1200 educators who have been through the institute and who are working individually and collaboratively to build anti-racist schools.  What started as an attempt to build an affordable, local option for anti-racist professional development has turned into a program that is accessed by educators nationally.

Ali received her B.A. in political science and African Studies from Williams College, with highest honors awarded for her thesis in African Studies.  She received her M.A. in Anthropology and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and her Ph.D. in Teacher Education from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was mentored by Dr. Howard Stevenson and Dr. Shaun Harper.  Her current research and writing focus on supporting teachers to mitigate the unintentional, pervasive effects of institutional and individual racism in their classrooms.  She also studies how White families racially socialize their children.

Ali has made two films, both of which portray students discussing their experiences of race.  She is also the author of “My Scar, My Road,” the biography of South African feminist activist Gertrude Nonzwakazi Sgwentu, which demonstrates the long-term effects of racism and White supremacy on one woman growing up under Apartheid.