The commitment by some historically ‘white’ schools in post-apartheid South Africa to retain their historical identity and privilege is especially evident in two discernible, yet inter-related paradigms. The more prominent one concerns the slow pace of learner diversity, while the other relates to the starkly neglected matter of teacher diversity. While historically excluded ‘black’ learners are kept at bay via the emergence of a new race-class discourse, ‘black’ teachers are excluded through an ambiguous language of ‘qualified, but incompetent’. Incompetency derives from one or several intersectional identity markers, which can include anything from culture, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, class, to qualification and knowledge, ultimately casting diverse teacher identities in images of mistrust. Of interest to this paper, on the one hand, is a seemingly a priori association of competence, as well as unquestioning trust coupled with ‘white’ teachers. While on the other hand, ‘black’ teachers are treated with suspicion and mistrust, not only because of their presumed incompetence, but because of who they are and the kinds of knowledge they stand to bring. What, therefore, is the role of schools in disrupting the binary between ‘white’-competence-trust’ and ‘black’-incompetence-mistrust? And how might schools become cultivated sites where diverse teacher and learner cohorts can serve as valuable opportunities and encounters for unlearning the epistemic harm of stereotypical biases and myths?

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