Afterword

As guest editor, alongside Shirley Ando and Collette Grant, of JALT Journal’s first special issue on a topic of such timely importance to our organization and to English language teaching (ELT) in Japan more broadly, I humbly felt the weight of expectations for this publication to address with full impact and import the breadth of all issues pertaining to race and native speakerism in ELT. This special issue pushed against such expectations, however, because it was rather motivated by a desire to spur greater discussion within JALT Journal on this topic, and so it should be seen not as a capstone but as a basis for further research, critique, and action. To that end, in this Afterword¹ I would like to address some outstanding issues raised by the related articles and books reviewed in this special issue in order to bring together the ideas raised, as well as to pose questions and propose directions for further examination with the hopes that future authors and editors will take these ideas and go beyond them, alongside the limitations and tensions in doing so.