First published in the October 1980 issue of Esquire magazine, James Baldwin's Dark Days cautions its readers that despite the progress made in fighting racism, sexism, genderism, and classism, the world has a long way to go and not as much time to do so. Confirming Baldwin, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey administered to 260,000 teachers in 15,000 schools across 48 countries reveals alarming findings: More than 10 percent of students have special needs; more than 10 percent come from an L1 background that is not the medium of instruction; 30 percent have socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds; and more than 10 percent are immigrants or have a migrant background.

Not a day goes by without witnessing the ramifications of the anti-immigrant sentiment that began to ratchet up with Trump's administration in the US, Brexit in the UK, the Syrian war that resulted in more than 6 million Syrian refugees mainly in Turkey but also in other countries; as well as the climate refu-gees mostly in Bangladesh, South Sudan, and Oceania due to pressing climate change. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022 once again displayed race and ethnicity-based inequalities and injustices. Many journalists outwardly distinguished between ‘civilized,’ ‘blue eyed,’ ‘White,’ and ‘Christian’ immigrants and those from the ‘Middle East’ who have been suffering years of oppression, war, and poverty in the hands of the so called-Western world.