The article brings together the fields of curriculum studies, history of education, and ethnic studies to chart a transnational history of race, empire, and curriculum. Drawing from a larger study on the history of education in the Philippines under U.S. rule in the early 1900s, it argues that race played a pivotal role in the discursive construction of Filipino/as and that the schooling for African Americans in the U.S. South served as the prevailing template for colonial pedagogy in the archipelago. It employs Michel Foucault's concept of archaeology to trace the racial grammar in popular and official representations, especially in the depiction of colonized Filipino/as as racially Black, and to illustrate its material effects on educational policy and curriculum. The tension between academic and manual-industrial instruction became a site of convergence for Filipino/as and African Americans, with decided implications for the lived trajectories in stratified racialized and colonized communities.