Critical race pedagogy 2.0: lessons from Derrick Bell

In this article, we attempt to honor the rich legacy of Derrick Bell by detailing how exploring his specific contributions to critical race theory (CRT) provided lessons for developing and refining critical race pedagogy (CRP). We examine Bell’s racial realism thesis in connection with his pedagogical work. In doing so, we find that he was as committed to developing a ‘community-based’ law classroom as he was to articulating a strong critique of the law (Radice 1991). As part of his teaching philosophy, Bell wrote extensively about the value and importance of a student-centered humanist pedagogy (Bell 1980, 1982, 1997; Bell and Edmonds 1993; Delgado and Stefancic 2005). We draw parallels between Bell’s humanist student-centered pedagogy and the tenets of CRP as a way to expand the accessibility of this framework. Finally, as the ultimate homage to the work of Derrick Bell, we end with a futuristic mini-chronicle that takes place in a school district boardroom. The chronicle features a fictitious character who happens to be a distant relative of Bell’s. As we will discuss, we believe that the use of chronicles and storytelling hold the possibility for helping us to name extant challenges and illuminate further possibilities of CRP as a tool for battling globalized oppression at the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality in education.     

An exploration of the relationships between student racial background and the school sub-contexts of office discipline referrals: a critical race theory analysis

A growing body of research indicates that exclusionary school discipline practices disproportionately impact students of color. Some scholars have theorized that racial disparities likely vary across school sub-contexts, as implicit bias in perceptions of student behavior may be more influential in locations where students and adults have weaker relationships (e.g. bathrooms and hallways, compared to the classroom). Guided by Critical Race Theory, this study used administrative data from a large urban school district (n = 20,166 discipline incidents, 9,170 students, and 185 schools) to consider the relationship between student race and the locations where youth are disciplined. Results indicate that Black, Latino/a, and Multiracial youth were no more likely than White students to have a discipline incident take place outside the classroom. These findings suggest attention is needed to the role of systemic bias and colorblind policies and practices in discipline disparities.     

Educational Cultural Negotiators for students of color: a descriptive study of racial advocacy leaders

The research presented in this study focuses on Educational Cultural Negotiators (ECNs). The participants were teachers, administrators, and graduate students in an after-school program in the Midwest and a community-based school/university partnership in the Western U.S. We posit that the roles of the ECNs function as advocacy leaders to invoke racial affirmation, and academic intervention on behalf of African-American and Latina/o students at these school sites. Relying on critical race theory as the methodological analysis of the findings, this study seeks to identify the role of the ECNs as advocates for students in these settings to promote their academic and personal growth and success. This work illustrates how these particular educational leaders provide academic direction and challenge racial neglect and color-blindness within the public school system.     

Hebcrit: a new dimension of critical race theory

ABSTRACT

I believe that it is essential to identify a new facet of Critical Race Theory that specifically addresses the needs of the Jewish people. Often overlooked and ignored in multicultural, diversity, and ethnic studies, Jews continue to face specific concerns and obstacles in the both the United States and around the world. In this article, I outline the foundational structure of this new critical theory that investigates issues affecting Jewish people in American society. HebCrit (pronounced ‘heeb’) is rooted in Critical Race Theory, History, Social Psychology, Education, and Jewish Studies. This new theoretical framework provides a way to address the complicated positionality that many American Jews navigate on a daily basis.     

Observing Black youth sociopolitical group participation and high school democratic climate through the lens of critical race theory

The purpose of this paper was to determine if high school democratic climates influence Black youth participation in sociopolitical groups using critical race theory as a lens. It was hypothesized that Black youth would be less likely to participate in sociopolitical groups due to perceived lack of support. It was also hypothesized that Black and White youth participation in sociopolitical groups is more comparable when the climate at their school is perceived to be more democratic. The hypotheses were only partially supported in that Black youth were more likely than White youth to participate in sociopolitical groups when the high school democratic climate was low. However, Black and White youth participation was found to be comparable when the high school democratic climate was high. This study adds to the literature by showing that high school democratic climates interact with race in a way that motivates sociopolitical group involvement among youth.     

Trayvon Martin and the curriculum of tragedy: critical race lessons for education

In what ways do the tragedies centered on the lives of black youth, particularly black male youth, inform teachers, education policymakers, and teacher educators about what knowledge is most worth knowing? In this counter/story, we will examine the details of the life and death of Trayvon Martin. From these details, we will extract and interpret a curriculum of tragedy that draws from Derrick Bell’s particular contributions to critical race theory (CRT) applies its central tenets. This article will conclude with lesson for black education for teachers, education policymakers and teacher educators.     

Diversity as interest-convergence in academia: a critical race theory story

This paper presents a critical race theory story regarding diversity and affirmative action in academia. The story's purpose is to raise issues regarding the treatment of diversity as a commodity in academia and how white faculty seek to privilege themselves in the diversity discourse. The story raises questions regarding the costs and benefits of diversity and affirmative action for minority faculty. The story illustrates how white faculty privilege themselves in diversity discourses by silencing diversity.     

Conceptualizing color-evasiveness: using dis/ability critical race theory to expand a color-blind racial ideology in education and society

Abstract

Color-blind racial ideology has historically been conceptualized as an ideology wherein race is immaterial. Efforts not to ‘see’ race insinuate that recognizing race is problematic; therefore, scholars have identified and critiqued color-blindness ideology. In this paper, we first examine Gotanda’s (1991) identification and critique of color-blind racial ideology, as it was crucial in troubling white supremacy. We then explore literature in both legal studies and education to determine how scholars have built upon Gotanda’s intellectual theoretical foundations. Finally, using a Dis/ability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) framework, we end by expanding to a racial ideology of color-evasiveness in education and society, as we believe that conceptualizing the refusal to recognize race as ‘color-blindness’ limits the ways this ideology can be dismantled.     

Everyday people: public identities in contemporary hip-hop culture

As scholars on culture have suggested elsewhere, cooption through consumption by the music culture industry has forced those who want to be part of the hip-hop subculture to go back underground. But to label all of these individuals in the underground merely ‘hip-hop’ would be as equally uninformative as labeling anyone who wears baggy blue jeans and can rhyme words together as being hip-hop. My year of field research in Chicago revealed that five major identities emerged: Professional Headz, Refugee Headz, Hip-Hop Fundamentalists, Black Headz and Tech Headz. These identities were characterized by the personal values that my participants indicated were most reaffirmed through hip-hop culture. This article contributes to the literature on hip-hop by providing an ethnographic study on how the Hip-Hop Nation defines itself, while examining some of the tensions that these identities provide within the Hip-Hop Nation. It also reinforces the view that subculture must still be experienced in the flesh and is not fully experienced by being able to engage in the culture industry of hip-hop through purchasing records, watching videos or buying hip-hop fashions. This article also provides a more complex qualitative understanding of what values constitute being hip-hop and which ones do not.     

Exploring the intersection of transnationalism and critical race theory: a critical race analysis of international student experiences in the United States

International student mobility to the United States (US) has increased over the past two decades. Despite the increase in numbers, international students may experience racism, nativism, and other forms of discrimination within the US context. Much of the existing literature focus on how international students can assimilate and cope with these issues rather than interrogating the systems of oppression that create negative student experiences. Thus, we utilized critical race theory (CRT) as a framework for interrogating how international student experiences are portrayed in current literature. Although CRT is grounded in US-based legal theory, we argue that CRT must move beyond the rigid confinement within US borders and expand to consider how transnationalism and global exchange contributes to the fluidity and applicability of this theory. We also provide recommendations for critical race praxis, with an emphasis on implications for practice, theory, and future research.     

Teaching in color: a critical race theory in education analysis of the literature on preservice teachers of color and teacher education in the US

In this article I take seriously the call for recruiting and retaining more preservice teachers of color by critically considering some of the pressing challenges they might encounter in teacher preparation programs. I draw from critical race theory (CRT) in education to review the extant literature on preservice teachers of color and teacher education in the US. I excavate how the dominant, (dis)embodied and normalized culture of Whiteness, White privilege and White hegemony pervades contemporary teacher education, and presents a formidable challenge to the goal of preparing teachers (of color) to teach in a manner that is relevant, critical and humanizing while also socially and individually transformative. I conclude by envisioning how teacher education programs might address these challenges in such a way that more effectively meets the needs of preservice teachers.     

‘A town new and modern in conception’: non-racial dreams and racial realities in the making of Gaborone,Botswana

ABSTRACT

Botswana has long been praised for its financial and political achievements. High economic growth rates and uninterrupted democratic governance since independence in 1966 have led to Botswana's labeling as the ‘African Miracle’. Long before Botswana's emergence as a darling of Western development agencies however, Tswana elites and colonial officials also saw Botswana as exceptional: surrounded by states divided along racial lines, these individuals sought to construct a nation organized around principles of racial and tribal unity. Aspirations of non-racialism were to be exemplified in Botswana's newly constructed capital city, Gaborone. At the same time, underlying the planning vision for Gaborone was a competing set of narratives, practices and aspirations that undercut these lofty ideals and resulted in the creation of a city highly stratified by racial segregation. This essay identifies three complementary urban planning rationales that produced urban exclusion in Gaborone: the desire to build Gaborone as an administrative capital, borrowing from both colonial and indigenous Tswana traditions that privileged spatial divisions related to status and race, and the goal to build a ‘modern’ urban center to lead Botswana into the future. These tensions divided the city in ways both familiar and unexpected and set the parameters determining who counts as a legitimate resident of the city. The paper, therefore, seeks to explore how a city founded on an ideal of racial unity instead became a site of stark division(s).     

The racial politics of STEM education in the USA: interrogations and explorations

ABSTRACT

This special issue brings together a mix of early-career, mid, and senior scholars to critically examine current realities of, and boldly imagine future possibilities for, STEM education in the lives of racially minoritized children in the United States. Given the implicit and sometimes explicit aspirations of STEM education to be a counteracting force against racialized injustice, how do students and communities of color experience and make sense of STEM reforms/initiatives? By examining a broad range of STEM contexts including mathematics, computer science, science and environmental science education, and through a diversity of methodological approaches, this special issue aims to contribute to a scholarly conversation about how racialized power intersects with the larger themes and foci of STEM education. In our introduction, we both highlight broad themes of the issue, and offer possible directions for future research at the intersections of race, power, and STEM.     

Disrupting an imposed racial identity or performing the model minority? The pursuit of postsecondary education by young African immigrant men in Southern Ontario,Canada

ABSTRACT

This article examines how young African immigrant men in Southern Ontario cope with the dominant racial identity at school in an effort to improve their academic performance and access postsecondary education (PSE). Critical race theory in education is employed to explain how the young men distance themselves from stereotypes about Black masculinity by regulating their own behaviour and differentiating themselves from their Caribbean immigrant peers. Sixty-seven young men who had immigrated to Southern Ontario from several African countries over the last 10 years were interviewed individually and in focus groups for the study. The findings suggest that the research participants adopted a model minority status within an educational system that clearly embodies racist and systemically oppressive frameworks.     

The roots of black resistance: race,gender and the struggle for urban land rights in Salvador,Bahia, Brazil

In Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, during the past ten years, the city has transformed its historical centre into cultural sites for leisure tourism. This process has included projects of ‘slum clearance’, negatively impacting black communities who have historically occupied these areas. In this essay, I present an ethnographic account of Gamboa de Baixo, a black coastal community in the centre of Salvador, and its political movement against urban renewal programmes. Specifically, I focus on the articulation of racial and gender politics in black women's grassroots activism against land expulsion and for access to material resources. This case in Salvador unearths one aspect of institutional racism in Brazil and the formation of an anti‐black racism resistance movement. Resistance to urban renewal plans in Salvador demonstrates how struggles for urban land rights are a crucial part of engaging in the broader national and international politics of race. In black communities in Brazil and throughout the African diaspora, urban land and territorial rights are the local idioms of black resistance.     

Critical Race Theory,policy rhetoric and outcomes: the case of Muslim schools in Britain

The expansion of state-funded Muslim schools in Britain since 1998 has developed against a backdrop of sustained public political rhetoric around the wider position of British Muslims in both political and educational contexts. This article explores the public policy rhetoric around Muslim schools under New Labour and the subsequent Coalition and Conservative governments and compares how these narratives align with outcomes in terms of numbers of, and types of, denominational Muslim faith schools in Britain. The article applies a Critical Race Theory approach based on the construction of counter-narrative through a critical analysis of policy and its outcomes. This analysis is contextualised through exploring the implications of counter-terror strategies such as Prevent for the political and educational equity of British Muslims as stakeholders in the state. Against this context the article explores the extent to which successive policy frameworks and political narratives around faith schooling have played out in terms of denominational state-funded Muslim schools. Whilst gains have been made under New Labour and the successive Coalition and Conservative governments, critical analysis reveals that public policy narratives allow for a misleading account of the extent to which Muslim communities have been enfranchised through state funding for Islamic schools.     

Border stories: using critical race and Latino critical theories to understand the experiences of Latino/a children

The number of school-age children of color in US schools is increasing, while the teaching force continues to be dominated by white teachers. According to the 2013 Digest of Education Statistics in the 2011–2012 school year, 81.9% of public school teachers were white, while the projected number of Hispanic students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools is expected to increase 33% between 2011 and 2022. In my experience, the issue of immigration is often ignored by the majority white teacher population, but, as I will share in this article, it is part of the lived experience of Latino children. I present my students’ border stories as discussed in relation to Latino children’s literature. I am using the words ‘border stories’ to represent the narratives my students shared about their families’ experiences crossing the US–Mexico border as well as what they felt about the societal discourse around ‘illegal immigrants.’ Critical race theory (CRT) and Latino critical theory (LatCrit) are used to frame these border stories to speak against the majoritarian story.     

Using our voices,losing our bodies: Michael Brown,Trayvon Martin,and the spirit murders of Black male professors in the academy

Abstract

The recent deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and other Black males have generated new civil rights urgencies in Black communities and spirited academic discourses in higher education regarding the educational and social plight of Black males in America. Connecting the deaths of Black males to our lived experiences in the academy, we use a text messaging performative writing style to demonstrate how Black males are not only gunned down in the streets of America by police but also are metaphorically gunned down in the academy. That is to say, white colleagues and students attempt to use what we call the bullet of rejection, the bullet of silencing, and the bullet of disrespect to destroy us and our academic agenda. We conclude with a call to action for teacher education programs as a way to deepen their understanding of the racialized experiences of Black males in the academy and Black males in America.     

Youth sport and community segregation: a study of kids’ participation in Australian rules football and soccer clubs in an Australian community

ABSTRACT

This research addresses the appeal for more empirical-based research on exclusionary practices in local community sport that often go unchallenged within dominant discourses. By examining how organised community sport clubs can uphold systemic segregation of various ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious and socioeconomic groups, this study also draws attention to the importance of research on race, ethnicity, and education in primary school age children; a population group often ignored in both racism studies and studies of sport. Using interview and focus group data from school principals and students (aged 9–12), including students from refugee and asylum seeker migrant backgrounds, collected over 3 years from two schools in the same multicultural community in Melbourne, Australia, this paper challenges the depiction of sport as an uncontested inclusive space in national and educational discourse, and instead demonstrates the continued existence of exclusion through systemically mediated segregation in organised community youth sport.     

Identities and inequalities: an examination of the role of racial identity in the formation of social capital inside a voluntary youth organization

This ethnographic study provides empirical illustrations of patterns of racial homophily and network ties within a voluntary youth association. The paper seeks to examine the role of racial identity and its relationship to the formation of social capital among a diverse group of youth participants. Drawing on narrative data, this article explores the kinds of organizational experiences that promote the development of interracial ties as well as how the construction of racial identity influences network formation and enhances social capital. The major findings are that racial homophily (staying within one's own group) are strongest among white participants while blacks are equally likely to form interracial ties with socially dissimilar peers as with socially similar peers. Some gendered and class differences also emerged. Institutional agents were also found to be important in helping youth participants bridge racial barriers.