Looking to the Bottom to Rise to the Top: My Journey to Criticality

• In Event: Know Thyself: Reflections of Emerging Black Female Scholars Through Critical Race Theory

Abstract

As a child, I loved school. My all-Black neighborhood school served as a refuge for me, a place where I escaped the heaviness of life associated with growing up as a poor, Black girl in 1980s urban America. In school, I could just be a kid; I could learn, grow, and play. Unfortunately, for as long as I have loved school, I have also always been aware of myself as a racialized, gendered, and classed being. On the first day of kindergarten, my White teacher attempted to create a classroom environment free of racialized talk by comparing the color of our skin to white and black construction paper. This colorblind ideology only reified racial differences, diminished our experiences as poor, Black children, and centered the White supremacist enterprise that is schooling in the U.S. context. As hooks (2013) explains, it is not whiteness that is the problem, but white supremacy. People of all races and skin colors have been socialized in this system of white supremacy and play a role in reifying it in a number of ways. Reflecting critically on the intersectionality of race, gender and class and using intersectionality as a theoretical frame, this political autobiography illustrates the tension that has existed in the life story of an emergent Black woman scholar as she navigates her way through public education. The data is from my experiences and span the whole of my life as a K-12 student, a student at a large, predominately White, public university, and more than a decade spent as a high school mathematics teacher at a predominately White, suburban, public school. This narrative highlights the ways in which education, as a white supremacist enterprise, has shaped me and, unbeknownst to me at the time, influenced the ways in which my identity was compromised and delegitimized in educational spaces.
The critical race theory (CRT) in Education course taken during my graduate studies was pivotal to my growth and development as a critical Black woman scholar. It served to help me understand my past schooling experiences and my current positionality as I pursue work around race and gender in mathematics education. It also served to inform my praxis and I work to inform the field in an effort to avoid the creation and enactment of racist, sexist, and classist exclusionary policies and practices in mathematics education. Delgado and Stefancic (2012) stated “only aggressive, color-conscious efforts to change the way things are will do much to ameliorate misery...look to the bottom in judging new laws. If they do not relieve the distress of the poorest group - or, worse, if they compound it - we should reject them” (p. 27). This paper serves to contribute to the diverse range of voices of my fellow emergent Black woman scholar in education and make a case for the benefit that CRT in Education courses could have for other developing educational scholars.

Author

• Missy D. Cosby, Michigan State University