Toward a Critical Race Love Praxis/Pedagogy/Practice Framework: Addressing Cis-Heteropatriarchy and Toxic Masculinity in Racial Justice Formations

• In Event: "Never-Finished Justice Situations": New Directions for Critical Race Praxis in Educational Research

Abstract

Objectives and Research Questions
In light of the continued state-sanctioned violence against Black lives, dispossession of Native lands and waterways coupled with racist and xenophobic policies to control im/migration, we find ourselves in a political moment that reflects an emboldened white supremacy. Given these concerns, this conceptual paper is a Critical Race Theory (CRT) love letter to educators of color working everyday to create critical counterspaces (Carmona, 2014) for faculty and students caught in the firestorm of white supremacy. We offer an intersectional framework of critical race love in which we seek to highlight and address the cis-gendered, heteropatriarchal toxic masculinity often reified in interactions, projects, and institutions intended to challenge racism. Offering these critiques from a space of love, instead of from spaces of castigation and disgust provides us with the necessary lens by which to build a critical race praxis with the people we love.

Theory
We argue that educators of color often (in)advertently perpetuate gendered oppression against each other as a mechanism for coping with racism and its associated stressors. This occurs in part due to the violence we have endured as 1) people of color in a society in which our oppression is endemic, 2) students and faculty of color navigating higher education spaces not built to welcome our presence, and as 3) educators who experience secondary trauma from the pain imposed onto the young people with whom we work, often resulting in educators of color rarely addressing gender dynamics that uphold power imbalance among men, women, and gender-nonconforming people of color.

Methods/Data Sources
Utilizing racial microaggressions as a tool for critical race research, we engage Critical Race Theory to draw on the discourse regarding “settler moves to innocence” (Tuck & Yang, 2012) and “white fragility defensive moves” (DiAngelo, 2018). These strategies articulate the ways cis-men of color can exhibit toxic masculinity in response to stress they feel when challenged/threatened, particularly by women and gender non-conforming people of color with whom their racial politics are theoretically aligned. Through qualitative interviews guided by critical ethnography, our data identifies practices that include, but are not limited to practices that shut down, silence, dismiss, negatively project, and violently argue with women-identified and gender- nonconforming colleagues.

Findings and Significance
A critical race love praxis focused on enhancing our relationship with ourselves and others to offer more sustainable and healing-centered engagement (Ginwright, 2016) in justice work as a potential mechanism for restoration. From the premise of our study, we conclude that critical race love entails (but is not limited to):
• an abject commitment to spaces that bring us joy over the ones that bring us
feelings of despair, marginalization, and isolation
• a commitment to build material coalitions with those committed to combat white
supremacy (from the belief that our plan for liberation emerges from our
commitment to be together)
• a commitment to transition from pessimism to a perspective that demands a
willingness to build and create (dismissing reform as the default strategy for our
liberation).

Authors

• Tracy Lachica Buenavista, California State University - Northridge

• David O. Stovall, University of Illinois at Chicago