We Love Ourselvz: Critical Race Love Letters to and From Educational Leaders of Color

• In Event: Love Yourz: Critical Race Love Letters to Community

Abstract

Objectives
Tupac Shakur lovingly confessed in his song, Dear Mama (1995), “I wish I could take the pain away. If you can make it through the night, there's a brighter day. Everything will be alright if you hold on. It's a struggle every day, gotta roll on. And there's no way I can pay you back, but my plan is to show you that I understand–you are appreciated.” While Shakur’s expression is directed towards his mother, his message of critical love is universal. Struggle and resilience is an ongoing part of human existence that must be affirmed. For educational leaders of Color in particular, they must participate in the co-construction of agendas of consequence that both seek to collectively heal from harms caused by white supremacy and work to uplift our collective humanity.

Within an Educational Leadership for Social Justice Ed.D. program, this study investigates how generative critical race love letter-writing produced counter-stories that invited an intimately loving, humanizing, and soulful voice as a way to be in, with, and relationally accountable to self and community. This research provides a glimpse into the ways that students deepen their critical consciousness, political clarity, and socio-political action.

Theoretical Framework
This research intersects critical race theory (CRT), critical whiteness studies (CWS), and a critical theory of love (CTL) (Brooks, 2017) to interrogate and counter the nuances of how whiteness is enacted and normalized. This framework is assembled because of the ways that 1) CTL attends to enacting love as action, intention, and prayer to counter how whiteness and racism are intimately intertwined within education, 2) CWS attends to the nuances of whiteness, white supremacy, and racism, and 3) the realities and aspirations of educational leaders of Color are legitimized and affirmed.

Methods
Within an Ed.D. seminar that examined community organizing as critical research, the following question was explored. How might a decolonial and critical race approach to letter writing produce counter-stories that are racially affirming, healing, and praxis-directed? A generative autoethnography (Camangian et al., 2021) approach was taken to catalyze the letter writing as a way “to engage a process to center the lives and struggles of those who live their lives as targets of White supremacy…in a way that provides tangible examples of what collective justice work looks like” (Camangian et al,, 2021, p. 2).

Results
This scholarship highlighted the impact of “PRAXISioner” tools of problematizing, visibilizing, reframing, and reimagining. Through this toolset, this study revealed how political clarity manifested in a student assignment entitled, “Love letter to my future self.” This scholarship also revealed the healing and affirming potential of critical race letter writing for doctoral students of Color.

Scholarly Significance
If we are to “disrupt attempts to stifle progress toward justice and equity” in accordance with the 2023 theme, we must think on intimate, coalitional, and systemic levels. Our educational leadership praxis must include not only critical consciousness raising, but also critical action that involves critical self love and sacred healing with impactful consequence.

Author

• G.T. Reyes, California State University - East Bay
  Presenting Author