No Turning Back! Our Journey Toward Critical Race Consciousness

• In Event: AERA Graduate Student Research-in-Progress Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Centering Race and Ethnicity in Research on Literacy (Table 11)

Abstract

This dialogue explores the transnational differences and similarities between the racial worlds of two literacy teachers currently in a doctoral program. Maure, a woman from Colombia who never questioned her white racial identity before coming to the U.S, is now trying to recognize herself within the blurry space created by the shift in racial landscape. Cory, a white man from the U.S., thought little of his racialization until relationships, especially with women of Color, began to reconstitute his racial consciousness by challenging his subscription to whiteness. In this exploration we build generative spaces in which we narrate, question, theorize, learn, resource, and read (with) each other. We walk together in ways that have allowed us to frame questions about our own racialization that can be useful for other educators. We identify some minimum conditions that are essential to be able to have conversations that support us in becoming whole amidst the mess. We feel the need to build racial literacies that challenge whiteness and anti-Blackness in order to have meaningful lives together. We are compelled to continue these conversations because within the mutual seeing of one another we find that another world is possible.

Author

• Cory Brautigam, Pennsylvania State University