"For Years, I Was Just an Island": How Antiracist Teachers Build Antiracist Teaching Communities

• In Event: What Now? Dismantling Whiteness in the Next Era of White Supremacy

Abstract

Context and Purpose
A recent twin problem has emerged: as fanatical attacks on “critical race theory” have dangerously pushed local and national politicians towards laws to censor teachers, a knee-jerk reaction has revealed that many of those wishing to defend teachers who embrace racially just practices, are in fact unprepared to do so. The inept response to these attacks should also be viewed in light of the popularizing of “antiracist” book clubs that have individualized white people’s responses to racism. These are just the latest examples that point to the need for much richer and more complex understandings of what racially just practices look like in education, and the need to support the teachers who are actually doing antiracist work. As such, this paper draws from a qualitative dissertation study through which interviews were conducted with K-12 teachers enacting antiracist practices in their classrooms and schools. Using the methods of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006), the study sought to understand: How have teachers come into their practices of critically interrogating racism in their classrooms and schools? And what obstacles have they encountered, or sources of support and inspiration have they received?

Theoretical Framing and Analysis
Yosso (2002) applied a curricular theory to CRT, asserting that “curriculums” function in and around classrooms through the “structures in place so that specific classes present specific knowledge [...] the processes designed to place students in certain classes” and the “discourses that justify” these racially contingent schooling decisions (p. 93). In this light, teachers should not only be concerned with the learning materials they are selecting, but engaging their students in a much broader inquiry about the racialized spaces they are occupying. The teachers interviewed in this study viewed their antiracist practices in similar ways: not confined to the unit of study, but pushing their students towards a broader critical analysis, enjoined with local action and organizing. In thinking about how racist “structures, processes, and discourses” affect their students, teachers reported explicitly engaging their students in an analysis of these systems, while also exhibiting radical care that responded to the material conditions of students’ lives.

The analysis for this study was also grounded more broadly in the tenets of critical race theory -- most notably, in the phenomenon of whiteness as property (Harris, 1993), and the understandings of race being “made” and socially constructed through schooling processes (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). Critical whiteness studies was used as a lens for understanding the epistemological dimensions of how whiteness is constructed (Mills, 2007).

Scholarly Significance
The findings of this study reveal rich, complex, and diverse ways that teachers are enacting antiracist practices. Beyond addressing the misinformation campaigns towards CRT, schools of education must take seriously the preparation of teachers to combat white supremacy, and will have much to learn from these teachers’ stories.

Author

• Pete M. Newlove, University of Colorado - Denver