Nuanced Narratives: Reporting with Critical Race and Feminist Standpoint Theories

Thinking Problems

Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools

The frequent police killings during the COVID-19 pandemic forced a reckoning among Americans from all backgrounds and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into a global force. This manuscript addresses major issues to aid practitioners in the effective treatment of African Americans via the lens of Critical Race Theory and the Bioecological Model. We place the impacts of racism on Black families in historical context and outline the sources of Black family resilience. We critique structural racism embedded in all aspects of psychology and allied fields. We provide an overview of racial socialization and related issues affecting the parenting decisions in Black families, as well as a detailed overview of impacts of structural racism on couple dynamics. Recommendations are made for engaging racial issues in therapy, providing emotional support and validation to couples and families experiencing discrimination and racial trauma, and using Black cultural strengths as therapeutic resources.

Race and Social Policy, edited by Sandra Edmonds Crewe, views current-day racism toward Black Americans in the United States through the lens of critical race theory, the concept that systemic racism permeates laws, policies, and institutions. With its legal origins, critical race theory can also provide a framework for understanding social policy because it relates to racism. In the medical field, this theory may be a less well-known concept which readers can be introduced to integrate into their practice and understanding of the impact of policy decisions. This book includes 12 articles from a special edition of the journal Social Work in Public Health first published in 2019 (volume 34, issue 1). These articles were mostly written by social workers with a focus that would be most beneficial to social workers. Other disciplines involved in developmental and behavioral pediatric care may find them useful in understanding the social context around racial issues through the lens of critical race theory. These chapters investigate the bidirectional effects of social policy and racism in the United States beginning with the slave trade, emphasizing the importance of taking a historical perspective. Topics examined include poverty, the workplace, media, housing, elections, education, welfare, fatherhood, disability, justice, the elderly, and the Christian church. The first chapter provides an overview which most readers could find helpful in deciding which additional chapters may be most interesting and relevant to their practice. For example, as a pediatric clinician, the chapter on Black fathers was enlightening. Specifically, it connected current family structures with historical context, emphasizing the ways slavery devalued the family unit and led to mothers taking on the sole caregiving role. The book calls its readers to action and provides some suggested policy changes. For example, the welfare chapter recommends collecting racial demographic data, and the chapter on education highlights the importance of recruiting Black and Latinx teachers. However, some readers may expect and hope for more recommendations in all chapters. By including only, the original journal articles published in 2019, the authors have missed many opportunities for editing these articles to fit the audience of 2023 and beyond. Noting, for example, the racial disparities highlighted by COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020, a multitude of events since 2019 have made prominent the impact of systemic racism in the United States. Acknowledgement and analysis of these major incidents using a critical race theory frame would strengthen the text for readers in the present day. Furthermore, since the journal's publication in 2019, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of using equitable and inclusive language. In the past few years, many professional clinical organizations including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have embraced and distributed guidelines for more equitable and inclusive language. However, this text does not acknowledge these language changes over time. Notably, chapter 9 “Inequities in Family Quality of Life for African American Families Raising Children with Disabilities” includes the use of the outdated term, “mental retardation,” which is now perceived as pejorative. While the data presented in the chapter were collected in 2011 before the publication of the DSM-5, it was unsettling to read the term in a book published in 2023 with no explicit acknowledgement of the way language has progressed over the past decade. A book emphasizing critical race theory and the marginalization of Black Americans should also be sensitive to the experiences of other marginalized groups. For health care professionals, critical race theory provides a framework for understanding the systemic racial inequities their patients continue to face. This book examines current social policy and provides some useful suggestions for improvements in policy to create a more equitable and racially sensitive society, but it could benefit from being updated to provide readers with more current information. Furthermore, for those affiliated with a university, these articles may be available in databases to which their universities subscribe. With limited modifications made since 2019, the book and journal articles are nearly the same.

Critical race theory (CRT) allows for the challenging of systematic manifestations of White privilege that subordinate people of color (Bell, 1992). Specifically, CRT places race at the center of analysis and explores the transformations of the relationships among race, racism, and power in various social, economic, political, and educational contexts (Crenshaw et al., 1995). A strength of CRT is that it allows for the capturing of counterstories or the narratives of marginalized groups that counter the perspectives of the majoritarian (Delgado, 1989). Because of CRT's focus on the in-depth understanding of stories, studies using a CRT lens often utilize qualitative methods (Parker, 1998; Parker & Lynn, 2002). However, in recent years, scholars have begun to contemplate whether or not CRT and quantitative methods are compatible. One perspective is that the positivistic/post-positivistic approach that is associated with quantitative methods is incompatible with the critical approach of race-based theories such as CRT; in addition, it does not allow for the telling of individual and multiple stories (Zuberi, 2003). The alternative perspective feels that critical quantitative approaches allow for the telling of "group" or "composite" counterstories, although through the use of numbers, and are therefore compatible with CRT (Carter & Hurtado, 2007).

Critical race theory (CRT) teaching currently plays a leading and controversial role in school board meetings; parent teacher meetings, media outlets, and in local, state, and national policy decision making. Proponents of CRT teaching maintain that students deserve an honest education that is free from omissions, distortion, and bias. Through the lens of CRT, students in grades K-16 learn history with accuracy and in developmentally appropriate ways. They explore transparently presented historical events and discuss contextual factors that led to these events as well as the progress that Americans have achieved over the last two centuries. This chapter addresses the impact of CRT teaching in learning transparent history, their resultant quest for more knowledge about marginalization and oppression, and their eagerness to “turn it around” and promote understanding and unity. Through enlisting the related practices of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), lessons and activities are illustrated in a content-integrated manner.

More progress is needed to achieve equity in racial and gender representation in the push to diversify the physical sciences. In order to continue moving towards representation and equity, there is a need for more analytic tools that can help us understand where we are and how we got here. This may also enable meaningful systemic change. In this article, we will review two theoretical frameworks: critical race theory (CRT) and feminist standpoint theory (FST). This paper will guide the reader through the historical context in which each theory was formed, present core tenets and major ideas of each theory, along with external critiques to each theory and where they stand today. This will help readers to further understand CRT and FST, what their role is in education, and how they may be used in physics education research. Simultaneously, this article will serve to broaden perspectives of fundamental societal problems such as racism and sexism.

The authors argue for a research and conceptual agenda that complicates and disrupts common narratives in teacher education that have serious implications for race. Building on the pivotal work of legal scholar Derrick Bell and through a critical race theory (CRT) lens, this article challenges researchers to broaden and complexify traditional ideologies related to: (1) characteristics of ideal teachers recruited into the field; (2) the amount of time teachers should be expected to remain in the field through alternative programs such as Teach for America; (3)weight placed on teacher entrance examinations; (4)racial diversity of P-12 teachers; (5)racial and ethnic makeup of teacher educators; and (6)over-reliance on subject matter knowledge in teacher preparation to the exclusion of other aspects of learning to teach. The authors argue given the present racial divide in schools between teachers and students it is imperative for teacher education programs to complicate and intensify the utility of race in their recruitment, retention, and support of teacher education practices and policies. The authors offer a counter narrative framework and agenda to advance policy and research through a CRT lens.

Growing research evidence on the ethic of care suggests that caring should be an integral part of the pedagogical methods implemented in schools. However, the colour blind ‘community of care’ often described in the literature does not disaggregate lines of ethnicity or race and much of this existing literature concerns elementary‐ and middle‐school students. This phenomenological study examined teacher care for African American secondary students, through a theoretical lens of critical race and care theory, as it was represented through the counter stories of eight ‘successful’ African American teachers. Findings revealed that teachers’ definitions and perceptions of care reflected a blend of traditional care literature, critical race theory and the literature on African American teachers before and after the US Supreme Court’s landmark Brown decision on integration. Findings also reveal the possibility of a pedagogy that I refer to as ‘culturally relevant critical teacher care’.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term coalition comes from the Latin coalescere or ‘coalesce’, meaning “come or bring together to form one mass or whole”. Coalesce refers to the unity affirmed as something grows: co – “together”, alesce – “to grow up”. While coalition is commonly associated with formalised alliances and political strategy in the name of self-interest and common goals, this paper will draw as well on the broader etymological understanding of coalition as “growing together” in order to discuss the Australian government’s recent changes to land rights legislation, the 2007 Emergency Intervention into the Northern Territory, and its decision to use Indigenous land in the Northern Territory as a dumping ground for nuclear waste.

Critical race theory (CRT) was developed to examine the persistence of racism. This literature review attempts to understand CRT as it has been applied in related fields such as higher education and possible reasons for its limited application in adult education theorizing about race and racism. This analysis of CRT is framed against a backdrop of the evolution of an adult education discourse on race and racism over several decades and distinguishes CRT from other racial theories that have been used in the field. CRT tenets are discussed using examples that demonstrate how CRT reveals areas of racism left untouched by other forms of theorizing. The author provides a critique of CRT, caveats for those adult educators who might choose to use it, and examples of areas within the field of adult education that might benefit from a CRT lens.

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) scholars have recently drawn on critical race theory (CRT) to critique and understand the propagation of Whiteness as a norm associated with native English speakers. However, the area of language studies, more broadly defined, has yet to develop the same link with CRT. To this end, this article proposes and introduces an emerging theoretical and analytical framework called LangCrit, or Critical Language and Race Theory. LangCrit puts the intersection of the subject-as-heard and the subject-as-seen at the forefront of interpretation and analysis. This article urges language studies scholars, both within the field of English language teaching and beyond, to continue to look for ways in which race, racism, and racialization intersect with issues of language, belonging, and identity.

The TPSR model, developed by Don Hellison, has been widely adopted in PE and YDP to foster life skills such as respect, effort, and self-direction among students, particularly those from marginalised communities. However, through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT), this article examines how TPSR’s predominant research focus on racialized minority students – especially Black students – racializes responsibility, positioning racialized minority youth as inherently ‘irresponsible.’ This ‘othering’ process reinforces the deficit-oriented narratives that attribute behavioural and social shortcomings to racialized identities rather than systemic inequities. Drawing on CRT tenets such as the permanence of racism and the critique of liberalism, the analysis reveals how TPSR, despite its emancipatory intentions, perpetuates racial hierarchies by framing Black students as needing intervention to achieve ‘normal’ responsibility (e.g. Boyd, K., Dixon, C., Simon, M., & Bennett, G. (2025). “In the line of fire”: Critical race counternarratives from Black and Latine physical education and teacher education faculty. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1123/jtpe.2025-0049). This scholarly exploration integrates historical context, empirical research trends, and theoretical critiques, drawing on existing PE literature addressing race and racism (e.g. Abel et al., 2024). Students’ perspectives on racism and anti-racism in physical education: a systematic review. Frontiers in Sociology, 9. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1374277; Blackshear, T. B., & Culp, B. (2023). Critical race studies in physical education. Human Kinetics; Harrison, L., & Clark, L. (2016). Contemporary issues of social justice: A focus on race and physical education in the United States. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 87(3), 230–241. https://doi.org/10.1080/02701367.2016.1199166) to advocate for anti-racist adaptations of TPSR. Implications for educators include shifting from deficit models to asset-based pedagogies that centre racial justice.

Understanding systemic racism through a lens of critical race theory can help music educators to critically examine their own practices as teachers and consider how equitable teaching practices might look. This chapter describes the experience of four music educators who learn about CRT and how an understanding of systemic racism can expand the opportunity to emphasize care in the classroom. Critical race theory is a lens through which to understand how race and racism operates in our society. With an understanding of systemic racism through critical race theory, music education practitioners can gain a deeper awareness of power, oppression, and racism in order to transform our profession toward a more caring centered profession. Critical race theory critiques color-neutral ideology where different races and identity points are acknowledged and not ignored. Educators can expand their ability to see, celebrate, and care for students and their differences while simultaneously dismantling oppressive structures.

Racist hate speech on UK university campuses remains an increasing concern. This article examines the widespread problem of racist hate speech through a multilayered theoretical approach; and suggests that a fuller appreciation of the problem can only be gained through a race-centred analysis. Drawing on Fraser’s work on the problematics of misrecognition and identity-reification, the article extends Levine-Rasky’s theoreticisation of power dynamics in the intersectionality between whiteness and middle-classness to intersections of whiteness with both middle-classness and working-classness as a contributing factor to mobilisation of lad cultures which is termed as white-laddism. The article advances the understanding of racist hate speech through a conjoined analysis of these concepts through a Critical Race Theory (CRT) lens. The conjoined analysis is informed by the Deleuzian ‘rhizomatic’ approach in order to examine the process by which multiple, diverse and non-hierarchical lines of connection between the concepts shape, dislocate, modify each other in variable ways. The detail behind the bigger picture helps further our understanding of the inadequate nature of equality policies and strategies that often look at issues in isolation, and thus fail to address the inequality and injustice being perpetuated on campuses.