Critical Race Studies Research Articles

Special Education Teachers’ Perspectives on Race and Restorative Justice

Restorative justice has become a widely used intervention in urban schools to address the ways that students of color and students with disabilities disproportionately face punitive disciplinary action. As such, understanding the perspectives of teachers of these students is of the utmost importance. Using Dis/ability Critical Race Studies as a theoretical framework, this interpretivist interview study centers the perspectives of three special education teachers as restorative justice is implemented at a predominantly Black urban school. This work has implications for more culturally relevant implementation of restorative justice. It also highlights the ways that race and disability impact school culture.

Beyond accreditation: unraveling the narrative of public health through a critical race praxis lens

IntroductionRecognizing and addressing health inequities among minority populations are pivotal to public health. Further, public health strives to understand the complexities between race and health without limiting discussions around race as a trivial variable. This commitment toward equity demonstrates considerable similarities to Critical Race Theory (CRT) which led to the creation of the Public Health Critical Race (PHCR) Praxis to instill CRT within public health. However, the literature on how public health education incorporates critical race studies remains limited. The goal of this study was to examine how public health curriculum currently aligns with the PHCR praxis and meets public health's goal of health equity.MethodsThis qualitative study employed document analysis to evaluate academic syllabi from CEPH-accredited MPH programs. Stratified random sampling was applied across two sampling pools, Schools of Public Health (SPH), and Public Health Programs (PHP). Course overviews, course objectives, course curricular information, and course policies were identified and extracted from each syllabus for analysis. A total of 53 syllabi were obtained from a final sample of nine public universities and one private.ResultsThrough inductive and directed content analysis, a priori themes of Structural Determinism, Voice, Critical Approaches, Ordinariness of Racism, Social Construction of Knowledge, Intersectionality, Disciplinary Self-Critique, Primacy of Racialization, Race as a Social Construct, Race Consciousness, and their respective categories arose as salient. Two new themes, Antiracism Practices and Culture of Inclusivity, were also present.DiscussionThis study is the first to explore public health education's current curricular practices concerning CRT and antiracist praxes. The results confirm the interwoven nature of public health education with critical race studies, as all principles of PHCR praxis were present. However, the prevalence of these principles varied, suggesting gaps in the alignment of public health curricula and CRT. It is essential that public health educators ensure that the foundational competencies students are expected to display align with public health's goal of health equity. This work can equip MPH programs and public health educators with the ability to revise or bolster their current curricular and instructional efforts to support the pursuit of health, racial equity, and social justice.

Desirable and disposable: Tracing the racialization of Chinese students in American higher education

This article dissects the current conjuncture facing Chinese international students in the U.S. higher education, situating their experiences within the history of Asian racialization. By examining key moments of the racialization of Chinese students in the US – 1949–1959, 2006–2017, and the period following 2018 – it illuminates how the intricate interplay of domestic racial politics and geopolitics have contributed to the paradoxical portrayal of Chinese students as both desirable and disposable within American racial capitalism. As they navigate their multifaceted roles as knowledge workers and prime consumers of educational services, these students encounter the challenges of an evolving neoliberal multiculturalism and fluctuating U.S.-China relations, placing them at the center of America’s ongoing political tensions. This exploration enhances our understanding of international student mobility, bridges discussions between critical race studies and geography of race, and introduces a fresh racial perspective to the field of education geography.

Empowering Disabled Voices: A Practical Guide for Methodological Shifts in Biology Education Research.

Biology education research provides important guidance for educators aiming to ensure access for disabled students. However, there is still work to be done in developing similar guidelines for research settings. By using critical frameworks that amplify the voices of people facing multiple forms of marginalization, there is potential to transform current biology education research practices. Many biology education researchers are still in the early stages of understanding critical disability frameworks, such as Disability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit), which consists of seven tenets designed to explore the intersecting experiences of ableism and racism. Our Research Methods Essay uses DisCrit as a model framework and pulls from other related critical disability frameworks to empower disabled voices in biology education research. Drawing from existing scholarship, we discuss how biology education researchers can design, conduct, and share research findings. Additionally, we highlight strategies that biology education scholars can use in their research to support access for participants. We propose the creation and sharing of Access and Equity Maps to help plan-and make public-the steps researchers take to foster access in their research. We close by discussing frequently asked questions researchers may encounter in taking on critical frameworks, such as DisCrit.

Theorizing Sexuality Politics of Neoliberalism: A Queer Sociological Approach

ABSTRACTThis article provides a critical overview of neoliberalism scholarship from a queer sociological perspective. Despite mainstream neoliberalism scholarship neglecting sexuality as a system of intersecting power relations, sociologists of sexualities have explored how neoliberalism reshapes the state, market, society, and subjectivity concerning sex, intimacy, and sexual politics. Highlighting the intersection of the sociology of sexualities with transnational feminist and queer studies, as well as critical race studies, I advocate for a refined understanding of sexuality as integral to neoliberalism's operations with empire, colonialism, and racial capitalism. I suggest areas for future research to further develop this understanding, including the emphasis on the variegated nature of neoliberalism, its ambivalence and contradictions, and its promiscuous convergence with other political, social, and cultural formations. This article ultimately calls for a queer political economic analysis in the continued engagement with neoliberalism and its interactions with sexuality politics to understand new global challenges and social transformations, including shifting geopolitics, digital and platform economies, and climate and reproductive crises.

How different opinions in Black Lives Matter (BLM) regarding the notion of ally shed light on social movement and ally studies

ABSTRACT ‘Black Lives Matter’ (BLM) is a conflict about central societal norms, embodied by activities and social actors . Those actors share a common vision but differ on some points. Combining several kinds of data (digital ethnography, interviews, and observation), this article argues that one of those dissension points is the activists’ valorization of the notion of allyship, particularly white allyship. Critical Race Studies and Ally Studies assume that working towards allyship is inherently desirable. However, three ideal-typical positions exist within BLM regarding this statement: adhesion, partial adhesion, and rejection. Analysing those positions puts light on moral and strategic considerations that contribute to structuring BLM into several complementary trends.

Italy’s colonial archives and its history of racial violence. An interview with Gaia Giuliani, author of Bianco e nero. Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani (2013) and Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy. Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (2019)

ABSTRACT This interview is dedicated to the pioneering work of Gaia Giuliani in critical race, whiteness and postcolonial Italian studies in Italy and internationally, over ten and five years, respectively, from the publication of Bianco e nero: Storia dell'identità razziale degli italiani (with Cristina Lombardi-Diop, Mondadori Education, 2013) and Race, Nation and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Shelleen Greene is an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Her Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa – Constructions of Race and Nation in the Italian Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2012) set a milestone in scholarship on Italian visual culture and race. Lorgia Garcia Peña, scholar and activist, is a professor of Latinx Studies at the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her Translating Blackness (Duke, 2022) conceived Latinx Caribbean diaspora (also in Italy) as part of both Black migrants’ oscillating border-crossings and their forms of resistance to colonialism and racism. Both scholars have long been in dialogue with Giuliani’s scholarship.

Contrasting Educator and Black Student Perspectives of the Special Education Placement Process: A DisCrit Counter-Narrative Analysis.

This critical qualitative inquiry employed a Disability Critical Race Studies Counter-Narrative framework (DCCN) to explore the contrast between educator and Black student understandings of the special education placement process and their implications. Interviews with 21 members of school personnel and 20 Black students between the ages of 14 and 18 were cross-referenced to narratively reconstruct the special education placement process in Quebec, Canada. Analysis of the results reveals a striking gap between educator and student understandings of the process, which can be linked to adverse student experiences. Subsequently, implications for enhancing educators' knowledge of diverse learners and professional practices are discussed.

A litany for survival in pandemic times – DisCrit mothering and radical love

This is a critical autoethnography informed by Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit) that explores the notion of DisCrit mothering in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. I use my experiences as a disabled Latina motherscholar and mindfulness practitioner to reflect on how I mother my two young children and foster radical love in educational spaces. I present the pandemic context and how it relates to compassion fatigue and a litany for survival but also offer the pandemic as an opportunity for personal and collective transformation. I use the narrative of sacrificio, a teacher’s note from school, and a “giftedness” program to discuss how I try to resist internal and external pressures to conform to ableist mindsets and practices by cultivating radical love, solidarity, and critical questioning in myself and in my children. I end this work with hope and love for the next generation of DisCrit, social justice warriors.

Race, Racism, and Ethnicity

This article examines the debates over historiographical uses of the terms race, racism, and ethnicity in the study of the premodern past. It begins with an analysis of conventional approaches to defining race, which understand the concept to be fundamentally modern and reject uses of the term in the study of the premodern world. Such conventional approaches to historicizing race are predicated on problematically essentialist definitions of the term that preclude comparisons of varying types of racisms that manifest across different historical periods. The article spotlights some of the arguments in favor of formulations of race and racism that allow for comparative analyses of premodern instances of racism, relying on the ideas of scholars working in race theory, philosophy of race, and premodern critical race studies. It also puts forward a working model of racism useful for analyzing examples of race-thinking found in Christian texts of the late antique period, focusing specifically on negative significations of blackness. Broadly, the article aims to outline more dynamic and fruitful approaches to conceptualizing race, racism, and ethnicity in the study of the ancient world.

Brave and Transgressive Appropriations Matter: A Review of “Exploring Othello in 2020” for Red Bull Theater

This is a review of New York’s Red Bull theater's Zoom salon, entitled “Exploring Othello in 2020.” The production used a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) cast. This review considers the production in relationship to larger trends within premodern critical race studies and the idea that theatre can create a brave space for exploring the relationship between race and performance in Shakespeare.

Ableism and (Neo)Racism in School Placement Processes in Quebec: School Personnel Interpretations of Immigrant Student Difficulties — A Secondary Publication

The school placement processes of students from immigrant backgrounds considered to be in “difficulty” is an international concern at the intersection of works relating to special education and those concerning the school experiences of students from immigrant backgrounds or racialized groups. The research problem of this article concerns the identification of these students as disabled or as having adjustment or learning difficulties. From a perspective anchored in Disability Critical Race Studies, this ethnographic study documents different interpretations of perceived difficulties made by school actors with regard to seven primary school students from immigrant backgrounds. Five interpretation types are presented: (1) medicalization by dismissal of cultural markers, (2) medicalization by professional constraint, (3) medicalization by cultural deficit, (4) precautionary wait, and (5) cultural differentialism. Our results help to shed light on the special education overrepresentation phenomenon regarding these students and to understand how ableism and (neo)racism contribute to it.

Education and Coloniality in the Nordics

Current research maintains that the Nordic countries, despite their contextual differences, are prone to amnesia and sanctioned ignorance in relation to their colonial histories, legacies, and structures (Eriksen, 2021; Fjellheim, 2023; Höglund & Andersson, 2019; Jore, 2022; Keskinen et al., 2019; Kuokkanen, 2023; Loftsdóttir & Jensen, 2012; Mikander, 2016; Pashby et al., 2020. As Quijano (2000) describes, European colonialism from the 15th century did not end with historical colonialism based on territorial occupation; enduring power and knowledge structures were installed in and through modernity, described as coloniality. Coloniality entails a specific colonial matrix of power (CMP), grounded in race as an organizing principle. CMP permeates social, political, environmental, and epistemological systems of capitalist modernity in local and context-specific ways. This special issue (SI) aims to advance critical discussions about coloniality in relation to education in the Nordic region. Education has been proven to reproduce coloniality, epistemic violence and racism, but represents at the same time potential avenues towards decolonial, socially just and sustainable futures. A decolonial conversation must give room for a diversity of voices. This is due, not least, to the harsh pushbacks experienced by researchers who raise these concerns in the Nordic context. As scholars, we see worrying signs emerging from the consequences of mainstreaming of radical right-wing politics. These include cuts to welfare and development aid and limiting rights for refugees – all aspects which have commonly been seen as intrinsic to Nordic national identities. The recent case of Tobias Hübinette, a scholar in critical race and whiteness studies, is an alarming example of how academics are being threatened. A supporter of the radical right wing enrolled in his class recorded and disrupted the lecture, attempting to silence Hübinette’s research on questions about racism in general. Despite the student being a threat to university staff and students, they were not expelled (Norheim et al., 2023). The case highlights the need for joining forces and making space for conversations across the Nordic community of researchers engaged in the issues of race, racism, whiteness, and coloniality. The first articles in this SI were written by Jore and Fagerheim Kalsås, and open with theoretical discussions concerning approaches to coloniality in Nordic education. The following contributions show the richness of the field, taking on a diversity of approaches, including poststructuralist and critical whiteness theories, post- and decolonial perspectives, and indigenous methodologies, as well as more empirically oriented and descriptive pieces. Although these methodological strands have many overlaps and are in practice often combined in research, they are also at certain points conflicting (cf. Eriksen & Jore, 2023; Finbog, 2023; Groglopo & Suarez-Krabbe, 2023; Keskitalo & Olsen, 2021). We do, however, consider diversity as a strength. Coloniality is complex and can be considered a foundational concept that encompasses many distinct processes and structures at multiple levels (Kuokkanen, 2023). With this editorial, the aim is to provide background knowledge and an axis of navigation for the articles in this SI. We start with a brief recap on the multiple ways in which colonialism, racial violence, and white supremacy form part of the history of the Nordic countries. As this overview shows, decolonial perspectives have been surprisingly belated in the region. We then give a brief introduction to education and decolonization in the Nordic region – a subject that is much better explored in the individual contributions. Then, finally, we draw special attention to acknowledging indigenous perspectives in analyzing decoloniality in the Nordic region and intra-Nordic relations.

Whiteness and the Problem of Colourblind Listening: Revisiting Leonard Feather's 1951 Blindfold Test with Roy Eldridge

Whiteness and the Problem of Colourblind Listening: Revisiting Leonard Feather's 1951 Blindfold Test with Roy Eldridge

"But They Were a Race of Whites": Race and the Making of Ancient Slavery in the Anglophone World, 1785–1980

summary: Today, few ancient historians believe that Greek and Roman slavery had anything to do with race or racism. But when histories of ancient slavery were first written in the 1780s, the connection was assumed. This article explores how and why race and racism persisted in Anglophone historiography on ancient slavery into the twentieth century, only disappearing in the 1950s. I argue that it might be time to reopen the book on whether ancient slavery was a racialized institution. Adopting insights from premodern critical race studies (PCRS), I argue that the real differences between ancient and Atlantic-world slaveries should not be seen in terms of discontinuity and rupture. Rather, I see the question through what Margo Hendricks calls a "bidirectional gaze," by which social arrangements of the past few centuries might bear uncanny resemblance to institutions of the ancient past.

“Who Created These Rules?”: Narrative Accounts of Two First Generation Black African Immigrant Students with Dis/Ability Labels

The scholars in Disability Studies in Education (DSE) have explored critical connections between race, disability, and other markers of identity. This article specifically explores narrative accounts of two first generation Black African immigrant students’ educational navigation and their English as Second Language (ESL) and special education experiences. A pluralistic theoretical approach including Disability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit) and Ethnic Racial Identity (ERI) Formation framework is employed. The author proposes a disability-integrated ERI (D-ERI) framework. Some important findings from participant narratives suggest their awareness of the ESL as a formalized system leading to special education placement, and their acts of resistance against the deficit perceptions about their intersectional ethnic-racial identities in U.S. schools.

“This Land of Thorns Is Not Habitable”: Diagnosing the Despair of Racialized Meta-oppression

ABSTRACT This article addresses the growing literature in critical race studies, which holds that racism is permanent or incurable, and that by adopting this pessimistic view of racism, we can enact improved and healthier racialized lives. I argue that the focus on curing anti-Black racism, and the failure to do so in the civil rights era and its aftermath has left people of all races, to varying degrees, stuck in pessimistic states of racialized anger, resentment, guilt, and shame. These pessimistic states have brought about an additional level of oppression for targets of racialized oppression. I call it “meta-oppression,” and it is the oppression of being oppressed. I argue that this oppression has exacerbated the effects of the social disease of racism, and it has literally affected the physiologies of many African Americans. This article provides a diagnosis of these existential and physiological states of meta-oppression and a clarification of its characteristics. This diagnosis is an initial step in a larger project of formulating and enacting effective treatments for it. I then argue that meta-oppression is a helpful diagnostic tool for clarifying the characteristics and ramifications on Blacks of US systemic racism during the post–civil rights movement period. I aim to establish meta-oppression as an existential and physiological condition that requires attention so as to expand the social imaginations of people of color and to allow us to engage in more systemic joyful affirmations of our racialized lives while still living within racist conditions.

Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race. Noémie Ndiaye. RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 613 pp. $64.95.

Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race. Noémie Ndiaye. RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. 613 pp. $64.95.

Racialized Identity, Then and Now: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the Rise of Donald Trump, and the Role of Academia

Abstract: This paper explores the formation of racialized and gendered identities in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. To this end, the intervention aims at analysing how these identities are constructed along the colour line and also reconnoitred in the novel by putting W. E. B. Du Boas’ seminal term “double consciousness” into operation. The study also zeroes in on the sea change taking place in the United States in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election and beyond to demonstrate how various racial constructions are still at work in assorted forms and practices and reinforced under the guise of Donald Trump’s slogan of “make America great again”. It, further, tries to show how we can address these issues by drawing on the course Critical Race and Ethnic Studies taught in the American academia that can eventually, to certain extents, help us to identify several critical tools and paradigms to deal with the politics of the “personal and spiritual” with a view to envisioning a future in relation to emancipation and equity.

More than just dying: Black life and futurity in the face of state-sanctioned environmental racism

Environmental justice (EJ) scholarship has long done work in and on Black communities. Yet, the field’s engagement with critical race studies has been rather recent and limited. This paper questions what we learn about Black living from EJ scholarship. I argue that there are two main registers of Black living in EJ scholarship: dying and activism. I draw on Black feminist geographies to think and imagine EJ work that incorporates nuance to the modalities of Black life and futurity in the face of state-sanctioned environmental injustice. The goal of this is not to deter EJ scholars from exposing instantiations of environmental injustice in the world, nor to undermine the deadly realities of EJ communities. Rather, this paper pushes EJ scholars to be wary of essentializing Black communities to death and decay and urges these scholars to behold Black life and futurity experienced in close proximity to death in these spaces. I provide examples of Black living and making way for Black futurity that occurs beyond the registers of dying and activism in EJ communities, such as care, Black intellectual life, and refusal, registers made apparent through a Black geographies lens.