Critical Race Theory In Education Research Articles

Policy opinions regarding the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has recently been positioned as a serious problem requiring urgent policy response among partisan media outlets. Making a case for pressing policy demands, several policy makers have proposed federal, state, and local level legislation and other measures to restrict how race, racism, or American history in general can be taught in K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and state agencies. Anti-CRT rhetoric in media and policy proposals have also propagated the notion of CRT as being divisive as well as ubiquitous in public education. Given this, it is critical to examine whether policy opinions regarding reactionary legislation is based on a real understanding of CRT. We conduct a conceptual and theoretical inquiry into anti-CRT rhetoric relying on the sociological concepts of moral panics and folk devils. Then, we examine familiarity, knowledge, ideology, policy beliefs, and policy opinions regarding CRT in education using nationally representative survey data. The analysis showed that most parents are not familiar with CRT, and the average parent neither opposes nor supports teaching of CRT. The opposition to teaching of CRT is largely driven by political affiliation and related ideological beliefs and positions.

Racist norms until interests converge: a long tradition of egregious educational policy patterns and global implications

ABSTRACT This article contextualises the crisis in Black education and the death of a 100-year-old Black educational system resulting from an unintended consequence of Brown: the excavation of thousands of highly educated and skilled Black educators. This theoretical article advances the literature on Brown using two critical race theory (CRT) tenets, the permanence of racism and interest convergence, to discursively trace the regression of Black education. This article illustrates the myriad ways interest convergence and the permanence of racism contribute to crises in Black educational systems and the death of a 100-year-old Black educational system. A limitation of CRT in education is the homogenous treatment of Black people despite their variations and conditions. Additionally, analysing connections between Brown, ESEA, and NCLB needs further examination. Finally, I advance that Black resistance to the permanence of racism in the US had global interest convergence implications and aligned with decolonial and independence movements.

Examining Race in LatCrit: A Systematic Review of Latinx Critical Race Theory in Education

This systematic review includes 125 peer-reviewed education-research articles that employ a LatCrit framework (from a search including articles published from 1995 to 2020). The author examines how the literature utilizes LatCrit and advances ideas about race, Latinxs, and Latinidad in education. The author presents significant patterns and divergences in the literature’s strengths, challenges, and tensions. Some strengths include detailing Latinxs’ experiences and valuing experiential knowledge. The author problematizes four research practices: (1) describing LatCrit with select tenets of CRT; (2) not defining race or other relevant concepts (language, culture, etc.); (3) claiming Latinxs are unique because of their multidimensionality; and (4) exceeding LatCrit’s scope by rationalizing the study’s use of LatCrit because its participants are Latinxs. The author argues that these complications lead to a paradox: even though LatCrit emerges from critical race theory and is described as for Latinxs, the literature largely undertheorizes race and lacks clarity about conceptualizing Latinxs as a racialized group. The author recommends four framing ideas that are particular to LatCrit and that help advance the specificity of Latinidad in education.

Shaping undergraduate public health education through critical race theory: a case study.

In 2020, the American Public Health Association declared structural racism a public health crisis acknowledging the long-lasting and harmful effects of prejudice, including relatively high rates of morbidity and mortality in many communities of color. Critical Race Theory (CRT) has become an essential lens to view and reconsider education's role in perpetuating racial and ethnic discrimination. Debates over integrating CRT in higher education with the intent to acknowledge and address racial equality and justice are more present than ever, and the discussions held in public health classrooms are no different. We present a case study of CRT integration into the Bachelor of Arts in Public Health (BAPH) program at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. In line with Solorzano's framework of CRT in education, initial goals of integrating CRT in instruction and advising included fostering discussions of race and racism, using a social justice framework to highlight opportunities to reduce health inequities, and validating the experiential knowledge of people of color. By engaging in active discussions with community leaders and participating in experiential learning throughout the program, students develop empathy and many underrepresented and marginalized students engage actively in their home communities. Specific examples of CRT integrated in the curriculum and examples of student projects that integrate a CRT lens are provided for educators and researchers.

Black Graduate Students’ Counternarratives and Interrogations of a Hate Crime

ABSTRACT Hate crimes across the country are becoming more prevalent, and there are growing concerns for higher education and college campuses. White supremacy has been noted as a potential driving force escalating hate and discrimination at disproportionate levels, especially for Black students on predominantly white campuses. This qualitative study described the murder of 2nd Lieutenant Richard Collins III by a white supremacist student, Sean Urbanski at a bus stop at the University of Maryland College Park. I used critical race theory in education and critical race methodology to analyze Black graduate students’ counternarratives and interrogations of a hate crime through semi-structured interviews. I described how the juxtaposition of this hate crime influenced campus and national conversations about Black students’ proximity to white supremacy. Lastly, participants’ counternarratives attested to widespread trauma, which adds a new layer to existing literature on Black graduate students’ experiences. Implications for this scholarship offer practice, policy, and research recommendations to eradicate hate crimes on college campuses.

Critical Race Theory in Education: How Banning its Tenets Undermines our Best Hope for Equity in Education

Critical Race Theory in Education: How Banning its Tenets Undermines our Best Hope for Equity in Education

Rejecting the racial contract: Charles Mills and critical race theory

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the deep roots and long history of the attacks on Critical Race Theory in education, while at the same time savoring the equally long and eminently venerable and presently visible traditions forged by “the insights of generations of anonymous ‘race men’ [and ‘race women] who, under the most difficult circumstances” developed ‘the concepts necessary to trace the contours of the system oppressing them, defying the massive weight of a white scholarship that either morally justified this oppression or denied its existence’ (1996, 131). I identify Critical Race Theory as the product of a long history of Afro-diasporic autonomous learning centers and parallel institutions as well as the producer of new ones.

(Re)constructing a Border Pedagogy: Centering the Borderlands in Latinx Teacher Education

ABSTRACT As teacher educators on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, our goal is to (re)conceptualize a pedagogical approach for bilingual teacher development informed by teacher education research in the borderlands and anchored in the myriad of historical, sociopolitical, cultural, and linguistic realities of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands – a border pedagogy. Our (re)conceptualization is based on a metasynthesis of bilingual teacher education research from the four U.S.-Mexico border states and additionally draws from critical race theory in education and border theory scholarship to examine the geopolitical context of the borderlands as impacted by colonization and whiteness. Principles for (bilingual) teacher development and design are discussed.

Introduction – Naming and Reclaiming Our Intergenerational Path Forward: Critical Race Theory in Education’s Past, Present, and Possibility

Abstract In this Special Issue introduction, I share lessons from five trailblazing scholars who contributed to developing CRT in education fields – Laurance Parker, Tara Yosso, David Gillborn, William Smith, and David Stovall. I put their reflections into conversation with the contributing authors of the Special Issue, which include Daniel Solórzano, Walter Allen, María Ledesma, Chezare Warren, Rican Vue, and many more. As the host, of what I envisioned as sort of a dinner-party style introduction, I also share my own coming into CRT moments and the legacy I am proud to carry forward. We gather here to honor the liberatory impact of CRT, speak its intergenerational stories, and learn its lessons about our past, present and future: to name racism; to be in collective struggle; to create spaces of support, freedom, and possibility.

Toward Deeper Unconscious Racial Bias Work in Education

Background/Context: Unconscious racial bias (URB) can be a pernicious form of racism. In light of increased awareness of and research on the subject, URB work has become a key focus of equity work in health care, education, and corporate contexts as part of broader calls for racial justice. In Canada, targeting URB in education has become a policy priority at the national, provincial, and school board levels. The role of individual and organizational URB is now widely recognized in policy as central to equitable outcomes in schooling; however, research is limited on how to engage these forms of racism in educational contexts. Prevailing approaches to URB work in schools often include truncated one-off workshops, which leave unaddressed the connections between the individual racial biases, and the operations of white supremacy and racism at the institutional, systemic, and structural levels. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: While URB is increasingly well-understood by social psychologists, there has been limited engagement from critical scholars working in areas such as critical race theory (CRT), anti-colonialism, and critical whiteness studies—despite the popularity of interrogating URB as an anti-racism strategy in education. CRT in education has laid bare and problematized the central function of schooling in the safeguarding and management of white supremacy. This project emerged from a dual recognition of URB as a productive entry point for racial awareness and anti-racism work, alongside a significant concern about the failure of mainstream URB discourse to address structural racism and white supremacy—masking at times the deeper ways that Euro-colonial racism underpins social relations in contemporary U.S., Canadian, European, and other contexts. This work seeks to address these limitations in the design of the study through deep work with participants. Specifically, the study sought to understand better the impacts of reading critical texts focusing on systemic, structural, and institutional racism on teachers’ understandings of their own racial biases, as well as teachers’ perspectives on the impacts of reading critical texts in terms of their professional practices. Research Design: This article reports on the findings of a 10-month study with secondary teachers in Toronto, Canada, focusing on critical approaches to racial bias mitigation in education. In addition to asking participants to enact a series of URB mitigation strategies developed in the field of social psychology, this study also required participants to read and reflect on one of the following critical anti-racism nonfiction texts: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo (2018); Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada From Slavery to the Present by Robyn Maynard (2017); Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School, edited by Mica Pollock (2008); Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada by Paulette Regan (2014); and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects by Christina Sharpe (2010). The project was designed using multiple data sources from participants, including electronic survey responses, ongoing journaling/reflection, a midpoint check-in questionnaire, and a final interview. These multiple entry points, as well as the duration of the project, aimed to go beyond the taken-for-granted and toward deeper understanding over time. Conclusions/Recommendations: Findings suggest that reading these works impacted teachers’ understandings of race and racism in terms of their teaching, as well as in terms of their personal relationships to race and racism, increasing their inclination and ability to address race and anti-racism. This work allowed for critical reflection to seep into the most intimate and invisible moments of operationalized whiteness in the professional and personal spheres of participants. This suggests an important complementarity between teacher intervention practices emerging from social psychology, and the introduction and engagement of critical anti-racist and anti-colonial texts in terms of teachers’ work for racial justice.

Studying and Challenging Racism in Higher Education: Naming Bad Faith to Understand the “Logic” of Racism

In this conceptual essay, the author argues that bad faith is a valuable concept in understanding and challenging racism in higher education. The philosopher Lewis Gordon argues that racism is a manifestation of bad faith. For the actor who sees Black people as less than human, for example, no evidence will allow the actor to see otherwise. Bad faith is the disavowal of any disconfirming evidence which allows actors to maintain their worldviews. The author draws from high profile examples of racism in higher education as conceptual cases to make his argument. Specifically, the author demonstrates how attacks upon Critical Race Theory in education, the currency of critiques of microaggressions research, and the perennial difficulty to name racist violence on campus as hate crimes operate upon a logic of racism through bad faith.

Critical race comics: Centering black subjectivities and teaching racial literacy

This article seeks to explore the complexities of Black subjectivities as written and illustrated by comic book creators of color who wrestle with the enigmatic qualities of blackness as they write within and beyond racial imaginaries and social realities. I call these works “critical race comics” to highlight their explicit engagement with the ubiquity of race and racism and other tenets of critical race theory in education. Critical race comics teach through onto-epistemological explorations of blackness and by centering the black gaze in ways that foster humanizing racial discourse in classrooms, develop racial literacy in readers, and contribute to antiracist pedagogy. As such, I position critical race comics as pop culture and curriculum as they reflect larger literary, artistic, and social movements for racial justice in America (e.g. Antislavery, Reconstruction, New Negro, Civil Rights, Black Power, Hip-Hop, and #BlackLivesMatter).

K–12 School Counselors Utilizing Critical Race Theory to Support the Racial Identity Development and Academic Achievement of African American Males

This article examines the role of racial identity development in the academic achievement of African American adolescent males. Through the lens of critical race theory (CRT), we highlight how K–12 school counselors may support and enhance the schooling experiences of African American males by understanding and acknowledging how racial identity development may impact academic achievement. A focus on CRT in education emphasizes the continual persistence of racism ingrained in K–12 education located within the educational opportunities, curriculum, representation, and teacher perception of African American males. We offer insight into how school counselors may work to decrease barriers to achievement by analyzing the effect race and gender have on the identification, retention, and underachievement of their African American male students.

Review of DisCrit: Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education by David J. Connor, Beth A. Ferri & Subini A. Annamma, Eds. (2016)


 
 
 DisCrit places scholars from the field of Disability Studies (DS) in conversation with those from Critical Race Theory (CRT). Specifically, dis/ability is put into conversation with class- and race-based analyses to formulate an intersectional framework1. The concept of intersectionality has taken on heightened importance within Disability Studies in recent years. While Discrit is primarily intended for scholars and aspiring academics, the text also directly speaks to people like me, who identify as dis/abled.
 
 

Using Critical Race Theory to Explore the Experiences of College Students from Rural Areas

There are several indicators (e.g. lower enrollment rates and lower persistence rates) that rural people are achieving less postsecondary success compared to their urban peers. This is particularly true for people with low socioeconomic statuses and people of color. This article, therefore, utilizes critical race theory in education to explore the experiences of college students from rural areas. The article begins with an overview of critical race theory and a review of relevant literature about rural students organized within a critical race theory framework. This information is then utilized to construct a strategy to guide educators in their critical explorations of rural students and their experiences through assessing pertinent questions. A case study is also provided as an example to assist educators in their utilization of the strategy, providing a promising practice to support educators at higher education institutions in their efforts to be more inclusive of students from rural areas.

All Around the World Same Song: Transnational Anti-Black Racism and New (and Old) Directions for Critical Race Theory in Educational Research

As demonstrated through the disregard for Black humanity and respondent Black social movements throughout Latin America, anti-Black systemic racism is a transnational phenomenon birthed from global White supremacy. Across the Americas, the hemispheric parallels undergirding collective resistance to anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned violence lend themselves to multifaceted interdisciplinary scholarly examinations. Using transnational anti-Black racism in Latin America as a point of departure, we advance a theorization of critical race theory in education capable of interrogating racist structures of coloniality, modernity, and White supremacy that operate globally to suppress Black humanity and humanness in general. To that extent, we draw from and reposition critical race theory (CRT) from its sociohistoric heritage in the United States and instead conceptualize transnational anti-Black racism vis-à-vis a Black Diaspora reading of CRT. Finally, we return to education as a key site of contestation for transnational anti-Black racism and draw implications for the meaning of this global theorization of CRT in urban education, praxis, and educational research. We end by charting new and old directions for CRT in educational research.

Queering critical race pedagogy: reflections of disrupting erasure while centering intersectionality

This article argues that intersectional pedagogies are one way to capture the experiences of Queers of Color, specifically in higher education classrooms. Using critical pedagogies and critical race theory in education, the author makes the case for the need to intentionally center race and sexuality within pedagogical approaches and curriculum, what they call “Queer Critical Race Pedagogy.” Using autoethnography, the author reflects on three pedagogical practices that center race and sexuality and finds that employing a QCRP is critical because the representation of Queers of Color in the classroom, course materials, and as historical actors are significant to disrupt erasure and silence in curriculum. The author concludes that QCRP can lead students of diverse backgrounds to commit to social change.

Toward a critical race pedagogy of physical education

ABSTRACTBackground: A critical race theory of education has a been a popular framework for understanding racial inequities teaching and teacher education. Furthermore, it has served as the foundation for critical race research methodologies and critical race pedagogy, which are meant to address racial inequity via research and teaching, respectively. With regard to critical race pedagogy, there has been no specific conceptualization for the preparation of physical educators.Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a critical race pedagogy of physical education teacher education (PETE).Key Concepts: In the paper, critical race theory and critical race pedagogy are highlighted as the conceptual roots of a critical race pedagogy of PETE. In doing so it offers a critique of resource pedagogies and their conceptualization in PETE. Critical race theory has been described as a scholarly movement that seeks to uncover and dismantle systemic racism while rejecting incrementalism. Critical race pedagogy is an approach to teaching that is informed by critical race theory and womanism. A critical race pedagogy of PETE builds upon previous conceptualization of critical race pedagogy by offering the (a) recognition context; (b) the value of Black self-reliance; (c) and the value of the Black body as its foundations.Discussion and Conclusion: A critical race pedagogy of PETE adheres to a post-White orientation. As such, this approach to teaching recognizes that Black physical education involves Black people and Black places without subordinating or comparing them to White people and White places. It is also a challenge for Black scholars and teacher educators within PETE to focus their attentions, intentions, and efforts to the sustaining of Black educational institutions and the training of Black physical educators for Black communities. Thus, I acknowledge context within the post-White orientation allowing for an appropriate reorienting of a critical race pedagogy of PETE to meet the needs racially minoritized communities globally.

Ethnic Studies as Praxis

The authors provide a collective counter-narrative of the movement at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) to resist educational policies that have negative implications for students, particularly students of color, and threaten Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Queer Studies. The authors contextualize the movement that erupted in the fall of 2017 at CSUN within the struggles of the 1960s to transform higher education by establishing Ethnic Studies. Drawing from Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy and Critical Race Theory in education, the authors maintain that, in its best iterations, Ethnic Studies is praxis that empowers communities to create transformative social change.

An Overdue Theoretical Discourse: Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice and Critical Race Theory in Education

Scholars often use Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Bourdieusian analyses with the aim of studying inequities in education. Despite their usefulness and popularity, a theoretical discourse between the two frameworks has not yet transpired and the two are sometimes constructed as incompatible, if not at odds. The argument in this essay is three-fold: (1) CRT has never fully engaged with Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, (2) Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice and CRT, although distinct, are not necessarily in opposition, and (3) CRT and Bourdieusian concepts have the potential to inform each other, resulting in a more nuanced engagement of the interplay between structure, agency, and racial realities in education.