Art materials created by and used within cultures with implicit racial bias can exemplify and perpetuate that bias. An art material named for skin color perpetuates the normalization and prioritization of one skin color. This viewpoint details how one White art therapist educator dealt with a sand-colored paint labeled "flesh," which…

A prominent feature of the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd has been the renewed call for schools to become antiracist. What can be learnt from past unsuccessful attempts to implement antiracist education? Specific critiques of the antiracist movement made by prominent academics such as Paul Gilroy are worth…

Storytelling is a powerful tool to be utilized within racial justice education. It humanizes our experiences, promotes empathy, and allows us to connect across difference. Existing literature illustrates the influence of storytelling being rooted in marginalized populations and its ability to transcend cultural contexts (Banks-Wallace, 1998; Bell,…

In 2022, many are coming to understand that racism is a proverbial pollutant in the water people in the U.S drink. Moreover, it is a toxin all members of a race-based society consume, and all must address. In this paper, I share my reflexive journey facing and dismantling racism in my own teaching praxis--examining ways I have upheld structures of…

Curriculum studies, like nearly all education scholarship, are predicated on Black suffering and death. Inspired by Christina Sharpe's treatise "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being," we will engage with the difficult questions of what it means to be curriculum theorists inculcated into whiteness and settlement. Pivoting Cheryl Harris's…

Critical and justice-oriented approaches to leadership are incomplete without attention to racism and racialization. This study employed basic qualitative inquiry to examine racialized legitimation within student affairs leadership education through lenses of whiteness as property and legitimacy. Findings detail how leadership educators sought to…

This paper examines how Black community-based youth workers navigate anti-Black racism in their educational programming with Black youth in a majority white college town widely recognized as 'nice,' 'liberal,' and 'progressive' with stark racial disparities between its Black and white residents. With racial liberalism and BlackCrit as theoretical…

Background: We are at a historical juncture that is punctuated by the rise of white nationalism, an exacerbation of racial divisions and tensions, an uptick in hate crimes, and bullying increasingly targeting immigrant youth, all of which, in the current political and cultural climate, have often been legitimized through a recourse to…

"Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods" dangerously lacked a centering, and critique, of white supremacy, as a structure of domination; we see the continuation of that active avoidance, or a progress approach through liberal or multicultural frameworks that do not precisely identify roots of racialized oppression, in…

The author argues that color-blind ideology amounts to a refusal to deal with the reality of racism, which protects and extends White racial advantage, as well as shares thoughts on dismantling Whiteness in education.

This research implements and evaluates the effectiveness of three scaffolds: critical theories in classes, critical friends groups to discuss white identity, dominant ideologies, anti-racist practices and diverse field based experiences. These scaffolds provided white pre-service teachers the opportunity to reconcile how their identities influence…

This self-study examined the challenges experienced by three Black counselor educators when implementing antiracist pedagogy into their classrooms. Two themes emerged: White gaze in counselor education and marked as an outsider within. Counselor educators should engage in continuous self-reflexivity and positionality while integrating and valuing…

This is the story of how the author came to understand race and racism in America. This story has everything to do with how he came to understand unconscious bias, white nationalism, and the fundamental threat to democracy we face today--and what each of us can do about it. The author shares a framework to help understand key concepts central to…

As a Black school librarian in Texas, there's one set of rules for her colleagues and another for Jean Darnell. Here she shares the difficulty she has endured trying to empower students to become active and engaged citizens while challenging school traditions. As an educator and school librarian for almost twenty years, she hesitated to even join…

When I look back before 2020, before the murder of Mr. George Floyd in particular, and think about this special issue, "Black Lives Matter in Literacy Research," a question comes to my mind: "Are we, the field of literacy research, sure that we want to include literacy research among the incalculable responses (already in progress)…