Drawing from a larger study of teacher empathy, this article offers a critical race analysis of three teachers' "dispositions" to discern (a) their social and emotional competencies (SEC) and (b) evidence of "transformative" social and emotional learning (SEL). Data sources include one-on-one teacher interviews, focus groups, document analyses, and more than 1,500 minutes of video-recorded classroom observations. Findings illustrate the influence of race, identity, and one's conceptions of power for determining transformative expressions of teacher participants' SEC. Implications for creating the conditions to effectively design and facilitate transformative SEL programming in urban school settings are discussed.