Out of Adolescence and Into Adulthood

My Own Introduction to CRT in Education

Because CRT and CRP deeply center themselves in counternarrative, I use my own interaction with the construct and its origins to frame my perspective. I was first introduced to the concept in my second year of graduate school in 1996. The Ladson-Billings and Tate article was just under a year old and creating buzz in educational foundations, curriculum theory, and curriculum studies. My department head at the time alerted me that a new professor was coming to the department who had begun to center his work in CRT. I was excited to meet him. At the time we were able to get a copy of an old syllabus from his classes, allowing us to get an idea of the readings he was using for the class. At this point, the majority of CRT were still nested in legal scholarship and were generating attention due to their challenge to mainstream jurisprudence. From reading the original edition of Bell’s (2008) Race, Racism and American Law to Critical Race Theory: Key Writings That Defined the Movement (1996), Cheryl Harris’s (1993) Whiteness as Property to Critical Race Feminism (2003), to Richard Delgado’s The Rodrigo Chronicles, myself and other classmates who were interested in the construct were completely enthralled by the fact that a group of scholars were willing to name the ways in which racism/White supremacy operates in the law.

When we came across the Ladson-Billings and Tate piece in Teachers College Record, the most striking piece of the document was its overall tone. In graduate school, I was always in conflict with the sentiment that theory and research should not exude emotion and should demonstrate a neutral stance. Already trying to buck the trend of neutrality in my own writing, I felt a camaraderie with the authors, in that they were direct and unabashed in their critique. As a graduate student, it was inspiring for me to read lines to the order of

[a] second reason for the naming-one’s-own-reality theme of critical race theory is the psychic preservation of marginalized groups. A factor contributing to the demoralization of marginalized groups is self-condemnation. Members of minority groups internalize the stereotypic images that certain elements of society have constructed in order to maintain their power. Historically, storytelling has been a kind of medicine to heal the wounds of pain caused by racial oppression. The story of one’s condition leads to the realization of how one came to be oppressed and subjugated and allows one to stop inflicting mental violence on oneself. (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, p. 57)

To read this as a graduate student was a watershed moment for me. Because the article was rooted in an examination between race, property, and education, it was deeply influential to have my early assumptions confirmed. Using Cheryl Harris’s germinal contribution Whiteness as Property, Ladson-Billings and Tate also understood education to be included in the property rights of the ruling elite with the purpose and function of exclusion and limited access. Coupled with the authors’ connection to the historical and intersectional lineage of writings by critical scholars W. E. B. DuBois, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Carter G. Woodson, Gloria Anzaldua Franz Fanon, and Cherie Moraga, it allowed me to draw parallels to what I was observing and experienced in school. To speak of the trauma of miseducation coupled with self-condemnation was vital in my development as someone who was trying to pair scholarship with work on the ground in communities that are directly experiencing isolation, marginalization, and disinvestment.

With the encouragement of my advisor, the tone of the article led me to look deeper into CRT. He alerted me to the work of legal scholar Eric Yamamoto, who challenged his colleagues in CRT to spend less time with abstract theorizing and more time on the ground with people who were actually experiencing injustice in their day-to-day lives. It was my “aha” moment. Despite the fact of genuinely gravitating toward CRT, I was concerned that it was leaving me at a “no-shit” moment. Yes, racism is real, White supremacy is a system, and race is a social construct, but I was left yearning for more. It was not enough. For myself, Yamamoto’s contributions were reflective of the fact that finally, someone had the courage to challenge members of the academy to think differently while challenging the status quo of research that is traditionally performed “on” communities. Even more refreshing was that he is painfully intentional about the fact that any work toward justice is often uneven and messy. Despite the fact that you can never truly be prepared for the real-life messiness of the work, Yamamoto’s honesty and up-front sentiment served as the fuel by which to develop clarity on my own work. From legal scholarship and education, the pairing of both articles is monumental in my development as a scholar committed to use the construct.

From Initiation to Praxis—CRT Beyond the “Sexy” Moment and Into the Necessary Conversations

Currently, in my classes, I often tease graduate students about their attraction to theoretical paradigms that push the boundaries of traditional scholarship. Collectively, we recognize the constructs as having their “sexy moment,” when everyone is gushing with joy at the idea of a paradigm that will deepen our language and inform future generations about the necessity of our intervention. Before CRT in education, critical pedagogy, multicultural education, and critical philosophy have all experienced their moment in the sun. Scores of scholars begin to discuss the work at conferences as “groundbreaking” or “game-changing,” creating a title wave of graduate students’ new faculty quoting the work throughout their dissertations, conference presentations, journal articles, and book manuscripts. Some theories have stagnated, while others hold staying power as they are constantly revisited to challenge the status quo.

For CRT, it might be the end of the “sexy moment” of sorts. Despite concentrations of scholars at universities in the West (University of California, Los Angeles, University of Utah), most concentrations of scholars that engage CRT remain relatively small. At the same time, a bevy of graduate students in these spaces continue to use the paradigm in undergraduate projects, master’s thesis, and dissertations. Twenty years also means that CRT needs to move from its “buzz” moment and heed the words of Crenshaw in her retrospective on the construct.

Our attention should neither become trapped in the assertion that attentiveness to race only serves to reify it, nor by the moderate view that the best approach now that these historical missteps are exposed is to embrace a colorblind strategy to ignore it. Race is not natural, yet race is embedded in social relations, many of which are naturalized by the knowledge-making disciplines that we have inherited and participate in reproducing. (Crenshaw, 2011, p. 1349)

Understanding that race is biologically false and yet socially real, we are challenged to challenge the concept of a post-racial world. Now that the construct in education has moved to include edited volumes (Dixson & Rousseau, 2006; Lynn & Dixson, 2013), LatCrit in education (Perez Huber, 2009), historiography (Benavides Lopez, Malagon, Velez, & Solorzano, 2008; Perez Huber & Solorzano, 2015), Tribal Crit (Brayboy, 2005), spacial geography (Velez, 2013), Asian-Crit (Su, 2007), and critiques of post-raciality (Carter Andrews & Tuitt, 2013; Hughes & Berry, 2012), scholars who wish to move the conversation forward need to take into account the current political moment in education. In furthering the larger project of interdisciplinarity, scholars should continue to utilize the disciplines of ethnic studies, philosophy, gender and women’s studies, anthropology, history, and sociology to analyze the lack of teachers of color in the urban teaching force, Race to the Top legislation, and neoliberal market rhetoric of competition in schools. Continuing the role of positioning itself as insurgent scholarship, scholars in CRT should not shy away from a forcible opposition to the neoliberal rhetoric in school spaces.

In the case of this document, I am also implicated in working toward this goal. For the last 10 years, this has come in the form of participating on a design team to create a neighborhood high school centered in social justice. Since my days of working on the design team to becoming a volunteer social studies teacher at the high school, I have to recognize the intensity of the current political moment in public education. CRT (along with urban studies, critical philosophy, policy sociology, spatial geography, and ethnic studies) has allowed me language to name the dynamic while simultaneously providing documentation of work on the ground. At the same time, recognition of the political moment allows scholars to continue to speak across disciplines to address the deepening rationales issued by governments and private corporations to end public education. Where some may find this rationale as extreme and/or polemic, I live in a city (Chicago) that has lost 178,000 Black residents since 2000 in addition to rationales from city government to permanently shutter 49 schools. Charters prop up next to the shuttered schools and siphon away students who would originally attend neighborhood schools. Touted as austerity measures, we are witnessing a situation where those who have historically had the least are guaranteed even less under austerity measures argued to reduce government spending. Unfortunately, Chicago has become a metaphor for the rest of the country, as cities are moving away from investment in neighborhood schools to a competition-based model that does not take into account the process of disinvestment by way of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2007). As the aforementioned dynamic speaks to the idea of the state and corporate entities displacing populations deemed undesirable and using the formerly inhabited spaces as capital for the purposes of development. In light of these realities, the following section is the attempt to re-consider the construct in light of the current times.

Pushing Beyond the Counterstory

I posit that working with community members, students, teachers, and organizers to struggle against the aforementioned forces pushes us to re-consider the work of Yamamoto (1999) and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012). From their challenge to scholars positioned in the academy to decolonize the traditional relationships between universities and communities, I consider the following question: How does our work contribute to larger justice efforts on the ground or is our contribution solely academic? Where this may be considered a topic too large for this collection of writings, I believe that it should be considered for scholars who utilize CRT in their work. Where our recorded and archived contributions in journals, book manuscripts, and edited volumes serve an important duty as reference points to researchers who are interested in the theory, we also need to consider the idea of rising against the state in a process beyond the page. As I remain thankful to the scores of contributors who precede me in the development of CRT in education, I cannot remove myself from the realities that are taking place in the communities like the ones from which I come. Reconsidering the acts of praxis, I have tried to take Yamamoto’s take on race praxis and make it applicable to my own work. In this process, I have attempted to go beyond the sole contribution of counterstory into work on the ground.

Again, I do not want to dilute the contribution of counterstory to the lives of people of color as method and theoretical frame. However, the drastic and intense nature of the current moment cannot deter us from recognizing the real work taking place in communities against the neoliberal forces that utilize White supremacy to rationalize further marginalization and isolation of people of color. Returning to interdisciplinarity, the work of activist scholars (Hale, 2008; Sudbury & Okazawa-Rey, 2009) offers a challenge for us to engage our contradictions, while understanding that the larger justice project in education remains rife with imperfections and contestations that will perpetually challenge how we act and move. In most of the CRT in education scholarship, praxis is still implied more than it is addressed directly. Invoking the work of critical pedagogy, our actions must remain reflexive if we are ever to improve the current condition.

Because we move in spaces that are often contradictory and contested, I also believe it remains important to take note of the reality that there will never been a lone person (or theoretical construct) that will liberate us. However, the reminder from the activist scholars is that the work will be done collectively. Similar to the ways in which counterstory provides both individual and collective analysis of the experiences of people of color, our work in the various outlets of neighborhood public schools, community organizations, progressive research/policy institutes, and youth groups must remain collective with a commitment to action and reflection.

Conclusion: Radical Imaginaries and Fugitive Spaces in Troubling Times

Critical scholars Stefano Harney and Frank Moten (2013) have challenged scholars positioned in the academy to entertain the idea of a fugitive space—one that is not created because of institutions, but in spite of them. In the same light, I place CRT into fugitive space as insurgent scholarship intended to contest, refute, and offer a different reality from that which is offered under the realities of White supremacy. In education, the ability of young people of color to think and create is perpetually threatened under the onslaught of high-stakes testing. Returning to Crenshaw’s (2011) positioning in her 20-year perspective on CRT in the law, we should take note of the fact that

. . . the task at hand is to interrogate (racial) power where we live, work socialize and exist. For academics, that world is implicated in the ways that the disciplines were built to normalize and sustain the American racial project. A contemporary critical race theory would thus take up the dual tasks of uncovering the epistemic foundations of white supremacy as well as the habits of disciplinary thought that cabin competing paradigms through colorblind conventions. (p. 1348)

As we are witnessing this most drastically in low-income communities of color in urban centers, we cannot ask CRT itself to do anything for us. Instead, the idea of fugitive space provides an opportunity to push the paradigm to ask a direct question.

. . . in the same way that post-racialism builds on colorblindness but re-popularizes it, a new critical approach might build on the remnants of racial injustice to fashion a new intellectual frame . . . But the space for such projects will remain, fueled by the likelihood that there are pockets of scholars, activists, policy makers and lay people who share a sense that among the worse outcomes of post-racialism would be not only the loss of forward momentum, but the loss of the ability to witness, to call forth hopes about different imaginaries that are not embargoed before they can ever be spoken. (Crenshaw, 2011, p. 1351)

Moving forward, I borrow from professor Rae Paris in a letter written to her students who were protesting the unwarranted deaths of Black women and men in the United States. Bearing witness to their trauma, she penned a letter as an act of solidarity and sent it to her network of scholars to distribute. As thousands signed the letter, her words ring true in the current moment.

We tell you about the underground network of folks who helped us, the people who wrote us the letters, the offices we cried in, the times we were silent, the times we spoke up, the times we thought we wouldn’t make it, the people who told us to hold on. We tell you over and over about the railroad of Black professors and other professors of color who we call when we know one of us is in need. We remind you skinfolk isn’t always kinfolk. We tell you to be careful.

We tell you to take risks. We tell you, guard your heart. We tell you, keep your heart open. We tell you to hold on. Hold on, we say, to you, to us, because holding on to each other is everything, often the only thing.

In our classes we’ll continue to do what we’ve always done: teach about race, anti-blackness ad White supremacy. This has and will continue to put us in positions we have to defend. This has and will continue to compromise our jobs, our health, our relationships with other people who profess to be our colleagues. This has and will compromise relationships with partners who tell us with love we need to set better boundaries.

What we do is not enough. It’s never enough, but we’ll keep on. We’ll keep finding ways to do more. For all of us. (https://blackspaceblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/img_5465.jpg)

Throughout its travels, CRT in education still owes much to many as it continues to develop and expand. As a Black person employed in academia, I too would continue professor Paris’ comments to include the lives of Black youth (both in and out of traditional education) to state the ways in which I continue to struggle and work with others in naming and defeating White supremacy. In the spirit of her remarks, I offer the following:

When your tattered and bloodied souls are prepared to give up or when you find yourself so frustrated that you feel the need to respond violently to the reality of your conditions, remember: you are the sum total of all we have in the perpetual war for our humanity. There are many that will raise up to thwart you. Rise against them. You are never alone. You are never by yourself. Whenever you feel this way, find us. I will forever be on the lookout for you. When we find each other we will work together. We have much to teach each other. I am accountable both to you and this struggle. We cannot win individually. Our victory will be collective. Waiting for something or someone to save us is agreeing to our collective death. If we are to live, then we must work to make life possible.

In the academy, there are still those who may find my reflections to be didactic. From the moment I came to critical consciousness, I have committed myself to a perpetual refusal of what naysayers may think. My real concern, however, is that if we continue down the rabbit-hole of post-raciality, we will fool ourselves into waiting for some new day to come. CRT in education reminds us to remain dutifully skeptical of this moment ever coming to fruition. Because it is not the mythical theoretical paradigm that will free us from spiritual, mental, or physical slavery, it should be continually questioned, challenged, engaged, and revisited. If we are committed to the aforementioned actions, our work is set for the next 20 years and beyond.