Using a Critical Race Praxis to Examine and Resist the Discursive Practices That Reproduce Racism,Misogyny,and Homophobia

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the use of a critical race praxis (CRP) and how I applied it in an English Language Arts high school class. I am guided by Yamamoto’s definition of CRP: a critical pragmatic analysis of racial realities and their intersections with other forms of oppression combined with educating for democracy, and organizing for social justice and change. My goal was to heighten students’ racial literacy and their agency to resist other forms of oppression. I conclude the article with an analysis of my practice using CRP and the tenets of critical theory in education.

Keywords

critical race theory ethnicity and race gender and sexuality discourse methods of inquiry qualitative research and education qualitative research methodologies

Frantz Fanon (1952) argued “It is no longer a question of knowing the world, but of transforming it” (p. 1). It is this statement that guides my praxis. Transformation comes through actions. If we remain passive in the face of individual, collective, or systemic prejudice, our inaction is a form of discrimination. If we choose to be theorist and not practitioners, we lack agency, and may be passively enacting a subtle form of discrimination. Our inaction may be the result of our privileged status which we fail to recognize yet use and spend all the same. Too often, prejudice is defined and described through the actions of an individual (Carbado, 2002; Vaught & Castagno, 2008). But prejudice is systemic and functions on a wide social spectrum. Our complicity comes when we condone and remain passive to the prejudice in society.

Part of the failure to recognize our privileged status has to do with the comfort we feel in our positionality. I recall talking to two women who identified as White despite their Latina heritage. In conversation with them, I recall asking why they would not declare themselves as Latina in college applications and when seeking financial aid. “Well I don’t really look Latina, and don’t really consider myself that” one responded; the other said she had never seen herself as Latina until I mentioned it. Both women grew up in White neighborhoods where their Latina heritage was seldom mentioned and rarely if ever acknowledged. The privilege they were afforded by whiteness and colorblindness could not compete with tokens, such as affirmative action, that non-Whites are allowed. Being Latina carried more material injuries than being left with less financial aid or denied from one’s school of choice. As Harris (1993) argues, whiteness carries the right of possession, use, and disposition to those who can afford it. It is a property that affords its owner of social privilege.

Both women are intelligent and have very liberal views, both fight for social justice and study racism through critical lenses. Ross (2002) believes this is the behavior of individuals who by their privilege—racial privilege in this case—fall in “the realm of whites who reject racism yet hold it in [their] consciousness” (p. 253). It is the population that despite—and perhaps because of—understanding racism chooses to fight racism without choosing to go against whiteness. “The simple truth” Ross argues “is that, to some significant degree, we do not really want to give up our whiteness” (p. 253).

In their book, Race Traitor, Ignatiev and Garvey (1996) reject idealized conceptions of whiteness that have served to romanticize the dominant discourse on race. Rather than engage in antiracism, Ignatiev and Garvey advocate for the abolition of the concept of whiteness. Unapologetically radical in their approach, they argue,

The term “racism” has come to be applied to a variety of attitudes, some of which are mutually incompatible, and has been devalued to mean little more than a tendency to dislike some people for the color of their skin. Moreover, anti-racism admits the natural existence of “races” even while opposing social distinctions among them. The abolitionists maintain, on the contrary, that people were not favored socially because they were white; rather they were defined as “white” because they were favored. Race itself is a product of social discrimination; so as long as the white race exists, all movements against racism are doomed to fail. (Ignatiev & Garvey, 1996, p. 11)

As a person of color, I am locked-out from an abolitionist approach to fighting racism, and disagree with Ignatiev and Garvey’s criticism of antiracism. However, I value their radical approach toward racism. I believe it will be through radical approaches that fight racism, misogyny, and homophobia that we dismantle and reject the pervasive discourses that normalize prejudice.

Statement of the Problem: Examining Oppression

I have been an English teacher in urban high schools for many years. I teach core English classes as well as some electives, in both I use epistemological and theoretical frameworks of critical race theory (CRT). My goal is to engage students in discussions about race, gender, and sexual orientation.

As CRT in education scholars argue students of color have lived experiences that are often silenced by schools and the pressure to “perform in keeping with the curriculum” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). In addition, students of color have a unique understanding of race and racism that is important to understand and make part of what is learned in a classroom. Following CRT’s cross-disciplinary tenet, I argue that understanding oppression through examinations and discussions about racism can lead to better understanding other forms of oppression (i.e., gender and sexual orientation). Often, this comes as a process of exposing oneself and our injuries and then turning a lens onto ourselves so we may also see how we injure. Without examining our marginalization, we could not understand how we also oppress and privilege ourselves at the cost of others.

In my experience, students of color understand or learn quickly what constitutes racial injury, but they are unaware of what constitutes misogyny and homophobia. When we explore racial injuries and describe them through counternarratives, we are also exploring oppression and presenting a view from the oppressed. It is this view and counternarrative that facilitates our understanding of other forms of oppression. Rollock (2012) posits that a common idea exists about racialized others occupying a “liminal space of alterity,” a position at the edges of society from which their identities and experiences are constructed. He argues that rather than at a place of disadvantage and degradation, “those excluded from the center can experience a ‘perspective advantage’ as their experiences and analyses become informed by a panoramic dialectic offering a wider lens than the [privileged] majority” (p. 65). It is this “perspective advantage” that I seek to develop in students and which begins the shift from theory to action; in other words, it is the first step toward a critical race praxis (CRP).

Method

The difficulties encountered with discussing issues of race in the classroom are the result of and outcome of a colorblind society. The achievements of people of color recently in the United States expressed most vividly in the electing of our first Black president for his second term, is often used to support the false belief that race issues in the U.S. have been overcome. Furthermore, bringing up these issues strikes many as a racist act. In response, a CRP engages students in discussions of race and racism and acknowledges the liabilities and psychology that make conversations about race so difficult. The fear and refusal to discuss issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation in schools is the result of “an active resistance to describing people as racial” (Pollock, 2005, p. 44). It is also a matter of ignorance as often teachers lack the required knowledge (knowledge students posses) to engage in such discussions. Again, this is a reflection that our society insists on being colorblind, and colormute (Pollock, 2005). The irony for people of color is that we live our lives with race as a salient part of how we are defined. Being colorblind and colormute only benefits Whites that, as a result, do not have to contend or discuss their privileged status (Bonilla-Silva, 2010).

First Step: Creating a Space

It is my experience that discussions about race, gender, and sexual orientation require (a) a safe space where students’ voices are valued; (b) a framework through which discursive construction of race, gender, and sexuality are contested; and (c) a pedagogical practice that breaks with the monologic tradition of classrooms and gives way to dialogic processes that involve students and teacher in the creation of new knowledge (Gutierrez, 2008).

Second Step: Modeling Vulnerability

I tell my students about the experiences with racism that I have had in my life: personal experiences as well as the experiences of friends and family. For example, entering the United States at an immigration booth, an officer asked me whether I had ever been deported. “Where to? Providence?” I responded. Countless times I have heard “Where are you from?” and been stopped by state troopers while with friends and family to see whether my seatbelt was on. Some may argue that race did not play a role in any of these encounters; however, it is the nature of microaggressions. They are subtle but rooted in the history of and experiences with racism that people of color have endured.

Third Step: Counterstorytelling as Dialectic

Recently a former student mentioned how her history teacher discussed Gobineau’s book on the superiority of the Aryan race. In response, the teacher said how silly and laughable it was and how it had been proven wrong later on; nevertheless, she did not provide any literature or authors who disputed Gobineau’s argument. The student wondered whether it had really been proven wrong? When? I explained to her that Anténor Firmin, a Black anthropologist, lawyer, and politician wrote a powerful rebuttal to Arthur de Gobineau’s book. I also explained how many authors have contributed to identifying the racist undertones and overtones in eurocentric texts such as Chinua Achebe’s critique of Heart of Darkness. Counternarratives are essential to any conversation on race and racism. Without the tools that refute the history of racism, we become reproducers of the hegemony of racism and can leave students in despair.

As teachers, we need to move beyond framing racism as accidental individual acts and begin to examine the intentional silence on racism that leads to a lack of awareness. It is unacceptable to simply label actions, behaviors, commercials, literature, and so forth as racist and discredit their effect on society as a whole. We need to tell a new story, a new narrative, and we need to learn a new history. We need to expose students to role models like Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa while we encourage students to pursue science. Students need to know about the history of the Black Panther movement, the strikes in California, DuBois’s frustration, persecution, and exile, as well as question the exile of FBI most wanted Assata Shakur. Then, we must question why our knowledge about these events and people in history and science is so limited.

Finally, students have much to tell and teach us about racism, recent racism. How they see themselves, how they perceive others treating them, and how school treats them. Creating the space, modeling vulnerability and developing racial literacy all have one purpose in mind, to elicit the student-narrated counterstories and make these part of what is learned in the classroom.

Analysis

Applying a CRP

My goal here is to outline what a CRP may look like in an urban high school classroom. I draw from my experiences as a classroom teacher, my theoretical knowledge of CRT, and the literature on CRP (Parker & Stovall, 2004; Su & Yamamoto, 2002; Yamamoto, 1997) and critical race pedagogy which Lynn (1999) defines as “an analysis of racial, ethnic, and gender subordination in education that relies mostly on the perceptions, experiences, and counterhegemonic practices of educators of color” (p. 615).

A CRP, as I argue in this article, must take from the concept of racial realism that Derrick Bell discusses. In the same way that Derrick Bell (1995) argues for a new approach to civil rights litigation—one that dismisses the idea of racial equality as a realistic goal—educators must also come to the realization that equitable education for students of color may also be, by the same, unrealistic. To assume otherwise is to ignore the legacy of racism in the United States, the present conditions of people of color, and the regressive trends of today’s market driven society to undo much of the civil rights movement’s progress, and the failures of schools in urban settings. A radical approach that disrupts the myths of race, gender, and sexual orientation is necessary if, as teachers, we want to engage students in an honest, formative, and meaningful educational experience.

CRP should engage students in a transformative learning experience. CRP must make race matter more than we generally might like to acknowledge. CRP must also be reflective; by examining and understanding the ways in which racial myths are normalized in society, we can explore how we normalize myths about gender and sexual orientation in our discursive practices as well.

It is important to set the context of the class by discussing with students the background on the history of race in America, the constructions of race both past and present, and the actions people take to change racism in America. All my classes make use of media as a primary source, I mix movies (Crash, American History X, Do the Right Thing), with documentaries (Africans in America, Hip Hop: Beyond Beats ’n Rhymes, The Black Mix Tapes, and The Interrupters), and YouTube video clips. We also discuss the documentaries Generation M: Misogyny in Media and Culture, and Speak Up! to move from race issues into issue of gender and sexuality. Once we have established that racism is real, we can examine the ways in which racism injures us, and begin to talk and write about it. These writings become counternarratives for scholarship (Delgado & Stefancic, 2011; Stovall, 2006). This is a key process, for as CRT scholars argue (Knaus, 2009; Solórzano, 1998), there is lack of literature that educates about the lived experiences of students of color. The first step toward a CRP is to elicit stories from students who have “first-hand experiences . . . [and] . . . intimate knowledge of racism in their lives” (Stovall, 2006, p. 231).

The second step is to begin the process of healing from injury. I call this process the resolution: creating a response to the injury and enacting change in our lives. We do this both as a classroom community and later individually. As a classroom, we begin to monitor our classroom discourse. We create dos and don’ts, for example, censor words that are not acceptable in the class, and we hold each other responsible. It is important to mention that it is not punitive. When we slip, an “I am sorry” is quick at hand.

We monitor our reproduction of racism by calling it out in the classroom. It is common practice for students or myself to shout out the phrase “That’s racist!” We make it so that it is completely acceptable in the classroom with the condition that we must engage in analysis and discussion. It is important to mention that overt racism is not common in the classroom; therefore, it is the subtle racism that is important to identify, label, and analyze. Calling-out racism and looking at our behavior critically when it happens in a safe space can facilitate our doing the same in less safe spaces.

This calling-out becomes the vehicle to the third step which I call “flipping the lens on ourselves.” As people of color, both my students and I get racism. We understand the injury when we experience both micro and macro aggressions. However, injuries stemming from misogyny and homophobia are not as easily nor as frequently experienced by us. Therefore, we are in a privileged position and must account for it. Here is where calling out misogyny and homophobia becomes the vehicle that traverses the discomfort of acknowledging our complicity and privilege. When it is public, when we see it in others, and others see it in us, we can together bridge a solution and begin to change our classroom discourse. Once our classroom discourse changes, we raise our agency to change how we think, speak, and finally act as a classroom and as individuals.

The fourth step is to define actions that we can take to change ourselves, our family, and our community. We begin with a personal question: What can I do and who do I have to become to make my life and my surroundings better for others and for myself? Each student comes up with an individualized plan of action. In it, they address the racial injury they sustained, the resolution to said injury, the injury they may have caused, and the action they will take to correct, prevent, or inform about racism, misogyny, and homophobia. In the study, these actions took on several forms: a letter to the interscholastic league (IL) that detailed the racism students were exposed to, presentations to class, public service announcements (PSA’s), screening of documentaries, and after school discussion groups.

Results

Being Latino, I was drawn to CRT and have taught using a CRP. After leaving the United States at age 7 and returning in my early teens, my racial awareness was heightened. I was exposed to what I would describe as peoples’ paradoxical curiosity: a complex process that framed many relationships with people who seemed genuine about wanting to know more about me and my culture, yet had certain expectations and definitions—constructed through dominant ideological stereotypes—about who I should be.

When I began teaching, I was reminded of this paradox. On one hand, I had begun my career with a commitment to social justice, but had also neglected to reflect on many of my stereotypical behaviors that contradicted my genuine commitment. I discovered early on that teachers often must fight their preconceived notions of students to understand and relate to them at a deeper level. This became a dialectic process where students and I needed to learn and understand each other at a meaningful and personal level. It meant going beyond ideas of tolerance and diversity and examining how racism functioned in society.

As some argue, for many children of color, schools represent a move into an environment that, at its best, is not representative of home setting, and at its worst, stimulates the same racism in society that structures race through a belief system of superiority and inferiority (hooks, 1995; Steele, 1992). Schools should follow the development of a student’s self-image and self-esteem, which are first developed through the parent–child relationship. As a result, I believe it is key to nurture an educational environment that welcomes a multiplicity of beliefs, traditions, points of view and customs of people. To emphasize this and give an idea of the level at which I knew my students, I chose to present some of my results through vignettes. I then follow these by a discussion about classroom events so as to also give an overview of how the class functioned, and how the transformational goal was met, and what it looked like.

Part I: Vignettes

Like stories used by CRT scholars, vignettes also tell a story but using a short impressionistic form that describes someone through a series of experiences. A second goal of these vignettes is to humanize the participants further and give them additional voice and subjectivity. All vignettes are the result of field notes, recorded and transcribed conversations, and student work.

Vignette 1

Derrick is Black. He is a senior in high school. He plays varsity football, basketball, and cross country. He is fit and excels in sports. He is smart and bored in school. He finds school to be easy and has to put very little effort to get an A or a B. I believe he uses apathy for protection, “As far as your class mister? I like it, but it isn’t a requirement you know.” He would often tell me when he first came to my class.

Derrick took a lot of coaching before he would tell me his experience with racism. When he finally opened up, he told me how he had been mistreated by the state’s IL, he explained how after being involved in a fight with another White student from a private school, he received a harsher punishment along with other innocent bystanders who were also Black. I asked him why it had been so difficult for him to tell me. “Because I didn’t want you to think bad about me.”

His story as well as his reason for not telling me struck a chord. Despite understanding how racist were the actions of the IL, he still questioned them and feared judgment. It is important to mention that our school had won the game and he had not initiated the fight.

His response was to write to the IL and accuse them of racism. We read June Jordan’s (2002) Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan, and used the story as inspiration and guide.

Vignette 2

Kenia is Black and bisexual. She is academically driven and open about her sexuality. She does not play any sports. She loves fashion and one can tell as soon as she steps in a room. She is amicable and a straight shooter so to say. She commands a room and is not threatened by anyone or so it seems.

Like Derrick, Kenia also took some coaching before telling me about her experiences with race. “I don’t have any mister” she told me after many days of pleading with her. “Kenia are you telling me you don’t have any stories or are you telling me you don’t have any stories that you are willing to share with me?” That is what it took. That day she came back with a narrative about how her “other” side of the family, the Italian side, would often criticize her hair and tell her it wasn’t as beautiful as theirs. She responded to this aggression by distancing herself. “It is why I don’t talk to them much and why I stick to my Black family.”

She read literature by Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and bell hooks. She was fascinated by Angela Davis and organized a group of students to attend a screening of Free Angela and all political prisoners at a local theater.

Her most memorable moment was when we discussed issues of gender, and gender abuse and violence. In front of a predominantly male class, while discussing rape statistics, Kenia stood up in vivid anger and called us out “How can you sit there and talk about this as if it were nothing. It isn’t nothing! None of you know what this is about!” she stared at me “you don’t know anything and yet you think you can speak about it.” She began to sob, the class crowded around her, I apologized. It was a rare moment in my teaching career to say the least. I questioned my praxis and wondered whether these discussions were leaving students in despair. As a teacher, I want my students to be safe and protected; nevertheless, I want students to expose themselves and find strength in the struggle against oppression. A few days after the incident, I sat down with her and thanked her for her candidness and the knowledge and awareness she had helped us achieve. It had been a teachable moment for her. Currently, Kenia is attending one of the top colleges in the United States and has begun to speak publicly on issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation. In one of my last informal conversations with her, I mentioned how I was going to see a presentation by Angela Davis: she responded, “I hope someday I can just call her and she will know who I am.”

Vignette 3

Jess is Black and a skater. He is very good. He is not into school sports. He is social and amicable. His grades are in his own words “not the best.” His parents are from Trinidad and Tobago and he likes to listen to YouTube videos of Stokely Carmichael.

Jess was very comfortable telling me his story. He began by prefacing it with “I am not sure this is about racism, but there was this one time I was at a skate park and these kids were looking at me weird.” They questioned his reasons for being there, to which he responded in a nonchalant manner “to skate man!” He skated well which got him in and accepted. The incident did not go further than this. However it was clear to Jess that in this situation his race mattered.

Delgado and Stefancic (2001) argue that a microaggression is not overt racism; it is the experiencing of an event as a person of color that leads you to wonder whether or not race played a role. At first, Jess dismissed the need to respond or discuss it further. In fact, it was difficult to establish whether Jess remained hurt about the incidence; but either way his telling of the story evoked feelings of oppression worthy of a response, which eventually came in the form of the rap below:

I know you fucking hate me

And think you can debate me

But I won’t let you bait me

Or even try to break me

The truth is in my actions

I don’t need your reactions

I only need to a fraction

Of talent and some speed

This is not about a black thing

This is all about a white thing

You think yourself a king

But you can’t even sing

Your ignorance betrays

Your hatred is so base

Your anger is misplaced

It is going to blow up in your face

If you can’t give me love

I got enough for both

If all you bring is pain

Then play another game

’cause in this one I reign

And here I will remain

Part II: Classroom Events

I guided students in the selection of texts. The majority of texts we used addressed the experience of African Americans. It is my belief that issues of race and racism are exposed and resisted best in African American literature.

Event 1: Writing about literature

In one of our classroom activities, I asked students to reflect on Audre Lorde’s poem A Litany of Survival. I began by asking students to close their eyes and listen to the poem as I read it out loud. I asked students to focus their thoughts on what the author was trying to express as they listened to the poem. I explained how poetry could be very abstract; it is full of literary devices that can make the meaning of the poem very ambiguous. I told students that I would read the poem four times, and at the end of each reading, I wanted them to quickly write down their thoughts. I further explained that in each new reading, I would reveal the author in terms of gender, race, and sexual orientation. We would then focus our discussions on what they wrote and whether in the process there had been any changes in their understanding of the author’s purpose.

After the first reading students focused on the sense of despair the poem evokes at the beginning. “It shows how we . . . count on people around us we always need acceptance even though we don’t appear to”; “People are afraid of their lives because they don’t want to lose anything and if they did lose something they become hopeless”; “The poem is about fear at the moment that (when) we have love we don’t want to lose it and when we are alone we might fear love will never come back.” A few students mentioned the ending of the poem “so it is better to speak” and the paradoxical hope in the line “knowing we were never meant to survive.”

After revealing that the author was a woman, many students mentioned the “nurturing” or “mother-like” theme in the poem but most kept recalling the sense of despair apparent in the poem “It talks about the fears we all at once have.” Some did not experience a change in perspective “It doesn’t change my mind that [it] was a woman who wrote the poem.” When told that Audre Lorde was Black, students wrote that the poem was written as a response to civil rights, but again most students did write about a change in their understanding of the poem.

Finally, I revealed that Audre Lorde was a lesbian. Beyond the silence of race, class, and gender in school talk, talk on sexual orientation specifically is not only silenced, it is frowned upon; often labeling these discussions as inappropriate or perverted. But one student’s reaction to the poem showed how necessary these discussions are. Kenia’s unedited entry I present below:

I think that this poem is about fear. It is also about life and how we manage to live day-by-day worrying of what might happen. I didn’t get the opening of the poem but it was the end that caught my attention. I also didn’t really hear a sequence of rhyming in this poem, which makes me wonder what type of poem it is.

Knowing that this author is a woman makes me see that she probably has this motherly thing going on and she speaks of how basically she’s afraid just like everyone in this world.

In the beginning, I thought that Audre Lorde was White but knowing that she’s black in the 1950’s make me go back and think of slavery. I think that she was talking about hard times in life.

Now that I know that she was a lesbian, it makes me think pretty differently and say that she was talking about hiding herself because she’s afraid. At first, I thought that this poem was written by a man and that it was just a whatever poem but now it makes me think deep about it. This poem has to do about identity.

How Kenia progressively identifies with the author is perhaps one of the best pieces of evidence I collected that students must connect with the literature to engage in it. Her initial dismissal “that it was just a whatever poem” reveals an expectation of a literature piece that is disconnected from her reality. Her first line “I think the poem is about fear” is later replaced with “she was talking about hiding herself because she’s afraid” contextualizing and giving meaning to this fear. When she wrote the last line “the poem (is) about identity” Kenia was no longer seeing the poem as one of solely struggle and suffering, but one of renewed confidence and hope. It is important to remember Kenia defined her sexual orientation as bisexual, one reason this poem may have spoken to her in a meaningful and personal way. I argue that allowing students to experience the voice of others who share in their struggle can have a significant impact in how we welcome and nurture our students’ uniqueness into the classroom.

Event 2: Talking about the n-word

Because even in the most democratic of classrooms, where multiple perspectives are presented, explored, contested and made part of the teaching and learning process, some students can still be silent; I engage, as part of the teaching and learning process, in one-on-one sessions with students. These one-on-one sessions lead to different kinds of conversations with degrees of trust and candidness that were unlike that of the classroom.

Discussions on the n-word happen in every classroom. Over the years, I have found that reading and discussing excerpts from Randall Kennedy’s (2002) Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word are useful as euphemisms of the word continue to proliferate in popular culture. In a one-on-one session with Chris, he referred to a lesson on the n-word and I asked him to talk about his thoughts which I was not completely clear about from the class discussion. The following is an excerpt of the discussion:

Chris:

So there is an African American (AA) teacher and there’s an American teacher. So in what we are reading so far if an AA teacher were to say to a Black kid “watch your tone” using the n-word or something like that they would be “Oh Ok miss, sorry about that” but if it were an American teacher [hearing it] out of nowhere and [they] happens to hear [me using the] N word, then they would have just been: that’s the way that I talk . . . You kind of get me?

Teacher:

Yeah.

Chris:

Like I kind of, to me, how I see it African American kids have more connection with their kind than Americans as in White. So that’s how I think about it. They are more open . . . like they can say more to their kind of race than another race.

[ . . . ]

Teacher:

Do you see it happening here?

Chris:

Well I see a lot of use of the n-word. And, like, to be honest with you . . . there’s not that much . . . like there aren’t many . . . there’s no teachers that really mind . . . You know what I’m saying? Like they won’t let . . . like they hate when we swear . . . but using the n-word is just like what you said already, it’s in our head it’s already going to come up before we even think about it. So over here I don’t see anybody . . . like there is a big difference between them in that story and over here. ’Cause we can use this word anytime we want and there is no discipline or nothing like that.

Teacher:

We don’t have any Black teachers for one.

Chris:

Exactly!

Chris understands both the reasons why the n-word should not be used but also the complexity that popular culture has created by using the word or euphemism of the word liberally. Chris’s argument reinforces Kennedy’s (2002) point that morphing the word does little to eliminate its destructive power and ignoring discussions about the word is unacceptable.

In her essay “Responding to the ‘N-Word,’” Luttrell (2008) documents the reactions of many teachers while they discussed the use of the word in their class. In many ways, what Chris is saying is confirmed in her essay. There is a kind of awareness that teachers often don’t understand when it comes to discussing the n-word. As Chris mentions, it is not the awkwardness that is upsetting but the passiveness and fear of engaging in a discussion about the word that can be more upsetting.

Conclusion

CRT in education presents an alternative to the traditional research in education that demeans and devalues the lives and experiences of students of color (Lynn & Parker, 2006). A major goal of CRT in education is to examine and challenge the effects of race and racism on educational structures, practices, and discourses (Yosso, Parker, Solórzano, & Lynn, 2004) with a commitment to the process of humanization (Freire, 1970).

CRT in education holds five tenets. (a) The intercentricity of race and racism with other forms of subordination: In other words, race figures as central, endemic, and permanent in defining prejudice in the United States. (b) Challenge to dominant ideology: Through its critique of liberalism, CRT in education rejects the claims of objectivity, meritocracy, colorblindness, race neutrality, and equal opportunity professed by educational institutions. (c) Commitment to social justice: CRT works toward the empowerment of people of color and other subordinated groups. (d) Centrality of experiential knowledge: CRT acknowledges the lived experiences of people of color as valuable and the narratives as vital to any movement that focuses on the emancipation of subjugated groups. (e) Transdisciplinary perspective: A critical analysis of race and racism in education must included multiple perspectives beyond education (i.e., law, sociology, ethnic and gender studies, etc.), and place them in historical and contemporary contexts (Lynn & Parker, 2006; Solórzano, 1998; Yosso et al., 2004). Using these tenets, teachers can put issues of race and racism at the forefront and make them salient. They can situate teachers’ practices within a critical race analysis that fights what Marilyn Cochran-Smith (2000) calls “blind-vision.” These tenets should lead us to a critical race pedagogy: a pedagogical practice that is grounded in the struggle to end racism and other forms of subordination (Lynn, 1999). Such a pedagogy requires us to rethink traditional models of educational practice and invent new pedagogical approaches toward our students, approaches that forge real alliances with our students that are the result of our awareness, focus, and disdain for the silence of a racial conscious discourse in schools. In what follows, I discuss how my use of a CRP connects to the tenets of CRT in education.

The Intercentricity of Race and Racism With Other Forms of Subordination

Discussions on race must engage with the variables of class, gender, and sexuality. Other forms of oppression surfaced soon after we had begun discussing race. When we discussed Audre Lorde’s poem and her biography, sexual orientation and gender were more dominant as themes than was race. Although some students felt privileged to openly express their disapproval toward gays and lesbians, one student found the agency necessary to resist and fight against the oppressive discourse that began to surface, and found the support she needed in the class and with her peers.

By examining other forms of prejudice through our experiences with racism, and looking at our own prejudice—be it privilege or internalized oppression—we were able to better engage in a conversations about sexual orientation, leading us to an understanding, rather than empathy, for the injuries of homophobic hate speech.

Challenge the Dominant Ideology

Stuart Hall (1981) argues that issues concerning race are complex, both at theoretical and practical levels. Perhaps paradoxically, we cannot understand racism and racial inequality in a vacuum that examines race alone. Therefore, when we look at racism and racial inequity, we must include broader examinations of oppressive ideological forces that function in society. When we examined a multiplicity of discourses in the classroom, we exposed the power relation that existed between them. Looking at discourses of power, the ideological assumptions hidden within them, and the privilege afforded by those who are not oppressed by it, led to bonds between oppressed that went beyond empathy to understanding.

Commit to Social Justice

CRP is more than a method or pedagogy; it also means taking a stance. To do so, we must engage in issues of oppression directly and openly and with a commitment to go beyond analysis and discussion into responses and agency. When I asked students to reflect on their own oppressive tendencies, I emphasized the idea that doing so meant recognizing said tendencies so as to resist them. It was important to understand that our goal was to end oppressive behavior of any kind. A student who at first refused to acknowledge his complicity in racist and misogynistic discourses wrote the following:

The class opened [my] eyes to things I never thought of . . . For example . . . I would have never thought of kids growing in a racist world and without them knowing its getting into them . . . How [people] put women down to a level that you might think is crazy and shocking . . . showing it to us makes us know how things are and were before.

Teaching using CRP means that we must encourage a commitment to social justice by modeling how to (a) critically analyzing social problems and conditions, (b) recognize individual and institutionalized forms of oppression, and (c) resist and fight oppression of any kind.

Centralize Experiential Knowledge

A key part of this work was encouraging students to tell stories. However, making these stories central to the class involved reflection and adaptation. Despite this, the rewards were great as students felt their stories carried weight and had a strong relevance to the class. Among many things previously discussed in other chapters, focusing our criticism on hegemonic forces in society rather than individuals allowed us to talk without the fear of being criticized. There is a silence about race in certain school spaces (Pollock, 2005). When we encourage students to have a voice and give them the authority to tell stories about their experience with race; we don’t just address this silence, we developed their racial literacy and fostered their agency.

Engage in Transdisciplinary Perspectives

The class was not a typical English Language Arts (ELA) class. I purposefully included historical narratives and critical texts. We discussed race through social and biological frames. We engaged in cultural studies focusing on ideology, hegemony, and agency, and created a visual aid to place ideological positions within our society. With discussions of race came discussions on class, gender, and sexual orientation. Popular culture was used as a vehicle to examine race and show contemporary forms of oppression. Using CRP involved widening the scope through which we look at race to include multiple perspectives from an array of disciplines. Doing so grounded our discussions and emphasized the variability and extension of topics discussed.

The purpose of a CRP is to interrogate subtexts to identify cultural representations and exercises of group power underlying and exacerbating oppression, and to translate insights into operational ideas and language that redress grievances (Yamamoto, 1997). The notion that a dictated step-by-step approach could be used to engage people in learning, and enacting change conflicts with the notion that critical learning and engagement involves an ongoing process, and an awareness of context. Therefore, my intention is not to prescribe a CRP, but to share my experiences and encourage others to engage in similar practices of social justice and antiracism.

What I have presented here is simply what happened in my classroom when I chose to purposefully make race visible and center student knowledge and experiences as the key component of what we learn in the classroom. Engaging students in a dialogue about race, gender, and sexual orientation using a CRP is transformative and much needed in today’s classrooms.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

J. Roberto García is an assistant professor in the Teacher Education Department at Weber State University. Previously, he taught English Language Arts in an urban school in Providence, Rhode Island. His work focuses on classroom discourse. His academic interests include critical race theory, critical discourse analysis, and critical discursive psychology. He lives in Ogden, Utah.

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