Color-blind/race-conscious: Interrogating race and racism in the lives of four teachers of color using critical race theory

This study presents the narratives of four teachers of color who participated as peer leaders in a nationally renowned professional development program focused on raising teachers' awareness of equity issues in schools. Drawing on interviews with these teachers conducted over a three year period, this study employs a critical race analysis to investigate how these teachers draw on features of critical race-consciousness to undermine institutionalized racism, the challenges these teachers face in building and maintaining a critical race-consciousness, and within the context of structural racism, what happens when these teachers attempt to disrupt or decenter Whiteness and to confront racism in their lives and in their work as teachers. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and theories of critical race-consciousness, this study finds that each of the four teachers, drawing on their own personal experiences with racism, accessed important features of critical race-consciousness to resist dimensions of structural racism. However, this study also finds that when personal experiences alone -- without a sociohistorical context for understanding racism -- grounded these teachers' interventions in racism, these teachers' attempts to disrupt and decenter Whiteness were acontextual and limited in nature. Further, this study also finds that structural racism framed these teachers' efforts to engage in conversations about racism with their White colleagues and students in ways that, in some cases, led them to protect Whiteness even as they sought to disrupt it. Findings from this study suggest that programs that seek to use the sharing of personal experiences as a tool for examining racial power dynamics may assist teachers in initiating conversations about racism in schools. However, these findings also suggest that, in the absence of a structural framework for analyzing the subtle, yet powerful ways racism may be enacted multidimensionally in the school setting, these programs run the risk of falling short of their anti-racist goals.