Pamela E. Barnett’s career and research in higher education have focused on advancing diverse student bodies, faculties, and curricula. She served most recently as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Distinguished Professor of English at Trinity Washington University in Washington, DC. One of the few remaining women’s colleges, Trinity enrolls a student body that is majority Pell grant eligible, first generation to college, and underrepresented minority. She currently serves as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at La Salle University in Philadelphia. Pamela began her career as a professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina, where she was named an Outstanding Teacher of the Year in 2003.

Stephen D. Brookfield is the father of Molly and Colin and the husband of Kim. He is a white man who was born in Liverpool, England, who has spent his professional life trying to understand how to help adults think critically about their learned ideologies and how to create collaborative yet critical learning spaces. He has done this with multiple organizations, sectors, and groups, including community organizations, nonprofits, corporations, TV companies, the military, hospitals, and numerous schools, colleges, and universities. As part of this journey he has written, coauthored, or edited 18 books on adult learning, teaching, and critical thinking, 6 of which have won the Cyril O. Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education (for the years 1986, 1989, 1996, 2005, 2011, and 2012). He currently holds the titles of distinguished university professor and John Ireland Endowed Chair at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. He has also been a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University; Harvard University; and the University of British Columbia.

Consuelo E. Cavalieri (Kootenai), PhD, is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Professional Psychology at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. Her scholarly and teaching interests focus on early childhood mental health, decolonizing psychology training, and the use of culture as medicine. She earned her PhD in counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2006. She has been an invited speaker at the Minnesota American Indian Mental Health Conference, has delivered guest presentations for the Indian Health Board in Minneapolis, and has collaborated with the State of Minnesota and the University of Minnesota to train early childhood–mental health clinicians in developmentally informed, evidence‐based approaches across Minnesota.

Bryana H. French, PhD, is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Professional Psychology at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. Her scholarly interests include black feminism and sexual violence, and her teaching focuses on multicultural and social justice psychology. She earned her PhD from the University of Illinois Counseling Psychology Program in 2010 and is a former Fellow of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Minority Fellowship Program. She has served in APA governance in Division 17 (Society of Counseling Psychology), Division 51 (Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities), and Division 45 (Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race), and her research on men’s sexual victimization has been featured in several news outlets, including Time, U.S. News & World Report, and the Huffington Post.

Talmadge C. Guy is a retired professor of adult education who has held various positions in the fields of adult and continuing education, from instructor to administrator to professor, spanning a career of 43 years. His specializations were in the history of the education of African American adults, diversity and inclusion, and culture and education. He has published research and analysis in a variety of publication outlets in North America and internationally. He is a Cyril O. Houle Scholar in Adult and Continuing Education, a recipient of the President’s Fulfilling the Dream Award from the University of Georgia, and a Carl Glickman Scholar. He has served as a consultant to organizations and in community settings to address issues of racial, gender, and class inequality. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

Susan Hadley, PhD, MT‐BC, is a professor and the director of music therapy at Slippery Rock University, Pennsylvania. She is the editor of Feminist Perspectives in Music Therapy (Barcelona Publishers, 2006) and Psychodynamic Music Therapy: Case Studies (Barcelona Publishers, 2003), and the coeditor of Our Black Sons Matter: Mothers Talk about Fears, Sorrows, and Hopes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), Therapeutic Uses of Rap and Hip‐Hop (Routledge, 2012), and Narrative Identities: Psychologists Engaged in Self‐Construction (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2005). She was also the editor of volumes four and five of Barcelona Publishers’ monograph series Qualitative Inquiries in Music Therapy. In addition, she is the author of Experiencing Race as a Music Therapist: Personal Narratives (Barcelona, 2013), for which she was awarded the 2016 President’s Award for Scholarly and Creative Achievement from Slippery Rock University. In appreciation of her critical approach to pedagogy, she was the faculty recipient of the 2014 Women of Distinction Award from Slippery Rock University. She has published numerous articles, chapters, and reviews in a wide variety of scholarly journals and books in the music therapy and related fields. Dr. Hadley serves on the editorial boards of several journals and is coeditor in chief of Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, an open‐access, peer‐reviewed journal that invites interdisciplinary dialogue and discussion about music, health, and social change.

Mary E. Hess has served on the faculty of Luther Seminary as a professor of educational leadership since 2000. One of her earliest peer‐reviewed journal publications was on the topic of white religious educators and unlearning racism, and since then she has continued to wrestle with the privilege she carries as a white woman in the United States. Teaching in a graduate theological school has given her the opportunity to work both with graduate students, and perhaps more importantly, the communities from which they come and to which they are sent as leaders. In the midst of the ferocious polarization and brutal neoliberalism of the United States, she finds hope in the day‐to‐day challenges of helping people to listen deeply to each other across various divides and in the creative energy to be found in imaginative and collaborative digital media. Her recent work includes developing the websites Storying Faith (Storyingfaith.org) and the Racial Justice Collaborative in Theological Education (https://mncts.net/2014/08/04/racial‐justice‐collaborative‐in‐theological‐education‐2).

Jaye Jones is the executive director of the Institute for Literacy Studies at Lehman College‐CUNY and an adjunct assistant professor in the college’s Department of Social Work. She received her PhD in social work from the University of Chicago. Her interdisciplinary research agenda focuses on adult learners with a history of trauma and the creation of emotionally responsive learning contexts that foster collective empowerment.

Mike Klein says, “I am from…white, middle class, male, able, middle aged, cisgender, heterosexual, blonde haired, blue eyed, and right handed…all the dominating identities of contemporary US culture. And I am from a critical and ongoing examination of the intersectional privileges and oppressions adhered to these identities so that I can work collaboratively for social justice from my particular standpoint.” He is an assistant professor in the Department of Justice and Peace Studies at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, where he teaches the undergraduate courses Leadership for Social Justice, Qualitative Research, and Introduction to Justice and Peace Studies, and seminars on art and social change, history’s future, community leadership, and coffee as a lens for interdisciplinary analysis. He also teaches graduate courses on social justice pedagogy, critical education in social movements, and the pedagogy of Paulo Freire. His research, publishing, and consulting focus on peace education, popular culture, the intersections of art and social justice, peace building, and democratizing leadership (the last is also the title of his 2017 book). He works with the Pillsbury United Communities’ Art Is My Weapon initiative in Minneapolis to creatively address violence by producing art from decommissioned weapons. He expresses gratitude for the opportunity to contribute to this collaborative publication with esteemed colleagues and for the generous editorial work of Stephen Brookfield, and he hopes that this volume might inspire work for racial justice.

Elaine Manglitz is a native Georgian who earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from West Georgia College, a master’s degree in middle grades education from Georgia State University, and a PhD in adult education from the University of Georgia. She has worked in the field of public education for almost 30 years, in both K–12 and higher‐education settings. Her most recent experience has been serving as the vice president for student affairs at Clayton State University, where she had the opportunity to engage both formally and informally with students, faculty, and staff to address issues related to equity and white privilege, among other areas. Elaine’s scholarly interests include research and writing on facilitating effective cross‐racial dialogues in educational settings and on other, similar topics.

Lisa R. Merriweather is an African American woman who works in a majority‐white institution of higher education. She is currently an associate professor of adult education at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and is involved in various initiatives related to equity, diversity, and social justice. She cofounded Dialogues in Social Justice: An Adult Education Journal in 2015. Her primary research interests are antiblack racism in adult education, Africana philosophy as a guiding lens for issues of race and racism, and culturally responsive doctoral mentoring.

Lucia Pawlowski is a white, cis, straight woman who earned her PhD in English from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and has been an assistant professor of English at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota since 2012. She specializes in the teaching of college writing, community‐engagement pedagogy, literary theory, and cultural studies. In the field of writing studies, Dr. Pawlowski works at the intersections of queer theory, Marx, and post‐structuralism. She has presented her work on how writing pedagogy should respond to the neoliberalization of the university at the conferences of College Composition and Communication and the Rhetoric Society of America, and at the Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition. Her scholarship has appeared in Griot: The Journal of African‐American Studies and she is coauthoring the forthcoming book Uncovering Whiteness with Dr. Stephen Brookfield (Stylus, 2019). Her teaching revolves around political injustice and how to respond to it through rhetorically powerful writing. Students in her class write for social justice organizations in the Twin Cities and study how marginalized people have developed linguistic varieties that resist standard forms of English. Dr. Pawlowski facilitates workshops on antiracist pedagogy throughout the Twin Cities, and she is an active member of the Anti‐Racism Coalition at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota.

Dianne Ramdeholl has been an adult‐education practitioner for over 15 years, working in community‐based adult‐literacy programs and, more recently, in higher education. She’s committed to adult education for democratic social change. Currently an associate professor in the Master of Arts in Adult Learning program at SUNY Empire State College in New York City, the principal focus of her research has been developing educational projects that promote equitable socioeconomic and sociopolitical conditions for disenfranchised populations. Her research and practice have primarily focused on connecting adult education to increased participation in democratic decision‐making. She has coedited three volumes of the series New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education (Jossey‐Bass), which focuses on reenvisioning doctoral education in more democratic ways, decentering the ivory tower of academia, and struggling for democracy within the field of adult education. She has also authored the monograph Adult Literacy in a New Era: Lessons from The Open Book (Paradigm, 2011).

Salina M. Renninger, PhD, is an associate professor and the director of training in the Graduate School of Professional Psychology at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. Her scholarly and teaching interests include clinical supervision and training, attending to culture and other diversity variables in training and therapy, and therapy to address the needs of those who have experienced complex trauma. She earned her PhD at the University of Minnesota in 1998. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, she worked for many years directing a practicum/internship training program and providing therapeutic services in university and community mental‐health settings.

Bobbi Smith is a teacher and education consultant in Campbell River, British Columbia. She is a white middle‐class housewife and minivan driver, who took a hell of a long time to do her master of adult education. Her graduate research was a self‐study of her adult‐education practice that teased out when and how she was performing whiteness and colonizing the indigenous students she was serving. She consequently developed a framework to help other professionals identify their own largely unconscious oppressive attitudes and behaviors, which she speaks about with government and nonprofit organizations. She can be reached at bobbipatriciasmith@gmail.com.

Buffy Smith, PhD, is a sociologist, educator, and consultant. She is the founding associate dean of Dougherty Family College and a professor of sociology at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. She earned her BA in sociology from Marquette University and her MS and PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The courses she teaches include Social Problems, Race and Ethnicity, Social Stratification, and the senior Seminar in Sociology. She was an Association for the Study of Higher Education/Lumina Fellow in 2003. Dr. Smith’s primary research interest is examining racial and class disparities within the higher education system. She also writes on policy issues dealing with mentoring, access, retention, equity, and diversity in higher education. For over 10 years, she has researched how colleges and universities can assist underrepresented students in understanding and navigating the institutional culture of higher education in order to achieve academic success. Dr. Smith has received several awards and grants that recognize her research on diversity issues in higher education. Dr. Smith’s work has been featured in a variety of research and practice‐oriented journals, such as African American Research Perspectives and Equity & Excellence in Education. In addition, she is the author of the book Mentoring At‐Risk Students through the Hidden Curriculum of Higher Education (Lexington Books, 2013). She can be reached at bsmith@stthomas.edu.

George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University. He has authored, edited, or coedited over 18 books. He is known for his influential essays and interviews in The Stone, the New York Times’ philosophy column. Yancy’s two most recently published books are On Race: 34 Conversations in a Time of Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly About Racism in America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Wendy Yanow is an adult educator and associate with Adult Learning Unleashed, a group of educators leveraging justice and equity through learning. She facilitates workshops on race, whiteness, and privilege through a network of interfaith organizations and other community groups in Chicagoland. Wendy works with adult university students, trains faculty educators, and has served as a popular education teacher in a bilingual adult high school. Wendy teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Developing Cultural Understanding, which engages adults in dialogic practices that foster a critical understanding of themselves and others.

There are some books that you write or edit because you think they’re necessary, and there are some that are torn out of your heart. Teaching Race is a work of passion intended to address one of the greatest scars on America’s soul. All the authors have activist hearts that impel them to view their classrooms as antiracist laboratories – spaces in which to raise students’ awareness of the pervasive dynamics of racism and to prepare them for action. So this is not a book of analysis (though there certainly is analysis in here) but a book of action. We have stuffed it full of activities, techniques, exercises, and tools, and all are designed to help teachers in their project of teaching about race and racism.

Obviously, however, this is not a recipe book, prescribing models of practice to be followed to the letter. There is no neat or exact recipe for this work, and we all, to some degree, constantly invent and reinvent our practice in response to the contexts in which we find ourselves. Anyone who sells you an inventory, method, protocol, or multiple‐step approach to transform your campus into an antiracist wonderland is either putting you on, making big bucks from people’s understandable desire for epistemological certainty, or just incredibly naïve. But we all have to start somewhere, and for me, that’s by combining a number of factors. I begin with my own learned instincts of what to do and then combine these with my read of a situation. These are then blended with actions I’ve seen colleagues take and things I’ve read about that make some kind of sense. Building practice is a collective and collaborative effort, and we all benefit from seeing how others work and adapting the good stuff to our own situations.

To go back to the recipe analogy: Chefs tell me that recipes are only starting points for your own experimentation, as you delete ingredients, change portions, alter cooking times, or add new flavors. I think this is how the practice of any teacher or activist is built. You see people doing something, and you think “Hey, I could try that.” Then, as you start to think through the particularities of your own learners, teaching goals, and environments, you strip this new idea down and reassemble it in a way that makes sense for your own work contexts and who you are as a teacher. For example, many of the contributors in this book talk about the importance of modeling a vulnerable commitment to examining your own racism in front of learners, but exactly how that general dynamic is realized in your own classroom, workshop, or community depends on your own identity and experience, who your learners are, and the culture in which you work.

Cooking involves a degree of generative creativity, and so does crime. I have always thought of myself as a burglar where teaching is concerned, a kind of pedagogic shoplifter. I enter learning environments with an acquisitive eye, looking for gems and valuables that are easy to remove but that have major payoffs for me. I’m always looking to steal (with thanks and attribution) exercises, techniques, and approaches that, with some alteration and reworking, will help me take learners where I want them to go. I build my practice on the shoulders of colleagues, authors, YouTube, Twitter, and other external resources just as much as on the analysis of my own experience. Sometimes I see a colleague doing an exercise and the only thing I’ll take from it is the core impulse behind it. At other times I judge that something works so beautifully that I can lift it wholesale and just alter the organizing question or prime focus. Mostly it’s somewhere in between.

Adaptations of practice are typically more substantial than, say, just changing the license plate on a Ford. You strip the engine down, recalibrate the acceleration, switch out the headlights, or add a turbo. When working with students new to considering race, you may initially be driving slowly on the equivalent of back‐country lanes or dirt tracks. But with students thoroughly committed to uncovering white supremacy and their own collusion in racism you’re charging down the Italian Autostrade. As you test‐drive your new machine, you find out which parts work well, which have to be thrown out, and what needs to be replaced. You consider students’ reactions to the activity, and, if you’re lucky enough to team teach, you debrief what happened with colleagues.

As you read through the pages ahead I hope you will do so with a burglar’s eye, always on the lookout for something to steal. Or if you think, “That’s a recipe I could try,” don’t hesitate to throw out ingredients, add new ones, or change portions. If any of these chapters offer ideas that you can adapt and experiment with in your own contexts, then this book will have been worth it. I have stolen from my coauthors and I urge you to do so as well.

Our Audience

Our audience is anyone interested in antiracist practice. Although we work mostly in college and university settings, we have used many of the exercises described here in groups, communities, and organizations far removed from academe. These include churches, prisons, the military, corporations, hospitals, public and private schools, media companies, social movements, and numerous community groups. These exercises have been tried out in the belly of the capitalist beast and in the Occupy movement, in the armed forces and with peace groups. Given that racism and white supremacy are all pervasive, permeating every corner of our society, we as educators don’t really have the luxury of choosing only to work with those who already think as we do.

Overview of the Contents

The book kicks off with an opening chapter that defines key terms (racism, white supremacy, and microaggression) and summarizes common dynamics of antiracist teaching, such as scaffolding, modeling, and community building. Chapters 2 and 3 explore, from different positionalities, the specific dynamics of teaching whites about their whiteness. In Chapter 2, George Yancy, a black philosopher and leading public intellectual on race, describes how he models vulnerability for his white students by describing his own sexism and then follows this up with race journaling. In Chapter 3, Susan Hadley, a white woman, also emphasizes the importance of modeling and the use of journals, and describes eight other techniques, including moving from right‐handed privilege to white privilege, bearing witness, practicing mindfulness, and depending on accountability buddies.

In Chapter 4 we move to an in‐depth discussion of how to create a brave space classroom through student writing. Brave space classrooms invite students to wade into controversy and ambiguity, and here Lucia Pawlowski describes how she uses writing assignments and social media to help students explore their racial identities. Teaching students about intersectionality and identity is also the focus of Mike Klein’s analysis of the “I am from…” activity in Chapter 5.

The next cluster of chapters looks at how to build trustful learning environments in which students will commit to the risk of engaging in truthful, honest racial dialogue. Pam Barnett describes in Chapter 6 how a teacher functions as “the good doctor” in using naming exercises, hopes‐and‐fears feedback, and structured questioning to build trust and negotiate conflict when teaching race. Chapter 7, by Lisa Merriweather, Talmadge Guy, and Elaine Manglitz, explains how teachers can carefully research their students while trying to balance a concern for safety with the need to confront learners with productive danger. Developing a working alliance with students is the focus of Chapter 8, in which Consuelo Cavalieri, Bryana French, and Salina Renninger describe the experience of working collaboratively to take students deep into uncovering systemic racism. In Chapter 9, Buffy Smith proposes joining students together in an ohana community before inviting them to consider privilege and white supremacy. And in Chapter 10 I review how six specific discussion protocols can be adapted to the analysis of racial issues.

Teaching against a color‐blind perspective is the focus of Chapter 11, in which Wendy Yanow builds on critical race theory to explore community writing projects, documentary analysis, and the juxtaposition of story and counterstory. Then in Chapter 12 Dianne Ramdeholl and Jaye Jones consider how to help students unearth their positionalities through learning histories, questioning, decoding media, and integrating current events into the curriculum. The practice of digital storytelling is examined in Chapter 13 by Mary Hess, who describes how the intimacy of this format brings students into an analysis of race and racism.

The final two chapters examine the role of mistakes in teaching race and urge readers to problematize the whole notion of mistakes as missteps and errors that can gradually be erased as we move to a trouble‐free racialized pedagogy. In Chapter 14, Bobbi Smith describes how her world exploded when she asked participants in a workshop to conduct an antiracist power analysis of her own teaching. Finally, in Chapter 15 I build on Samuel Beckett’s notion of failing well to review some common misperceptions that block white teachers’ efforts to do antiracist work.

We all acknowledge the numerous students, colleagues, and activists who have formed our identities as antiracist educators and who continue to embrace the risks and dangers of teaching race. I particularly want to acknowledge my fellow authors for sharing their insights and experiences, and for providing so many suggestions for readers to steal, adapt, and shape for use in their own practices.