This qualitative study case study explicates how a preservice teacher of color in an urban teacher education program (TEP) peripherally engages critical pedagogy with perceived content irrelevancy and cultural conflict. Findings reveal how her maneuvering of corporatized model student behaviors is friendly yet subversive. These tactics result in successful matriculation in the TEP yet produce limited dispositional shifts with the focal participant. The project illuminates the challenges of being preservice teachers of color who do not culturally identify with marginalization or the growing diversity of K-12 schools. Challenging such normative assumptions and highlighting these experiences can inform the practices and policies of TEPs, especially the recruitment, retention, and development of teachers of color.