In this commentary, Festus Obiakor responds to Louise Taylor's "Seeking Equality of Educational Outcomes for Black Students: A Personal Account" (EJ1316951). He begins by describing himself as a Black man who has consistently endured racism, xenophobia, and prejudice in the United States. Growing up in Nigeria, he experienced lots of…

This media review focuses on one of "Atlanta"'s episodes entitled "FUBU." The episode is utilized as a proxy to provide a critique of American society and its power relations in everyday life. "Atlanta" and its writers use television as their vehicle to create critical and constructive discourse in spaces that they…

In an interview, Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria," discusses schools, race, and identity today.

In this article, the author highlights the post-election priorities of the Southern Education Foundation (SEF). Leadership is a big priority and the SEF is working with a different notion of leadership that has more to do with collective--as opposed to individual--actions, systemic change, and more focus on the issue of care and empathy.…

The first six years of the child's life are infinitely the most important, as they are the years in which attitudes are being established, habits formed, and character trends largely fixed. This article examines topics such as race relations and prejudice in kindergarten, the role of kindergarten teachers, soldier play in kindergarten and its…

Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", talks about race with "Kappan" editor-in-chief Joan Richardson. Tatum advises more conversations about race and racial identities as a way to bridge the divide between the races. Silence, she says, is not an effective strategy for…

In this response to Stephen Brookfield's "Why White Instructors Should Explore Their White Racial Identity" (EJ1246146), Shantih Clemans agrees with Brookfield's strong assertion that white teachers need to carefully explore what it means to be white. However, she takes two primary points of departure: (1) she feels Brookfield falls…

In this article Willie James Jennings opens this discussion by noting that he lives in the midst of a North Carolina gun culture, the intensity of which is quite overwhelming. He asks how we might educate against the specific seductive powers of the weapon and especially the gun? As an educator, Jennings believes that clearly, the unmaking of…

The questions that begin Stephen Brookfield's discussion of why he thinks white instructors in multiracial Adult Basic Education (ABE) classes need to explore their own whiteness include the following: (1) If racial identity is largely a cultural, not biological, construct, then why focus on "any" form of racial markers?; and (2) Doesn't…

In this essay, we specifically focus our attention on Donald Trump's perspective of the conditions of schools that Black children attend. The fact remains that as a presidential candidate, he verbalized stereotypical notions that many people hold about the conditions of schools that Black children attend. Thus, the purpose of this essay is to…

The shocking election of President Donald Trump following a campaign characterized by hateful and divisive rhetoric has left many people fearful. In this essay the authors recount their story about the difficulties they encountered trying to disrupt the normalization of white experience through a local community policing initiative in their…

Farzana Shain reviews two books: (1) Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang and George Lipsitz, 2019; and Education and Race: From Empire to Brexit, by Sally Tomlinson, 2019, Bristol, Policy. Shain begins this review by saying that we…

Even though I recognize the value of using the mass media to teach sociological concepts and reveal racial biases, I caution against the use of classroom exercises that are developed solely in the context of whiteness studies. Overarching statements of white privilege mask complex race-class interactions generally and the mass media's…

In this response to Stephen Brookfield's "Why White Instructors Should Explore Their White Racial Identity" (EJ1246146), Edith Gnanadass writes her response from the point of view of an adult educator with a multiplicity of identities in her critique of Brookfield's concept by going beyond his call for reflection of one's own whiteness.…

In the 2012 essay, "The Girls from Compton Go to College," the authors analyzed how growing up in Compton, California, impacted their identity development as scholars, teachers, and activists. In this article, the authors build on their previous work, utilizing a similar reflexive process to delve more deeply into how cultural capital…