In this article, we draw upon Charles Mills' powerful scholarly insights on the racial contract and epistemologies of ignorance and argue for keeping his spirit and theorizing alive through a relentless focus on the endemic reality of racism/white supremacy in our society and institutions -- particularly in the institution in which he and we work,…

This article advances a deeply political and material understanding of feeling in the context of racial capitalism. Informed by Ahmed's work on the "politics of good feeling" (2008, 1) and Gilmore's concept of "infrastructure of feeling" (2022, 490), we interrogate how feeling is regulated in everyday literacy contexts through…

In this theoretical paper, I bring together work on structural, racial, and affective gaslighting to turn attention to 'affective injustice' as a distinct kind of injustice suffered by victims of racial gaslighting in educational settings. Under this conceptual framework, it is possible to explore how education spaces facilitate racial gaslighting…

The following article positions the work of Charles Mills (1951-2021) as seminal to the development of critical race theory (CRT) in education. His groundbreaking contribution, The Racial Contract, has served as the foundation for understanding the myriad ways that white supremacy is central in the social contract championed by scholars of the…

Much of Black student life, understandably, is seen through a lens of resistance. Black people, given their societal position, are resistant in context. Yet, one cannot use resistance, by itself, to understand the expansive, dynamic nature of Black student life -- even in otherwise constricting contexts. In this paper, I wrestle with the central…

In the 1960s, Black student protests of racism through sit-ins, building occupations, and demands for the resignation of university top administrators spurred the creation of ethnic studies and diversity programs on white university campuses in the United States. These efforts did not, unfortunately, dismantle entrenched structural racism. Black…

Through a critical discourse analysis of three Asian American organizations' rhetoric around race and education, we explore the activism of Asian Americans working against affirmative action and other race-based educational policies. We examine the way these groups engage ideological discourses regarding race, civil rights, and the freedom to…

Making sense of normalized feelings in teacher education, scholarship on race and gender has spotlighted the affective and emotional landscapes of teaching and detailed how the profession has been shaped around its primary workers, cisgender straight white women. "Dis"affection, though, or unfeeling in ways that disrupt the sociality of…

Black doctoral students in engineering and computing fields experience racialized stress, as structural racism in STEM takes a toll on their sense of belonging and acceptance as intellectually competent in comparison to White and some Asian peers and faculty. Black doctoral students are often told by campus administrators that the source of this…

We explore discourses about social emotional learning (SEL) and trauma-informed practices (TIP) as school interventions in response to resistance from students and guardians. We analyze an illustrative example and one data source that casts light on the deficit impact of SEL and TIP discourses on both teacher/school practices and children and…

Focusing on the potential of progressive movements at the local level to expand conceptions of justice, this article examines discourses within curriculum reform efforts by focusing on public testimonies in a successful campaign for the adoption of an Ethnic Studies resolution. Findings from observations and content analysis of public school board…

Because racism is permanently woven into the fabric of American society, the fight for Black equality and liberation is a constant struggle of resistance. Traditionally, a strong method of resistance utilized by oppressed people has been the use of language. Language is a form of symbolic power, a political force utilized to empower those who make…

While research has called attention to the phenomena of a link between school and prison for many Black students in the United States, there has been much less examination of the direct impact to Black families, in this case Black mothers. This paper seeks to center the stories of Black mothers to provide a specific type of sense making around…

The compartmentalization of (dis)ability from race and ethnicity, and other identity markers serves to maintain these constructs at a safe distance from one another. Beyond these broader socially constructed categories, there are also the subtler messages about normativity that manifest in gradients of ability, color, behavior, capital, expression…

Unjust racial disparities persist in the United States criminal justice system fueled by a school to prison pipeline which, through criminalizing processes, disproportionately and unjustly targets boys of color in our schools. This criminalization and the ways in which boys of color resist, remains largely under-researched on the elementary school…