I explore the possibilities for domestic educational travel to impact students' understandings of racism, and their attitudes and planned behaviors toward enacting change in their communities. Prompted by movements for racial justice and drawing from the critical pedagogies of Paulo Freire, students on the "America's Race Issues"…

This article builds from scholarship on anti-Blackness in education and spatial imaginaries in geography to theorize an anti-Black spatial imaginary as the prevailing spatial logic that has shaped the configuration and character of American social intuitions, including K-12 schools. As a spatial imaginary, anti-Blackness is circulated through…

One of the most significant and controversial issues facing the United States as it prepares for the 2020 election cycle centers around reparations--whether the United States should compensate African Americans for slavery, Jim Crow segregation, racial inequalities, and persistent racial discrimination--and the numerous moral, political, social,…

"Slavery is the ground zero of race relations," declared James and Lois Horton in their groundbreaking book, "Slavery and Public History." Engaging the history and legacy of slavery is a crucial step in understanding current U.S. society especially race relations. Historic sites that have connections to slavery have begun to…

This paper uses Derrick Bell's interest convergence principle, which argues that whites will support racial justice efforts only if they believe they will see gains for themselves, to examine white philanthropic support of Black education in the postbellum South and in current school reforms. Using the concept of "bad" (or compromising)…

In this article, I explore this question: How can teachers, especially new teachers, create school spaces that present humanizing images and stories of people who were enslaved, particularly people of African descent in the United States? To explore this question, drawing from an ethnographic study of teachers at an elementary school in the U.S.…

The "nadir of race relations" is a term used by historians to describe the time period after Reconstruction, 1890-1920. During this time, African Americans were free; some argue, however, that it was a worse time than when these individuals were enslaved (Brundage 1990; Woodward 2002). There is a debate whether this time period…

Black American Literature is a microcosm of the history of the black people's presence on the American continent as it is known today. The literature of the Black Americans cannot be fully separated from the experience of Slavery and Racism which characterized their lives as a community of people whose social, economic and political privileges are…

The focus of this research was on the affective learning experienced at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center--a museum that tells the history of slavery in the United States, the courage, cooperation, and perseverance enacted by many who overcame the challenges and consequences of the unfreedoms once practiced in America. Such a study…

This study is a mixed-methods text analysis of African American representation within K-12 U.S. History content standards treating the revolutionary era, the early U.S. republic, the Civil War era, and Reconstruction. The states included in the analysis are Michigan, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Virginia. The analysis finds that the reviewed…

The Civil War ended slavery but not the pernicious inequality of power and status that still characterizes relations between black and white America. As soon as they could, with the help of presidents bent on appeasement and the benign neglect of northerners who had fought the war to preserve the union but not necessarily to invite former slaves…

Barack Obama's ascension to the highest elected office in America's land is surely a milestone in the American narrative. The events of Nov. 4, 2008, and Jan. 20, 2009, are marks of America's collective progress. In the course of the long campaign season, however, there is another date that also should be etched into American textbooks: March 18,…

The contact hypothesis (Allport 1954) predicts that cross-racial interaction can produce social bonding under certain status, relational, and institutional conditions. We extend this classic theory on ingroups and outgroups using qualitative data on Cambodian and Hmong refugees' recollections of casual conversations about ancestry with black and…

Research on the racial identities of White future teachers has assumed and circulated an overly simplified, and ultimately unhelpful, conception of White racial identity. An alternative is needed, which the authors develop with reference to scholarship that explores White people's participation in blackface minstrelsy. They argue that at the core…

While white residents of antebellum Boston and New Haven forcefully opposed the education of black residents, their counterparts in slaveholding Baltimore did little to resist the establishment of African American schools. Such discrepancies, Hilary Moss argues, suggest that white opposition to black education was not a foregone conclusion.…