Drawing from the work of "cultural memory" and "racial formation theory" (Omi and Winant 1994) we explore the ascension of Barack Obama as an illustration of how "race" is understood and remembered. This article focuses on the public media discourse of the 2012 Obama re-election to illustrate how the narrative morphed…

Drawing on data from a historical-ethnographic study of the cultural politics of school desegregation in Seattle, USA, the author explores suffering as a recurring theme in the narratives of four black leaders, educators and activists involved in the struggle for black educational opportunity in that city during the post-Civil Rights Era. As these…

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has become a centered conceptual framework to understand American education and reform (Ladson-Billings and Tate 1995; Solorzano and Yosso; 2001; Decuir and Dixon 2004). Indeed, educational leadership scholars have not been far behind in recognizing the explicative and powerful role of CRT studies in their work (Lopez…

The late Professor Derrick Bell is renowned as the intellectual architect who drafted the blueprints that guided the initial development of critical race theory (CRT). Prior to the advent of CRT, Professor Bell wrote extensively on initiatives designed to improve the lives of African Americans. Among his most influential scholarship, "Serving…

In this paper I explore some of the issues associated with teaching about race, culture, and ethnicity in a psychology program. These curriculum initiatives are part of a broader agenda of raising awareness about racialised oppression and exclusion and contributing to the development of ways of researching and practicing psychology that are…

This article examines the ways in which researcher authenticity is negotiated along three axes of difference, ethno-linguistic affiliation, sexual orientation and race/skin color. Ultimately, it analyzes how researcher authenticity is produced and played out within research, via interactions between participants, researchers and others who…

This article is about an ongoing initiative that addresses the challenges confronted by teacher candidates to whom English is an additional language and whose cultures are considered different from those of the Canadian mainstream. The initiative is a seminar, Language and Cultural Engagement, in which teacher candidates are prepared for practice…

The purpose of this article is to advance Derrick Bell's (1992b) interest-convergence principle as an analytical lens for understanding the complex role of race in the educational experiences of African-American football student athletes. Currently, there is a scarcity of educational research that employs a critical theoretical perspective on race…

Much of the scholarship on urban children and families has focused on ways to increase the involvement of parents of colour in the education of their children. However, these suggestions for increasing parental involvement ignore the long tradition of activism in the courts as families have fought through the legal system for equal educational…