There is a growing recognition in teacher education that in order to work toward a more equitable and just society, programs of teacher education must explicitly engage with the political commitments of teachers and teacher educators (Cochran-Smith, 2005). They must prepare prospective teachers to address "societal structures that perpetuate injustice" and to engage in "individual and collective action [that mitigates] oppression" (McDonald & Zeichner, 2009). From this perspective, it is critical that teachers understand "the sociopolitical and economic realities that shape their lives" and the linkages between macro-level structures and micro-level classroom processes (Bartolome, 2004). An essential aspect of such an understanding is what Bartolome terms "ideological clarity," which involves teachers' identification, comparison, and contrasting of dominant society's "explanations for the existing socioeconomic and political hierarchy" with their own explanations (p. 98). In this article, the author builds on this body of scholarship as well as theories of ideology and conceptual change (Philip, 2011) to argue that teacher educators often fail to facilitate the development of important aspects of prospective teachers' ideological clarity when they promote broad critiques of injustice without attending to how these critiques are situated in contemporary efforts "to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines" (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 56). To examine this argument more closely, the author briefly explores the processes through which public institutions and spaces, particularly schools, have been undermined in California in the years leading up to and following the historic Civil Rights rulings and legislation of the 1950s and 1960s. Based on his experience as an instructor in teacher education courses that examine the historical, social, political, and economic contexts of schooling, and his work with prospective teachers more generally, the author argues that social justice educators often re-voice and reaffirm well-intentioned critiques that inadvertently undermine the public, thereby continuing to deny equitable access, particularly to people of color, in the post-Civil Rights era (Bonilla-Silva, 2001, 2003). (Contains 1 footnote.)