Multicultural education courses in US teacher training programmes attempt to prepare (mostly and increasingly white) trainee teachers to work effectively with children from racial and ethnic backgrounds different from their own. In this article, I discuss the promise and challenge of fostering critical pedagogical dialogue in these settings, focusing on the particularly complex difficulties faced by ethnic and racial minority students who find themselves present in very small numbers. The challenge for university instructors is to create a safe dialogic space in a setting where minority voices can be both extremely valuable as well as dangerously marginalised and essentialised.