Abstract
Examining the persistence of racial disparities in education, this presidential address provides a conceptual framework for advancing racial justice in education. Grounded in the tradition of “freedom dreams” and hope and belief in unseen possibilities, the talk addresses four principles: examining the foundations of racism and the complicity of higher education, identifying how racism shapes contemporary educational landscapes, evaluating organizational routines that perpetuate injustice in K–12 and higher education, and issuing a call to dismantle oppression and center racial justice in research and practice. Through interrogating histories, analyzing present evidence, and radically imagining transformative change, this work seeks a more just, humane, and equitable future for all students.
The quest for racial justice in schools and society has endured for centuries in the United States. Much of what has inspired and informed the struggles and sacrifices for better opportunity and for a democratic society where racial justice is a staple is what Robin Kelley (2002) called “freedom dreams”: dreams that are rooted in a better tomorrow, replete with aspirational paths and possibilities, yet mindful of an ever-present reality of forces that eviscerate our humanity and seek to disrupt those very dreams. In the quest for racial justice in education, it is imperative for us to understand our past, examine its roots, investigate our current practice and policies, and think and dream radically to imagine a more, just, loving, and humane education for all students. Although it may seem impossible to some, ours is a tradition that is rooted in possibility and hope in the unseen (Suskind, 1998). In this article, I offer a conceptual frame for redressing racial justice in education research and practice, based on four key principles:
examining the foundations of racism in the United States and the role that higher education, the academy in particular; scholars; and researchers played and continue to play by using pseudoscience and its remnants to create and reify racism in the United States;
identifying the ramifications of racism in today’s education landscape through study of the national context and through contemporary data, examples, illustrations, stories, and words from various stakeholders;
examining what Diamond and Gomez (2023) referred to as organizational routines and their role in the perpetuation of racial injustice in K–12 and higher education and a willingness to adapt, disrupt, or abandon many of those routines for the pursuit of educational equity;
making a call for the dismantling of racial injustice and other forms of oppression and the construction of new possibilities that situate racial justice at the center of our research efforts.
I seek to lay out a framework that makes a case for our unapologetic dreaming, imagining, and building and our willingness to construct knowledge to create new paradigms and possibilities that are situated in understanding our racial reality and transforming it.
Continuing to Center Race and Racism
Multiple types of oppression undermine the quest for dreams of freedom to come true. Patriarchy, misogyny, white supremacy, exploitation, able-ism, heteronormativity, nativism, and xenophobia (Annamma et al., 2023; Brockenbrough, 2024; Spring, 2025) are all rampant and undermine the basic humanity of billions of people every day in our global community. But my analysis is focused on race and racism and their intersection with other forms of oppression (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). It is racism that has been the source of pain, death, destruction, and continuous struggle for freedom in this country and globally (Ewing, 2025; Joseph, 2022). It is racism and white supremacy, more specifically, that have had a global impact on people’s quest for humanity and continue to plague billions of people worldwide (Spain Bradley, 2019). Capitalism, with its inherently racialized nature, operates to construct racial distinctions and normalize the perception of certain groups as racially inferior. This process serves as the foundation for the racial hierarchies and inequalities perpetuated by the capitalist system, framing these disparities as a consequence of the supposed racial inferiority of communities of color (Robinson, 1983). Racism has always been and still remains the United States’s original sin and continues to obstruct our pathways for democratic and justice-rooted dreams to come true (Ewing, 2025). I frequently tell my students that research is “me-search” and that for many of us, the questions that we ask, the areas that we study, the topics we explore, the problems that we examine are often deeply rooted in our lived experiences and realities. Mine is no different. I grew up in Compton, California, a predominantly Black working-class city that was full of promise and potential in the 1970s. It was my parents’ dream of living a better life—in a safe community, with home ownership, a front yard, and good schools—that was drastically different from the lives they had left in the Jim Crow segregated South. My parents were part of what Isabel Wilkerson (2010) beautifully documented as the largest migration in U.S. history of more than 6 million Black people in search of “the warmth of other suns.” But over time, my beloved city of Compton, like many other cities across the country comprised of Black and Brown folks, changed dramatically. The work of Gary Webb (1998) tells tales of drugs in the 1980s that linked CIA officials in Central America to importing drugs to cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. The crack cocaine epidemic did irreparable harm to my beloved Compton and to countless other cities across the country. Most of its harm was on Black and Brown communities. And unlike the current pandemic of opioids, which has been horrific but is seen as a public health crisis, crack cocaine possessors and users were vilified, criminalized, and demonized. The destruction, death, and despair from crack cocaine left an indelible impact on babies, women, and children and destroyed entire families and communities; the remnants are still felt today (Love, 2023).
I witnessed firsthand a community transformed, where hardworking, law-abiding citizens—working-class Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, and Black folks—saw the normalization of a different life, with inferior public schools, inadequate public services, overaggressive policing, and lack of investment in infrastructure and resources. Thus, before I knew what a PhD was or what a theoretical framework was or could spell, let alone say “epistemology,” I had a burning research question that guided my living and daily observations: Across the globe, why do darker peoples suffer the most? This burning question became my life’s journey: trying to answer this question, understand the question, unpack the complexities of this question, and interrogate the layers of this all too persistent reality. Whether people were of African, Latin, Indigenous, Asian, or Indian descent, the burning research question of my life has been: Why do darker people suffer the most? Whether it was Compton, Oakland, Sacramento, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, New Orleans, or Miami, dark people suffered the most. But I also realized that it was not only in the United States, but that it was also global (Collins et al., 2023). It was in India, Brazil, the Philippines, Central America, South Africa, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, the othering of darker people. Why do darker people suffer the most? And how do we dismantle it? The answers to this question are complex and simple, and they lie in white supremacy, imperialism, settler colonialism, colorism, racism, and the construction of an ideology, worldview, and knowledge base that continue to otherize Darker People across the globe (Edwards & Shahjahan, 2025).
It has been Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, the colonized peoples from all over the world who have been what Sarah Wise (2014) referred to as the most “inconvenient people” to this nation. It is these inconvenient people who have been the soul of the country, or the moral compass of the nation, the salt of the Earth. The inconvenient people have held America’s feet to the fire to live up to its lofty ideals of what it means to be a fair, just, and democratic society. It is these inconvenient people, those darker people, whose children have attempted to make schools inclusive and democratic spaces yet for centuries have been given subpar educational opportunities. It is these inconvenient people who are often the most democratic, the most loyal, and the most patriotic yet have faced the most brutal oppression, exclusion, and sustained structural racism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. It is Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous faces that have been what Derrick Bell (1992) referred to as “the faces at the bottom of the well.” The pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness remains elusive for many in the United States. Racism, along with other forms of oppression, has littered the path to self-actualization and remains arguably the persistent stain on our quest to be seen as a beacon of democracy. Ruha Benjamin (2024) contended that “racism, among other axes of domination, helps produce this fragmented imagination—misery for some and monopoly for others” (p. 49). It is time for our organization, the American Educational Research Association, to grapple with racial injustice in our work, our research, our policy, and our practice domestically and globally.
In this presidential address, I make the case for what freedom dreaming in the quest for racial justice can look like in our research, theory, and practice. I make this argument with an acknowledgment that our roles as researchers, policymakers, and practitioners are critical in the quest for racial justice because there is no middle ground, particularly in these times. We are either working to dismantle it or helping to uphold it. Although scholars have called for the end of dualistic and dichotomous “either/or” thinking, when it comes to racial justice, our intentionality must be clear, our goals and objectives must be specific, and our collective courage to do the unpopular and uncomfortable work in education research must be enduring. In the following, I unpack key considerations for what our freedom dreams for racial justice need to do, what characteristics our work should include, and the considerations that we should be mindful of in this work.
Why Freedom Dreaming Matters
The quest for freedom dreams has always been challenging because of the manner in which the United States offers pathways as possibility yet acts in direct opposition to those pathways (Banks, 2019). The hypocrisy of our nation’s ideals and its actual past and present need adjudicating, require analysis, and must be a constant focus of our work. Myrdal (1944) talked about the American dilemma where the country needed to realize the major gulf that exists between the nation’s democratic ideals and the realities of many of its people. As education researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, I suggest that we have an “academic dilemma.” How do our platitudes, statements, commitments to equity and justice, website declarations, promotional flyers, and magazines actually align with the unfortunate realities of students, faculty, and staff who work and attempt to learn in these spaces? Are we as hypocritical as the nation has been in the past when it comes to racial injustice? In this moment of political contentiousness and polarization, the academy can and should be playing a pivotal role in disrupting racial injustice and constructing new possibilities of living and learning from preschool through graduate school, from the playground to the academy. But does our work reify and concretize racial injustice? Or does our work help to inform how to dismantle racism and imagine new possibilities?
Foundations of Racism and the Academy’s Role in It
We cannot attain our freedom dreams and create realities of hope, prosperity, and joy until we begin to address the ugly stain that has been the legacy of institutionalized racism. It was 125 years ago that Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois (1899/1996) conducted one of his most essential studies in the sociological realm. Du Bois sought to interview 500 Black Philadelphians to study the challenged notions that Black Americans experienced poverty, illness, and deprivation because of their biological character and innate inferiority. Du Bois’s detailed and intricate study utilized history and sociology to consider the social experience of African Americans in the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His work offered one of the most comprehensive examinations of Black life, including migration, religion, crime, family, health, and education. In this important work, Du Bois essentially arrived at an important conclusion that still rings loud today and was said long before Cornel West coined the phrase “race matters.” And in 2024, 70 years removed from Brown v. Board of Education, we know that race still matters, and 50 years removed from Lau v. Nichols, we know that race has always mattered.
As education researchers, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners, ours is the work to examine the most complex issues and challenges facing the spectrum of educational contexts and to report out our findings, discoveries, and insights. We perform this craft in manners that require us not to avoid but to embrace the most vexing problems that individuals and communities face in the pursuit of educational access and opportunity. Our work investigates and studies topics that have been unabating, harmful, and disruptive to people’s quest to be self-actualized. These aspirations and commitments reflect the highest ideals set forth in the mission of the American Educational Research Association (2025)—“to advance knowledge about education, to encourage scholarly inquiry related to education, and to promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.”
Talking about, studying, and dismantling racial injustice requires us to go to the root causes of America’s foundation as a nation and to a recognition of how the ideologies of that time have influenced education since the nation’s inception. This work requires us to understand the full scope of settler colonialism, the destruction of native lands, the eradication of precious languages, the displacement of Indigenous communities, and the massive deculturalization that resulted. We must remember that Indigenous erasure remains all too real (Tuck & Yang, 2018). The efforts of school districts to remove or water down Indigenous history and other ethnic studies curricula is yet another example of the effort to continue the long history of erasing Indigenous culture, language, and history from this nation’s fabric (Smith, 1999). This examination requires us to come to grips with the long-standing ramifications of anti-black racism, as manifested through slavery and Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the resistance offered by the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movement (Clayton, 2018; T. C. Howard, 2021). The examination of race is essential to have spaces for researchers who examine the impact of the anti-immigration sentiment that has intensified over the last decade, which has led to excessive criminalization of Latine people, history, and culture (Garcia et al., 2022). We cannot get real about racism until we recognize the persistence of anti-Asian hate that has existed for centuries in this country and exploded at the start of the COVD-19 pandemic. Although not new, it reminded us of the deep-seated hate and disdain that this nation has held toward Asian Americans and Asian Pacific Islanders. At the outset of the COVID-19 outbreak, we witnessed an unprecedented surge of anti-Asian hate in our country.
One of the most essential ways for us to interrogate racism in the education research realm is to understand some of the foundations of racist ideologies. One of the important areas to understand is the impact that scientific racism had in misinforming the general public about racial categories and hierarchies. To help us understand the instrumental role that so-called research played in the creation of racial hierarchies, consider Reginald Horsman’s (1980) Race and Manifest Destiny. Horsman documented the significant rise in scientific racialism in the early 1800s and the idea of different races as being fundamentally different—with Anglo Saxons being superior to non-Whites (a trope that would be ingrained in the minds of people globally). Horsman argued that views of racial inferiority hardened and gained traction beginning in the 1800s through the mid-19th century and was used as a form of justification, specifically for Indian removal, slavery, and the Mexican War. By the 1840s, he asserted that the scientific concept of a hierarchy of races (with Anglo-Saxons at the top) was the majority opinion. Horsman leaned on the Mexican War and experience in the Southwest during the 1840s to make his point. He cited the work of “academics” of the time, such as Charles Caldwell and Thomas Cooper, who promoted ideologies about Black inferiority. Horsman also documented the work of Samuel George Morton, who established Crania Americana in Philadelphia, and how it became the world’s largest scientific collection of human skulls, comparing cranial size, capacity, and structure. Phrenology, the study of brain size, became a foundational aspect of scientific racism. Morton used these “data” to reinforce racial hierarchies of intelligence and pushed theories of American Indian inferiority. These so-called scholars at the time promoted and popularized phrenological knowledge through its affiliated magazine, American Journal of Phrenology, the first and leading phrenological journal in the antebellum United States. Philadelphia was considered the hub and global center of phrenology and racist tropes in the 1800s. The irony cannot be lost that Philadelphia, the first capital of the United States, the birthplace of democracy in North America, was among the first and most iconic locations of the study of phrenology and scientific racism.
Academics and researchers continued to play instrumental roles in the perpetuation of racist mantras based on fake science that reinforced racial inferiority. Journals such as Mankind Quarterly became platforms for race science—places to publish questionable research under the trappings of objective science. The journal Intelligence was a more respected psychology journal of the time, but it also occasionally included papers with pseudoscientific findings about supposed intelligence differences between races. And these outlets remind us that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) people were not just “others” but inferior others. The works of many scholars have asserted that university-based research was used as a primary tool and persuasive spreader of racist tropes, harmful racial stereotypes, and misinformation that were instrumental in justifying Indigenous erasure, Black enslavement, dehumanization of Mexicans, and claims about intellectual superiority of Europeans (Collins et al., 2023; Dancy et al., 2018). Pseudoscience, craniometry, and phrenology are also prominent in the works of Stephen J. Gould (1996), who provided a searing analysis of the early works of scientific racism. These works were conducted and promoted by university researchers creating “the theory of unitary, innate, linearly rankable intelligence” (Gould, 1996, p. 11), such as craniometry, the measurement of skull volume and its relation to intellectual faculties. Steven Selden (1999) documented the history of the eugenics movement in the United States during the 20th century. Building on archival photographs, documents, and scientific thinking of the time produced by respected and high-profile university researchers, Selden provided a powerful historical account and refutation of biological determinist ideas. Selden’s work documented the role played by America’s foremost social theorists and biological and social scientists, popular media, and most important, school textbooks in shaping public consciousness regarding the “truth” of biological determinism. Hence, the role of higher education in creating and reifying racial hierarchies is documented and clear and warrants attention in efforts to reimagine efforts for racial justice in education research.
Examining the Ever-Reaching Ramifications of Racism in Today’s National and Global Context
Understanding the historical context of racial injustice helps to provide a bridge and clearer understanding of many of today’s contemporary educational realities. To highlight the manner in which racial injustice has manifested in real time and continues to have material consequences, there are a number of important data points that should capture our attention to let us know that there is lots of work to be done. For example, ross (2020) argued that anti-blackness can be identified in “explicitly violent examples.” Sadiya Hartman (2007) talked about the “afterlife of slavery,” and ross discussed how “the afterlife of school segregation necessitates we also interrogate the routine and reoccurring practices of schooling that cause Black suffering, melancholy, and indignities.” I ask us to think about our work to probe deeply into the history of inequality, the history of economic injustice, and racialized poverty in our global community—again, the fact that darker peoples suffer the most, the persistence of settler colonialism in school ethos, the persistence of violence against women and queer folks in school curriculum, the erasure of Indigenous peoples’ histories, the minimization and mischaracterization of the 246 years of enslavement of people of African descent, the demonization of immigrants, and the anti-queer legislation that has been rampant locally and globally. Consider current efforts to erase people’s histories.
Book Bans
We have become a book banning nation with remnants of erasure of vital parts of our history, the elimination of truth telling, and the elimination of histories of marginalized people. PEN America (2024) reported that in the 2022–2023 school year,
There were 3,362 instances of book bans in U.S. public school classrooms and libraries.
These bans removed student access to 1,557 unique book titles, the works of more than 1,480 authors, illustrators, and translators.
Over 40% of all book bans occurred in school districts in Florida.
Across 33 school districts, PEN America recorded 1,406 book ban cases in Florida, followed by 625 in Texas, 333 in Missouri, 281 in Utah, and 186 in Pennsylvania.
About 30% included characters of color or discussed race and racism (n = 1,003).
About 30% included LGBTQ+ characters or themes (n = 997). Of note, within this category, 205 instances were books that included transgender characters, which is 6% of all instances of books banned.
Coupled with the persistence of book bans has been the spread of anti-critical race theory (CRT) laws across the country. A recent UCLA Law School study found that in 2021 and 2022, (a) government officials introduced 563 measures aimed at restricting teaching about race and racism; 241 of those measures have been adopted. (b) Nearly half of the proposed measures borrowed language from the now-rescinded Executive Order 13950, which was issued by President Donald Trump during his first term, in 2020. (c) More than 90% of the measures targeted instruction at K–12 schools (CRT Forward, 2023).
Part of the anti-CRT efforts have been fear mongering, leading parents to feel that teachers are indoctrinating their children in ways that are harmful and destructive. Hannegan-Martinez (2025) suggested that these books bans do harm to many students of color, leading to decreased engagement, critical thinking, and the acquisition of important literacies. As a result, measures targeting K–12 schools have sought to regulate curriculum and classroom lessons in ways that undermine teacher autonomy, instill fear, and reduce truth telling in classrooms across the country. Of the 563 introduced measures targeting K–12 schools, 73% (n = 372) regulate classroom teaching, and 75% (n = 384) regulate curricular materials (CRT Forward, 2023).
The chilling effects of the anti-CRT and anti-Woke movements, along with the SCOTUS ruling, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, have clear ramifications for racially diverse populations and send yet another powerful message about how despite our best science, which tells us that race matters, we live in a politically polarizing moment when some seek to uphold colorblind policies and practices that we know are harmful to communities and people of color.
School Discipline, Punishment, and Arrests
U.S. schools continue to be places of pain, punishment, criminalization, discipline, and exclusion for far too many Black, Indigenous, and other students of color (T. C. Howard, 2013, 2020). According to a systematic review done by Richard Welsh (2025), school discipline continues to be highly racialized, and “Black students lose the most instructional time due to suspensions, and this lost time is linked to lower achievement and worse adult outcomes” (Losen & Whitaker, 2017; Morris & Perry, 2016; Pearman et al., 2019).
In 2017–2018, Black students represented 15.1% of total K–12 enrollment, yet they represented 38.8% of expulsions, 38.2% of students who received one or more out-of-school suspensions (OSS), and 31.4% of one or more in-school suspensions (ISS) (U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2023).
The disparities are systematic and start as early as prekindergarten. In 2018–2019, Black preschool students accounted for 43% of students receiving one or more OSS but only 18.2% of total preschool enrollment (U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2023).
A recent report from the Office of Civil Rights highlighted that “Black boys received both in-school suspensions (20.1%) and out-of-school suspensions (24.9%) at rates more than three times their share of total student enrollment (7.7%)—the largest disparity across all race/ethnicity and sex groupings” (U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, 2023, p. 17).
A recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (2024) found that Black girls, although they made up only 15% of girls in public schools, accounted for nearly half of exclusionary discipline cases, including 45% of OSS, 37% of ISS, and 43% of expulsions. Other groups, such as American Indian/Alaska Native, multiracial, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander girls, also faced disproportionate discipline, but to a much lesser degree. The intersection of race and disability status revealed even larger disparities, particularly for Black girls.
In addition, 2017–2018 data released by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (2024) uncovered that nationally Black girls were:
5 times more likely to receive OSS than White girls,
4 times more likely to be arrested than White girls,
3.5 times more likely to receive corporal punishment,
3 times more likely to be referred to law enforcement,
2 times as a likely to be physically restrained than White girls.
When discussing school discipline and punishment, a concept that Cornel West (1993) discussed as relevant is Black nihilism, a sense of worthlessness that exists among many Black people. For many Black and Brown students in schools, this feeling is all too real, and we wonder why chronic absenteeism is prominent and why students are angry and resistant to engaging in school (Grant et al., 2021). Regrettably, schools are hostile places for far too many Black and Brown youth (J. R. Howard, 2024, 2025). The sense that “everyone here is against me” is unfortunately common. Nihilism is the experience of lack of meaning, lack of hope, lack of intimacy, lack of community, lack of connection, lack of love, lack of touch. It is the sense that all the forces of society and the world are against you, where you cannot fall back on anything to sustain you. Moreover, students with disabilities, students in foster care, and students who are unhoused face disproportionately high rates of suspensions and expulsions. They too are relegated to this feeling daily in school (Harvey et al., 2021). They become the inconvenient young people. And the inconvenient students are disproportionately BIPOC. Du Bois (1935) stated: “We shall get a finer, better balance of spirit. . .by putting children in schools where they are wanted. . .than in thrusting them into hells where they are ridiculed and hated” (p. 331). Once again, posing the question of why do darker people suffer the most?
Affirmative Action and Other Race and Gender Identity Restrictions
The 2022 SCOTUS ruling essentially ending affirmative action has been a major blow to universities across the nation in their efforts to diversify their campuses and programs and subsequently improve experiences and outcomes for all students—for Students of Color in particular. And despite the mounds of evidence that have demonstrated that diversity has countless benefits in workplaces and learning spaces in a democratic society, the fight remains. Higher education scholar Uma Jayakumar (2023) documented the extensive number of higher education scholars who have written extensively and eloquently about the benefits of diversity and why affirmative action matters. These scholars have informed us that student diversity has numerous upsides for campuses and workplace and (a) leads to significant educational benefits, such as improvement in cognitive abilities, critical thinking, and self-confidence; (b) promotes cross-racial understanding and reduces prejudice; and (c) promotes increased civic engagement. The SCOTUS ruling has not only had an impact on admissions; it has also been part of a larger campaign leading to attacks on climate and inclusion at a time of significant challenges domestically and internationally. Consider the following: Since the start of 2023,
65 across 25 states that would roll back diversity efforts at colleges, such as hiring statements and mandatory trainings, have been introduced in more than two dozen states and in Congress, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education (2024).
Eight bills have become law, including in North Dakota, Texas, and North Carolina. In the state of Texas, this includes outlawing of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices, diversity hiring statements, and faculty and staff diversity trainings.
The University of Texas at Austin closed its Multicultural Engagement Center because of the new law. And the university stated that it would no longer fund cultural events, such as graduation ceremonies geared toward Black, Latino, and Asian students.
The election of Donald Trump in 2024 has led to a significant number of threats to any race-based consideration, which has left an excessive number of universities and colleges scrapping their DEI efforts for fear of loss of federal funding.
Proliferation of LGBTQ Legislation
At least 510 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced in state legislatures across the United States in 2024—a new record, according to American Civil Liberties Union (2025) data. That is nearly 3 times the number of such bills introduced in 2022. Of those bills, 75 became law.
How Research Can Disrupt: Organizational Routines
The question remains: How does our work speak back to these bodies of research? So as we seek to dismantle racial injustice and construct possibilities and freedom dreams, I ask us all to look inward at our thoughts, policies, and practices that continue to harm inconvenienced peoples and darker peoples across the globe. I go to the work of John Diamond and Louis Gomez (2023), who stated that “organizational routines” play an instrumental role and are foundational mechanisms that generate and reproduce white supremacy and anti-Black racism. They build on the important work of Dumas and ross (2016), who contended that anti-Blackness is something fundamentally different than anti-racism, given the unique atrocities that have been afflicted on Black minds and bodies. To that end, it is essential for all scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to consider our organizational routines. Thus, it is important for journal editors, publishers, and scholarly outlets to ask:
What are our organizational routines?
Whose works and what types of work are being prioritized today?
Do works centered on racial tropes continue to receive priority?
What is the ethnic, racial, and gender composition of editorial boards and reviewers?
Do scholars whose works center racial and gender equity get marginalized?
Do manuscripts get fair and thoughtful reviews?
How often are works focused on the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure highlighted?
This is the conversation our field must have. Too many racist reviews come back to authors that appear to be personal and lacking any constructive scholarly feedback; too many high-quality works have been rejected with no reasonable rationale. If we delved into a data analysis of the top journals in the education field, how many pay attention to race? How many nominations for fellowships, awards, and recognitions have been overlooked or rejected because scholars’ works address race, queer, and gender studies and other forms of marginality? A number of scholars have been valuable in providing high-quality, rigorous outlets to debunk the racist tropes and to illuminate excellent works on race and other forms of oppression, which have become normalized in their journals and not just relegated to the “special issues” that many journals resort to in their efforts to be diverse and inclusive.
So going back to organizational routines, it is not just journal editors. What about the roles we play in our universities, colleges, and departments? I ask us to think about the following:
How have search committees gone about their work when there are no people of color on them?
Deans and department chairs should ask: What are my organizational routines?
How do departments, schools, and colleges conduct tenure and promotion cases when individuals’ scholarship addresses race and racism but their colleagues do not have a proclivity to those works—especially in this era of anti-DEI, anti-Blackness, and anti-Queerness?
What are the organizational routines that need to be disrupted to dismantle racial injustice and other forms of oppression in our practices and policies, where many graduate students and faculty of color feel overlooked, overscrutinized, and overburdened with mentoring students of color yet under-mentored? What are the organizational routines that lead to such realities? What are our organizational routines when it comes to promotions and tenure at many institutions that were founded on principles of patriarchal white supremacy? What are the practices that we engage in that not only maintain white supremacist mechanisms but also lift them up, preserve them, and protect them? What are the organizational routines we participate in that reinforce Indigenous erasure, anti-Asian hate, anti-blackness, anti-disability, cisheteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism? Dumas and ross (2016) have been instrumental in helping us to understand how anti-blackness as a conceptual frame has real-life manifestations in our work, and they contended that it is important to document “precisely how Black bodies become marginalized, disregarded, and disdained” (p. 417) in order “to attend specifically to the Black experience of anti-black racism and White supremacy” (p. 424). Educational scholar Linda Smith (1999) warned us about the challenges of how we think about our research with and about communities of color and the dangers associated. She cautioned that from the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term “research” is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, “research”, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. . . .The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. (p. 1)
Hence, our organizational routines must be dedicated to thinking about the tools we use for our research, the questions we ask, the theories that inform our work, and the commitment to utilizing methods that do not create further harm but center the lived experiences of historically marginalized people in humanizing ways. There are many more bold, courageous scholars who have been instrumental in this work (Banks, 2006; Gay, 2020; Ladson-Billings, 1994, 2006). There has been a plethora of works that push on the problems of scientific racism. I would contend that although many of these theories and frameworks appear old and outdated, their remnants remain in today’s policies and practices. Scholars whose works address issues of race and racism and its intersectionalities continue to have a higher threshold to climb to get their works published, and these same scholars face obstacles to receiving fellowships, awards, and other recognitions from many of the members of this Association. So the question is not only about how our research reinforces or ignores issues tied to race but also how we treat those who call it into question. The question is raised at an important political moment in our country, when attacks on DEI are an everyday occurrence, colorblind policies are pervasive, and erasure of racial histories have become a staple in the nation’s policies and legislation. States across the country have banned works that even mention equity and diversity, let alone race and racism. What will our response be? What about the policies adopted in our states and universities around race? Where are our stances to resist such policies that affect the very work that we do? How will our departments, schools, and colleges look with new positions that we seek to fill and the thousands of young scholars whom we have mentored and encouraged to do race work?
In the announcement of my presidential theme (“Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action”), I was greeted with statements such as “Do you think it’s too narrow?” or “We don’t really do race in our work.” For anyone who is studying education, you are studying race. Thus, issues tied to race, racism, and racial injustice should be explicitly studied in teacher education, history, measurement and evaluation, curriculum, administration, leadership and organizational development, human development, psychology, the professions, and higher education. Moreover, as education scholars, we should be at the forefront of challenging fields outside education to center the examination of race in their work. Ours is a field that is shaped by medicine, public policy, community health, law, social welfare, mental health, and the list goes on. I would also ask us to pay attention to climate justice in our communities (Jadallah, 2024). A growing number of scholars are focused on environmental justice issues and are to be applauded. The focus on climate change is needed and important. However, largely absent from discussions of climate change is its disproportionate impact on communities of color. Noguera et al. (2019) examined how Black students and other students of color in Los Angeles are exposed to excessively high levels of pollutants, such as lead and toxic air, leading to high levels of asthma and other respiratory issues and chronic absenteeism for large numbers of students. I would hope that many of those efforts would place an unapologetically bold spotlight on environmental racism, which has been rife in communities of color for centuries (Waldron, 2018). The building of schools on or near toxic landfills and dumping sites, or near freeways and highways, and crumbling school infrastructure in urban and rural communities continues to occur far too often, and many experts put the cost at close to $100 billion (National Indian Education Association, 2019; Jackson & Johnson, 2021).
An analysis published by the Center for Effective Government in 2016 found that nearly one in 10 children in the United States—4.9 million—attended the approximately 12,000 schools nationwide that were within one mile (1.6 kilometers) of a facility that used or stored dangerous chemicals. Another analysis by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that industrial plants near schools released high volumes of toxic chemicals and put thousands of schools and hundreds of thousands of children at risk of exposure to hazardous air pollutants (Legot et al., 2010). Among these are chemicals known to adversely affect respiratory and neurological health—including lead, mercury, and compounds associated with fossil fuels. These contaminants are known to cause irreversible brain damage, affect nervous systems, decrease cognitive capacity, lead to impulsive behavior, and cause adverse cardiovascular and kidney effects, elevated blood pressure, and infertility in both men and women. The Center for Effective Government report found that People of Color and people living in poverty, especially poor children of color, were significantly more likely to live in these fence line zones than White people and people with incomes above the poverty line and that the greatest disparities were among poor children of color. So even when it comes to the environment, race still matters.
How Do We Move Forward?
So how do we move forward? How do we construct educational possibilities with a focus on being free of racism and other forms of oppression in the quest for justice? How do we disrupt and end darker people’s suffering? I am mindful of the deep skepticism that many have about seeing a nation and a world that is free of racism. Our data suggest that there has always been racial strife in the form of the hierarchies, gender inequities, and violence that have been inflicted on darker peoples across the globe. There are moments when we are hopeless, but those moments cannot become static conditions, where we feel there is no way out. Afro-pessimists and abolitionists astutely remind us that after 400+ years in the United States, racism is permanent (Grant et al., 2020; Hartman, 2007; Wilkerson, 2010). I would ask us not to be chronic pessimists. Derrick Bell (1992) argued that “racism is an integral, permanent, an indestructible component of this society” (p. ix) and that racial realism tells us that we will have “peaks of progress” (p. 12), short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies.
However, we have to remain steadfast in our understanding of a different reality. Our research must be what Milner (2025) referred to as “consequential work”: research that is intentionally designed to have a real impact on addressing and improving problem spaces. It involves systematic inquiry that is coplanned and coenacted to improve the research process, and the knowledge gained, with the potential to transform outcomes in practice and policy. He informed us that consequential research is characterized by its intentionality to solve, address, and improve identified problems, and it includes essential elements such as understanding and connecting history, responding to and advancing the knowledge base, amplifying researcher positionality, rejecting essentializing and polarization, prioritizing the voices of the most marginalized, and considering multiple dissemination outlets.
Hope has to be our focus. Even in a field based on science, evidence, and data, hope needs to be part of the framework for moving the field forward. Our hope must be rooted in criticality; it must be a type of hope that Duncan-Andrade (2009) said “audaciously defies the dominant ideology of defense, entitlement, and preservation of privileged bodies at the expense of the policing, disposal, and dispossession of marginalized ‘others.’” (p. 190). bell hooks (2003b) contended that “it is imperative that we maintain hope even when the harshness of reality may suggest the opposite” (p. 13). Imagination must be part of our work. Not in the romanticized way, but imagination that is committed to radical social change. Robin Kelley (2022) stated that we need “an imagination beyond what people can see right now thus opening up a portal to new tomorrows. Solving issues requires creativity and the changing of hearts and minds” (p. xxvi). Education research must allow our imaginative inquiry to focus on the construction of different life experiences, different educational possibilities. Possibility, potentiality, perpetual hope, love, and self-actualization are what we need in our work. A willingness to use our theories, methods, epistemologies, and frameworks with a level of criticality that seeks to address and improve the public good; place an intentionality on those who have been most harmed by our policies, practices, and research; and focus on healing (Ginwright, 2016).
For us to redirect our efforts and works around dismantling racism, we must start with a focus on the pervasiveness and problems of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism should be understood as a “structure rather than an event” (Wolfe, 2006, p. 390). Tuck and Yang (2018) reminded us “how settler perspectives and worldviews get to count as knowledge and research and how these perspectives—repackaged as data and findings—are activated in order to rationalize and maintain unfair social structures.” Therefore, it is important to acknowledge scholars who have been bold and unapologetic, who are raising important questions about racial hierarchies and the real collateral damage that they inflict on education research, theory, policy, and practice.
I want to frame the focus of freedom dreams to disrupt racial injustice around four pillars that can inform our work as scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. It is also time to draw from the work of Afrofuturists who assert that we must imagine possibilities that are beyond our wildest imagination, that we must Dream Out Loud, and that our efforts must invoke freedom from walled-in spaces and from tightly wound time, and instead [espouse] notions of escapes, egress, return and reformation. As a diasporic set of artistic practices that tends to be titled against notions of European philosophy. . .Afrofuturism asserts that there is wisdom in Black cultures—unnamed, untapped understandings with answers for us all. (Strait & Conwill, 2023, p. 24)
Moreover, Afrofuturism as method and practice, vision, and goal, teach us both to dream and to work, to envision and to labor. It seeks to mold the best practices of all peoples into a unique creation that can best serve all. (Strait & Conwill, 2023, p. 28)
Afrofuturists build on the idea of the Black radical tradition that asks us to build collaborative social movements rooted in artistry, science, and activism to give rise to the idea and promise of a future that could advance Black life. It is this premise that education research can borrow for dismantling oppression. Therefore, to that end, freedom dreams that are radically rooted to disrupt racism and other forms of oppression must have four key anchors: (a) centering voice, (b) imagining new possibilities, (c) examining routines, and (d) remaining intersectional in our analysis.
Centering Voice
It is essential that our work be committed to listening to and centering the voices, opinions, perspectives, and lived experiences of those who have always been marginalized, silenced, or rendered unimportant. Our research, policy, and practice must be anchored on listening with compassion, empathy, and care. Let our surveys, experimental designs, interviews, policy proposals, pedagogies, and observations be rooted in the believability of groups who have been consistently told that their pain, struggle, and sacrifice do not matter.
This work will also be vital if we do a better job of listening to young people: centering the voices of those who have the most at stake—our students. Be they elementary, secondary, undergraduate, or graduate, student voices provide unique insights into the day-to-day realities that many of us research and write about but that are far removed from our experiences. Most of us did not go to elementary, middle, or high school in a social media era. Many of us did not attend schools in the 21st century. Most of us did not attend elementary or high school in the midst of a global pandemic. Intentionally centering student voice in educational spaces and positioning students as experts of their educational experiences is vital to centering voice. Khalifa (2018) made the case that schools have to be intentional to embrace, affirm, validate, and promote the voices of students, their families, and their communities to more adequately and fairly serve children from marginalized backgrounds. Similarly, Emdin (2016) stressed the importance of redistributing power in classrooms so that students’ voices are privileged, allowing teaching and learning to be experienced through varied culturally responsive perspectives. Centering student voice means creating space for them to speak, write, and share their truths, which, in turn, should inform how educators and researchers think about policy, practice, and scholarship. Let students’ voices inform how we think about our own research, policy, and practice.
Thus, we need to sit, listen, and learn from the stinging critiques of those most affected by current-day practices and policies. These perspectives are often harsh, but they are honest; they are real, raw, and rooted in the pain and frustration that many students continue to feel. This research is also about voice: the voices of the innocent, those unhidden geniuses, replete with their hopes, dreams, and imaginations, and the schools they envision, the type of education they aspire to attain, and the world where they hope to live in, learn about, and love. I engage young people in seeing the complexity that is racism, but I place the utmost gratitude in their willingness to imagine possibilities. To see something different, to create the type of schooling that empowers, that does not harm, that recognizes joy, expression, fulfillment, and love. The type of learning that allows creativity and risk taking, affirms all of their multiple identities, and asks them to create, learn, think, laugh, and learn all at the same time.
Imagining New Possibilities
Let us use our research and inquiry to find ways to imagine what our world can be, free of oppression and racial injustice. In our pursuit of Freedom Dreams, we must let our imaginations run wild in the field of possibility. Ruha Benjamin (2024) said we need a “collective imagination, as when we imagine different worlds together, writing shared stories and plotting futures in which we all can flourish” (p. i). Here again, I borrow from the scholarship of Afrofuturists who talk about imagination as an aesthetic, a method of self-liberation, self-healing, an epistemology that intersects with imagination, technology, mysticism, culture, and liberation (Strait & Conwill, 2023).
Freedom dreaming is a way of interrogating the past, struggling in the present, and reimagining a future through a Black cultural lens. Afrofuturism is rooted in issues of social justice and equity. Mark Dery (1994) coined the term “Afrofuturism” and said that it gave rise to “a troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history imagine possible futures?” (p. 180). Scholar, writer, and activist Octavia Butler (1979, 1993) used science fiction to explore themes of power, identity, and inequality in her writing, which are consistent with the ideas of Afrofuturism. Through her work, Butler frequently wrote about worlds that challenged conventional notions of race, gender, and humanity itself. She frequently blended elements of African mythology, futuristic technology, and social commentary to envision alternative futures where Black protagonists faced and overcame discrimination. Butler’s work was characterized by its exploration of symbiosis, hybridity, and the fluidity of human boundaries, which was vital in offering a posthuman perspective that questioned traditional categories of being and the human existence (Haraway, 1991). Her unique ability to imagine transformative societies while addressing real-world issues made her a defining voice in Afrofuturism. Butler talked about how she began writing about power because she had so little, encapsulating her drive to empower marginalized voices through her fiction. Freedom dreams through an Afrofuturistic lens would connect education research to multiple disciplines, such as literature, music, arts, film, and dance. Afrofuturism also centers the use of inventiveness. It helps people transform their circumstances. Seeing oneself in the future creates agency. Therefore, let our epistemologies, theoretical frameworks, and research questions be situated in a context that is probing, rigorous, creative, imaginative, and thorough but guided by an ethic that sees the possibilities of those things we have not seen but that we wish to be our realities and the realities of our children’s children. To offer our wildest dreams, thoughts, and questions situated in a field that has often been deemed to provide pathways of possibilities, hopes, dreams, and the construction of a better day and better way. The field of education has been positioned as a good for our public democracy, although there is ample evidence that it was never constructed for those who believe in it the most. But the pursuit of something that is constructed from hope, love, compassion, empathy, possibility, and freedom dreaming must be our aim. Education scholar Muhammad (2023) talked about seeing the genius in every one of our students; that should be our normal in schools. Anything short of that will render us with current-day arrangements, which continue to inflict false hopes, nightmares, and eternal scars for young people.
Examining Our Current Routines
The commitment to racial justice in K–12 and higher education cannot be deterred by various political moments when some seek to undermine important progress that has been made. Moreover, the commitment to racial equity in education research has to be anchored in the idea of being committed to unapologetic justice in our work. The disruption of harmful routines needs to be connected to brave spaces, dialogues centered on understanding oppressive practices that dehumanize multiply marginalized populations, People of Color, queer folks, people with disabilities, women of color, and more pointedly, Black women. We need to commit ourselves to building departments, schools, and universities that allow for the spaces to rewrite our scripts and research our truths. There are many department chairs, deans, associate deans, vice chancellors, and presidents in our organizations. What good is it to have a seat at the table if we only reinforce the current routines that are harmful to folks that look like us?
Freedom Dreams are rooted in the idea of not only dreaming in an imaginative fashion but also being rooted in critical self-reflection and being mindful of our daily routines as we do so (T. C. Howard, 2003). Critical self-reflection requires us to examine our own positionalities and worldviews to understand how our perspectives of our work are shaped by the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts that we inhabit. Moreover, cultural humility must be part of the framing wherein we are mindful of how our cultural practices are not universal, and we remain ever-present with the understanding of how our cultural ways of being, knowing, and doing are not everyone else’s. We must also examine our organizational routines. Therefore, let us work toward the construction of new possibilities, new paradigms, and new ways of how we engage in work around race, racism, and other systems of oppression. Coming back to Diamond and Gomez (2023) and organizational routines, they contend that successful interrogation of racialized practices has three components: (a) understanding who is harmed and the ways that harm is experienced, (b) identifying how organizational routines and practices combine to produce a harm-causing system, and (c) determining how organizations should interrupt old routines and produce new ones that reduce or eliminate harm and produce more racial justice.
To create freedom dreams in efforts to disrupt racial injustice in education research, policy, and practice, we must seek fidelity to democratic ideals (Howard et al., 2019). This is our moment for true democracy. Fragile as it is, broken as it may seem, our moment to uphold and preserve it is to focus on its original sin. In cultural democracies, epistemological democracies, methodological and theoretical democracies, the legacy of racism, the legacy of oppression, subjugation, colonialism, conquering, and conquest can be disrupted and eliminated through our efforts if done with precision, rigor, and collaboration. We must ask ourselves:
Can we live up to the ideals?
Can we form a more perfect union?
Can we make America great for the first time ever?
Can we contribute to a global community that is free of hate, violence, displacement, and genocide?
Can our work build knowledge that eradicates stereotypes, reduces prejudice, and eliminates all forms of oppression? Will we live up to our ideals?
Intersectionality in Our Analysis
We have to think about our work from an interdisciplinary standpoint to think radically about reimaging systems and practices to disrupt racial injustice. Intersectional frames allow us to see how racial injustice and other forms of oppression are not anchored only in education but are also present in housing, employment, financing, technology, medicine, and environmental matters. Scholars such as Kenjus Watson and Tiffanie Marie (2022) borrowed from the field of biology to offer provocative insights into the research on the biological (telomere) impact of schooling and anti-Blackness by examining molecular biology, cell biology, aging research, and cancer biology. Nichole Garcia et al. (2022) helped to push our understanding of quantitative research through a critical lens that lifts up the utility of our quantitative analysis in a rigorous manner that calls into question power, privilege, and oppression, which should inform all quantitative work. Julissa Muñiz (2021) examined carcerality, power and privilege, surveillance technologies, institutions, institutional logics, and abolition at the intersections of the U.S. public education, criminal legal, and juvenile legal systems. It is the work of these scholars that will help us to imagine new paradigms, more critical methodologies, and more rigorous examination of systemic polices, practices, and research that impede progress toward racial justice in education. Brianna Harvey et al (2024) and Kenyon Whitman (2023) have done important work around child welfare, public policy, education, and race to raise important questions about the harm inflicted on Black youth in systems deemed to support and care about them.
These works have all moved our field forward with critical inquiry, intersectional examinations, transformative interventions, and imaginative stances that have an impact on the everyday lives of those most “inconvenient people.” The intersectional approaches must disrupt the narrative that paints BIPOC folks and communities in monolithic terms. Our intersectional approaches must recognize that although racial discrimination brings its own pain, struggles, and suffering, it is compounded when one considers the experiences of BIPOC queer folks, those who are undocumented, and those with disabilities. Moreover, the investigative realm of conflating poverty and race raises important concerns that merit different analyses.
Although our intersectional work must come from a place of radical hope, decolonial desires, and unconditional love for our ancestors, relatives, and future generations, it cannot rest on mere dreaming. Our work must be rooted in rigorous study, intense struggle, critical analysis, prolonged inquiry, deep thinking, and collaborative action. Our work in constructing new possibilities should unapologetically embody our personal, professional, and ethical commitments and responsibility to transform education systems for all, particularly for historically marginalized communities, those inconvenienced peoples, those darker peoples who have suffered the most (Gay, 2020). Our intersectional research and inquiry must be situated in an ethic that pushes us to new limits in centering the Other, of humanizing those who have been rendered as disposable, and making those inconvenient people the people whose lives will never be rendered less than anyone else’s. It is important to recognize the wave of scholars who have been bold and unapologetic in asking us to think differently about this work: Ana Julia Cooper, bell hooks, Audra Lorde, who have pushed for more intersectional analysis in our work. The same thing can be said for education scholars who have been instrumental for the past 5 decades in helping to connect education to other fields, such as James Banks, Geneva Gay, Carol Lee, Gloria Ladson Billings, Sonia Nieto, Christine Sleeter, Danny Solórzano, Carl Grant, and Kris Gutiérrez, who helped us to understand the complexity and connections of education to culture, history, race, psychology, gender, ethnic studies, and language, which inform so many scholars’ work today.
Conclusion
We must imagine, create, and sustain spaces of racial justice, a world where students of all ages are allowed to question, explore, resist, play, jump, smile, take risks, dance, create, and have no limits placed on their visionary brilliance. We must imagine and build education justice that is rooted in the fundamental idea of recognizing and doing what is right. The concept of justice is rooted in the notion of moral righteousness that is afforded to all people (T. C. Howard, 2024). The justice construct is anchored in the context of recognizing each person’s humanity and providing the basic necessities that allow each person to be seen, heard, valued, and recognized. Justice is also connected to the idea of what education scholar Maisha Winn (2018) called a paradigm shift that anchors justice as not just an idea, theory, or abstract concept but a way of being that informs our thoughts and actions in everyday practice.
Although education has been an effective strategy to destroy Indigenous nations, people, culture, and history, education can and should be a tool for affirmation of multiple languages and authentic respect for neurodiversity, support for all genders, acknowledgment of diverse cultural practices, and consciousness of racial realities. This requires us to imagine, construct, build; this requires a systemic change where we can be at the forefront with our praxis.
We have to think, imagine, write, research, and create the world that we desire to live in. I return to Robin Kelley (2022), who reminded us that “the most radical ideas grow out of concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression” (p. 8). Our children and children’s children deserve that world which is not only rooted in standing up to injustice, harm, and oppression but also anchored in boldly creating and sustaining a completely different reality. Let our organizational routines not be steeped in oppressions, tyranny, and exclusion but centered on hope, possibility, love, freedom, and justice. Our research and inquiry must not be limited to examining the sources of pain, prejudice, and hopelessness. Let’s also commit to the work of studying models of pedagogies and policies that provide possibility and hope. Let ours be the generation that makes the impossible possible, the unthinkable thinkable, and the undoable doable. I challenge us to be the change that we do not desire to see but the change that our work, our ideas, our scholarship, and our inquiry will BE. Thank you for being in community. Thank you for giving me the honor of serving as your president.
