Raising Race Questions: Whiteness and Inquiry in Education

Conversations about race can be confusing, contentious, and frightening, particularly for White people. Even just asking questions about race can be scary, because we are afraid of what our questions might reveal about our ignorance or bias. Raising Race Questions invites teachers to use inquiry as a way to develop sustained engagement with challenging racial questions and to do so in community so that they learn how common their questions actually are. It lays out both a process for getting to questions that lead to growth and change, as well as a vision for where engagement with race questions might lead. Race questions are not meant to lead us into a quagmire of guilt, discomfort, or isolation. Sustained race inquiry is meant to lead to antiracist classrooms, positive racial identities, and a restoration of the wholeness of spirit and community that racism undermines.

Book Features:

• New insights on race and equity in education, including the idea that a multicultural curriculum is not sufficient for building an antiracist classroom.
• Case studies of expert and experienced White teachers who still have questions about race.
• Approaches for talking about race in the K–12 classroom.
• Strategies for facilitating race conversations among adults.
• A variety of different resources useful in the teacher inquiry groups described in the book.
• Research with teachers, not on teachers, including written responses from each teacher whose classroom is featured in the book.