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Teacher educators of antiracist pedagogies must begin by asking ourselves the question: How do issues of race, class, religion, and sexual orientation live within us?
One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist.
-Ibram X. Kendi
We are at a time in the history of the United States when race, class, and culture weigh heavily upon us. We are still healing from the Trump presidency, during which the continuing disparities of inequity were glaringly spotlighted by the global pandemic of COVID-19.
The memory of George Floyd dying on video is horrendous, traumatizing, and brutal. Listening to Floyd tell the police that he could not breathe is a stark echo of Eric Garner's exact words six years earlier. And still the police are not listening. Hearing Floyd call for his mama with his last breaths tore at the hearts of (Black) mothers worldwide. What is this injustice that still haunts Black and Brown bodies across the globe?
All of this is backdropped by a global pandemic-the coronavirus-that is erasing clusters of people in nearly every country. At the time of this writing, nearly a year and a half since the advent of the pandemic, we are still locked in, shut down, and in isolation, frantically trying to save ourselves. Amid this health crisis, Black and Brown bodies, who are most vulnerable to the virus, continue to be persecuted and terrorized by their fellow humans.
At George Floyd's memorial-televised live in the United States-the Reverend Al Sharpton pled in his eulogy for law enforcement and government to "take their knee off our collective necks." What a palpable request. Long after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, racism remains as insidious than ever. It is capitalistic, sexist, gendered, and classist in ways that continue to frighten and overwhelm us. The structure of institutionalized racism and bigotry is alive and consistently unsettling the lives of people who have historically been discriminated against for generations.
All of this is foregrounded in the heart and minds of many scholars of color and has become pivotal to the scholar-activist lives they lead. This paper examines the lived experiences of two women of...