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Introduction
In The Alchemy of Race and Rights, critical race legal scholar Patricia Williams centers the lives of Black folks who are inequitably treated by the legal system and society. Williams, blending her personal narrative, speaks truth to power through examining the disproportionate murderings of Black folks, not restricted to only the body, but also the ongoing process of the spirit. Williams (1987) first conceptualized spirit murder as a by-product of racism and white supremacy, which inflicts pain and is a form of racial violence that steals and kills the humanity and spirits of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). We argue that Williams not only locates spirit murder as racial violence in the legal system but also through her reflections of working as a law professor in academia. Offering insights into her pedagogy in the law classroom she describes the responses of her students and colleagues as she states:
The next day I get a note from the dean: he has received a variety of complaints about the polemical nature of my teaching and feels that my style is inappropriate in 'the' law-school classroom. That night I go home, pour my own sherry, and write up lecture notes for the next day's class, which on the next day I give, out of neither defiance nor defeat but because I don't have anything else to say. (p.32)
Much like Williams, we found ourselves often neither defiant nor defeated, but rather left with nothing to say. Our battles come with peaks, highs and lows, and are ongoing in academia as Women of Color. Williams provides us with racial microaffirmations that our stories and that of many others is "real talk" to discuss how far we have come and where we go from here (Solorzano, Perez Huber, & Huber-Veijan, 2019). More often than not, we are survivors of "white" notes sent via email of complaints of how we are not doing our jobs well or better yet perpetuate stereotypes of our behavior being "inappropriate" and to act "white/right." We are not the first to use Williams notion of spirit murder in education broadly, nor will we be the last.
Education scholar Bettina Love (2016) applies spirit murdering to the lived realities of Black and Brown students...