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The pursuit of racial justice in education continues to demand research that employs critical race theory (CRT). Underscoring the importance of such scholarship, this review of K-12 literature examines the trend of racial literacy in educational research. Using an interactive and recursive systematic review of research, this paper ultimately analyzed 22 peer-reviewed articles that employed racial literacy as a theory and/or method--many connected to CRT--for the possibilities they offered in upending racial liberalism in K-12 teaching and schooling. In this review, racial literacy was categorized into themes: as a process, as disrupting white supremacy and internalized racism, and as working toward curricular transformation, intersectional analysis, and centering youth voice. We conclude by discussing ways that racial literacy research can continue to work within and beyond the academy to disrupt racial liberalism and work toward anti-racist transformation in K-12 education.

Singing and dancing for diversity examines a series of professional development workshops ostensibly centred on racial equity designed for secondary school teachers. Using the concept of neoliberal multiculturalism to critique the implementation of the workshops, this article illustrates how superficial multicultural curriculum distorts anti-racism and reproduces whiteness. The analysis focuses on the social and affective dimensions of racialization that emerge and converge during the workshops to instantiate white epistemological ignorance of race. Epistemological ignorance is established through the construction and sequencing of a watered-down curricular approach to multiculturalism in combination with a diversity concert that functions to persuade white teachers to embrace a non-critical definition of racial equity.

In this article, Justin Grinage investigates how black youth experience and contest racial trauma using racial melancholia, a psychoanalytic conception of grief, as a framework for understanding the nonpathologized endurance of black resistance to racism. Examining data from a yearlong ethnographic study, Grinage engages the notion that melancholia is needed for mourning to take place, a crucial distinction that engenders agency in relation to the constant (re)production of racial oppression in the lives of five black twelfth-grade students at a multiracial suburban US high school. Grinage illustrates how racial melancholia structures racial trauma and analyzes its effects on black identity, dismissing pathologizing definitions of racial injury while centralizing the importance of asset-based, healing-centered approaches for enacting racial justice in education.

The pursuit of racial justice in education continues to demand research that employs critical race theory (CRT). Underscoring the importance of such scholarship, this review of K-12 literature examines the trend of racial literacy in educational research. Using an interactive and recursive systematic review of research, this paper ultimately analyzed 22 peer-reviewed articles that employed racial literacy as a theory and/or method – many connected to CRT – for the possibilities they offered in upending racial liberalism in K-12 teaching and schooling. In this review, racial literacy was categorized into themes: as a process, as disrupting white supremacy and internalized racism, and as working toward curricular transformation, intersectional analysis, and centering youth voice. We conclude by discussing ways that racial literacy research can continue to work within and beyond the academy to disrupt racial liberalism and work toward anti-racist transformation in K-12 education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the management of teacher-student conversations about racial violence and racism. Topics include the confrontation of discourses of violence in the classroom, the psychoanalytic concept of transference, and psychopolitical anxieties. Also mentioned are details on racially melancholic classroom and the use of home as a curricular tool.