<italic>Heads I Win, Tails You Lose</italic>: Anti-Black Racism as Fluid, Relentless, Individual and Systemic.

Derrick Bell's thesis, that racism is a permanent feature of society, is frequently misrepresented by detractors as signaling a view of racism as monolithic—bold, obvious, and unchanging. This paper argues that critical race theory reveals a very different understanding of racism as relentless, yet fluid, and quick to morph depending on current circumstances. In this way, CRT offers a new perspective on the view that the more things change, the more they stay the same, the central theme for this issue of the <italic>Peabody Journal of Education.</italic> This paper focuses on two key issues where the last quarter century has seen considerable superficial change that appears progressive but masks a deeper reality of continued racial injustice: first, the changing contours of the black/white achievement gap in England, and, second, the continuing fascination on both sides of the Atlantic with notions of genetics and intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]