URBAN EDUCATION / JANUARY 1999Lynn / TOWARD A CRITICAL RACE PEDAGOGY TOWARD A CRITICAL RACE PEDAGOGY

This article explores the connectivity of research and theories of African American emancipatory pedagogy to Critical Race Theory (CRT). In doing so, the guiding principles and maxims of CRT as an emergent ethical and moralistic discourse on race and racism in the law will be briefly outlined. Next, the premises of CRT will be used to analyze ethnographic interviews conducted with eight African American teachers. The interview data will then be used as a manner in which to articulate a Critical Race Pedagogy. As we arrive at the threshold of a new millennium, it appears that Africans in America have come to yet another educational cross-roads. The ominous question that has been and continues to lurk in the recesses of our minds is “At what point will our children have access to quality education? ” and even more important, as Carter G. Woodson (1933/1993) reminds us, to what degree will schooling serve African Americans if it teaches them to respect and honor the cultures of others and not their own? As is evident in the critical analysis of Woodson, there has always existed a response to the level of “miseducation ” that Africans have been forced to endure in the United States. Woodson’s (1919/1968) earlier studies describe, in detail, the difficulties encountered by freed Africans, during the antebellum period, to establish schools and to participate in the educational process. Along the same lines, Eugene Butchart (1976) critically analyzes how schools for Africans emerged in post–civil war America. His conclusion: Africans were offered schools before they were offered housing and employment. Furthermore, he ar