Existentially Guilty: Where Do I Go From Here?

Teachers, students, parents, and even politicians have been forced to confront the by-products of not having difficult conversations about race and class. Political pundits are using this moment in history sparked by recorded injustice and the publicized murders of unarmed black people at the hands of law enforcement to demonize Critical Race Theory (CRT), a framework created to analyze how the law is racialized. This portfolio is largely a result of Dr. Rudine Sims-Bishop’s “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors” and contextualizing it through my personal experience as a classroom teacher, as a black man in a majority white, female profession, and as a young teacher having more questions than answers when examining the larger social context of the outside world. The portfolio began as a rationale to use Dear Martin, All American Boys, The Hate U Give, and On The Come Up as a social justice literature circle. The substantive research turned into an examination of whiteness, and CRT as a tool to combat white supremacy culture, which has become the normalized default to weaponize white rage against the othered. By the end of the portfolio, Critical Race English Education (CREE) is one solution in the fight to reimagine the classroom for black, indigenous, and people of color students and teachers, centering blackness, and humanizing curricula that confronts anti-black perceptions