“She [the White middle school teacher] was like: ‘BACARI…BAAAA—CAAAAA—RIIIII.’”

—-(African American female eighth grade urban school student imitating her White English teacher—student is shouting out the name of a Black male student, stretching the name out, at the top of her lungs.)

“I know! [To the Black female student]

She’s [the White English teacher] like—-[makes an facial expression frowning, angry].

I hate it when she does that [pretends to scream loudly but no sound comes out].

She [the White English teacher] like, “Write it down. Write it down. WRITE IT DOWN. WRITE……IT……DOWN!!!!”

And everyone is like, “Shut up!!”

Because she just like randomly…she just starts screaming.

She just like keeps repeating and then she just starts screaming it.

And everybody is like, “Ai’it Ai’it, chill out.” [The word ‘alright’ contracted]

—-(African American male seventh grade urban school student is imitating the same White English teacher. He imitates the teacher with his voice getting louder, more enunciated, and more drawn out each time she repeats her directions until at last he is screaming.)

[Both students laugh.]

—What is Good Teaching?

Black Students’ Perspectives:

All Black Middle School Located in the American South

Interview, 2010

This essay interrogates the seeming diversity paradox of multicultural teacher education and its connection to the White world of education (Juárez and Hayes 2010; Juárez et al. 2008). It has now been decades since the call for the multicultural preparation of future teachers has been widely accepted, taken up, and apparently implemented in the world of U.S. teacher education; indeed, the acceptance and implementation of teacher preparation for multicultural diversity is so wide spread across contemporary U.S. teacher education that it would likely be immensely difficult, if not impossible, to find even one teacher preparation program in the nation that did not already have implemented—and most importantly, was not already excelling at preparing future teachers for the multicultural diversity of today’s public schools (Au 2017).

We, the authors, are three teacher educators who have respectively each worked in various teacher preparation programs across the U.S. for the past two decades. Taken together, our experiences in teacher education combine for a total of over sixty years in and in contact with many teacher preparation programs located within every region of the U.S. Across these combined sixty years of experience as teacher educators, interestingly, not one of us has ever worked in or encountered a teacher preparation program that was not already [self-defined as] “ahead of the curve”, “exceptional”, “robustly democratic”, or otherwise stellar in successfully preparing future teachers for multicultural education.

Also interestingly—and very significantly, despite the widespread excellence of U.S. teacher education in the multicultural preparation of future teachers, the education of students from racial minority, economically poor, and other historically subjugated communities continues to be substandard at best. Joyce King’s 2005 indictment of Black education remains today on point for schooling generally in too many U.S. public schools serving racial minority, economically poor, and other disenfranchised groups: “The abysmal state of Black education in the United States and globally is an inhumane situation that calls into question the values and pronouncements of Western “civilization”’ (p. 3).

Reflected by rates of school graduation, discipline, test scores, and more, the contemporary state of education for Black, Latino and other racial minority students from communities identified as economically poor continues to be much like attempting to learn in a burning house (Baldwin 1985; Horsford 2011); it is also the cause of significant grief and loud lamentation over U.S. public education, particularly urban schools, projected by policy makers, educational and other researchers, business and community leaders, teachers and administrators, among others (Rodriguez 2012).

Yet, again, despite the widespread, largely self-proclaimed excellence of multicultural teacher preparation, we posit, it is no ‘who done it’ mystery regarding how and why the continued substandard education of racial minority students persists despite the outraged cries of the innocents, a term James Baldwin used ironically to refer to White America and its seeming outrage at U.S. society’s persistent inequities (Baldwin 1985). Indeed, as we see it, school failure is the logical, intended outcome, the rotten fruit (Sojoyner 2013) to be expected, of the whiteness of education, teacher preparation programs, and the historical supremacy of Whiteness in US society (Leonardo 2009).

Bluntly stated, teacher education plays a key and intentional role in maintaining this substandard schooling and racial subjugation faced by students of color in U.S. public schools and society (Leonardo 2009)—hence, it is no mystery, despite the continuing cries of outrage against failing public schooling and substandard education for students of color. It is not a mystery as to why the substandard education of vulnerable communities in U.S. society continues—we know the enemy and the enemy is us; we know who plays a key role in producing and maintaining this substandard education—it is ourselves as teacher preparation programs and teacher educators.

We, the authors, recognize that there are those among our readers who may consider our tone and directness about the condition of public schooling today as polemical, angry, even bitter. Yet, we consider the situation Joyce King (2005) referred to as “abysmal” in public schools to demand a tone and language that capable of acknowledging the slow deaths that are being accomplished by schooling and identifying, even opening up spaces for action, be it polemical or otherwise. To ponder the experiences of the students in the epigraphs above, dear reader, brings to mind the words of Lerone Bennett (1972) who reminds us—“Bullets aside, there are two ways to perpetuate the oppression of a people. The first way is to refuse to educate them. And the second way is to educate them” (p. 224).

As we (Juárez and Hayes 2010), among others (Sleeter 2001), have noted elsewhere, the world of U.S. education is a White world with teachers, teacher educators, and future teachers all being predominantly White. In schools, whiteness is likewise reflected in the curricula, teaching and assessment practices, teacher-student and other interactions, decision-making, and more likewise with the consistent privileging of the interests, values, accomplishments, histories, and more of Whites (Gorski 2009). “The Whiteness of teacher education becomes visible with the emergence of multicultural education courses and activities on the margins of programs and interactions and as separate from the daily business of preparing future teachers” (Juárez and Hayes 2010, p. 235).

The negative consequences of Whiteness in education for the schooling outcomes and experiences of socially diverse learners is well documented (Matias 2013a, 2013b). The excerpted interviews in the epigraphs above highlight some of the ways these negative consequences of Whiteness in education are experienced by Black and other students of color in the classroom.

In the epigraphs above, the students are being subjected to forms of treatment that are antithetical, to say the least to successful teaching and learning; it is likewise doubtful that the students in the epigraph above are experiencing successful learning and likely do not have access to and participate in quality educational and social opportunities (Grossman & McDonald 2008). At the same time, it is doubtful that the White English teacher in the epigraph above entered the teaching profession to scream at children or do anything other than to help students learn to develop a love of learning, and specifically, a deep love of learning about the English language and all it entails.

Kindly, dear reader, take a moment to carefully re-read the epigraphs at the opening of this paper. These epigraphs are actual lived experiences representative of a typical day in a city’s urban schools serving a predominantly African American and economically poor community. No student should be subjected to the schooling experiences represented in the epigraphs above and faced daily by these and far too many other children and youth. Notwithstanding, the epigraphs above are representative of business as usual in this community’s urban schools. At the same time, these urban schools are hardly unique in the U.S. nor are the negative schooling experiences faced by these students.

It is at this intersection between the harsh realities experienced by students of color in the classroom and the intended egalitarian goals of education represented by the teacher’s role as facilitator of successful teaching and learning that the negative consequences of student underachievement and exclusion are realized for far too many Black and other students of color in U.S. public schools, despite the best of intentions of schools and educators and others. Teacher preparation programs are responsible for preparing teachers to realize successful teaching and learning for all students.

The teachers in the epigraphs above were prepared in a teacher preparation program that was officially self- and otherwise institutionally proclaimed as “ahead of the curve” in multicultural teacher education. Lest the individual teachers in the epigraphs above are considered to be individual failures, rather than the products of their teacher preparation programs, please do note, dear reader, that there are countless other exemplars of teachers and classrooms from other schools that could have been used to represent and illuminate the seeming paradox of multicultural teacher education excellence in higher education and the harsh realities of teachers’ failed multicultural experiences and teaching and learning approaches in many urban schools serving historically underserved communities.

Unfortunately, to be sure, we three [authors] are keenly aware and it is well documented that the teacher in the epigraph above who is screaming her frustrations out at her students is not alone; she does not represent an isolated case of White women teachers and the students of color in their care and a lack of positive, productive learning experiences and outcomes in their urban school classrooms. Instead, this White teacher’s failure is representative and symptomatic of the failure of multicultural teacher preparation programs in the U.S.

It is not, in short, a “who done it” mystery as to why this teacher and many teachers are not adequately prepared for the realities of contemporary U.S. public schools; U.S. teacher education must take responsibility for this failure despite widespread and ongoing self-congratulations about “being ahead of the curve” in multicultural teacher preparation.

Considering the Mystery of U.S. Teacher Education’s Diversity Paradox

Applying a critical race methodology (Taylor et al. 2009) and concepts from critical whiteness studies (Camper 1994; Levine-Rasky 2000; Matias and Mackey 2016) and the Black radical tradition (Baldwin 1985; Cone 1987; West 1993), we—the authors, draw from our combined lived experiences as teacher educators at institutions located across the U.S. as an important source of critical knowledge about the Whiteness of education to highlight specific, representative moments of practices typical in many U.S. teacher preparation programs (Solorzano and Yosso 2002. Our purpose in this essay is to critically examine these moments of teacher preparation practices as one way to explore and better understand how the officially and continuously proclaimed success of multicultural teacher preparation across the nation persists in producing teachers profoundly unprepared to successfully realize educational equity for all students.

We use our examination of these moments of teacher preparation practices as a way to explore and learn more about how to dismantle, even ameliorate the mechanisms and modus operandi of Whiteness in teacher preparation by exposing how equity-oriented aims are daily sabotaged despite the equity-oriented and otherwise good intentions of multicultural teacher education.

Very importantly, our intent it is not to blame individuals or programs or to promote White defensiveness or guilt (Juárez and Hayes 2012a, 2014, 2015). For multicultural teacher education to realize its equity-oriented goals, we posit, the realities of active complicity in protecting the Whiteness embedded within teacher preparation must be exposed and challenged (Juárez 2013, 2014). The persistent Whiteness in education is not accidentally or coincidentally [re]created behind the backs of individuals and programs despite historical collective cries of [White] innocence (Juárez and Hayes 2012b).

In the paragraphs that follow, then, we identify specific, actual moments drawn from our respective professional experiences which typify and are representative of how the historical privileging of White interests, values, and histories is regularly, even daily re-established and protected anew as individuals, groups, and programs make decisions, interact, and act in ways that buttress the exclusion, diminishing, and silencing of the interests, values, histories and accomplishments of people of color—regardless of whether or not the individuals or groups making the decisions and interacting with others are aware of how the consequences of their choices often contribute to the reifying and maintenance of the historical privileging of Whiteness in education and U.S. society. These pedagogical moments are real time enactments of White racial domination at the expense of people of color that cumulatively and together realize the re-establishment of the historical, continuing subjugation of people of color through education.

Pointedly, these types of pedagogical moments of privileging Whiteness happen every day, every year across teacher education programs despite the multicultural aims of most teacher educators and teacher preparation programs. The point of these pedagogical moments is to highlight specific points in time that are representative of patterns of actions, interactions, and decision-making that combine over time to produce the systemic failure of multicultural teacher preparation in U.S. teacher education despite self-proclamations of commitments to diversity and excellence in pedagogical preparation.

There are those officials, business leaders, educators, and others who may wonder about this mystery of diversity failure in classrooms and its connection to the diversity excellence in teacher education—who is responsible? It is not a mystery, however, as to why teachers enter the classroom unprepared to realize successful teaching and learning for all students despite graduating from teacher preparation programs self-identified as outstanding in multicultural education; teachers are in reality not being prepared for the realities of today’s culturally diverse classrooms and the following pedagogical moments show how teacher educators themselves individually and together produce this failure to actually prepare teachers for multicultural realities.

It’s no ‘who done it’ mystery as to why future teachers are not prepared for multicultural realities in contemporary public schools and multilingual, multicultural classrooms and communities. We are the ones, to be very clear, as teacher educators and teacher education programs, who together do not prepare future teachers for multicultural classroom realities.

This failure will continue until we collectively decide that it can not go on. To interrupt this failure, moreover, we must understand how it is created. At the same time, this process of creating multicultural teacher preparation failure is no mystery.

How it Happens: The Pedagogical Making of White Domination

As James Baldwin (1962/1993) would surely agree, it takes no great imagination or high level intelligence to understand that this innocent nation has had no intention to [actually] effectively prepare future teachers for the cultural diversity of classrooms past, present, and future. Indeed, public schooling directed by White people for White people was never organized to provide anything other than discount education and classrooms as holding pens for the bodies of children of color.

We are too harsh in our judgements of public schooling, you suggest, dear reader? Perhaps there is now orchestrated against us, the authors, a chorus of outraged teachers and other teacher educators and more innocents vigorously repudiating our claims about the whiteness and its domination in teacher education. In the tradition of Baldwin (1962/1993), our readers may now be crying out about the goodness of intentions regarding public schooling for racial minority students—“No! This is not true! How bitter you are!”

Yet……hear us out. As we have noted elsewhere in depth (Juárez and Hayes 2015; Juárez Harris et al. 2016; Hayes and Hartlep 2013), your whiteness is showing, we posit, when you proudly point to traditions of inclusion and democratic education in our university, college, and department while, at the same time, the syllabi, teaching practices, and curricula of your programs are indicative of and reflect teaching, learning and experiences that are by, for, and about white people.

Importantly, education deemed democratic and inclusive is most often reserved for people historically identified as white while violence, both symbolic and physical, is the learning experience made available to all those designated as not white just as in the U.S. justice has historically meant ‘just us White people’ (Juárez and Hayes 2010). Lee (1974) once explained the negative consequences of education’s whiteness in this way, “My teacher’s wisdom forever grows, he taught me things every [student] will know; how to steal, appeal, and accept things against my will. All these acts take as facts, the mistake was made in teaching me how not to be BLACK” (p. 201; emphasis in the original).

In the following paragraphs, we thus present ten pedagogical moments typical of education and specifically of teacher preparation programs and practices. These pedagogical moments carry the assumptions, processes, and other mechanisms wherein the multicultural goals of equity in teacher education are co-opted, subverted, and then transformed to promote the historical supremacy of Whites in U.S. society despite the good intentions of individuals and groups seeking equity in education and society (Hartlep and Hayes 2016; Hayes et al. 2016).

Pedagogical Moment One

The whiteness of education and the preparation of teachers for whiteness, not multicultural realities, is manifested when White colleagues emphatically insist that, as a program, a school or college, a community, we are—and [in some cases] always have been racially and otherwise diversely integrated. Perhaps ironically, however, it goes largely unnoted that, at the same time, the recently unveiled social diversity plan for the teacher preparation program and college of education is the literally the very same plan that was put forth 4  years ago as if it is new.

In a way, this diversity plan is indeed new because it never made it off the paper the report for teacher preparation program credentialing was printed on. Indeed, the sheer existence of a Diversity Plan underscores the lack of racial and other forms of diversity infused throughout the institution.

At the same time, it is notable that the token People of Color appointed to the college’s diversity committee dissented to that diversity plan even when it was originally new and their replacements also have voiced reservations. It is a secret only to white people that our programs and institutions are racist. As W. E. B. DuBois (1920) well knew, “[m]y word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism. And yet as they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped—ugly, human” (cited in Lewis 1995, p. 453).

Pedagogical Moment Two

Again, we posit, the whiteness of education and teacher education, and simultaneous failure to enact multicultural preparation, emerges in moments when colleagues and leadership faculty, for example, forcefully tell the faculty that diversity is the way we are going in this program, like it or not. Then, interestingly, these colleagues and leaders briskly skim over and casually dismiss questions about why we have no courses on the history of Black, American Indian, Latino, Women’s education, given our focus on social diversity, and given the demographics of surrounding communities. We, the authors, each are or have been faculty members of minority-serving educational institutions. The communities surrounding our institutions of higher education and teacher education programs are made up of people of color, other historically disenfranchised groups, and immense diversity in linguistic, religious, economic and other backgrounds—standing in stark contrast to the whiteness of the institutions in which we respectively teach and have taught.

Pointedly, the whiteness in education emerges in these types of incongruent cultural illiteracies. To be culturally illiterate does not mean that you do not know how to be nice, or at least polite, to those with phenotypical features, linguistic preferences, and other characteristics different from your own; Rather, it means that you are willing to make largely empty pronouncements of the valuing of cultural diversity but simultaneously work to ensure that the practices of Whiteness are protected and perpetuated at the expense of people from racialized and otherwise historically subjugated communities.

To say that one values cultural diversity but enacts the privileging of the traditional White curricula is to reinforce the historical supremacy of Whites. Importantly, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., few things in the world are more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity (Cone 2004).

Pedagogical Moment Three

The whiteness of education and teacher preparation, and failure of teacher preparation for multicultural realities, emerges in moments when, for instance, colleagues and leaders form hiring committees with the specific intention to seek and hire scholars of color. However, this hiring committee’s goal is to hire applicants of color who teach just science or just literacy methods.

We are asked, for instance, “Do you know any potential candidates for the position,” we have been asked, “who teach science, but not all that political business?” Administrators call on us to tap our social networks for people of color but let us know very explicitly that they are tired of all that “white people bashing”; Hence, window dressing diversity is their hiring goal—people of color who have White ideals and perspectives.

Yes, we understand, you “want very much to have a black person in [your] department as long as that person thinks and acts like [you], shares [your] values and beliefs, [and] is in no way different” (Hooks 1989, p. 113; emphasis in the original). Nothing new here regarding diversity and Whiteness in institutions. Whites have been deciding for the past 500 years what kind [of window dressing] and how much “diversity” they will tolerate. To seek candidates who are racial minorities but expected to think and act in ways that reflect White traditions is to undercut the very notion of multicultural teacher preparation and democratic institutions.

Pedagogical Moment Four

Whiteness in the preparation of teachers, and the devaluing of multicultural realities, is also manifested through professional interactions and decision-making processes and outcomes when colleagues and faculty are regularly offended at any kind of so-called race talk or race work. It is better, our colleagues suggest, to speak, hear, and do colorblindness to race—the rule of thumb, no race talk (Leonardo 2005).

For instance, when we seek to bring in guest speakers for panels, presentations, and more, we have been advised that we are moving too fast; Colleagues who are White tell us they feel uncomfortable talking about race and being confronted by topics associated with racism and other forms of oppression. When a scholar from another university arrives to talk about contemporary white racism and speak on being black in historically white institutions, our White colleagues suggest that they are being subjected to reverse racism given the discomfort they experience during these events and conversations.

Certainly, we understand and recognize that historically White people are regularly have been offended—as demonstrated by an appalling oppressive and bloody history known all over the world (Baldwin 1985). Yet, after 244 years of slavery, 100 years of lynching, and 40 odd years of formal civil rights, we wonder aloud to our colleagues and to each other, is it that we are really moving too fast or not fast enough? And, if we are indeed moving too fast, then, we are moving too fast for whom? Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, why is it that it the historical record shows that it is white people who always decide how fast we should be going when we are talking about and seeking to act on matters of equity and justice? Shouldn’t those who have historically been most often on the wrong, or bloody, side of democracy and justice have some say on these matters?

Pedagogical Moment Five

In education and teacher preparation, the privileging of whiteness and the simultaneous devaluing of multicultural realities likewise manifests when faculty and colleagues suggest that it is impolite, even rude, to keep talking about the pernicious and pervasive educational and other social inequities still running along U.S. society’s enduring color line. People’s feelings are hurt, we are warned by our White colleagues and fellow faculty members. People with hurt feelings don’t make for good collaborative partners in democratic and equity endeavors, we are advised. We are further informed that [White] people just don’t like being continually beat over the head with white racism and made to feel guilty about being white. “Should White people take to beating themselves with belt straps for being White?”, our White colleagues inquire.

Yes, white racism hurts all of us, we posit. However, very importantly, racism kills only some of us in the immediate moment (Camper 1994). Every day for the past 500 years, people who walk around in bodies racially marked as Other than White have had to be afraid of more than their feelings being hurt. Indeed, the near genocide of some and the enslavement of others as chattel, and likewise today’s mass incarceration of some and the continued failure to provide quality education for others, do much more than harm individuals’ feelings, as important as feelings are. Perhaps if we worried less about White people’s feelings, we wonder aloud to each other and to our colleagues, there might be more concerted efforts to push forward on eliminating inequities in education and society.

Pedagogical Moment Six

And again, it is likewise whiteness showing in education and teacher preparation, not teacher preparation for multicultural diversity, when colleagues and faculty say that we need to end the meeting, the seminar, and the semester on a positive note so that [White] people won’t be subjected to any further confrontations over “diversity”, as if to say that conversations about social differences are unpleasant and disturbing to White people. You do not enjoy being called a racist all the time, we are told by our White colleagues.

But, we wonder aloud to our White colleagues and to each other, why is it always about you [White people] and your feelings and what you need [as a White person]? Are the feelings of White people always the priority in these discussions of inequity and racism in education and teacher preparation? Apparently, yes.

Notwithstanding the importance of White people and Whites’ feelings, it is simultaneously notable that African American, Asian, female, and many other students cannot just decide that today is not a good day to be black at school, not a good day to be a girl at school today, not a good day to be Asian at school today—that perhaps, with regard to being marked as socially different, tomorrow or next week will be better. Rainbows, butterflies, and other lovely assumptions about social diversity are not options for everyone as they appear to be for at least some White people who are positioned to be able to decide when and how they will engage matters of race and racism and other dimensions of inequities in education and society.

A White student can decide that today is not a good day to talk about social differences while a student marked as socially different does not have this option. And, moreover, we do wonder aloud to each other and to our colleagues, how many of those people who tell us that neither they, nor their family, ever owned slaves, do actually believe that they are the first and original ones to enunciate this statement as an apparent statement of evidence rendering them [in their own eyes at minimum] as a racism-free White person.

Pedagogical Moment Seven

Again, it is whiteness, and not multicultural values, in education that [re]emerges when teacher education faculty and administration proclaim that they are “doing diversity” by inviting our white colleagues as keynote speakers to share at a university faculty forum, brown bag luncheon what they learned on their trips to Bolivia and South Africa. The matter of taking one’s White body into spaces of the racially and socially different Other [than White] and coming back to share stories about adventures in the land of Otherness does not an expert on culture and diversity make.

Indeed, we argue, there is little significance to the fact that a White person may have grown up with a best friend who is American Indian and today has a best friend who is African American. That a White person has lived in Indonesia for so many years does not make them an expert on cultural diversity unless and until that person is able to locate themselves within and understand themselves as a primary beneficiary of white supremacy and the globalization of capital.

Do you really think it matters, we wonder aloud to each other and to our White colleagues, whether or not we require our students to do a student teaching practicum or an internship in Belize, on an American Indian reservation, or in Alabama, when neither you nor they know how to unpack your collective “first world” white privileges to understand that the “problems” you see in the Other’s space are the consequences of our nation’s affluence gouged out of and built up from the backs of the Other at home and abroad? We posit to our White colleagues, you aren’t the first white person and you surely won’t be the last to be enriched by your tour of and venture into Exotica and the Other’s “culture”.

Pedagogical Moment Eight

Whiteness in education and teacher preparation, and not multicultural teacher preparation, is yet again manifested and recreated when colleagues and faculty indignantly protest against explicit talk and action taken against injustices and inequities in education and society. We are told by colleagues and faculty that this inequity talk is not necessary anymore because, unlike in times past, today we have made so much progress. To prove their point about social progress toward equity and justice, our colleagues tell us to around us and to the city’s Black and Latino leaders in government, the media, and other positions of leadership in the community and region. Indignantly, our colleagues charge us with reverse racism for even bringing up the topic of inequities in education and society in the face of so much social progress in evidence around us.

When we tell our colleagues that we respect their views on social progress, but find it necessary to deliberately and explicitly put the perspectives and experiences of minoritized peoples at the center of our research, teaching, and everything else we do in the university, in the community, and at home, we are told that we are stuck in the past, refusing to recognize how much progress has been made toward social justice. In response, we wonder to ourselves, have we made all this progress because “[a] few well-screened, well-scrubbed Negroes have been allowed into previously all-white classrooms” (Lomax 1962 cited in Westin 1964, p. 22)?

Still questioning this idea of how much social progress our colleagues suggest society has made, we find ourselves sitting in meetings where all faculty participants are white except for the token few People of Color who are the untenured junior faculty. Still refusing to recognize all this social progress that our colleagues suggest is in evidence around us, we are told that we are the ones who are racist. Continuing to talk about race and racism, we are told, we are the ones who are making racism and inequity a reality.

As evidence of the racism on our part and the lack of racism on the part of the White teacher education program, the administration points to the traditions on our campuses of South Asian and African American Cuisine luncheons is in their second years at institutions located down river and in the heart of Aztlan. Yet, because we refuse to recognize these ethnic luncheons as substantive efforts on the White institution’s part to push against inequities, we are labeled by the institution and its representatives as the racist ones. To paraphrase Malcolm X (see Cone 2004), the victims of racism are always created in the image of racists; it is not progress just because you pulled out the knife you stabbed me with just a little bit, or even all the way. Indeed, again paraphrasing Malcolm X, it is not progress until you admit that it was you who stabbed me in the first place.

Pedagogical Moment Nine

Yet once again, it is not multicultural teacher preparation, but the recreation of whiteness in the education of future teachers that emerges when colleagues and faculty concede the debilitating effects of inequities in schools and society and then insist that the issue underlying inequity is socio-economic class, not race. After all, we are often told by our White colleagues, your brother told you that he did not get the job he applied for after finishing his Ph.D. in archaeology because of Affirmative Action [read an unqualified or less qualified racial minority or woman took the job that was supposed to be your brother’s job]. Also trying to justify the significance of socio-economic class, not racism, you tell us that your partner told you that in their office African American women are just zooming up the ladder of success, so race can not be the matter that undergirds inequity in schools and society.

Importantly, we never doubt the stories that are told to us about a colleague’s uncle’s grandmother’s niece’s friend and how socio-economic class was the salient factor in their stories, not race and racism. However, the individual stories of others, including a few prominent African Americans, do not account for the race-based color line of inequities in schools and society.

To date, indeed, the number of white required to March in the streets calling out that White Lives Matter remains negligible; U.S. society values White lives greatly. It is the lives of Americans of color whose value is in question. Some of us in U.S. society, still have to teach our children that because of the unequal valuing of individuals’ and groups’ lives, they have to be twice as good to go half as far and to keep their hands visible while walking around in black and brown bodies at the local malls, in school, and any other public space. It is definitely not the case that we are all multicultural now. Cornel West (1993) said it best; Race matters.

Pedagogical Moment Ten

Finally, the whiteness of education and teacher preparation, and not the multicultural preparation of teachers, emerges once again and is recreated when colleagues and faculty members are astonished, even indignant and outraged, that some Others have the audacity to question and criticize the program’s official efforts, endeavors, and awards for helping the Other and working in the Other’s neighborhoods and schools. These White do-gooders, as Richard Wright (1957) might call them, may wonder why they should have to keep proving that they are not racist—that they are one of the [good] whites who get it, in reference to being racially aware or “woke”? Fundraisers to buy books for the [poor] communities, for example, should be above reproach; of course, there is no racism here when we are busy “helping” the poor racial minorities, right?

When racial minorities and others marked as Other than White are well-behaved (Juárez Harris et al. 2016) and do not question any motives behind the help they receive, desired or not, they do indeed serve as a marvelous means of helping white people to fulfill the obligation of nobility to the ignoble (DuBois 1920 cited in Lewis 1995, p. 554) or responsibility [to be seen] to help the poor and unfortunate. “So long, then, as humble black folk, voluble with thanks, receive barrels of old clothes from lordly and generous whites, there is much mental peace and moral satisfaction. But when the black man begins to dispute the white man’s title to certain alleged bequests of the Fathers in wage and position, authority and training; and when his attitude toward charity is sullen anger rather than humble jollity; when he insists on his human right to swagger and swear and waste—then the spell is suddenly broken and the philanthropist is ready to believe that Negroes are impudent, that the South is right, and that Japan wants to fight America” (DuBois 1920, cited in Lewis 1995, p. 455).

Token outreach efforts in communities of color challenged by economic poverty are hence very often more harmful than helpful; it is accordingly highly important to question who benefits most from these kinds of “service” projects in teacher education.

Concluding Thoughts, But no Apologies

Pointedly, we—the authors, do not apologize for our blunt indictment of whiteness in teacher education and the academy. Our purpose is not to injury the delicate feelings of our colleagues nor anyone else. Rather, our purpose is to show how, despite the typically equity-oriented intentions of educators and others, the realities of substandard education are perpetuated and teacher preparation for multicultural, inclusive education is subverted even as good people with multicultural intentions act and interact and make decisions that promote the existing racial hierarchy and the historical, systemic privileging of White interests. As the representative pedagogical moments we have highlighted above illustrate, the historical supremacy of Whiteness in education and U.S. society does not occur by accident—the so-called diversity paradox in teacher education, in terms of teachers not being prepared for multicultural education despite being prepared in “premier” multicultural teacher preparation programs, is not a mystery and we do know who did it.

The so-called diversity paradox in teacher education isn’t even a paradox; rather, it is consciously or otherwise realized as people and groups make decisions and interact in ways that promote the existing racial hierarchy grounded in the historical privileging of Whiteness.

Accordingly, and of great import, the Whiteness of teacher education and its spoiled fruits do not just happen behind our backs or the backs of any of us. We are bound to tell the truth as we see it; we will not pretend that we do not see feet of clay, as DuBois (Lewis 1995) would say, while we are told that the innocents are not complicit in ensuring the school failure of some for the benefit of others.

At the same time, we also know that we too are regularly complicit in these processes as well as we negotiate the historical relations of difference-based domination and resistance. After all, one of us is a White woman married to a Black man, another one of us is a Black man married to a White woman, and one of us is a Black gay man in an inter-ethnic relationship; two of us were born and raised in the American Deep South and one of us was born and raised in the American Midwest. We do not escape these historical trajectories without scars, injury, and complicity.

Moreover, and very significantly, racism is a correlate of democracy (Cone 1987; Delgado 1999). When the immensity and depth of the physical and psychological violence continually committed against minoritized peoples is considered, the majority of it by nice people, we realize that the cost in suffering and lost lives is too high to keep tiptoeing around whiteness and trying to appease and placate white people with velvet gloves.

We also realize that “[w]hat societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish.

The obligation of anyone who thinks of [herself or] himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it—at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change” (Baldwin 1963, cited in Wise 2005, p. 61). For democratic education to be realized, therefore, we must work together to abolish, rather than ignore, reject, and pretend that we do not all of us know in our hearts of hearts, as Richard Wright (1957) might say, that the whiteness of teacher education and the academy sabotages our freedom dreams and we must put a stop to it now. Freedom now (Westin 1964)!