Schools are essential sites for nurturing critical consciousness about race and racism with youth of color. Yet, limited research has taken up how critical race consciousness development can be carried out with a primarily white teaching force or about the classroom practices of white teachers who are motivated to do this work. Drawing on observational data collected over four years, this chapter describes and analyzes lessons taught by three white educators as they earnestly attempt to teach about race and racism. Ultimately, we conclude that these white teachers used meaningful, thoughtful, and rigorous curricula resources to support their students’ developing critical consciousness about race and racism, yet they encountered several pedagogical challenges that may be rooted in their socialization into whiteness. Our findings have implications for white teacher preparation and support and offer practical insights for white teachers who are actively seeking to foster critical race consciousness with their students.

Addressed to “the Great Variety of Readers,” the 1623 First Folio envisioned a reading subject whose importance time would realize. The unstated assumptions about readers lay in their unraced “variety,” and the significance of racial identity on the act of reading Shakespeare has been virtually taboo. With the advent of early modern critical race studies that challenged assumptions and methods in Shakespeare scholarship, the salience of Toni Morrison’s assertion in Playing in the Dark (1992) that readers are “positioned as white” needs investigation in relation to contemporary scholar-readers of Shakespeare. Whiteness studies, a subfield that Morrison’s text represents, intersects with early modern critical race studies in this book’s original examination of the reader as racial subject. Systemic whiteness, the historical and institutional formation of white racial identity and perception, has infused our cultural practices only to produce silence around the “white” reader. Racial literacy is proposed, therefore, as an acquired antiracist reading competence in response to the overdetermined critical practices of racial denial and erasure.

The through line of American history is a persistent trauma of dispossession epitomized in W. E. B. DuBois’s prescient words: “I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth, forever and forever, Amen!” This form of whiteness is also the defining feature of the contemporary maelstrom of racial unrest. To acquiesce to only one form of whiteness locks the racialized reader into a narrow, overdetermined praxis aligned with proprietary aggression. This book is, however, rooted in a creative and emancipatory set of antiracist possibilities. These alternate possibilities are assigned the term "forms of whiteness" as a re-imagining of the reader’s positionality in the culture and the world; a resolve to grapple with the multiple ways of disassociating from the malignant monopoly of systemic whiteness; and a determination to undo patterns and practices of denial and discrimination within literary studies. Building on the conclusions of Chapter 5, the Epilogue meditates more fully on scholarly practice within an ethics of coaction that translates research and pedagogic inquiry into lived experience and public life.

Richard Wright published four major books between 1938 and 1945: Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Native Son (1940), 12 Million Black Voices (1941), and Black Boy (1945). This essay discusses how Black Boy converses with the preceding three books, and how, thereby, they all contextualize each other. They are all migration narratives presenting African Americans moving from South to North in the Great Migration era. They portray black boys including Wright himself migrating from boyhood to young manhood. Collectively, they present Wright migrating into his writing career, his writing self. Once there, he can be a racial “we” and a personal “I.” Special attention is given to how 12 Million anticipates Black Boy. Quite specifically, the racial “we” in 12 Million becomes the “I” in Black Boy who tells his own story and his race’s story of starving variously in a neglectful American nation. The FSA photographs in 12 Million led Wright to see himself and others among the black people portrayed. Hearing the voices, seeing the faces, and seeing himself prepared Wright for composing American Hunger. What came out in 1945 was Black Boy, the portion of his story before he headed North.