Introduction

And we know that all things work together for good to them who love God, who have been called according to his purpose.

(Romans, 8:28)

THE ROAD TO CRT In this brief chronicle, Adrienne Dixson will document her “road to CRT.” I spent the summer of 1993 as the Dean of Students in a program that brought together students from the city’s elite private schools and public schools. My job, as the Dean of Students, was ostensibly to help the instructors, all of whom were undergraduates from elite private universities and mostly White, develop lesson plans, manage their classrooms, and make “learning fun” for the students in the program. The common refrain recited by both kids and staff was: “Education Crossover1 is not like regular school.” I was new to the program, and connected to it because of my participation in a national teacher corps. That phrase bothered me, as a classroom teacher in one of the city’s public schools, especially since the program was designed to meet the academic needs of the city’s mostly African American

population. The inclusion of the students from the city’s elite private schools, most of whom were White, was a recent change in the program’s policy and that also bothered me. The program was housed in one of the premier private schools in the city, which boasts two Superbowl champions among its alumni. The stark contrast between the haves and the have-nots was striking. The kids who attended public school were bussed in, and the kids who lived near the program either walked every morning or their parents dropped them off. The refrain of “This is not like regular school,” I thought, was a constant reminder to the African American students of how unobtainable and temporary wealth and Whiteness were for them, no matter how close they were to it. In addition, that refrain, at least from my perspective, was a reminder of the inferiority of their Black schools with mostly Black teachers. In other words, and as we say in the vernacular, it was a diss. The contrast between the White students and the mostly White faculty and the African American students was shockingly uneven. It was during this summer that I was introduced, almost by accident, to Derrick Bell’s (1992) groundbreaking book Faces at the bottom of the well. Interestingly, and what I understood after reading Faces and other work by Bell, the mostly White and self-described liberal (“Progressive” was a term that was in vogue in the early 1990s) faculty raved about how insightful Faces was for them in terms of “understanding racism in America.” What I found so profoundly ironic was that they could not see how the entire program and indeed their actions during the program were also racist. In the Treme2 and miles away from the uptown location of Summer Stroll, I purchased the book from the local Black-owned bookstore, the Community Book Center. I read it one day. I couldn’t put it down. Bell’s masterful storytelling interwoven with case law and historical information was so captivating and vivid that I felt as though I was reliving each event that he described. I also felt that I had more clarity on what I had been experiencing as a person of color in the U.S. It became even more clear to me that I had no real framework or vocabulary to describe what I believed was racism but that I had been socialized not to name racism explicitly. It would be several years before I would have an opportunity to engage Bell’s work in a “scholarly” manner as a graduate student and have new vocabulary with which to talk about and examine race and racism: critical race theory. For the time being, Faces helped me make sense of what I was witnessing as structural racism at its most pervasive both within the Summer Stroll program and in my work as a teacher in a severely under-resourced school district.