ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that a jazz methodology, from an epistemological perspective, might be useful for examining educational issues utilizing a critical race theory (CRT) theoretical and analytical lens. John O. Calmore argues that just as jazz as an aesthetic form of resistance was born out of the experiences of black people, an oppositional discourse that critiques and examines the failures of US jurisprudence to redress racism. The chapter examines the ways in which race and racism manifest in educational settings are inherently political, particularly if the goal is to disrupt marginalizing educational practices and policies. It draws the philosopher Charles Mills's scholarship on alternative epistemologies, Du Bois's notion of double consciousness and Collins's black feminist thought. The chapter explains a story to illustrate the ways in which racial naiveté and white racial bonding occurred within one school to frame an African American boy as violent and impulsive and his mother as racially hypersensitive and to justify inequitable disciplinary actions.
