ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses my key challenges as a Black male scholar who has been instructing mostly White pre-service teachers during the racially tense era of Trumpism. White pre-service teachers’ epistemological and ontological shifts from willful ignorance to the White-savior complex (Matias, 2013) will be examined. I also employ Mills’s (1997) Racial Contract Theory (RCT) to unpack how mostly White pre-service teachers tend to digest historical oppression to create a contemporary buffer from racism and other forms of oppression. Additionally, I address implications for interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches and targeted course design for teacher educators from racialized backgrounds.
