ABSTRACT
As a researcher, bracketing is an important process of addressing personal biases, both conscious and unconscious. As one could imagine, the unconscious biases are the more challenging aspects of our perspectives to identify and understand. Through deep self-reflection, this opening chapter depicts my journey toward identifying my unconscious biases and how those understandings motivated me to address an issue I was facing as a white teacher in a predominantly white school. By exploring how the school and town influenced how I see the world, I realized that I needed to know why predominantly white towns can exist in the post-Civil Rights era. My introspective work opened my eyes to how race is in everything and is an inherent part of society everywhere, thus providing me with my first taste of Critical Race Theory. I credit this process as the main motivator for conducting the research study that is explained in this book.
