This panel queries the notion of “critical race theory” and how to teach racial issues whether or not one is specifically a “critical race theorist.” This topic is especially urgent during a time of right-wing “anti-‘woke’” agendas that seek to erase the very concept of race from public education and to attack as “divisive” any effort to offer a historically informed and rigorous accounting for ongoing inequality and racism in American society. Race is perversely both denied and invoked as that topic which is too disturbing to teach and yet absolutely necessary for the maintenance of normative political structures.