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. How do we bring such issues into the classroom and discuss them critically even as “race” is the fulcrum by which regressive political forces seek to eliminate public education itself as a space of free inquiry in an increasingly eroded polity? Diverse perspectives welcome: psychoanalytic, ethnic/gender studies, feminist, Marxist, new historicist.

Note: one must be a member of PAMLA to participate in sessions. Information about the PAMLA 2023 conference can be found at PAMLA.org. The 2023 PAMLA conference will be held in-person only in Portland, Oregon, USA. This is session #18782 in the Call for Papers for the 2023 conference.