The Limitations of Being a Good Antiracist

Abstract

In this paper, we take up our shared antiracist identity aspirations as teacher educators and investigate how complex racialized emotions generated in interracial encounters trouble the idealized object of a good antiracist identity. Utilizing redirected antiracist psychoanalytic method to parse stories created through collective memory work, persistent emotional defenses that diminish an ability to dismantle oppressive racist structures, both internal and external, are uncovered and theorized. Later, contrary to some transmissive curricular and pedagogical texts and discourses that prioritize resolve, the contours of a relational antiracist curriculum and pedagogy that welcomes and integrates ambivalent, ambiguous emotional dilemmas present and inevitable in racialized subjects across racial lines are discussed.