Critical Cases for Antiracist Leadership: A Contribution to the Movement

Abstract

Monumental social change is often the result of people turning moments into movements. A year of shelter-in-place during the first year of COVID-19 created space for us all to pause, assess, and confront the current state of our country through a collective critical eye. The result has been exposing and identifying injustices inherent in the systems that shape our daily lives-including health care, nutrition, safety, policing, politics, and education. Some of the loudest cries were for educators to remove barriers to equity and opportunity for students and families of color within the educational system (e.g., Sampson et al., 2020;Wong & Mishra, 2021). The American Educational Research Association (AERA) Leadership for Social Justice (LSJ) Special Interest Group (SIG) seized this moment to leverage the combined knowledge and experiences of scholars and practitioners to address these pernicious concerns.The AERA 2021 conference in particular guided our thoughts and planning for this special issue. The conference theme, "Accepting Educational Responsibility," turned a critical eye toward our current period in education history, when "listening, understanding, and reasonably considering the viewpoints of persons beyond one's own political party are skills educators failed to teach those who go on to make consequential policy decisions that affect entire nations." Their critique noted that we are now dealing with the backlash of such lack of preparation. The AERA (2021) then emphasized the need for higher education to: