Introduction

Black Educators’ Racial Identity Attitudes and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: A Psychological Framework and Survey of Within-Race Diversity

“…Consequently, Black educators and other educators of color are often positioned as “superheroes” who will turn the tides of structurally disparate academic and discipline outcomes for children of historically marginalized racial groups (Baldridge, 2017; Brown & Brown, 2014; Pabon, 2016). Headlines such as “Wanted: More Teachers of Color” (Toppo & Nichols, 2017) and “2 Colleges Train Black Men to Work in Special Education” (Basinger, 1999) contribute (perhaps unintentionally) to public perpetuation of a problematic “magical negro” trope, one that “is designed to erase blacks’ [ sic ] complex humanity” (Ikard, 2017, p. 11) and assigns weighty expectations to racialized individuals. Stated differently, this magical negro trope implies that simply being Black endows Black educators with “natural” pedagogical abilities, detached from multitudes of other personal characteristics, strengths, and lived experiences that shape how Black people—as individuals embedded in complex social systems—come to see, understand, and behave in the world (Ikard, 2017).…”