Although certainly not a new pedagogical approach, perhaps more than ever before, antiracist pedagogy has been a topic of conversation amongst teachers and scholars in academia. Between the national outcry following the senseless murders of Black Americans including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the continued questions surrounding racial bias and policing in the United States, the staggering increase in racially charged violence against Asian-Americans, the structural sociopolitical inequities now magnified by the global pandemic, and the rise of alt-right nationalists who have confidently emerged from their shadows at the behest of a delusional president, the reasons why antiracist pedagogy has gained so much attention are too numerous to fully elucidate. 

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Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication by Condon & Young (2017) is a collection of essays that together explore different methods to enact antiracism in the writing classroom, but the introduction itself discusses racism and the problems identifying it in higher education. To both the authors, who have traveled to many colleges around the United States and observed how racism works in higher education, merely having to explain that racism is “real” is explicitly frustrating, but nonetheless, they feel it is a highly important conversation to have as much as they feel it is important to counteract racism in the academy and beyond the walls of the academy. However, in order for racism to be counteracted both within and beyond the university walls, the authors assert that scholars and teachers must put forth an effort toward enacting antiracist pedagogy. While Condon & Young (2017) admit that they have seen curriculums and teachers who do work that aligns with the ideas of antiracist pedagogy, they also see how these very same teachers cannot escape covert forms of racism around them and are not able to identify them. They also draw upon scholar Joyce E. King and her concept of “dysconscious racism” which pretty much means taking the world and accepting it as it is. As the authors explain, it is not that people are not conscious about race, it is that their consciousness around it is impaired.