My journey to this place called the RAC: Reflections on a movement in critical race thought and critical race hope in higher education

Abstract

This chapter recounts the story of how I came to design a Research Apprenticeship Course at UCLA—what we call the RAC. I lay out the origin story of the RAC dating back to early collaborations with Arturo Madrid of the Tomas Rivera Policy Research Center and the Ford Foundation Family of Fellows in the mid to late 1980s. These collaborations helped me establish the blueprint for the RAC as an academic counterspace—a space centered on identifying, analyzing, and challenging race and racism in education. We did this by extending Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the Law to the fields of Education, Race and Ethnic Studies, Women of Color Feminist Theories, and Freirean Critical Theory. My journey weaves in the stories of former students and their relationship to the RAC and how the RAC impacted their research, teaching, and service.

PROLOGUE

This essay has an interesting origin story. The two editors of this special issue, Professors Laurence Parker and María Ledesma contacted me in early 2020 and asked if I would write a reflective story of my Research Apprenticeship Course (RAC). To move the process along, Professors Parker and Ledesma came to the RAC and spoke to our students on March 13, 2020, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, UCLA shut down all on-campus instruction on Wednesday, March 11, and moved online. The March 13 RAC was my first attempt at online instruction. If I recall, we had around 30 students attending online via Zoom, and five were in our Moore Hall classroom. During the RAC, Professors Parker and Ledesma asked the students to send their reflections or their stories of the RAC. They also sent out an email to former students asking for their reflections. After the March 13^th RAC, I wrote the first draft of this article. Professors Parker and Ledesma then inserted the selected reflective quotes they received from the students into the narrative. I then weaved the quotes into the story of the RAC.

In the Critical Race Counterstory tradition, the following narrative reflects the collaboration of Professors Parker and Ledesma, my former students, and myself.

Keywords:

• CRT
• counter-storytelling
• academic counterspaces

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Editor’s Note

The way we recommend following this counterstory is first to read the important genealogical tracing that Dr. Solórzano does regarding his entry into the academy, Critical Race Theory, the RAC, and supporting current and former student quotes. Dr. Solórzano and the UCLA RAC have played an integral part in “the work of scholars who are developing an explanatory framework that accounts for the role of race and racism in education” (D. Solorzano, talk at UC-Davis School of Education on microaggressions and everyday racism, 5 August 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JU4294fZNA).

Notes

1 Founded in 1858, the University of California has appointed only three Latina/o chancellors of its now 10 campuses—Tomas Rivera at UC Riverside in 1980; France Cordova at UC Riverside in 2002; and Juan Munoz at UC Merced in 2020.

2 In around the year 2000, Professor Jeannie Oakes, my colleague at UCLA, asked me if I would serve as the associate director of UC/ACCORD—a multi-campus research unit whose mission and goals were to support UC doctoral students and faculty on research related to diversity, equity, and social justice. I mentioned the Tomas Rivera Center, the Ford Conferences, the Ford Family, and my RAC in our conversation. I shared with her my goal to replicate these spaces as we envisioned a UC/ACCORD Family. From 2000 to 2015, we successfully created and supported that Family. In the 15 years of UC/ACCORD’s existence, we funded a total of 148 projects featuring 157 awardees. These funded projects included 110 dissertation fellowships, 12 Postdoctoral fellowships, and 26 faculty seed grants. UC/ACCORD convened 13 Annual Conferences of Fellows. When Jeannie moved to the Ford Foundation in 2008, I became the director.

3 From NORC, I was able to gain access to the Survey of Earned Doctorates. This survey is administered to all doctoral recipients from U.S. institutions.

4 A note: From 1975 to 1985, I taught in the Chicano Studies Department at East Los Angeles College.

5 The Chronicle of Higher Education is a weekly newspaper that addresses the latest news, information, and job listings in higher education.

6 I credit this term with my colleague Professor Laurence Parker at the University of Utah. I also want to recognize Roberta Espinoza’s (2011) concept of “pivotal moments.” I’ve interpreted her concept as those “thoughtful interventions that can point the way toward” new ideas and new ways of viewing and interpreting the world.

7 For three seminal readers in Critical Race Theory and the Law, see Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado, 1995; and Matsuda et al., 1993.

8 I am now exploring how CRT can be used in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) and medical fields.

9 My undergraduate training at Loyola University was in Chicano Studies, Black Studies, Sociology, and Film. In my first high school teaching assignment at the Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall School, I was introduced to Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy (1970, 1973). My early college teaching was in Chicano Studies and Sociology at East Los Angeles College, Santa Monica College, California State University-Northridge, and California State University-Bakersfield.

10 For my story of that journey in Race and Ethnic Studies, Freirean Pedagogy, Resistance Theory, and Racial Microaggressions see Solorzano, 2013; Solorzano, 2018; Solorzano, 2019; Solorzano, 2020; Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001; Solorzano & Perez Huber, 2020.

11 The first CRT presentation was titled “Critical Theories, Marginality, and the Career Paths of Minority Scholars.” This was an invited talk to the Spencer Foundation Research Training Orientation at UCLA on 20 September 1994. My first CRT conference paper was titled “Critical Race Theory, Marginality, and the Experiences of Minority Students in Higher Education” and presented to the Annual Meeting of the Association for Studies in Higher Education in Orlando, FL on 2 November 1995. My initial introduction to CRT in Education was Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate’s article, “Toward a critical race theory of education” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). My first CRT article was “Images and words that wound: Critical race theory, racial stereotyping, and teacher education” (Solorzano, 1997).

12 We plan to house these life history interviews in the respective Ethnic Studies Research Centers at UCLA.

13 In the year we have been teaching online, I have learned a lesson I will take back when we return to in-class instruction. This last year we have colleagues from all over the U.S. join us virtually in the RAC through Zoom. For many, because of the distance and commitments, I know that coming to the RAC in Moore Hall would not be possible. As we return to campus in the Fall of 2021, we have created a hybrid environment to welcome our collaborators to the RAC space.

14 As I reflect on this journey, I should put together a CRT Bibliography of current and former students who have and continue to contributed to Critical Race and Gender Frameworks.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel G. Solorzano

Daniel G. Solorzano

is a professor in UCLA’s Departments of Education and Chicana/o and Central American Studies and the Director of the Center for Critical Race Studies in Education. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with research and teaching interests in critical race theory, racial microaggressions and microaffirmations, and critical race spatial analysis.