Dear familia y communidad,
We are honored and humbled to share this special issue with you, entitled, ParentCrit: Critical Race Parenting for our children’s lives and humanity. We are hesitant to call this work ‘a labor of love,’ for the cliché doesn’t quite capture the heart and exertion poured in to these imperfect but honest accounts. So, instead, we try to relate the larger parental experience in this introduction.
The idea for this special issue emerged from a panel organized by the first author for the American Education Research Association (AERA) in 2016, but the work of these articles began a year, or in some cases years, before that. During the comprehensive time of developing this special issue, Philando Castile was murdered and his murderer acquitted, Sandra Bland was killed and no one held to account for her death, Jordan Edwards was murdered, Alton Sterling was murdered, and countless other parents and children were killed for being Black or Brown. To be a critical race parent, especially one of Color as these reports rolled in rendered many of us paralyzed even as deadlines loomed. As two of the co-editors for this issue, we received emails apologizing for missed deadlines simply because the author couldn’t bring themselves to write as they grieved. We’d be lying to say that we ourselves, as two of the contributing authors did not find ourselves frozen over keyboards or walking away from our articles even as we broke promises to our reviewers around timelines simply because we needed to attend to the pain a little longer.
Of course, the development of this issue also happened in the midst of life (most of us as parents); we wrote through family deaths, we wrote through divorces, we wrote through dissertation work, we wrote through degrees conferred, and new jobs. But not to be overly morose, we also wrote through babies being born, children starting kindergarten, children starting high school, and tenure promotions. We laughed, cried, and loved with our families and wrote about it and expressed it in different ways.
Some of the original authors on that 2016 AERA panel chose not to participate and others joined us to make up this special issue. Our reviewers were exceptional race scholars and parents, who offered us sometimes difficult but invaluable feedback. We are grateful to all of these scholars who participated and shared themselves and their experiences in different ways.
We of course realize that the tragedies, events, and life that kept going as we developed this issue are the reality for any scholars in studying race critically. Yet, as parentscholars, developing this issue, the work was del corazón. The implications for this work we saw running around and playing in front of us as we wrote. We understood as we developed this issue that our children’s lives and humanity were at stake. Thus, we wrote through broken hearts and when our cups runneth over, which sometimes happened simultaneously. We continued to write through the micro and macro aggressions and comforted and educated our children as they experienced this same violence, although we were seething.
ParentCrit is a new scholarly field, although the practices are not new, as is discussed in this issue and the epilog. With the publication of this special issue, we fully intend it and offer it to you, parentscholars, educators, activists, and others who are caring for children, to grow and develop. We discard the traditional academic notions that say to us, keep the personal out of your work. Don’t mention that you have kids in that job interview or in your publications, particularly if you are a woman. We understand that to write and publish on ParentCrit is a risk, but if your scholarship is critical and focused on race, you are used to risk.
So, we invite you to write on ParentCrit yourselves. Build on our articles and critique them. Join us in this work. And, we look forward to reading all that will come from you.
In solidarity,
School of Education and Human Development, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO, USA
[email protected]