Citywide constructs such as “West Side” or “South Side” are spatial codes that result from more than the informal conversations of city residents. This article shows how elementary school educators in one U.S. metropolitan school district participated in the production of a local knowledge of the East Side and West Side space and individual. It demonstrates how educators used these codes to name race and class, as well as to obscure the codes’ meanings. The article maps the convergence of institutional technologies and local educational knowledge whereby this knowledge resisted change and buttressed the citywide East Side–West Side relations and knowledge. The disjunctures in this knowledge base are also identified, as educators attempted to produce a knowledge of a third space that they termed “Central City.”

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In this article, the authors examine White parents’ endeavors toward the racial enculturation and inculcation of their transracially adopted Black children. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the authors identify and analyze themes across the specific race socialization strategies and practices White adoptive parents used to help their adopted Black children to develop a positive racial identity and learn how to effectively cope with issues of race and racism. The central aim of this article is to examine how these lessons about race help to connect family members to U.S. society’s existing racial hierarchy and how these associations position individuals to help perpetuate or challenge the deeply embedded and historical structures of White supremacy. The authors use the notion of White racial framing to move outside of the traditional arguments for or against transracial adoption to instead explore how a close analysis of the adoptive parents’ racial instructions may serve as a learning tool to foster more democratic and inclusive forms of family and community.

Using the critical race theory methodology of counter-storytelling, the authors provide narratives of their experiences as teacher educators to consider why and how the racial power of Whiteness continues to derail teaching and learning for social justice in US teacher preparation programs, despite the democratic intentions, hard work and good will of many teacher educators. Contending that Whiteness serves as a hidden referent structuring interactions and activity within US teacher preparation programs, the authors draw on their narratives to highlight and analyze moments in time when teacher educators actively and fully participate in and enact the obstruction of social-justice-oriented educational endeavors, thus ensuring that future teachers will not be prepared to teach all students.

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