Enduring Racial Realism: Confronting Permanence, Retrenchment, and Resistance in Education

Dear Colleagues,

In most of our lifetimes, racial realism has never been clearer than it is now (Bell, 1992). Only five years ago, in 2020, schools, colleges, and universities throughout the nation sought to align themselves with activists’ calls for racial justice by denouncing anti-Blackness and institutional racism. Today, many of the forms of equity created by this movement have been dismantled in educational settings and beyond. Recent federal legislation threatens to severely restrict access to healthcare and higher education while further widening the racial wealth gap for Communities of Color (Altman et al., 2025; Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, 2025; Moran, 2025). Concurrently, undocumented families and communities are being kidnapped, terrorized, and  disappeared by masked federal agents (Cantor, 2025). Many people, regardless of their legal status, are afraid to leave their homes. Critical race legal scholar Derrick Bell (1992) used the term racial realism to explain the recurring patterns in which advances in civil rights are followed by retrenchment, illustrating the enduring permanence of racism in the U.S. Further, Bell argues, “racial realism insists on both justice and truth” (p. 99). And so, the struggle for racial justice continues.

This Special Issue is a call to researchers and educators grappling with the urgency of racial realism within the current political, social, and educational climate. We welcome contributions that not only acknowledge Bell’s foundational insights but also extend, challenge, and apply racial realism to contemporary struggles in education and society. We are seeking original research articles and reviews that focus on education in a broad sense, including PK-12, higher education, and community spaces that

• Theorize and extend racial realism in ways that illuminate how education institutions reproduce racial inequities, even in moments framed as reform or progress.
• Document and analyze retrenchment following racial justice initiatives, including the dismantling of equity offices, the banning of race-conscious curricula, the censoring and defunding of Ethnic Studies instruction, and attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) work.
• Highlight the resistance and survival strategies of students, educators, families, and communities who navigate racial realism in classrooms, campuses, and communities.
• Offer methodological innovations that take racial realism seriously as a framework for research—particularly approaches that resist liberal narratives of progress or that foreground storytelling, historical memory, and lived experience.
• Reimagine the work of educators and researchers in light of racial realism: What does it mean to teach, lead, and research when racism is understood as permanent? What ethical and political commitments emerge when we abandon the myth of inevitable progress?

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Reference:

Altman, H., Broder, T., D’Avanzo, B. (2025). The anti-immigrant policies in Trump’s final “Big Beautiful Bill,” explained. National Immigration Law Center. https://www.nilc.org/resources/the-anti-immigrant-policies-in-trumps-final-big-beautiful-bill-explained/

Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. Basic Books.

Cantor, M. (2025). ‘Abducted by ICE’: The haunting missing-person posters plastered across LA. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/18/los-angeles-missing-posters-ice.

Congressional Black Caucus Foundation (2025). H.R.1: One big beautiful bill act impact on Black communities. https://issuu.com/congressionalblackcaucusfoundation/docs/h.r._1_one_big_beautiful_bill_act_impact_on_bla?fr=sOTM0YTgzNzg4MzA

Moran, B. (2025, July 18). How the ‘big, beautiful bill’ will deepen the racial wealth gap—a law scholar explains how it reduces poor families’ ability to afford food and health care. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/how-the-big-beautiful-bill-will-deepen-the-racial-wealth-gap-a-law-scholar-explains-how-it-reduces-poor-families-ability-to-afford-food-and-health-care-260680

Carlos Fitch
Guest Editor Assistant
Affiliation: Department of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
Website: https://education.ucsb.edu/education-current-students
Interests: higher education; critical race theory; critical qualitative methodologies; jotería studies; rurality; transfronterizx students

Dr. Lindsay Pérez Huber
Dr. Oscar Navarro
Guest Editors

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• educational equity
• social justice
• racial realism
• institutional racism