Lived Practices of Race and Racism in the Arts: Schools, Communities, and Other Educational Spaces

This section presents boots-on-the-ground, empirical investigations of the arts as white property. The studies take place in local contexts of arts-based teaching and learning. Using a range of qualitative methods, such as narrative inquiry, portraiture, interviews, youth participatory action research, and autoethnography, the authors highlight the lived practices of students, teachers, and visual and performing artists. The collective result of the respective inquiries offers what critical race theorist Derrick Bell (1992) calls racial realism or “a hard-eyed view of racism as it is” (p. 378). The view is a multifaceted one that captures racial subordination as it manifests in everyday practices from individual to organizational levels of the arts in education.