White, award-winning history teachers’ navigation of anti-‘CRT’ efforts across the United States

This article explores how White, award-winning history teachers have been differently affected by legislative efforts to restrict teaching about race and racism, and teachers’ various resistances in response. Findings describe how teachers’ feelings of constraint (or lack thereof) around race-restrictive policies, rhetoric and legislation were often locally determined, resulting from actions by parents, local policymakers, school administrators and other community-based actors. The article then reports on a subset of teachers’ various responses to restrictions, illuminating how teachers exerted agency and tactical manoeuvring in order to continue to teach about race and racism in contradiction to official policy and unofficial pressure. Findings showed how teachers in a variety of sociopolitical contexts continued teaching about race and racism in history despite the risks of official or unofficial retribution. They did so through wielding explicit denial, through selective silences and by directing student attention to topic suppression in ways that conveyed meanings about race and racism even when remaining officially silent.