This review of research examines classroom conversations about race with a theoretical framing oriented to understanding how such conversations may disrupt social and educational inequalities. The review covers research on how classroom conversations on race contribute to students’ and educators’ understandings of a racialized society, their construction of and reflection on relationships among students, as well as to their learning of academic content knowledge. The review considers research across grades P–12, as well as conversations in teacher education, with a specific focus on the U.S. context. Limiting the review to the U.S. context is done not to obfuscate conceptions of race and inequalities globally, but to elucidate how race becomes manifested in unique ways in the United States—often positioning African Americans and Blackness as the “fundamental other.” The review offers a social, historical, and political discussion that contextualizes how classroom conversations, and their omission, are not conversations only relegated to the classroom, but are part of a larger dialogue within the broader society.

It is not really a “Negro revolution” that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating White people who know nothing about their own history. And the reason is that if you are compelled to lie about one aspect of anybody’s history, you must lie about it all. If you have to lie about my real role here, if you have to pretend that I hoed all that cotton just because I loved you, then you have done something to yourself. You are mad.

—Baldwin (1963/2008, p. 17)

Race is not a biological category but a social construction that is given meaning and significance in specific historical, political, and social contexts (Appiah, 1989; Omi & Winant, 1994) with long-term and enduring effects on people, communities, and even research. Language plays a crucial role in the social construction of race. As people interact with each other, the language they use in how they respond to one another reflects and refracts (cf. Volosinov, 1929/1973) extant conceptions of race and race relations. Language also signals meaning explicitly through the denotational meanings of words and implicitly through indexicals (implicit references to social, cultural, and historical contexts), language choice (e.g., register, language variation, key), and other subtle but powerful ways that often lay just below consciousness (Gumperz, 1986). Thus, the social construction of race through people’s use of language occurs both when it is an explicit topic of conversation and when it is not. We also recognize the problematic nature of the word “race” because despite the present acceptance that [it] is a social construction, the term was used for political gain and economic advantaging that traverses the Black–White binary (Lewis, 2003).

Given the social, historical, and political contexts of race in the United States, an argument can be made that race is ubiquitous in conversations within and across social institutions, including classrooms. One of the reasons for specific attention to classroom conversations and race is the unfulfilled promise placed in public education in the United States for promoting equality, equity, social mobility, and a democratic society (cf. Kluger, 1985; Spring, 1991). Yet, it also must be recognized that historical analysis questions whether U.S. law and legal processes and educational policies and practices ever intended to devote an equitable opportunity for educating and liberating all of its citizens because of race (cf. Ladson-Billings, 2004). A key question to ask, therefore, is, “How might classroom conversations on race disrupt the inequalities that students suffer both within the classroom and outside it, both in their present and in their future?”

Despite the importance of the question above, there has been relatively little research in P–12 classrooms on classroom conversations, race, and the disruption of inequality (although there has been a plethora of research on race in classroom education, per se). Some researchers have suggested that teachers and students in the United States rarely explicitly discuss or confront issues of race in their classrooms or curricular discussions (Pollock, 2004; Schultz, Buck, & Niesz, 2000) and when they do, as noted by Bolgatz (2006) it is usually “within carefully controlled boundaries of scope and sequence . . . neatly package and limit the treatment of race into confined arenas” (p. 260). Why are there so few discussions of race in classrooms given the ubiquitous presence of race in all aspects of life in the United States? Is the absence of discussions of race in classrooms a form of silencing, thereby, maintaining the illusions Baldwin (1963/2008) referred to in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter? How might conversations on race in schools disrupt the inequalities manifest in and through education policies, structures, and practices?

We have organized this review to, first, address the question how has (and how might) classroom conversations on race be researched? Thus, we offer a social, historical, and political discussion that contextualizes how classroom conversations, and their omission, are not conversations only relegated to the classroom, but are part of a larger dialogue within the broader society. We then discuss the logic-of-inquiry used in research on classroom conversations on race to understand the nature of the knowledge such studies yield. The two sections following—(a) the nature of classroom conversations on race and teacher education and (b) classroom conversations on race—address a second question: What is known about how classroom conversations on race might disrupt inequalities?

Methodologically, several considerations have guided our approach. First, given the historic nature of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, we have chosen to use this court case as a starting point to begin examining evidences of how researchers pursued inquiry into the pedagogical relationships between teachers and discussions of race in classroom settings. Another important consideration has been to examine studies where there were classroom conversations being presented by ways of audio recordings, video recordings, and forms of conversational analysis, as this approach aligns directly with our premise for the review. We have used several research databases such as ERIC, EBSCO, and Google Scholar. Our search terminologies included (a) conversations of race in classrooms, (b) race talk in classrooms, and (c) discussions of race. Using 1954 to 2016 as the time frame, the first publication that engaged in discussions of race in a university classroom settings was found in 1992 (Tatum, 1992). As discussed later, we believe there is tremendous opportunity to examine “race talk” in schools that analyzes both structures and contexts, but also to consider how are students and teachers engaging in conversations about race to develop their knowledge about the world in which we live and the critiques necessary to disrupt the inequalities within it.