Chapter 3: Centering the Voices of Teacher Candidates of Color to Inform Racially Just Educational Spaces

White supremacy has created an education system that results in predictable racial disparities (Leonardo, 2007). These disparities continue to exist in the United States, in part, because there is often a gap between the teachers and students. While 51% of students in 2012 identified racially as Black, Brown, or Indigenous, 82% of teachers are White (U.S. Department of Education, 2016) and in some areas that figure soars much higher (Lad-son-Billings, 2005). Further, these teachers have been prepared by mostly White teachers and White college professors in predominantly White colleges or universities (Ladson-Billings, 2005). Therefore, education in the United States has been dominated by White, monolingual, middle-class females (Cheruvu, Souto-Manning, Lenci, & Chin-Calubaquib, 2015) and often does not represent the diversity of lived experiences in the classroom. Further, many of these White, monolingual, female preservice teachers report having limited interactions with backgrounds different than their own (DiAngelo, 2016) and have little knowledge about the historical contributions of individuals outside the dominant culture in the United States (Taylor & Sobel, 2001).