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

CRT, Whiteness studies and attacks on ‘CRT’

Debates about what to teach have been present since the dawn of public education in the United States (Moreau, 2003; Teitelbaum, 2022). Still, the most recent conflict campaigns, defined by Pollock et al. (2022: vii) as the purposeful and interconnected efforts on the part of ‘powerful conservative entities (media, organisations, foundations, PACs, and politicians)’ to ‘block or restrict proactive teaching and professional development related to race, racism, bias, and many aspects of proactive diversity/equity/inclusion efforts’, have dominated the educational landscape since the 2020 ‘racial reckoning’ ignited in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Christopher Rufo (as cited in Williams, 2022: n.p.), one of the originators of the campaign against ‘CRT’, described his goal of aggregating the various ‘cultural insanities’ into one ‘brand category’ by infiltrating the public imagination with interpretations of ‘CRT’ as dangerous and discriminatory against White people in order to mobilise a (largely White) constituency in support of right-wing formations rooted in White supremacy.

In bills across states, ‘CRT’ has been operationalised as a vehicle through which to ban teaching about race-related concepts such as systemic racism, (un)conscious bias and privilege (Harrison et al., 2021). Vue et al. (2024) frame the attacks on ‘CRT’ as characterised by race-evasiveness – an ideology that reduces racism to individuals while promoting meritocracy – and White racial identity, which weaponises White victimhood and collective persecution that emerged in the face of the Black Lives Matter movement, Barack Obama’s presidency and growing public recognition of the ongoing use of racial violence in the United States. While much of the anti-‘CRT’ opposition has appeared to be driven by groups of local, largely White parents, LoBue and Douglass (2023: 548) have argued that this emergence of mobilised parents’ rights movements was part of a ‘national disinformation campaign led by astroturf advocacy organisations’, who ‘maintain a façade of grassroots support’ by hiding their elite, conservative financial backers.

The impacts of these anti-‘CRT’ efforts have been felt throughout the United States across educational levels and community contexts. Pollock et al. (2022: viii) identified that at least 894 impacted school districts, enrolling 17,743,850 students, or 35 per cent of all K–12 students in the United States, have faced conflict campaigns in states with and without official restriction. They found that districts experiencing rapid demographic changes were three times more likely than districts with little change to their White student populations to experience impacts from local conflict campaigns, and that communities either leaning conservative or liberal (that is, politically ‘purple’), with racially mixed and/or majority White student populations, were most likely to be affected by conflict campaigns (Pollock et al., 2022), rather than in more politically or racially homogeneous communities. Since January 2021, 44 states have taken steps (legislative or otherwise) to restrict how teachers teach about race and racism (Schwartz, 2025). As of February 2025, 18 of those states had successfully passed legislation restricting how teachers can teach about race-related content. Five additional states have introduced legislation, and 21 states had anti-‘CRT’ bills that had been vetoed, overturned or stalled indefinitely (Schwartz, 2025).

In analysing the restrictive bills across the United States, Filimon and Ivănescu (2023) found that these bills largely set about this mission through: (1) defining sets of prohibited concepts; (2) creating mechanisms to detect perceived ‘CRT’ offences; and (3) dispensing penalties and sanctions against potential transgressors. In January 2025, the bans took a federal turn, with Donald Trump’s signing of the executive order ‘Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling’, which pledges to revoke federal funding from states that teach ‘discriminatory equity ideologies’, which, among other topics, make illegal the teaching of White privilege, unconscious bias, and that ‘the United States is fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory’ (The White House, 2025: n.p.; see also Dorn, 2025).

The campaigns against ‘CRT’ have had a range of impacts on primary, secondary and post-secondary education, including: the reallocation of state funds away from diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts (Moody, 2023); bans on books related to race and racism (Powell, 2023); and teacher firings for broaching content considered to be ‘controversial’. An analysis in the Washington Post found that 160 teachers had lost their positions due to political debates, signalling the heightened political tenor of the moment, and the attendant risks surrounding teachers’ curricular and pedagogical choices (Natanson and Balingit, 2022). Administrators of colour have been accused of indoctrinating children and have even received death threats (Morgan, 2022). Morgan (2022) has explored the current and potential impacts of anti-‘CRT’ laws on states such as Texas and Pennsylvania, arguing that students of colour are likely to be those most harmed by this legislation. Jayakumar (2024) surveyed 117 teachers across the United States, finding that CRT bans harmed school racial climate, limited conversations about race, stymied racial justice efforts and contributed to the systematic burnout and pushout of teachers, especially those in states with official CRT bans and those who identify as liberal.

Additional research has looked at the effects of anti-‘CRT’ rhetoric on related social justice efforts. For example, Villavicencio et al. (2023) reported that their school-based partners engaged in research–practice partnerships centring on racial justice were profoundly affected by fears of retribution for even mentioning race with their students. In Florida, college professors of race and ethnicity have been forced to cancel or modify their courses due to government pressure (Golden, 2022). Even in Democratic California, Chang (2022) found that White parent activists mounted a successful opposition campaign to ethnic studies by positioning Christian White boys as the victims of ethnic studies curricula and binding their movement to local disability activists, exposing the durability of the right-wing apparatus. Koyama (2023: 78) found that in relation to the ‘CRT’ bans, Arizona principals worried about potential lawsuits and parental pushback that risked ‘hurting white children by too much talk of slavery or race’, and, at the same time, also feared being labelled as sell-outs should they adhere to the bans in contradistinction to their social justice commitments or alignment with different Arizonan communities. All the principals in her study admitted that the bans would lead to the diminishment of curriculum grounded in historical fact. At the same time, they also engaged in complex assemblages of dynamic, shifting and competing forces. When faced with the ‘CRT’ bans, none of the five principals, Koyama (2023: 80) argued, ‘were made to do anything … but were actively engaging with/creating/extending assemblages around/through the bans’, for which they engaged ‘principals, teachers, children, and families in relation to each other, to public discourse, and to the ban, itself’. Although not explicitly related to history teaching, these examples speak to the variety of manifestations of anti-‘CRT’ campaigns across sociopolitical contexts, and the messy assemblages that emerge out of the prospect of the bans. This research study seeks to explore the specific and localised experiences of history teachers in relation to these bans and to capture various resistances that teachers are drawing on to teach about race and racism despite official restrictions and/or unofficial local pressure.

White teachers teaching about race and racism

Irrespective of the current onslaught of anti-‘CRT’ fervour and the passage of ‘divisive concepts’ legislation, a great deal of research has examined the intersections of White teachers’ race and racism, asserting that White teachers require cross-racial understanding to avoid perpetuating racial inequality in their classrooms (Cochran-Smith, 2000; Haviland, 2008; King, 2014, 2016, 2018; Kohli, 2009; Kohli and Solórzano, 2012; Leonardo, 2004; Washington and Humphries, 2011). One prominent strand of this literature specifically examines the ways in which White teachers engage with race-related topics (Garrett and Segall, 2013; Hytten and Adkins, 2001; Sleeter, 1993; Smith and Crowley, 2014), identifying the active and inactive responses reflective of Mills’s (2007) theory of ‘White ignorance’, wherein White supremacy and racial injustice are structurally maintained through ignorance that is embedded in educational institutions. In these varied examples, White teachers were found to engage in strategies of silence (Castagno, 2008) and evasiveness (Frankenberg, 1993), and a slate of other deflective patterns (Picower, 2009).

When it comes to teaching about race, White teachers’ ideologies and applications are often inconsistent, despite their antiracist intentions. Jupp et al. (2016) reviewed literature on White teachers’ race evasion from 1990 to 2015, most recently identifying the theme of ‘fertile paradoxes’, whereby White teachers’ understandings of race often operated in contradictory ways, in which race cognisance/visibility existed alongside power evasion, which served to diminish the effects of racism itself. For example, White teachers acknowledged White privilege while also reifying ideas such as ‘we are all the same people’, serving to deflate or render invisible an analysis of White supremacy in determining who has power (Jupp et al., 2016: 28). Emblematic of this stance, Hawkman (2019) found that teachers vacillated between antiracist and nonracist stances in their history teaching. Washington and Humphries (2011) studied how one White history teacher struggled to confront her students’ overt racism that surfaced during her attempts to teach ‘controversial issues’, and Wetzel and Rogers’s (2015) case study found that despite the teacher’s increased understanding of racism and Whiteness, her efforts to enact racial literacy with her students ended up reifying an understanding of race as biological.

Along similar lines, King (2014) described an underdeveloped understanding of systemic racism among pre-service teachers, and Wills (2001, 2019) found that history teachers tended to individualise their teaching of racism during the civil rights movement, promoting an understanding of racism as individual animus rather than as functioning through institutions, systems and structures. Similarly, Martell and Stevens (2017) found that even among race-conscious teachers who did centre race in their teaching, there were key distinctions between those who sought to eliminate individual prejudice and those seeking systematised equity within their teaching. Crowley and Smith (2015) grappled with the pedagogical blockages that hindered critical conversations about Whiteness, finding that pre-service history teachers had difficulty understanding the structures of White supremacy, integrating their personal experiences with Whiteness, and recognising structural racism as occurring in their classrooms, through their teaching and in educational contexts. Each of these examples point to the prominence of White social studies, defined by Chandler and Branscombe (2015) as centring White peoples, eliding the study of systemic racism, and ultimately reifying White common sense (An, 2020). Besides the undercurrent of anti-Blackness, defined by Carruthers (2018: 26) as a ‘system of beliefs and practices that attack, erode, and limit the humanity of Black people’, this body of research broadly implies an underlying lack of racial literacy on the part of White teachers attempting to teach about race and racism, even without a larger hostile sociopolitical context conspiring to eliminate the teaching of race and racism altogether.

Structural reductions of risk

Although most (69 per cent) of the teachers in this study taught in states that had either introduced or passed anti-‘CRT’ legislation, only 38 per cent expressed feeling restrained by the anti-’CRT’ laws or rhetoric, the extent to which varied based on structural conditions (school type, student demographics), and community position, in states with and without restrictive anti-‘CRT’ policies. Teachers who taught in private and charter schools described having much more leeway in their curriculum because they were not beholden to the same degree of state-level curricular oversight as typical public schools. Polly, a high school teacher at a diverse charter school in a Southeastern state, described that she had no fear about putting her job on the line, explaining, ‘I would fight that battle … it’s just so patently ridiculous to me to teach in any other way.’ Other factors seeming to influence teachers’ disregard of official policy included teaching in wealthy schools (both private and public) and teaching predominantly students of colour whose caregivers are less likely to express fear or hostility to diversity, and who may not be the target of right-wing stoking of fears about increasingly diverse spaces (real or imagined) (Bertrand et al., 2023; Grewal, 2018; Major et al., 2018).

A final factor pertained to teachers’ feeling of adequate expertise, or to community-conferred approval or clout meaning that they did not have to worry about retribution. For example, Francesca, who taught in a predominantly White charter school in an affluent community in a conservative suburb of a Democratic state, attributed her lack of fear to her school’s college-going culture. This meant that students depended on teachers for letters of recommendation, which provided leverage for teachers who felt empowered to push back against parental complaints about using historical texts centring different groups’ counter-narratives, modelled on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. In other words, feeling that they were understood and supported by their administration or community insulated teachers from opposition, even when they had different political stances.

Denial of ‘CRT’

Denying that they were teaching CRT was a common thread among nearly every participant in the study. Some teachers in the study claimed ignorance or a lack of expertise about CRT, drawing sharp distinctions between what they taught in their history courses and the university level they may have encountered during college. Others were more explicit in their awareness of the overlaps between CRT tenets and historical examples illustrative of CRT principles. In some cases, teachers revealed the strategy behind their pointed denial of CRT, citing that it enabled them to continue to teach historical examples demonstrative of CRT principles, such as systemic racism and/or the ongoing presence of racism throughout US history, while avoiding confrontation with hostile constituencies. In both cases – those claiming a lack of expertise and those more strategically aware – participants expressed awareness of the politicisation of CRT, acknowledging the cynical ways in which it had been weaponised by the Right. In one example, Brenda, who taught in a predominantly White public school in a Midwestern state that had introduced restrictive legislation, drew a disciplinary distinction between CRT and history, asserting:

I’m not teaching CRT. I’m teaching history. You know, honestly, I know what CRT is, kind of abstractly, but I never took a course in CRT because I didn’t go to law school. So, you know, it’s just a dog whistle. And I’m not going to bow down to that.

In this case, Brenda drew a contrast between teaching history and CRT, while also alluding to the ‘dog whistle’, for example, the Right’s contortion of ‘CRT,’ naming the cynical intent behind the anti-‘CRT’ movement.

Tyler, who taught mostly students of colour in an urban charter school located in a conservative Southwestern state, also denied teaching about CRT, citing that he was not ‘qualified’. At the same time, Tyler asserted:

I do need them to understand that there are some overlaps … This boogeyman that people have created surrounding this critical race theory thing … we do talk about systematic racism.

Illustrative of this commitment, Tyler described teaching myriad examples of racism within laws exemplified in a variety of court cases, and racial massacres, including Tulsa. He described teaching about the Dred Scott decision, Japanese internment and the killing of Ahmaud Arbury in 2020. He taught about his city’s history of redlining, which directly impacted many of his students’ families. Each of these examples are illustrative of CRT principles regarding past and present systemic racism entrenched in law. In this case, claiming silence on CRT enabled him to teach historical events in alignment with CRT principles. He explained the context in which he operated, and how he oriented his pedagogical practice in a politically conservative environment, when asked about how he was dealing with the national movement against ‘CRT’:

What I’ve taught in class has not changed … Nowadays, people really try to figure out a way to put a label on it so that they can say what they want about it. But what I say about race and what I say about the past when it comes to the United States and race, the message has always been the same. The lessons have always been the same when it comes to the students.

Here, Tyler acknowledged the aligning threads within his teaching goal of excavating systemic racism. He also recognised the increasingly hostile sociopolitical landscape, naming it as a ‘boogeyman’. Still, Tyler claimed that the content of his teaching has been largely unchanged. Implicit in this explanation is a critique of people trying to ‘figure out a way to put a label on it’, but steadfast was his refusal to be pigeonholed or targeted, or to change the content he taught about racism. Tyler rejected the terms of the debate as proscribed by the right-wing apparatus in order to maintain fidelity to his approach and his commitment to teaching about race systemically.

Drake, who taught in a predominantly White private school in a Republican-led Southern state that had passed legislation, understood that there were many commonalities with the way he approached teaching US history and the tenets of critical race theory, explaining:

By the standard definition of critical race theory, it’s impossible to teach American history well and not talk about the underlying systems that have created inequality and notions of race.

Still, he recounted how his administration dealt with the onslaught of parental concern about the ‘dangers’ of ‘CRT’ by vehemently denying that it was a content area being taught at their school. He recalled how at the beginning of the school year, the principal told the staff, ‘Listen, we’re not going to talk about critical race theory.’ Drake elaborated:

Effectively, what he was saying was, I know what you teach, but don’t call it critical race theory, because some parent is going to lose their marbles over it, because it was all in the news.

Drake and his administration understood the political landmine risked by acknowledging CRT and, thus, like the other educators described, he made strategic denials to protect teachers’ autonomy over content.

These examples point to the affordances of denying the CRT label. While teachers acknowledged, to varying degrees, the corruptive politicisation of CRT, their refusal to adopt the label of CRT, regardless of alignment with historical examples, provided a layer of insulation from potential hostile parties.

Strategic silences and rearticulation

In addition to denial, teachers reported heightened awareness of politicised terminology and described adjusting their language to avoid buzzwords that might be tripwires for explosive political discourses. Delia described how being immersed in her rural, mostly White, Midwestern community with statewide restrictions, gave her an understanding of the differences between the conservative rhetoric employed by parents in her middle school and their actual sentiments around diversity. She explained:

I think if you were to ask our people in our community what they thought about critical race theory, they’d be very anti it. They’re a very Fox News sort of crowd around here. But I think if you said, I just want to teach history to make sure that we’re including everybody’s stories, including, you know, the Black Americans or including Native Americans, they’d be like, oh yeah, that’s fine. You know, it’s like they just hate the name. They don’t even know what it means. And so as long as you’re not using it, as long as you’re just like, oh, no, we’re just going to tell everybody’s stories. They’re like, oh, that’s fine. Then they’d be very reasonable about it.

This example demonstrates how Delia’s understanding of her community informed her framing of potentially inflammatory topics. She understood the effects of content that was perceived to be incendiary by her parent population, but she also understood that alternative framing of the same topics would subdue that opposition. In this sense, Delia reframed the terms of the debate predetermined by right-wing political formations’ demonisation of ‘critical race theory’, instead fusing it with terms such as ‘everybody’s stories’ to regain articulative power and narrative control, about which she believed parents and community members would ‘be very reasonable’. The rearticulation of CRT to ‘everybody’s stories’ could be interpreted as a neutering act that makes racism palatable for her largely White student body. However, Delia did engage her students in a variety of explorations into historical topics regarding systemic racism, including educational segregation, protests during the civil rights movement and an array of systemic actions that harmed the local Indigenous people in her state, notably the systematic killing of bison and the flooding of Indigenous lands by the construction of a dam. These examples, along with Delia’s resolution to ‘tell the truth … this is what happened’, indicate a commitment to centring explorations of power and the material impact of racism.

Susan, who taught in a diverse, relatively liberal magnet school in a very conservative part of a Southern state that had passed restrictive legislation, explained how she avoided using certain buzzwords that she knew would be agitating in her conservative context. She denied embracing antiracist principles, stating ‘I don’t use any of that language’, and explaining:

That label is so charged down here that if I put that on, I wouldn’t be able to bring everybody along with me.

Despite her resistance to the label, Susan followed up by explaining that she did in fact teach antiracist materials and kept up with her colleagues’ curricular developments in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. She described various historical exercises she taught where students reckoned with incidents of racial terror in ways that many would deem to be in accordance with CRT principles, including the Tulsa Race Massacre (and she described the change in the naming convention from ‘riot’ to ‘massacre’) and the Colfax Massacre. Still, Susan was keenly aware of the politicisation of certain terms, and she avoided the use of certain concepts that she considered to be politically ‘loaded’. She explained one instance:

We were having to revise our course catalogue … and in the description of it [the course], it talked about American exceptionalism post-World War Two. So, I went to the assistant principal and said, ‘let’s take out that. Let’s just call the power of the United States post-World War Two. We do not need to use that loaded language. I will teach American exceptionalism in terms of, this is an idea, and we’ll look at the pros and the cons of it’.

Like Delia, Susan anticipated the sensitivities of her community, and she reframed content that could be seen as political. While she affirmed her commitment to teaching the idea of American exceptionalism, she understood how students’ political backgrounds may cause them to ‘shut down’ when confronted with certain politicised rhetoric. By defanging progressive buzzwords, Susan felt she could be more efficacious in teaching ideas, even those that may be considered controversial.

Stuart, who taught in an elite, majority White private school in a conservative Southern city with statewide restrictions, pushed up against the limits of his privileged school community. While he did recount teaching about White supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, he opted not to ‘use the word Whiteness’, for fear that to do so would put his largely White students on the defensive, entrenching their White supremacist attitudes rather than disrupting them. He detailed an incident where a student group focused on cultural awareness brought up ‘White privilege’ at an all-school meeting which went ‘absolutely nuclear’. He explained, ‘That phrase tapped into that partisan kind of ideological identity politics and just … wildfire.’

Stuart situated this reaction within larger questions of antiracism and the limits which he knew his school community could endure. He believed that talking about racism from the angle of just individual justice made it more palatable:

Is it OK for the police to assault somebody who is unarmed? And I think they’re much more open to discussing that kind of thing. But if they feel like there’s … kind of criticism of their identity, it goes bad very quickly. Calling myself an antiracist at school, I don’t think would be one of those trigger words. But if I said I was attacking White privilege, I think I might get run out of town.

This example showcases a sense of threat that accompanied the implications of White supremacy for White students in a school and community context that continued to be heavily shaped by the legacy of enslavement and its aftermath. While Stuart acknowledged that his community could tolerate the language of ‘antiracism’, he knew that White privilege would be an inflammatory ‘trigger word’, leading to widespread displeasure from the White population at the school. Stuart deliberately silenced discussions of Whiteness to enact what he viewed as a more effective course of action, explaining, ‘I think if it’s seen as a balanced discussion that’s not picking on any of these scabs, you know, those trigger words, it goes a lot better for us.’

Directed attention to suppression

Directing students’ attention to silences and suppressions was a powerfully disruptive tactic employed by teachers who were teaching in particularly constrained contexts. To begin, Lauren, who taught in a conservative Southwestern state with restrictive laws, and who described herself as an abolitionist teacher, framed her work through an inquiry approach. She explained:

Being in a state where we have people actively trying to convince parents to sue us for teaching this sort of stuff, I find if you give them a chance to lead to the water, it really does help in presenting that knowledge, because [if you] do the research, you’re going to find it out.

For Lauren, one of the most effective antidotes to parental concerns about ‘CRT’ was involving students in their own learning so that they could pursue their own questions as part of the course content. Also effective was delicately drawing students’ attention to the critical content that many of their parents were afraid of without calling out parents directly. She explained that ‘most of the students are on board’, and ‘want to know this sort of stuff’:

The strange thing is the students are protecting the teachers from their parents because you do have kids who do want the knowledge, they do want the understanding … ‘If I’m not allowed to know it, why am I not allowed to know it?’

In this example, Lauren described introducing students to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay in the 1619 Project by asking why some might have a problem with it. In asking questions about stakeholders’ interests in silencing Hannah-Jones’s story, Lauren lobbed an (albeit silent) critique against those who wished to silence the project without having to do the heavy lifting herself. Instead, by inviting students to grapple with questions of ‘why’, her students were able to come to new truths about both the validity of the narrative and the fundamental fallaciousness of the anti-’CRT‘ movement writ large.

Marie also drew attention to content suppression as a pedagogical strategy. Teaching in an increasingly conservative university town in a Republican-led state impacted her storytelling. She blithely described having to read sections of the student handbook aloud to her students as part of the new restrictive law, promising that she would not make them feel ‘prejudiced’ because of their race and that she would not critique meritocracy, an essential underpinning of the ‘American Dream’, a portion of the law which Marie laughingly admitted she had already ‘broke’, having recently taught about social Darwinism from a critical stance. In describing this event, Marie also noted her students’ reactions, saying that they ‘scoffed at the whole thing’.

This example showcases both the structural constraints on teachers who are forced legally to humble themselves as professionals, and the ways in which teachers can and do work within the system. For Marie, her dry recounting of this event, along with her blatant admission of having broken the promise regarding meritocracy, revealed the layered and subversive way in which individuals participate in and subvert official acts. The anti-‘CRT’ discourses circulated alongside discourses critical of the anti-‘CRT’ forces in equal measure. Despite adhering to the bureaucratic policies of reading the legislation aloud, Marie’s retelling, underlaid with her own critique of the ridiculousness of the request along with students’ ‘scoffing’, constituted an act of creative insubordination where humour punctured the power of the institutional discourse.

In a final example, Mia, another teacher from a Western, politically conservative state in the process of passing anti-‘CRT’ legislation, provided an incisive example of drawing students’ attention to suppression. She described a lesson on imperialism and her response to a student’s question about whether American imperialism was connected to racial superiority, explaining:

I said, ‘Oh, I cannot answer that question … I can’t … I won’t even mention that word …’ And so, several students were like, ‘Wait, what did she say?’ … And I said, ‘I can’t bring that up. You can bring it up, but I’ll leave you to make the conclusion. But you should know I cannot talk about that issue without creating a firestorm for myself. If any of you should choose to go home and say that I said there was anything to do with racial superiority and imperialism …’ And so, most of the students knew what I was saying without me saying it. And so, they don’t like that, they’re like, that is stupid … why can’t you talk about what is real?

In her expressed unwillingness to ‘answer that question’ and ‘even mention that word’, Mia sent a message to her students that accentuated the initial question about the connection between imperialism and racial superiority. By naming the silence, and refusing to answer their questions, Mia effectively disrupted the dominant narrative and, like Lauren, forced her students to confront questions of why some knowledge has been deemed off limits for them, surfacing their own critiques – ‘that is stupid, why can’t you talk about what is real?’ In this example, Mia wielded the silences imposed by her state’s legislature loudly, conveying to her students not only the connection between race and imperialism, but also silently inviting critiques of the gag order imposed by the state, and the other forces that prevented students from learning certain content – an implicit indictment of many actors, including many of the students’ parents, culminating in students’ frustration: ‘Why can’t you talk about what’s real?’

These teachers drew attention to the various suppressions forced on them by legislative decree. They did so by highlighting the ridiculousness of the laws through humour, by asking direct questions about content and why one might want to ban it, and by giving space for research to answer students’ questions without the teachers’ imprint. Each of these pedagogical choices reconfigured the effects of institutional and/or bureaucratic impositions and rearticulated the terms of the anti-‘CRT’ debate for students, conveying pointed messages to them about the role of race and racism in society, and the students’ own role within those debates.