'Can We Call This Racism?' Yes! Disrupting White Educational Spaces and Affirming Students' Positive 'Possible Selves'

As two White, privileged educators and researchers, we have questioned, challenged, and examined how to best operate in diverse classrooms, keeping in mind our joint goals of advancing socially just teaching agendas alongside our desire not to "whitesplain" issues centering on race to students of color. Through narrative case phenomenology and Critical Whiteness Studies frameworks, we analyze separate classroom events in which racialized content was both unexpected and foregrounded. Our responses in these moments, and our ensuing conversations and intellectual discussions, serve as data for this paper. Additionally, these scenarios are ripe for analysis as we have served either as teachers or researchers with distinct priorities and roles. The classroom scenarios we present have caused both our personal introspection and professional growth. Implications for practice include our assessment of antiracist teaching as a moral and ethical issue that belongs in classroom space, no matter the educational circumstances.