Teaching Solidarity: Critical Race Reading with Malini Johar Schueller

Malini Johar Schueller unpacks critical race reading and the role of discomfort in the classroom on episode 625 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Quotes from the episode

Racism is a permanent structural feature of American society, and law alone, as now we have it, cannot deal with racism because racism is also part of law.
-Malini Johar Schueller

Critical race reading takes off from that, and it asks, is there a way of reading… that can awaken us to questions of racial privilege and hierarchy, but without us imagining that we have taken over somebody’s place?
-Malini Johar Schueller

Critical empathy, where you feel for others and you feel the injustice of others, but you also feel differently, you know, differently.
-Malini Johar Schueller

Some level of discomfort is fine for learning, because if learning doesn’t produce any kind of discomfort, you haven’t moved outside your zone of what you already know.
-Malini Johar Schueller

Resources

• Teaching Solidarity: Critical Race Reading, by Malini Johar Schueller
• Malini Johar Schueller’s personal site
• Kimberlé Crenshaw
• Patricia Williams
• Disparate treatment vs. disparate impact
• The 1619 Project
• Shoshana Felman
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire
• Teaching to Transgress, by bell hooks
• Defy: The Power of Saying No in a World That Demands Yes, by Sunita Sah
• Jesse Stommel on Episode 320
• Journey through infertility (Pudding, March 2026)