Think quickly; do not ponder.

Fill in the blanks:

If you resisted the urge to say Picasso , Mozart , ballet, and Shakespeare, you are probably already familiar with some of the arguments contained in this Handbook. You may be aware of the fact that while Picasso was indeed a great painter, many of his contributions to modern art were crass appropriations of African cultural expressions. You also may have noticed that while some cultural producers are called “actors” or “composers” or “artists,” others are described as “African American artists” or “Latino composers” and wondered why the former are almost always assumed to be White. In fact, you may have heard that major awards like the Grammy for Best Album of the Year and the Oscar for Best Actor/Actress are almost always awarded to White artists. These patterns are also true in literature. For example, you may wonder why it is that Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald are labeled “American” authors, while the works of Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Leslie Marmon Silko are relegated to “multicultural” literature. When it comes to dance, the claim that learning the ballet technique is necessary for all dance styles may seem suspicious when you consider dance forms that have been around much longer in locations other than Europe or are premised on relationships between the body and the earth that are opposite to the light and flighty embodiment of ballet.¹

These examples begin to point to the overarching argument that brings together the chapters in this Handbook. Succinctly put, dominant understandings of “the arts” and what it means to be an artist are profoundly shaped by racial logics and racist assumptions. Yet, because racism is foundational to Eurocentric understandings of culture and cultural production, it is always implicit in how the arts and artists are recognized and valued. This is particularly the case in those places that have been influenced by European conquest and where the concepts of “the arts” and the “artist” have historical and socio-cultural salience. This would help to explain why, for instance, the proposition that listening to Mozart will make a child smarter is so compelling, even though the scientific evidence for a “Mozart Effect” has been completely debunked.² The association between the so-called “classical” music (note that it rarely has to be called “White” or European) and higher intelligence is as taken for granted and assumed as is the association between Latin dance and sexuality or between rap music (assumed to be a synecdoche for urban African American youth) and violence. To go further, the so-called “culture wars” that have raged for five decades on university campuses across the United States and Canada hinge on whether one thinks that what counts as “great” works of art have the essence of being great or, more accurately, the essence of being White.

As a field, the arts in education has been late to reckon with its racist past and white supremacist present. This is in part because the scholarship of the arts in education has been largely about arts advocacy, and as such there has been a general reluctance among arts educators and researchers to recognize, theorize, and address the ways in which the arts operate in relation to and are implicated in white supremacy. In fact, despite strong rhetoric to the contrary, arts in education scholars and practitioners have been remarkably silent regarding how dynamics of race and racial oppression manifest both explicitly and implicitly through assumptions, practices, and frameworks that define the field. Instead, the focus has been on how that which is called “the arts” presumably challenges racism and encourages social justice, with very little attention to how the opposite is also the case. As such, the ways in which racism and white supremacy define and constitute the field have largely remained unspoken. This is perhaps the reason why spontaneous answers to the blanks that open this introduction might yield predictable (White) answers.

In recent years, a number of scholars, educators, and cultural workers have taken up the task of providing a critique of the arts in education that takes serious account of race and integrates anti-racist work as an important aspect of social justice education. This includes some chapters in edited collections such as Culturally Relevant Arts Education for Social Justice: A Way Out of No Way (Hanley, Sheppard, Noblit, & Barone, 2013), and Revitalizing History: Recognizing the Struggles, Lives, and Achievements of African American and Women Art Educators (Bolin & Kantawala, 2017), as well as books and articles in specific fields, such as museum education (e.g. Dewhurst, 2014); community-based arts education (e.g. Kuttner, 2015); music education (e.g. Bradley, 2007); and dance education (e.g. McCarthy-Brown, 2014), for example.³ Although these important interventions provide starting points for addressing the centrality of race and racism in the arts, few of the works take up Critical Race Theory (CRT). Moreover, these efforts have been somewhat isolated and without major impact on the mainstream of the various disciplines and fields that constitute the arts in education. A significant barrier to change has been the fact that most projects engage particular fields of practice, such as visual art, music, or drama, or specific contexts, such as museums, schools, or other cultural organizations, yet rarely attempt to speak to multiple fields, contexts, or through disciplinary boundaries. With a broad focus across educational artistic practices and contexts, this Handbook is the first major intervention across the various fields of the arts in education using CRT as a basic unifying framework.

This Handbook brings together the work of scholars, educators, and activists, some of whom have been theorizing, researching, enacting, and reflecting on CRT through their work for some time, in conversation with others whose work has emerged more recently. In gathering the chapters included in this Handbook, we focused on work that made deliberate use of CRT to frame the arts in education. While both CRT and the arts in education constitute robust areas of scholarship, the two are rarely brought together and never before in the kind of wide-ranging project this Handbook represents. In doing so, we hope this Handbook will provide a platform for ongoing scholarship and educational practice that takes seriously the problem of how racism operates and how racial hierarchies are constructed within the arts in education. By gathering the work of a diverse group of authors involved in different areas and disciplines and working at different levels and types of settings within the arts in education, this Handbook provides a wide-angle view of the field through the lens of CRT.

The chapters in this Handbook interrupt the persistent silences and omissions about race and racial injustice in and through the arts in education. The authors mobilize the conceptual tools of CRT to examine how whiteness and white supremacy manifest and are legitimated through discourses, visual representations, and practices of the arts in education. While exploring a wide range of questions related to how race shapes the field, as well as proposing active responses to the violence of racism, many of the chapters zero in on the ways in which White identity and the racial frames of whiteness take hold and contribute to inequality. As editors, we believe these processes are best captured through an understanding of “the arts” as white property. To make this argument, in this chapter we introduce key tenets and concepts of CRT as a framework. We then offer a dual-lens understanding of “the arts” as both an inclusive and an exclusive category through the frame of cultural production. This dual framework allows us to observe as well as challenge the underlying relationship between “the arts” and the racist ideologies and racial hierarchies that ensure white supremacy.