A Quiet Uprising in Cardigans
How America’s female-dominated teaching workforce became the carriers of liberation pedagogy
From 1989 to 1997, I immersed myself in the deepest intellectual currents at GWU—700-level African American Literary Theory, Marxist Feminism, and the postmodern canon. I read Derrida, Butler, de Beauvoir, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Maya Angelou, and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. These works shared a throughline: power hides in plain sight, and education can either protect it or dismantle it.
When I began teaching creative writing in Kalamazoo in the mid-’90s, I didn’t see CRT as a subject on the syllabus. What I saw was the worldview of liberation pedagogy—rooted in Latin American liberation theology, adapted into Black Liberation Theology, and carried into teacher training. Freire’s ideas were everywhere, shaping teachers to believe their work wasn’t neutral—it was a form of activism, an awakening of “critical consciousness.”
Critical Race Theory emerges from this same lineage. While each framework—liberation theology, Black Liberation Theology, liberation pedagogy, CRT—has its own origins and methods, they share a mission: center the oppressed, expose systems of power, and demand transformation. CRT is the secular continuation of an older liberation tradition.
Who delivered this worldview into every American classroom? Teachers. And in the U.S., teachers are overwhelmingly women: 77% of all K–12 educators, almost 90% in elementary schools. For decades, this female workforce became the quiet vanguard of liberation pedagogy—not through protest or policy, but through daily practice, lesson by lesson.
So when critics say “CRT isn’t taught in schools,” they miss the point. It was never a class. It was the air. It was the lens. It spread not through lectures on theory but through the way teachers were trained to teach.
This was not an accident. It was intentional, organized through ideas and institutions rather than edicts. The movement didn’t storm the gates—it staffed them.
The real cultural shift in America hasn’t been loud. It’s been a quiet uprising in sweater sets, reshaping generations one classroom at a time.