Enacting Antiracist Pedagogy: An Analysis of LeBron James and Doc Rivers’ Antiracist Discourse

ABSTRACT

In the summer of 2020, powerful protests against police brutality took place throughout the United States in response to the unlawful deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the shooting of Jacob Blake. Though the types of protests ranged from local grassroot organizations walking the streets to athletes using their platforms to address the injustices, the protests had one goal in mind—to bring attention, awareness, and hopefully change to an unjust legal system that consistently and disproportionately affects unarmed Black people. The aim of this article is to focus on the responses of both LeBron James and Doc Rivers to the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot seven times in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), as informed by Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit), we argue that the dynamic words of these two Black men not only operate as an act of protest and an act of resistance, but also they provide pedagogical enactments for being and becoming antiracist.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2022.2158392.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. James uses the pronoun he when referencing police officers as the default.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brittany Jones

Brittany Jones is a doctoral candidate in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education Department at Michigan State University. Her research interests include antiracist social studies, critical Black histories with an emphasis on Black emotionalities and emotions, and examining how the intersections of race, power, and oppression inform the creation of social studies standards and curriculum materials. Prior to her doctoral studies, Brittany was a high school social studies teacher.

Joel Berends

Joel Berends is a doctoral student in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education Department at Michigan State University. He works with secondary English interns and teaches courses on professional practice, social foundations of education, and critical literacies. His areas of interest are documentary poetics, public pedagogy, and critical literacies. Joel previously taught high school language arts and social studies.