ABSTRACT
Nicholas Mitchell’s chapter is a brief chronicling of his experiences of being the only Black male on faculty at an all-girls predominantly White Catholic high school during the Obama years while also being a student of the curriculum theory project. He will explore his intellectual journey from being a data-driven historian to being a curriculum theorist, as he’s attempted to answer a single question put to him by Petra Hendry and Roland Mitchell over his five years in the CTP: How does creolization complicate race? He will describe how in an effort to answer this question, he encountered the concepts of “race as a form of curriculum” and creolization, which shaped how he came to see himself, his generation, Southern Culture, and how he teaches about the very concepts of race and racism. His chapter concludes with how his eventual answer to this question - that America is a creole culture and the dominant curriculum around race actively seeks to bury this fact - still guides his current scholarship and teaching on race.
