Abstract
This study is about a seventh-grade classroom in a predominantly White region in the rural northwestern United States where a White teacher led an interdisciplinary unit on African American narratives of enslavement and freedom fighting. Through the lenses of racial literacy, critical Whiteness studies, and discourse studies, authors use data from a co-ethnographic classroom research project to examine how students grappled in talk and written assignments with tensions around how to understand race and racism in the past and present. Findings present three race talk dilemmas-race is not really a thing (but it is), just tell us the right words (but the right words aren t enough), and we can stop racism before it starts (but can we?)-and offer windows into the tensions present in building racial literacy in predominantly White spaces as a contradictory process, not linear or one-size-fits-all. Discussion suggests that engagement with race talk dilemmas must make space for racial literacy to be seen as a relational process grounded in place and the inclusion of local experiences and histories with race.