When They Go Low , We Go High : Scholars of Color , Activism , and Educational Research in a Post-Truth Era

In the post-truth era, research from scholars of color will serve greater utility due to their propensity to speak truth to power, counter inaccurate narratives about marginalized populations, and challenge the politics that emerge during the post-truth era. This paper will highlight how scholars of color have centered race and social justice within their research, and provide examples of how the educational research community should counter the current post-truth era. We propose that scholars of color should be more prominent in our research agendas. This includes citing more of their work, supporting research agendas that positions ‘race’ at the center, and promoting critical Education Policy Analysis Archives Vol. 26 No. 146 SPECIAL ISSUE 2 scholarship that moves away from deficit language. If we are going to speak truth to power in today’s post-truth climate, then educational researchers must produce critical scholarship that challenges the lies and myths that permeate in a post-truth era.


When They Go Low, We Go High: Scholars of Color, Activism, and Educational Research in a Post-Truth Era
In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries selected 'post-truth' as its word of the year.Defined as an adjective relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief ("post truth, n.d., para 1), post-truth has captured the everyday lexicon of American politics and society.Googling 'post-truth' will reveal a litany of news stories, think pieces, longform articles, and blog posts that explain how we are currently within a post-truth era.The fact that 2016 was the year that Oxford Dictionaries would select post-truth as its word of the year should not go unnoticed.There was significant change in global politics in 2016, for example the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union through a process called Brexit.In sports, the Chicago Cubs won their first World Series title since 1908, and the music industry lost legendary icons such as Prince and David Bowie.These events were just a few of what many considered to be an unbelievable year of newsworthy topics that could not be imagined happening anytime soon, if ever.However, for many people the election of Donald Trump was the event of 2016 that captured that we were entering into different times.In fact, the post-truth era has been personified by the election and ascent of Donald Trump as president of the United States.
While numerous news articles and books have proclaimed that the election of Donald Trump ushered in a new post-truth era (Sismondo, 2017), and a new political reality through his selection of appointees for cabinet positions or judicial appointments such as Betsy Devos and Bret Kavanaugh, for people of color, there is an argument to be made that this is not a new post-truth era.Instead, we argue that what is happening in the United States is what has always been happening since the founding of this country, especially for people of color.Concerns about who occupies the presidency, cabinet and judicial appointments, changes in policies and laws that negatively impact communities of color, and dog-whistle politics that signal political agendas that desire to "Make America Great Again", are in fact realities that have concerned people of color for decades (López, 2015).The national divide as it relates to race, class, and gender is also not new.Policies that are hyper-focused on disenfranchising communities of color, remaining silent on issues affecting marginalized people, and the absence of a national conversation on race and systemic injustices have existed long before Donald Trump.Issues of oppression, marginalization, unjust policies, unfair practices, and a variety of societal ills have always been a part of everyday life for people of color.In fact, people of color have not only had navigate these issues but have sought to raise attention about these societal ills and racism that have plagued American society for decades (Harris, 1993;Kendi, 2016).Now, the election of Donald Trump has only emboldened his base to follow a president who is willing to call Mexicans rapists, attack Black athletes protesting police violence by kneeling during the national anthem, and assign equal blame to white nationalists and counter-protesters after clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, and would-be white allies have been willing to listen and take action.
Today's post-truth era has emboldened "white supremacy, capitalism, racism, neoliberalism, patriarchy, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and more" (Castrellón, Reyna Rivarola, & Lopez, 2017, p. 936).The post-truth era allows for not only an amalgam of misinformation (Castro Samayoa & Nicolazzo, 2017), but also provides space for the misinformation of facts to millions of people, especially around important political and societal issues.Academic scholarship has not been immune from this, especially educational research, as academic research and scholars are increasingly questioned in the news, trolled online through social media, and academic publications have seen a decline in readership due to their inaccessibility (Ratna, 2017).For scholars of color, this has been an added burden, as historically we have always experienced questions or doubts about our scholarship, have had our research dismissed or not published because challenged traditional institutions or norms, or our scholarship seen as too edgy because it called out the societal ills and injustices that marginalized people experience in the United States (Bernal & Villalpando, 2002).
If, education researchers are going disrupt the current societal and political climate, then the field needs to be as Dubois (1926) articulated, "...one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks beauty for Beauty to set the world right" (p.293).In this article we argue that in this current posttruth era, education research should illuminate and cite more scholars of color.As mentioned earlier, for scholars of color the post-truth era is not new, as we have been writing about many of the issues and problems that are now being highlighted prominently within media and academia.Scholars of color serve as strong examples for what it will entail to critique and dismantle systems of misinformation, oppression, and discrimination in a post-truth era.The current post-truth era will require scholars, regardless of race, to use their pens and voice that will highlight truth within a vacuum of lies, falsehoods, racism, bigotry, classism, sexism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.This type of action, in conjunction with promoting and citing scholars of color, should not be seen as a hindrance to rigorous and reputable research, but instead offers a way for the research community to become politically engaged, advance scholarship that focuses on critiquing systems and structures of inequality, promote research that addresses current societal issues, and moves the educational research field to be more reflective regarding its biases absorbed from a world still practicing racism and human exportation (Morris, 2017).Scholars of color should serve as an example to others in the education research community on how to advance, critique, and research in today's post-truth era.Our attempt with this article is not to outline a new approach to educational research, but instead propose that the work of scholars of color, and the ways they center race and social justice within the educational literature, should be more prominent and citied in our research agendas and publications; especially if dismantling the current post-truth era is the goal.
We begin the article by outlining why using an exclusive citation practice that focuses on scholars of color is relevant and needed in today's academic research.We then present two overarching themes: a) centering race in educational research, and b) educational leadership.These themes serve as examples for the type of scholarship that is necessary during a post-truth erascholarship that is able to reveal the facts when it comes to the real issues that impact education.Also, we offer a discussion on recent research that offers additional insights and perspectives that could assist in critiquing the post-truth era, while offering innovative approaches to understanding and addressing the educational inequities that affect students of color.We end with an academic call for action, one that promotes the research of scholars of color and advances critical scholarship that will be necessary to push back against the post-truth era.

Exclusive Citation Practice
For many scholars of color, like the authors of this article, thinking about the responsibility to speak out against racial and social injustice, aligning research agendas that promote and advance marginalized communities, and navigating the dichotomy of scholar and activist can be a taxing endeavor.In a way, being a scholar of color represents a form of activism.In 2015, out of the 1.6 million faculty 1 at degree-granting postsecondary institutions, 6% of faculty were Black, 9% were Asian/Pacific Islander, and 4% were Hispanic.Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented relative to their U.S. population shares, and many academic departments are filled with all white faculty (Li & Koedel, 2017).When scholars of color do hold faculty positions, they face, structural barriers when it comes to promotion and tenure, attacks on alternative research methods and action-oriented scholarship that go against traditional notions of valued research, derailment of careers, limited social networks, and public scrutiny that can hinder their upward mobility in the profession.In private conversations and public forums, faculty of color have shared countless stories of how their white contemporaries have either helped in building or remaining silent about those barriers that have slowed down their professional trajectory in the academy.
There has been a significant increase in the number of scholarly articles focused on the citation rankings of academics (Delgado López-Cózar, 2014), and how an increasing number of tenure and promotion committees are considering citation numbers (Urrieta Jr., Méndez, & Rodríguez, 2015).Recognizing this phenomenon, we offer that researchers should implement in their writing an exclusive citation practice (Ahmed, 2017).Ahmed (2017) argues that an exclusive citation practice involves recognizing those scholars that have contributed to the intellectual genealogy of feminism and antiracism.Furthermore, it should include work that is often dismissed, forgotten about, cast aside, or left behind by the traditional research community.
We yoke our citational practice for the purpose of this article to the research of scholars of color to underscore the need to highlight these scholars' prescient and longstanding research when it comes to race and inequity from within the so-called ivory tower.Ahmed (2017) suggests that citation is a kind of memory-work, or "how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before" (p.15).It can be an "energizing" kind of memory-work that, when modeled to undergraduate or graduate students, simultaneously introduces them to research that has likely fallen off their other syllabi while showing them that scholars who look like them exist and record insights and instincts that have been long proven accurate (Ahmed, 2017).This practice offers a type of counter-narrative to the faceless, decontextualized research paradigms of many scholars of color who are situated within traditionally white higher education institutions (Reddick & Saenz, 2012).Research agendas, such as those that touch on issues of race, class, students and educators of color, opportunity gaps, teaching and learning, graduation rates, and school improvement, that fail to cite scholars of color contribute to the further development of antisocial cultures that ignore intersectional identities and research, and their impact on scholarly argument.Exclusive citation practice is a type of endeavor that pays "debts" while paving a path for future scholars.Citations are foundational to academic writing; exclusive citation practices may be one way to emphasize this truth while highlighting the limited citations (read: debts) that scholars of color receive from their general colleagues.
In the remaining sections, we use an exclusive citation practice to illuminate scholars of color who have provided important contributions to educational research.While a selective sample, our goal is to highlight these scholars as a way to present their research that positions race at the foci, promotes critical approaches to collecting and analyzing data, provides spaces for voices of color such as students and teachers, and negates deficit language that positions people of color as less than their white counterparts.This does not mean that scholars who are not of color have not done such research, but scholars of color who do this work often pay a higher price as outlined earlier.Furthermore, while having allies in this endeavor is important, scholars of color and their research should be at the forefront of our efforts to speak truth in this post-truth era.

Centering Race in Educational Research
A recurring question in the aftermath of the 2016 election was, what role does race have in America during this current post-truth era?As many commentators have observed, the election of Donald Trump did not initiate a new kind of vitriol directed towards people of color, but has amplified the divisive rhetoric and political apparatus towards advancing racist, classist, and sexist ideologies and policies.In his position as president, Trump's words have served as a megaphone for espousing longstanding prejudices and bigotry.Trump's divisive, dismissive, and disingenuous rhetoric is creating a ripple affect across our political, judicial, correctional, and educational systems.This "white backlash" to the advancement of civil rights and election of President Barack Obama (Anderson, 2016), coupled with a schooling system that helps to maintain and sustain white supremacy (Horsford, 2018;Horsford & D'Amico, 2015), has created an opportunity for the educational research community to engage with scholars of color and their work, which could provide a useful lens to disrupt the post-truth era.
In this section, we argue that during this post-truth era, the naming and placing of race at the center of educational research needs to be more explicit.It is through this centering that the field would do a better job at exposing and addressing the numerous inequities that affect U.S. education.For many scholars of color, centering race in their research has been common practice and an important application when it comes to advancing research that highlights the educational, social, and economic conditions of students in U.S schools.The use of Critical Race Theory (CRT), and in particular counter-storytelling, is one orientation that scholars of color have used to help shed light on the racial and social injustices that have taken place in U.S. schools.This section will provide an example of the possibilities that exist when scholars center race in their scholarship, and how it can be used to deter the effects of the current post-truth era.

Critical Race Theory in a Post-Truth Era
While not new, though perhaps more recently desired, race-centered research has been an ongoing effort that has sought to expose race as a historically socially-constructed concept (López, 1994).Educational research has not only critiqued the societal and educational systems that have advanced white students at disproportionate rates then students of color, but also has offered observations and solutions for how to improve systems and address educational inequities.An important tradition in educational research has been the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to examine a range of educational issues and the way they are informed and impacted by race and racism (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995).Defined as "a set of legal theories contending that racism is normal, not aberrant, in U.S. society" (Ladson-Billings, 2017, p.81), CRT has become a prominent tool for analyzing how race is a contributing factor to the educational inequities that exist in America (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995).Scholars such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, William F. Tate IV, Laurence Parker, Adrienne Dixson, and many others have argued that race is central to understanding the various disparities in educational outcomes that transpire in schools across the country.Furthermore, they have argued that race should be viewed not simply as an SPSS or STATA variable, but as a central tenet in understanding how schooling and educational outcomes have been determined based on one's skin color.
According to Delgado and Stefancic (2001) there are five tenets that are a staple of CRT: 1) a belief that racism is normal or ordinary, not aberrant, in U.S. society; 2) interest convergence; 3) race as a social construction; 4) intersectionality and anti-essentialism; and 5) voice or counter-narrative.These tenets build the framework for CRT and are useful in understanding how the legal underpinnings of CRT serve to understand race in education (Tate, 1997).According to Dixson and Rousseau (2005), a central tenet of CRT has been the recognition of the experiences and scholarship of people of color, primarily through the act of storytelling.Traditionally, storytelling has been used to provide entertainment, educate populations, preserve cultures and traditions, and instill moral values that have passed down through generations (Ladson-Billings, 1998).Critical Race Theorists have used storytelling to illustrate how policies and laws have impacted racial and social justice through the experiences of people of color as sources of knowledge (Dixson & Rousseau, 2005;Ladson-Billings, 1998).
In a post-truth era, CRT and specifically the tenet of storytelling, can serve as a useful counter to the permeance deficit perspectives of students of color.For example, in education, deficit perspectives promoted beliefs about students from lower socioeconomic statuses and nondominant races that have viewed these students as incapable of achieving academically, unable to contribute to society, negatively plagued by their upbringing or community environment, parents and communities that do not care about education, and students themselves who present more problems than value to a classroom or school (Milner, 2010).In academic scholarship, deficit perspective research has often placed the causes of unequal educational outcomes on students of color themselves rather than on society and institutions (Solorzano, 1997).Research of this nature often lacks in interrogating the impacts of health, housing, neighborhood conditions, school environment, or a multitude of other facts that can affect educational outcomes for marginalized students (Ladson-Billings, 2017).While scholars of color have pushed back against this type of research, there still exists a perpetuation of "destructive thinking about the capabilities of learners based on race" (Ladson-Billings, 2012, p .115).Therefore, counter-storytelling plays a critical role in expressing the common experience of racism that exists in education for people of color, and present perspectives that counter the dominant white narrative that is often perpetuated in educational research (Dixson & Rousseau, 2005;Teranishi, 2002).In a post-truth era, untruthful narratives are often expressed about non-dominant populations that can cause harm long after it has been spoken, implemented as practice or policy, or settled into a society's psyche.Counterstorytelling allows for non-dominant populations to have a say about what is expressed about their communities and lived experiences.In education, this serves as a useful endeavor as we continue to wrestle with the best educational system, schooling structure, learning inputs, and student outcomes that are necessary for equitable education for students of color.
Centering race in educational research allows for a counter to post-truth era narratives about students of color.This type of scholarship refuses to see students of color, their families, and their communities as pathologically and fatally flawed.It also assists in cultivating a cadre of new teachers, leaders, and researchers "who think critically about the ways race and class delimit what students can and cannot do while they consider the intellectual work they must do."(Ladson-Billings, 2017, p. 89).For example, Milner (2010) argues for the publication of teacher education research that is conscious of the dynamics of race, class, and the structural issues of education.This is useful, not just for teacher preparation but other facets of educational research, as a way to counter the posttruth era and for understanding how the concepts of color-blindness, cultural conflict, meritocracy, deficit conceptions, and white supremacy can perpetuate educational inequities.Without centering race in educational research, and this goes beyond just acknowledging that race is "present", it will remain an open empirical question if a disruption of the post-truth era will occur.

Lessons from Educational Leadership
Educational leadership research has incorporated social justice within its scholarship as an innovative approach to addressing diversity issues in education (Santamaría, 2014).This scholarship contrasts the traditional leadership research that emphasize management and resource allocation (Rivera-McCutchen, 2014).The current post-truth era has brought to the forefront leaders and leadership styles that should raise serious concerns for society.By employing a practice of leadership that is void of culture, overtly oppressive, and non-liberating, the post-truth era has seen leaders rely on half-truths, lies, and innuendos.This type of leadership style has had a profound effect on society as people now expect leaders to relay untruths, and followers do not mind as long as the lies identify suitable scapegoats or express desired policy outcomes (Horsford, 2018).The lack of leadership in a post-truth era leads to confusion, inequitable distribution of resources, failure to acknowledge structural and economic inequality, and an unwillingness to acknowledge the abuses suffered by marginalized people by the various institutions that are oriented to serve and protect them (Green & Castro, 2017;Horsford, 2018;King, 2017;Mathias & Newlove, 2017).
Educational leadership research, even with its history of omitting non-dominant perspectives and scholarship (Gooden, 2012), can serve as a useful example for how scholars of color have articulated research that has pushes back against the ills of a post-truth era.For example, Tillman (2004) found that education research journals had a long history of placing the study of Black issues and Black leaders at the margins.The research literature on educational leadership has had a troubled past of limiting the voices and perspectives of scholars of color (Dantley, 1990(Dantley, , 2002;;Tillman, 2004).However, as the field of educational leadership has been slow to include voices of alternative perspectives within its discourse (Dantley, 2003;Dantley & Rogers, 2001), the past 30 years has seen an emergence of research from scholars of color.There are several reasons for this emergence of critical and non-dominant scholarship in educational leadership research.First, a commitment to equality, democracy, and justice has grown in prominence in educational leadership preparation programs and scholarship (Gooden & O'Doherty, 2015;Roland, 2018).Second, programs like University Council for Educational Administration's (UCEA) Jackson Scholars Program, have focused on recruiting, developing, and supporting talented graduate students of color who have the potential to contribute to the education policy and leadership research.This emergence hasn't happened in isolation, as the growing diversity of students in our nation's schools calls for different perspectives on educational leadership (Dantley, 2005;Horsford, 2010;Rivera-McCutchen & Watson, 2014).
In a post-truth era, it will take social justice leaders to challenge teaching and learning environments that attempt to marginalize students of color (Khalifa, Gooden, & Davis, 2016).Not only that, it will take academics to develop their own critical consciousness not only to train educational leaders (Khalifa et al., 2016), but also to engage in the necessary research that will cut through the noise and lies that a post-truth era brings.Social justice leadership research calls for a commitment to advancing for the inclusion of marginalized voices, frameworks, and orientations that have often been limited in the educational leadership canon (Gooden & Dantley, 2012;Murtadha & Watts, 2005).

Next Steps for Education Scholarship in the Post-Truth Era
The past several years has seen an emergence of scholarship spearheaded by scholars of color that offers new perspectives to educational research.These scholars of color have introduced either new research or have pushed traditional research to consider new populations, theories, or methodologies that are pushing the field to investigate the challenges of today's post-truth era.Furthermore, these scholars are also investigating how students and communities of color are resisting narrow narratives that are emerging out of the post-truth era.These emerging and transcending research agendas are proposing abolitionist approaches to dismantling educational inequality (Love, 2019), understanding the ways that racialized students experience and navigate higher education (Garcia, 2017), rethinking culturally relevant pedagogy through Hip-Hop-based education (Emdin, 2010;Love, 2015;Travis, 2013Travis, , 2015)), exploring the intersection of race and dis/ability (Annamma, 2017), understanding how education policies can hurt or harm students of color (Grooms, 2016;Sampson, 2018;Welsh & Williams, 2018), and other approaches to addressing and improving educational outcomes for students of color.This wave of scholarship has centered race as an important determinant for understanding today's educational system and underscores the importance for academic research that includes the voices of the community and advocates for a reframing of education policy that pushes against the noise in the current post-truth era (Dumas & Anderson, 2014).

When They Go Low, We Go High
In what many consider to be one of the best convention speeches of all time, former First Lady Michelle Obama offered a resounding narrative that attempted to remind the country of its true spirit.In her speech, Michelle Obama recalled all the times that she had to teach her daughters the importance of ignoring the naysayers, and that when people are cruel that they should not stoop down to their level.In the speech she offered a motto that served as a rallying cry for weeks during the 2016 presidential election, "when they go low, we go high."The motto resonated so well, that it became a somewhat unofficial anthem for the Clinton/Democratic campaign in the closing weeks of the election.
The phrase "when they go low, we go high" is a useful analogy when discussing the experiences and contribution of scholars of color.Traditionally, educational research has been dominated by the ideas and scholarship driven by white scholars.Historically, these scholars and their research have been critiqued for framing their research on communities, students, teachers, and leaders of color from a deficit perspective (Bernal, 1988;Foster, 1999;Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).However, for many scholars of color their research has focused on the assets and contributions of educators, scholars, and communities of color, while also pointing out educational inequities (Green, 2017).Combating systemic inequities and injustice, whether through research or practice, is an emotionally difficult endeavor and politically risky for scholars of color.Scholars who center race, gender, sexual orientation, and class within their research can also have political ramifications as well, especially within this new post-truth era (E.Castrellón, Reyna Rivarola, & López, 2017).
If scholarship is going to serve as a form of resistance during the post-truth era, then a discussion is also necessary of citation practices.As mentioned earlier, scholars of color have been writing, presenting, and discussing the issues that are now rising to the consciousness of the general public and research community for decades.However, the practice of attributing credit to scholars of color who have provided key findings or insights around a research phenomenon has disproportionally affected scholars of color (Stanley, 2006).Scholars have critiqued how the politics of citations can influence the career trajectories of scholars of color (Johnson, 1991;Leonardo, 2004).Nevertheless, scholars of color have always and continue to contribute to educational research by ensuring that issues on systemic inequities, and the experiences and voices of marginalized students are present in the research literature.What important in the post-truth era is that scholars of color get the appropriate credit for their work, and that their research is used appropriately to counter the untrue narratives that are pushed in the post-truth era.
Richard Delgado (1992) argued for his white contemporaries to cite scholars of color, and to do it often.Therefore, during a time when scholars of color are being hired and promoted at universities (Martinez, Chang, & Welton, 2017;Martinez & Welton;2017), citing scholars of color would help to promote the critical research that is needed during this pivotal time in history.In fact, promoting the research of scholars of color should be an intentional response by those white scholars who write in areas that serve to repel the lies that are pushed during the post-truth era.To be clear, the new post-truth era is built upon a foundation of white supremacy, and if white scholars are really engaged in countering the post-truth era, and concerned with the civil rights of marginalized communities, then we should see scholarship that includes the citations of scholars of color, past and present, who have been speaking truth to power for years.In no way are we suggesting that by referencing more scholars of color by our white contemporaries would it add necessary relevance or validity to our work.Rather, to push against the noise in these current and possibly future post-truth eras, it will require a critical ally-ship, both in verbal and written form by our white colleagues.For many scholars of color, whose whole career has been about speaking truth to power, a thoughtful amplification of their research would assist in highlighting the problematic and systemic inequities that have risen to the national forefront during this post-truth era.
Intentionally, we wanted to continue in the tradition of promoting scholars of color as a form of raising awareness that helps in debunking myths about our scholarship and historical notions about communities of color.Our intentionality was inspired by recent efforts on social media to cite scholars of color and scholarship exists that speaks to the many issues that have arisen during this post-truth era.In recent years hashtags have been created to highlight that scholars of color are noticeably absent from research conversations, presentations, and literature.For example, during the 2018 American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference two hashtags grew to significant prominence that highlighted that even within scholarship on communities and students of color, the research of scholars of color are noticeably absent or not cited.#POCAlsoEdPolicy and #POCAlsoKnow began trending during AERA, and since then have resonated in such a way that it has been used as a way to bring attention to the research of scholars of color who are engaged in important educational research.Created as an actionary response to center Black women scholarship in the research literature, #CiteASista serves as another example of efforts to raise awareness around the lack of recognition for Back women scholars (Nicole & Williams, 2018).In the post-truth era, we should be inspired by these hashtags to do the necessary work to highlight the contributions of scholars of color, while also moving beyond the hashtag to make sure that their scholarship has utility as well in the post-truth era.
Today's post-truth scholarly climate often fails to recognize or even read the work of scholars who critically engage concepts of race.As a result, when race-based education issues finally make it into the news cycle, there is a general scramble for authorities on the subject.This scramble is a waste of energy.As this discussion has hopefully made clear, the field of education is home to many scholars who are well-versed in the impact of concepts of race on educational structures, outcomes and discourse.The stakes are too high in this new post-truth era for scholarship to not speak truth to power.

What's at Stake in the Post-Truth Era
Former First Lady Michelle Obama's convention speech, that included the line "when they go low, we go high", should have served as an early warning that we were on the verge of entering a post-truth era based on who was elected to the presidency.Michelle Obama's famous 2017 inauguration face, which exploded as an expression of disgust that represented the overall mood of people of color throughout the country after Donald Trump's election, served as a visual representation the country should have listened and followed the lead of people of color, who for the entire election cycle tried to warn about the dangers of a Donald Trump presidency.Now, as we wrestle and try to understand the chaos and the issues surrounding us daily, especially as it relates to the research academy, it is important that we do not glance over years of research done by scholars of color about some of these issues that are prevalent in society now.For example, Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) discussed the salience of race in American society yet called for more scholarship that explored the intersection of race and education.Tate (1997) highlighted the importance of Critical Race Theory as a theoretical perspective that could provide insight on investigating education research that could lead to addressing societal inequalities.If we are going to emerge out of this post-truth era and advance activist and truth-finding research agendas that will help to usher in a new era of scholarship, then we should center scholars of color work and ensure that we are not ignoring issues of class, race, privilege, and white supremacy that has helped to advance the current narratives in the post-truth era.There is opportunity for collaboration between scholars who may be aligned in their outrage towards what is happening in the post-truth era, to ensure that there is an intentional foregrounding of the role of scholars of color and partnering with them to amplify their scholarship.The post-truth era raises new intellectual challenges and moral dilemmas; however, scholars of color offer a compelling and insightful way forward on how to challenge post-truth politics and narratives.If we are going to emerge successful from the post-truth era, then it is important that we re-install and re-center the research of scholars of color whose efforts will be salient for an emancipation from the-post truth era.Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie Sam Houston State University tonyonwuegbuzie@aol.com Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie is Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Sam Houston State University, where he teaches doctoral-level courses in qualitative research, quantitative research, and mixed research.Further, he is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg and an Honorary Professor at the University of South Africa.His research areas primarily involve social and behavioral science topics, including disadvantaged and under-served populations such as minorities, children living in war zones, students with special needs, and juvenile delinquents.Also, he has conducted numerous research studies on factors that predict educational achievement at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels.Additionally, he writes extensively on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methodological topics applicable to multiple disciplines within the field of the social and behavioral sciences.
Travis M. Marn (Ph.D., University of South Florida) is a Professor in the Curriculum & Learning Department at Southern Connecticut State University where he teaches child development and educational psychology.His scholarship focuses on philosophically informed empirical accounts of performative identities, employing new materialism and posthumanism in psychological research, and contributing to the development of qualitative and post -qualitative methods and methodologies.
@vanderbilt.eduShaun M. Dougherty is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Education, Peabody College of Education & Human Development, Vanderbilt University.His work focuses on applied quantitative analysis of education policies and programs, equity, and career and technical education.