Introduction and Objective

I was born in China and came to the United States for graduate studies in education. I am part of the majority ethnic group and culture, the Han Chinese, the largest by population among the 56 officially recognized ethnic groups in China (Joniak-Luthi, 2017). Therefore, one of my first encounters in the U.S. was to (un)learn the privileged perceptions and experiences that I was not aware of until then as a member of the dominant ethnic and cultural group in my home country. While I did not have to view myself through a racial or ethnic lens being a member of a group that made up more than 90% of the Chinese population, similar to the experiences of many White Americans in the U.S. (DiAngelo, 2018), and did not consciously self-identify as Asian, coming to the United States meant a transition from majority to minority mindset with the assigned Asian (American) identity (Lee & Ramakrishnan, 2020) and the racial/ethnic minority and people of color labels, both of which were novel to me.

I learned in graduate school about the racist history and racial relationships in the U.S. and its racialized understandings of citizenship that permeated across social institutions, including education (Brodkin, 1998; Jacobson, 1999; Ladson-Billings, 2004), and started developing a racial consciousness both in my professional work and my daily life as I was Asianized (Iftikar & Museus, 2018). Similar to what many minority scholars have reported, while I have chosen to accept such labels as “Asian American” or “minority” as formal descriptions in public settings, they are “loose garments” that can be readily removed in private life (Hernandez et al., 2015). Therefore, while I will check the box of “Asian (American)” when filling forms unless “International” or “Non-U.S.” is an option, I certainly am not an Asian American in the legal, citizenship sense and do not have a strong “Asian American” identity. Nor can I say that I understand what it means to be an Asian in the U.S. despite the many cultural values and practices and memories that I share with this diverse group (Lee, 2009).

Upon completion of my doctoral study in a research university in the Pacific Northwest, I was fortunate enough to accept a tenure-track faculty position in a mid-size public university in a Southern state. While the city the university is located has a Black-majority population and is geographically close to several of the most racially and linguistically diverse cities in the country, the institution itself is comprised of mostly White students, faculty, staff, and administrators. Therefore, I am a minority not only in the cultural and legal senses as a non-citizen in a foreign country, but also in the institutional sense as a non-White faculty of color who is “foreign” to a predominantly White institution (PWI).

Because I was raised and primarily socialized outside the United States until graduate school, my experiences and knowledge as an educator are not typically represented or even expected in the U.S. higher education contexts. Additionally, literature documenting the stories of foreign minority faculty members vis-à-vis domestic minority faculty remains limited (Hernandez et al., 2015; Mamiseishvili, 2010). Therefore, in this chapter I used autoethnographic narratives and reflections to explicate my experiences and intersectional identities as a foreign-born, non-White, non-native English speaking, pre-tenure teacher educator and researcher in a PWI in the United States. Adopting a critical race theory framework, I analyzed how the overlapping “foreign/minority” status shaped my practices and explained the strategies I used to navigate and resist the White-dominant academic and institutional norms. I hope that sharing my experiential knowledge and counternarratives will empower and invite minority educators facing similar racialized experiences and struggles in foreign cultural and educational settings to join the collective transformation endeavors.

Theoretical Framework

I draw on critical race theory (CRT) and two related constructs, intersectionality and Asian critical theory (AsianCrit), in framing my analysis. The CRT framework centers analysis on race and racism while recognizing the intersectional relationships among racism and other forms of oppression, such as sexism, classism, and nativism, across contexts (Crenshaw, 1991; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). AsianCrit builds on and expands the CRT framework to examine White supremacy, systemic racism, and other forms of subordination as they manifest among the Asian American lives and experiences (Museus & Iftikar, 2014). All three constructs are helpful to illuminate my racialized experiences and identities as a minority educator of Asian descent in a foreign context intersecting on race, language, immigration, and professional status.

Critical Race Theory

The critical race theory framework purports that racism is pervasive and endemic in the United States to the extent that White-centrism and -dominance are often considered as the social “norm” and “ordinary.” CRT also recognizes the intersection of racism with other forms of oppression that operate in such dimensions of gender, social class, and language (Crenshaw, 1991; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) and challenges the research paradigm and practices that privilege the experiences and perspectives of the dominant social groups (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Ledesma & Calderón, 2015). CRT thus values the experiential knowledge and counternarratives of people of color and other minoritized groups that are historically excluded and marginalized from the dominant, master narratives (Aronson et al., 2020; Brown & Au, 2014; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).

Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) first introduced the CRT framework to the study of education from legal studies where it originated (Bell, 1980; Crenshaw, 1991; Delgado, 1989). The CRT framework has thereafter been applied in examining White supremacy and racism as they pertain to educational policies, programs, and practices, and impact on the learning opportunities, experiences, and outcomes of individuals from minoritized and marginalized groups in K-16 education settings (Annamma et al., 2013; Brayboy, 2005; Gillborn et al., 2018; Ledesma & Calderón, 2015; Milner, 2013; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001; Yosso, 2005).

Delgado and Stefancic (2017) offer a set of essential tenets of CRT, two of which are in particular relevant to this chapter: counternarrative and intersectionality. Counternarrative, or counterstorytelling, empowers people of color to challenge the dominant, White-centric perspectives and majoritarian interpretations of issues and events with their own voices and stories (Delgado, 1989; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). This notion of counterstorytelling is important for minority educators and scholars to disrupt the White-dominant academic spaces and ways of knowing by elaborating their struggles and complex identities that are often silenced and marginalized. Intersectionality, as explained in depth below, refers to the ways in which racism intersects with other forms of structural oppression and discrimination, such as sexism, homophobia, and classism (Crenshaw, 1991). This orientation compels me to ask how my intersected experiences of race, nationality, gender, and language have shaped my position and informed my practices as a minority educator in foreign cultural and institutional contexts.

Intersectionality

Intersectionality contends that discrimination and marginalization based on socially and culturally constructed categories, such as race, ethnicity, language, social class, sexual orientation, gender, and nationality, do not operate in isolation. Instead, these forms of oppression intersect with one another to collectively constitute systems of prejudice, stereotype, suppression, and exclusion that render the lives of certain individuals and groups subordinated across different social and institutional contexts, such as women living in poverty and LGBTQ people of color (Collins & Bilge, 2016; Crenshaw, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 1998). While the intersectionality framework was originally created to conceptualize the lives of Black women, it has been applied to examine the racialized and gendered experiences of other minoritized and marginalized groups, including male of color, and the intersected systems of oppression they face (Griffin et al., 2014). The intersection of my nation of origin/citizenship, race, and non-native English-speaking status contextualizes how I negotiate my identities and how I am perceived as a minority educator and researcher in a PWI in the U.S.: while I am an insider of the academia in the sense of having earned graduate degrees and becoming a college professor, my foreign origin, non-White presence, and non-native English accent inevitably signal me as an outsider to the dominant U.S. society as a “forever foreigner” (Tuan, 1998). Intersectionality is thus a helpful construct to analyze the overlapping function of racism, nativism, and xenophobia that collectively affect my experiences as a minority educator of color in a foreign country and in the predominantly White and English-dominant culture of the U.S. universities (Stanley, 2006).

Asian Critical Theory

Iftikar and Museus (2018), building on the CRT scholarship, propose an AsianCrit framework with seven interrelated tenets:

  • Asianization as a result of White supremacy and racialization that positions Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, yellow perils, model and deviant minorities, emasculated men, and hypersexualized women;

  • Transnational contexts that situate Asian American experiences affected by racism and White supremacy within broader socio-economic and -political structures at the global level;

  • (Re)constructive history aims to foreground Asian American voices in the process of reconstructing historical narratives in the United States;

  • Strategic (anti)essentialism reiterates the argument that race is socially constructed and challenges the ways in which Asian Americans are essentialized as a monolithic group with their inter- and intra-group diversities being reduced into a singular set of racialized characteristics;

  • Intersectionality examines the intersecting forms of oppression that shape the Asian American experiences and identities;

  • Story, theory, and praxis highlight the lived experiences and experiential knowledge of Asian Americans as alternative epistemological perspectives to the dominant, White narratives that can inform the development of transformative theories and praxis;

  • Commitment to social justice aims to end all forms of oppressions, exploitation, and dehumanization.

Similar to the original CRT and derived frameworks, such as LatCrit (Solorzano & Yosso, 2001) and DisCrit (Annamma et al., 2013), AsianCrit bears a “methodological nationalism” standpoint (Shahjahan & Kezar, 2013) that is primarily situated within the U.S. context and centers on the lives and oppression of Asian Americans. As such, much AsianCrit scholarship falls short of examining the complex experiences of foreign-born immigrants/non-U.S. citizens who are (and perceived as) of Asian descent and subject to the many stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination resulting from the ways in which Asian Americans are racialized in the United States (Lee, 2009). Nor does this framework fully take account of the exclusion and alienation based on markers that are unique and perhaps more salient to their identities, such as language, immigration status, and religion.

Iftikar and Museus (2018) recognized the limitations of the AsianCrit framework in attending to the impact of language and the differences between Asian Americans born and raised in the U.S. and recent international Asian immigrants. A few studies have also problematized the U.S.-centric orientation of the CRT scholarship and started applying the CRT framework in analyzing racialization and racism in global histories and transnational contexts (Busey & Coleman-King, 2020; Yao et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2019). Yet our understandings of non-U.S.-domestic minority teachers’ lives and trajectories in a foreign cultural, linguistic, and educational context remain limited. Therefore, I shared in this chapter my experiences as an Asian, non-native-English-speaking, minority educator in a PWI setting in a foreign (the U.S.) culture with the hope of advancing the conversation and pushing the CRT and AsianCrit frameworks to be more inclusive and equitable.

Methodology

This chapter is a critical autoethnography (Chang, 2008) that primarily draws from my reflective narratives and lived experiences. Autoethnography is both a qualitative research method through which researchers collect and analyze their autobiographical data and the product this process creates (Hughes & Pennington, 2017). Similar to other qualitative inquiries, autoethnography focuses on the experiences and perspectives of the participants, i.e., the researchers themselves, so that meanings are constructed out of the researchers’ lived experiences and presented from their emic point of view (Chang, 2008). The ethnographic orientation of autoethnography allows researchers to situate their personal experiences within the cultural communities and practices of which they are members and to illuminate various aspects of a culture through embodied and affective narratives (Ellis et al., 2010). Critical autoethnography works well with the CRT framework as they both empower me to critically reflect on and convey my lived experiences and intersectional identities in the form of counternarratives (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) as a minority educator negotiating foreign cultural and institutional contexts. As such, I hope to provide an account that not only has meanings for my own reflection and growth but also challenges the pervasive White-centric norms and narratives ingrained in the U.S. cultural and academic spaces.

I followed the conventions of autoethnographic research by collecting written narratives as the primary data sources (Chang, 2008; Ellis et al., 2010). The narratives were drawn from an ongoing, reflective journal I have been writing since 2017, with the purposes of recording critical incidents at work that were of significance to my practices and identities as a teacher educator, as well as my emotions and reflections in making sense of these events. Additional reflective writing was created for the purpose of this research when I reviewed my journal in preparing for this chapter. I also added explanatory notes and memos to some of the original observations and interpretations in the process of re-reading and reflecting. This activity added an initial analytic layer to my documented personal experiences and narratives (Ellis et al., 2010).

I used an inductive, iterative approach to coding the data and building meanings from the narratives across time and incidents, adopting the techniques of qualitative data analysis (Miles et al., 2019). When reading my writings, I paid attention to incidents that had shaped my experiential understandings (Delgado, 1989) of race, ethnicity, language, and gender in the U.S. and the intersectional systems of oppression that positioned me as a minority teacher in a foreign country/culture and a PWI context. Open codes were created and constantly refined and later clustered under three emerging categories (Miles et al., 2019): teaching, research, and service. Categorizing data in this way prompted me to see the multifaceted impact of the “minority” status on my practices and identities as a teacher educator and researcher as I navigated the dominant academic and institutional spaces, leading to common themes across categories (Chang, 2008; Miles et al., 2019).

The validity of autoethnographic accounts is established by illuminating how others might experience similar personal and cultural experiences. That is, relating the self to others and gaining cultural meanings out of personal understandings, which is the ethnographic nature of autoethnography (Chang, 2008; Ellis et al., 2010). Ladson-Billings (2014) also cautions against writing about personal stories that are merely “vent or rant or be an exhibitionist regarding one’s own racial struggle.” Instead, Ladson-Billings argues that principled arguments should be made in order to “advance larger concerns or help us understand how law or policy is operating” (2014, p. 42). Therefore, I strove to situate my personal narratives and unique experiences within the CRT-informed literature about the challenges and struggles of minority and international educators throughout my data analysis and presentation of findings (Ellis et al., 2010).

Findings and Discussion

I this section, I presented findings around the three areas identified from the inductive analysis and most relevant to my work as a university faculty member, teaching, research, and service, with a focus on the first. I explored the tensions arising from me being a minority, multicultural teacher educator and researcher practicing within a foreign and PWI context. I am simultaneously invisible and highly visible, though often for different reasons and under different circumstances: in a national context where education is locally grounded, my non-citizen status and most of my non-U.S. experiences are not valued as legitimate sources of knowledge unless when conversation about cultural diversity is evoked or when an “international” perspective is requested, which then makes my presence super visible. In a PWI in the U.S. South where the White bodies and White ways of knowing are the norms, my mere presence as a minority/international other and my non-White pedagogy are constantly scrutinized and even questioned by my colleagues and students, despite my expertise and qualifications as an educator and researcher. In addition, the majority of the (White) faculty members either receive at least one degree from or spend decades teaching in the university. This institutional context adds yet another layer of foreignness that positions me as a “minority” outsider who is new to the institution as a junior, non-tenured faculty member of color. While nobody ever comes out declaring that this is a White territory, it soon becomes clear that I am, as one White senior colleague once told me, the “foster child” of the family, who allows me to temporarily enter their space, the White space.

Teaching

The first task I was charged as a new faculty member was to develop and teach an undergraduate course in cultural diversity and education, which was my research area and was something I was very passionate about. This course was needed for accreditation purposes per the diversity requirements of the accrediting agency and would be a required course for all teacher education major students. Therefore, my background in multicultural education became visible to my colleagues and valuable to fulfill this task. Meanwhile, this expectation also constituted a particular kind of recognition of my expertise that simultaneously placed specific limits on the kind of work and identity options available to me. I was given detailed instructions on what to be included in the curriculum and what the department considered the most relevant topics to be taught. I listened carefully and passionately added curricular and pedagogical ideas I thought were important to the state histories and local contexts. I remember negotiating with my senior colleagues and administrators on including challenging topics and counternarratives, such as slavery and racist legacy of the South, a local celebrity and his family’s anti-LGBTQ comments, environmental and health equity, and the ongoing refugee and immigration crises. I eventually learned to keep silent in many occasions after these ideas and my non-White ways of knowing were repeatedly interrupted or even dismissed and after being told how high the stakes were for this course. In other words, while my qualifications as a diversity scholar, i.e., a Ph.D. in multicultural education, was generally recognized, my embodied professional knowledge was rendered illegitimate and irrelevant in this specific context (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). Instead, I was asked to observe a colleague’s classroom that supposedly showcased the desired ways of teaching and classroom management that to me were reproducing and reinforcing the dominant curricular narratives (Brown & Au, 2014) and power hierarchy between teachers and students. As a non-citizen, pre-tenure junior faculty member new to the institution, I had no choice but to comply with and reinforce the departmental and institutional expectations that were oppressing and punitive in nature. However, rather than enforcing institutional norms and majoritarian policies and succumbing to the dominant culture of teaching, I managed to integrate social justice issues in my teaching and invited guest speakers and community members knowledgeable about local histories. I also encouraged students to voice their interests and contribute to class policies, assignments, and activities as counternarratives (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) so that they could feel that they legitimately owned and took responsibility for their learning. As such, I actively carved space for powerful yet subtle resistance, or “wiggle room”—tailoring practice within the parameters of the local circumstances (Erickson, 2014)—so that I could keep true to my pedagogical beliefs and enrich student learning without overtly defying university policies.

In addition to this multicultural education course, I designed all my courses as vehicles through which students were prompted to see the relevance and significance of cultural diversity, social justice, and (in)equity in education and educational research. I consciously embedded in my teaching multicultural experiences, marginalized and oppressed perspectives, and counternarratives, which students might not otherwise be invited to think had the courses been taught by members of the dominant group. I adopted a pedagogy I called teaching with and for multiple perspectives that not only incorporated different viewpoints in teaching materials and activities but also empowered students with diverse backgrounds to share their points of view in an equitable and empowering learning environment (Gay, 2013). I engaged students to read multicultural authors and analyze research featuring marginalized groups so that they developed understandings of schooling opportunities and outcomes from a variety of standpoints (Clarke & Whitney, 2009; Marcus & Stoddard, 2009). I used my own lived experiences as an entry point to introduce issues related to immigration, linguistic diversity, and the internationalization of higher education and invited students to share their own experiential knowledge and community cultural wealth (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002; Yosso, 2005). Students learned to listen to one another’s opinions, debate with evidence and respect, and deliberate for solutions in a civic manner (Hess & McAvoy, 2014). The active participation and collaboration allowed my students to develop not only the cognitive ability to interpret issues and concepts from multiple points of view but also an empathic faculty to relate to and appreciate diverse experiences, fostering the much-needed cross-cultural competencies in a multicultural society and global world (Banks, 2017). While I was able to push the curricular and pedagogical boundaries and challenge the institutional “norm” through my praxis, I often received student comments, via both informal channels and official end-of-course evaluation, suggesting that some of the required readings and activities were “not relevant” or “biased” because they exposed White privilege and racial oppression.

As a minority teacher, I have to endure constant gaze from colleagues and students and make the challenging decisions associated with how to present myself in the classroom. That is, do I teach as an authoritative instructor that is closer to the dominant image of college professor or teach in ways that are built on authentic relationships with students that would break the power hierarchy in classroom while supporting student learning? Would the second choice compromise my authority and place me in a position at odds with my colleagues? This feeling of estrangement escalates as my English accent is constantly judged, both explicitly and implicitly, by my colleagues and students. Being perceived as a foreigner and non-native-English speaker, my authority as a professor has already been questioned by some students. In my undergraduate class, some students were evidently surprised to see an Asian man teaching an education course in the U.S. South. During office hours, I was frequently asked “Where are you from?” Coming across this question so many times, I knew exactly what they meant and what answer they expected to hear. “Seattle,” I would say, quickly adding “I received my Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle.” “But where are you originally from?” was often the next question, which was a constant reminder of me being perceived as a “forever foreigner” (Tuan, 1998) whose legitimacy and legality of presence, intersecting with my ethnic and linguistic identities, required frequent interrogation in the White dominant professional and institutional spaces (Museus & Iftikar, 2014; Yoon, 2019). Evidently, I am required to explicitly define “what I am” and how I stand with regard to immigration or citizenship status as if my degree and experiences alone are insufficient to establish my credibility as a college professor.

Research and Service

In many U.S. universities, conducting research and publishing research works are critical to faculty members’ promotion and tenure consideration. While the “publish or perish” pressure in the teaching-focused institution where I work is not as strong as in research universities, there is an unambiguous emphasis on research projects leading to external funding, which shapes the kind of research projects faculty members are expected to pitch for (Belgrave et al., 2019). As a multicultural educator, I center my research on issues surrounding power relationships in knowledge construction that challenges the established paradigms of knowing (Banks, 1993). My research also has a strong focus on equity and social justice, which requires me to spend time with my participants in the communities, building trusting relationship with them so that they feel safe to share with me their experiences. This is important for me as a social justice-oriented qualitative researcher (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). I also carry out my work in close collaboration with educators at the ground level and integrate my research with practitioner knowledge through partnership with schools and school districts. The deep participant engagement and investment in the communities come at a price as it takes longer to produce research outputs, which is at odds with the institutional expectations on the number of grants and publications valuable for tenure considerations.

While I do not necessarily share the same experiences as Asian Americans, the model minority myth (Lee, 2009; Ng et al., 2007) can work to my advantage by positioning me as someone with academic excellence and as a high-achieving researcher among my colleagues. However, my Asian presence in the school was often unexpected, if not suspicious, in a (White) place where virtually nobody looked like me (Museus & Iftikar, 2014; Tuan, 1998). When I was conducting research in local schools, I would be introduced by my White female colleagues to the school leaders, teachers, and staff. Even weeks into the project, I would still be questioned “How can I help you?” by random school staff when I was walking in the hallway or waiting for my informants in a classroom. I was also often asked by students if I was the father of one of the students, who was Japanese American and the only student of Asian descent in that rural school. Yoon (2019) characterized similar haunting experiences when she was conducting research in the field as an Asian American woman. This incidence of “being the only one” and seeing “nobody like me” in the classroom, in the research site, and in university meetings has been the norm for me most of the time.

Minority faculty members in higher education are often called upon to carry heavy service loads (Guillaume & Apodaca, 2022; Martinez & Welton, 2017). They also feel a need to mentor minority students who have to go through similar challenges in the academia (Acevedo-Gil & Madrigal-Garcia, 2018; Griffin et al., 2014). I was placed, within the first month into the job, on the diversity committee of the department that was chaired by a White female colleague. I again became highly visible and Asianized (Iftikar & Museus, 2018) and my presence seemed desirable and even essential whenever there was a need for “diversity,” such as a culturally responsive teaching workshop for teacher candidates or diversity seminar for college instructors. My fellow White colleagues would turn to me and expect me to speak as a “representative” of the “minority” or “international” community. I have also been asked to serve on many other committees in order to be shown as living evidence of how diverse the faculty is, often for recruiting and marketing purposes, both of which are of prime interests to the school (Bell, 1980). I am frequently sought by racial minority and female students who are less familiar with the conventions of academia and bring with them less, quoting one of my graduate students, “cultural capital” (Yosso, 2005). I feel a sense of responsibility to mentor these students who similarly find it challenging to see someone who look like them and share their struggles in the White dominant institutional space.

Epilogue

When I was preparing for the first draft of this chapter in June 2020, I attended an event at my institution that aimed to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion amid the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and in response to the outrage invoked by two faculty members’ racist posts found in social media within a week. University leaders gathered together with students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members to reaffirm the institution’s commitment to embracing diversity, deemed as “one of the university’s core values.” The event started and ended with ceremonies that were associated with one particular religion to which I did not subscribe. Everyone was invited to stand up and participate. I was, once again, reminded that I was the foster child who had yet to be part of the family.

I share my journey and reflections in this chapter as I continue to work as a pre-tenured, minority educator in foreign national, cultural, and institutional contexts. While my experiences are similar to what scholars called “perpetual foreigner” facing many Asian Americans (Ng et al., 2007; Tuan, 1998), my perspectives are unique to my positionality as a foreign-born, English-learning, immigrant educator who had to navigate the majority-turned-minority status in addition to the racialized Asian American label. While the AsianCrit framework recognizes the transnational experiences and memories of Asian Americans due to immigration and colonial histories (Iftikar & Museus, 2018; Yoon, 2019), expanding the framework is necessary given the increasing presence of international minority teachers in K-16 education settings and the internationalization of higher education around the world (Dolby & Rahman, 2017; Dunn, 2011). An expanded framework that attends to the transnational trajectories and intersectional identities of educators within and across divergent contexts will add the needed complexity to the CRT scholarship and help advance the CRT-informed praxis in a global world (Busey & Coleman-King, 2020; Ledesma & Calderón, 2015).

Minority teachers contribute to the diversity at schools and serve as role models for minority students (Jayusi & Bekerman, 2019). In an era of globalization and transnational migration (Banks, 2017), it is an imperative to pay greater attention and respond to the struggles of minority teachers living and practicing in foreign cultures. While minority educators are often expected to assimilate to the majority cultural and educational settings, transformative policy changes at the institutional level need to be made to structurally include them. It is also important for minority teachers from all spectrum of experiences and contexts to engage in critical studies that collectively add to the repertoire of counter narratives. I hope that sharing my stories can help other international minority teachers feel empowered to claim their voices and to fight towards more diverse, inclusive, and socially just spaces in educational institutions through transformative and engaged praxis.

Findings of this chapter call for more inclusive Critical Race Theory (CRT) and AsianCrit frameworks to recognize the unique perspectives and lived experiences of international minority educators. An expanded framework that attends to the transnational trajectories and intersectional identities of educators within and across divergent contexts will add the needed complexity to the CRT scholarship and help advance the CRT-informed praxis in a global world. I hope this chapter will serve as an empowering invitation for international minority scholars to contribute to the collective counter narratives and to transform education towards a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable space through transformative scholarship and engaged praxis.