Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) centers students lived experiences by validating their cultural backgrounds, leveraging community knowledge, and fostering critical consciousness. It insists that learners see themselves reflected in the curriculum and equips them to interrogate social injustices, exposing how “neutral” lessons often mask white supremacist assumptions.

Critical Race Deconstruction is a method that merges Critical Race Theory’s focus on how law and policy embed racial power with deconstructionism’s practice of unpacking hidden assumptions in language and texts. Critical Race Deconstruction (CRD) unpacks the hidden logics in texts and policies—revealing how everyday terms like “achievement,” “standards,” or “progress” serve as coded mechanisms to uphold racial hierarchies. By tracing these discourses back to Enlightenment–era racial taxonomies, CRD shows that essentialist education isn’t benign heritage but  white nationalist ethno-centric revival of pseudo-scientific, white-over-Black ideologies.

Together, CRP and CRD make clear that piecemeal reforms or “color-blind” approaches (as championed by Project 2025) merely perpetuate the same oppressive structures. What’s required is a transformative curriculum and instructional design that:

• Integrates students’ cultural knowledge as a core academic resource
• Teaches learners to deconstruct and rewrite inherited narratives
• Aligns assessments and standards with equity-driven, interdisciplinary inquiry
• Embeds anti-racist frameworks so every lesson actively counters white supremacy and essentialist doctrines

Only through this fusion of CRP’s affirming practices and CRD’s incisive critique can educators dismantle the reemergent Maga essentialist agenda and cultivate truly liberatory classrooms.