This paper discusses a study which examined the manifestation of racial epistemology in the teaching and learning of multicultural education in three university classrooms. In this research, ethnographic data were collected and interpreted to understand preservice teachers' divergent responses toward multicultural education classrooms. Based on the data, the paper suggests that responses to multicultural teacher education need to be understood in terms of preservice teachers' conceptions of their own cultural identity in which the self and others are situated in an oppositional relation, and that by not challenging preservice teachers' binary epistemological world, multicultural education is seen as education for minority students and has little impact on preservice teachers' beliefs, values, and attitudes. The implementation of multicultural teacher education needs to involve a reconstruction of preservice teachers' cultural identities in which relations with self and others are reconceptualized in a culturally diverse, and yet democratic, society. Contains a 55-item bibliography. (BT)