Asserts that developing personal and professional critical consciousness about racial, cultural, and ethnic diversity should be a major component of preservice teacher education; discusses how teacher education students avoid engaging with racial issues in education (silence, diversion, guilt, and benevolent liberalism); and suggests strategies to counter them (creating learning expectations of criticalness, modeling, providing opportunities to practice critical consciousness, and translating conceptual multicultural education into K-12 instructional possibilities). (SM)