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Although founders of start-up ventures seem to hold similar views about ethical, social, and environmental principles as those in large firms, entrepreneurs tend to be focussed on their immediate stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, and investors. The purpose of this paper is to compare founders’ views – “what they say” – about sustainable business practices to their described business models – “what they do.”

An opinion survey of prospective business start-up founders, along with a content analysis of their business plans, is used to compare founders’ views – “what they say” – about sustainable business practices to their described business models – “what they do.”

Findings suggest that prospective business founders do value sustainable business practices. However, the content of their business models does not reflect their espoused importance of sustainability.

The main limitation of this study is that university students in a business-planning course were used as surrogates for actual start-up venture founders. That being the case, a small percentage (just under 5 percent) of the students indicated at the end of the course that they would like to continue pursuing the venture they helped develop a business plan for. To address this, future research should focus on actual founders of new ventures.

The content analysis of the business plans revealed a marked disconnect between the high-value founders reported to place on sustainability and the actual limited inclusion of sustainability in their business models. Therefore, more work needs to be done to educate, encourage, and coach start-up founders to raise their awareness of and desire to include sustainability as key parts of their business models.

To date, no studies have attempted to compare start-up venture founders’ views – “what they say” – about sustainable business practices to their described business models – “what they do.”

Discourses of racism have always circulated within US classrooms and, in the current sociopolitical climate, they move with a renewed sense of legitimacy, entitlement and violence. This paper aims to engage the consequences of these shifts for the ways that racism works in university-based classrooms and, more specifically, through the authors’ own teaching as White language and literacy educators.

This teacher narrative reconceptualizes moments of racialized violence in the courses, as constructed via circulating discourses of racism. The authors draw attention to the ways that we, as White educators, authorize and are complicit in this violence.

This paper explicates a praxis of questioning, developed through efforts to reflect on our complicity in and responsibility for racial violence in our classrooms. The authors offer this praxis of questioning to other White language and literacy teachers as a heuristic for sensemaking with regard to racism in classrooms.

The authors situate this paper within a broader struggle to engage themselves and other White educators in work for racial justice and invite others to take up this praxis of questioning as an initial step toward examining the authors’ complicity in – and authorization of – discourses of racism.