Critical Race Theory in Education

All God's Children Got a Song

Adrienne D. Dixson, Celia K. Rousseau Anderson, Jamel K. Donnor, Adrienne D. Dixson, Celia K. Rousseau Anderson, Jamel K. Donnor

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317487005
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Education General

Appropriate for both students curious about Critical Race Theory (CRT) and established scholars, Critical Race Theory in Education is a valuable guide to how this theoretical lens can help better understand and seek solutions to educational inequity. While CRT has been established as a vital theoretical framework for understanding the ways race-neutral policies and laws sustain and promote racial inequity, questions around how to engage and use CRT remain. This second edition of Critical Race Theory in Education evaluates the role of CRT in the field of higher education, answering important questions about how we should understand and account for racial disparities in our school systems. Parts I and II trace the roots of CRT from the legal scholarship in which it originated to the educational discourse in which it now resides. A much-anticipated Part III examines contemporary issues in racial discourse and offers all-important practical methods for adopting CRT in the classroom.

Part I

Critical Race Theory and Education in Context

1

Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education

Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate IV

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN TEACHERS COLLEGE RECORD, 97(1), FALL 1995, PP. 47–68

The presentation of truth in new forms provokes resistance, confounding those committed to accepted measures for determining the quality and validity of statements made and conclusions reached, and making it difficult for them to respond and adjudge what is acceptable.

—Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers, not by me.

—Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom

In 1991 social activist and education critic Jonathan Kozol delineated the great inequities that exist between the schooling experiences of white middle-class students and those of poor African-American and Latino students. And, while Kozol’s graphic descriptions may prompt some to question how it is possible that we allow these “savage inequalities,” this article suggests that these inequalities are a logical and predictable result of a racialized society in which discussions of race and racism continue to be muted and marginalized.¹

In this article we attempt to theorize race and use it as an analytic tool for understanding school inequity.² We begin with a set of propositions about race and property and their intersections. We situate our discussion in an explication of critical race theory and attempt to move beyond the boundaries of the educational research literature to include arguments and new perspectives from law and the social sciences. In doing so, we acknowledge and are indebted to a number of scholars whose work crosses disciplinary boundaries.³ We conclude by exploring the tensions between our conceptualization of a critical race theory in education and the educational reform movement identified as multicultural education.

Understanding Race and Property

Our discussion of social inequity in general, and school inequity in particular, is based on three central propositions:⁴

1. Race continues to be a significant factor in determining inequity in the United States.

2. U.S. society is based on property rights.

3. The intersection of race and property creates an analytic tool through which we can understand social (and, consequently, school) inequity.

In this section we expand on these propositions and provide supporting “meta-propositions” to make clear our line of reasoning and relevant application to educational or school settings.

Race as Factor in Inequity

The first proposition—that race continues to be a significant factor in determining inequity in the United States—is easily documented in the statistical and demographic data. Hacker’s look at educational and life chances such as high school dropout rates, suspension rates, and incarceration rates echoes earlier statistics of the Children’s Defense Fund.⁵ However, in what we now call the postmodern era, some scholars question the usefulness of race as a category. Omi and Winant argue that popular notions of race as either an ideological construct or an objective condition have epistemological limitations.⁶ Thinking of race strictly as an ideological construct denies the reality of a racialized society and its impact on “raced” people in their everyday lives. On the other hand, thinking of race solely as an objective condition denies the problematic aspects of race—how do we decide who fits into which racial classifications? How do we categorize racial mixtures? Indeed, the world of biology has found the concept of race virtually useless. Geneticist Cavalli-Sforza asserts that “human populations are sometimes known as ethnic groups, or ‘races.’… They are hard to define in a way that is both rigorous and useful because human beings group themselves in a bewildering array of sets, some of them overlapping, all of them in a state of flux.”⁷

Nonetheless, even when the concept of race fails to “make sense,” we continue to employ it. According to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison:

Race has become metaphorical—a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological “race” ever was.

Expensively kept, economically unsound, a spurious and useless political asset in election campaigns, racism is as healthy today as it was during the Enlightenment. It seems that it has a utility far beyond economy, beyond the sequestering of classes from one another, and has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before.⁸

Despite the problematic nature of race, we offer as a first meta-proposition that race, unlike gender and class, remains untheorized.⁹ Over the past few decades theoretical and epistemological considerations of gender have proliferated.¹⁰ Though the field continues to struggle for legitimacy in academe, interest in and publications about feminist theories abound. At the same time, Marxist and Neo-Marxist formulations about class continue to merit consideration as theoretical models for understanding social inequity.¹¹ We recognize the importance of both gender- and class-based analyses while at the same time pointing to their shortcomings vis-à-vis race. Roediger points out that “the main body of writing by White Marxists in the United States has both ‘naturalized’ whiteness and oversimplified race.”¹²

Omi and Winant have done significant work in providing a sociological explanation of race in the United States. They argue that the paradigms of race have been conflated with notions of ethnicity, class, and nation because

theories of race—of its meaning, its transformations, the significance of racial events—have never been a top priority in social science. In the U.S., although the “founding fathers” of American sociology… were explicitly concerned with the state of domestic race relations, racial theory remained one of the least developed fields of sociological inquiry.¹³

To mount a viable challenge to the dominant paradigm of ethnicity (i.e., we are all ethnic and, consequently, must assimilate and rise socially the same way European Americans have), Omi and Winant offer a racial formation theory that they define as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed and destroyed…. [It] is a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized.” Further, they link “racial formation to the evolution of hegemony, the way in which society is organized and ruled.” Their analysis suggests that “race is a matter of both social structure and cultural representation.”¹⁴

By arguing that race remains untheorized, we are not suggesting that other scholars have not looked carefully at race as a powerful tool for explaining social inequity, but that the intellectual salience of this theorizing has not been systematically employed in the analysis of educational inequality. Thus, like Omi and Winant, we are attempting to uncover or decipher the social-structural and cultural significance of race in education. Our work owes an intellectual debt to both Carter G. Woodson and W. E. B. Du Bois, who, although marginalized by the mainstream academic community, used race as a theoretical lens for assessing social inequity.¹⁵

Both Woodson and Du Bois presented cogent arguments for considering race as the central construct for understanding inequality. In many ways our work is an attempt to build on the foundation laid by these scholars.¹⁶ Briefly, Woodson, as far back as 1916, began to establish the legitimacy of race (and, in particular, African Americans) as a subject of scholarly inquiry.¹⁷ As founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and editor of its Journal of Negro History, Woodson revolutionized the thinking about African Americans from that of pathology and inferiority to multitextured analysis of the uniqueness of African Americans and their situation in the United States. His most notable publication, The Miseducation of the Negro, identified the school’s role in structuring inequality and demotivating African-American students:

The same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished everything worthwhile depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples.¹⁸

Du Bois, perhaps better known among mainstream scholars, profoundly impacted the thinking of many identified as “other” by naming a “double consciousness” felt by African Americans. According to Du Bois, the African American “everfeels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.”¹⁹

In a current biography of Du Bois, Lewis details the intellectual impact of this concept:

It was a revolutionary concept. It was not just revolutionary; the concept of the divided self was profoundly mystical, for Du Bois invested this double consciousness with a capacity to see incomparably further and deeper. The African American—seventh son after the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian—possessed the gift of “second sight in this American world,” an intuitive faculty (prelogical, in a sense) enabling him/her to see and say things about American society that possessed a heightened moral validity. Because he dwelt equally in the mind and heart of his oppressor as in his own beset psyche, the African American embraced a vision of the commonweal at its best.²⁰

As a prophetic foreshadowing of the centrality of race in U.S. society, Du Bois reminded us that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”²¹

The second meta-proposition that we use to support the proposition that race continues to be significant in explaining inequity in the United States is that class- and gender-based explanations are not powerful enough to explain all of the difference (or variance) in school experience and performance. Although both class and gender can and do intersect race, as stand-alone variables they do not explain all of the educational achievement differences apparent between whites and students of color. Indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that even when we hold constant for class, middle-class African-American students do not achieve at the same level as their white counterparts.²² Although Oakes reports that “in academic tracking, …poor and minority students are most likely to be placed at the lowest levels of the school’s sorting system,”²³ we are less clear as to which factor—race or class—is causal. Perhaps the larger question of the impact of race on social class is the more relevant one. Space limitations do not permit us to examine that question.

Issues of gender bias also figure in inequitable schooling.²⁴ Females receive less attention from teachers, are counseled away from or out of advanced mathematics and science courses, and although they receive better grades than their male counterparts, their grades do not translate into advantages in college admission and/or the workplace.²⁵

But class and gender, examined alone or together, do not account for the extraordinarily high rates of school dropout, suspension, expulsion, and failure among African-American and Latino males.²⁶ In the case of suspension, Majors and Billson argue that many African-American males are suspended or expelled from school for what they termed “non-contact violations”—wearing banned items of clothing such as hats and jackets, or wearing these items in an “unauthorized” manner such as backwards or inside out.²⁷

The point we strive to make with this meta-proposition is not that class and gender are insignificant, but rather, as West suggests, that “race matters,” and, as Smith insists, “blackness matters in more detailed ways.”²⁸

The Property Issue

Our second proposition, that U.S. society is based on property rights, is best explicated by examining legal scholarship and interpretations of rights. To develop this proposition it is important to situate it in the context of critical race theory. Monaghan reports that “critical race legal scholarship developed in the 1970s, in part because minority scholars thought they were being overlooked in critical legal studies, a better-known movement that examines the way law encodes cultural norms.”²⁹ However, Delgado argues that despite the diversity contained within the critical race movement, there are some shared features:

• an assumption that racism is not a series of isolated acts, but is endemic in American life, deeply ingrained legally, culturally, and even psychologically;

• a call for a reinterpretation of civil-rights law “in light of its ineffectuality, showing that laws to remedy racial injustices are often undermined before they can fulfill their promise”;

• a challenge to the “traditional claims of legal neutrality, objectivity, color-blindness, and meritocracy as camouflages for the self-interest of dominant groups in American society”;

• an insistence on subjectivity and the reformulation of legal doctrine to reflect the perspectives of those who have experienced and been victimized by racism firsthand;

• the use of stories or first-person accounts.³⁰

In our analysis we add another aspect to this cri...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword: The Evolving Role of Critical Race Theory in Educational Scholarship
• Introduction: Critical Race Theory and Education: Singing a “New” Song
• PART I: Critical Race Theory and Education in Context
• PART II: Key Writings on Critical Race Theory in Education
• PART III: Critical Race Theory at 20 Years
• Index