Condition or Process? Researching Race in Education

By James D. Anderson

The question of why we need to think about how we research race demands a conceptualization of race that captures both its social construction and its temporal evolution. We need both an understanding of race and clarity about how we talk about it in our design and conduct of research, and in how we interpret and apply it in our findings. As a field, we can use research on race and racism in education to help construct social change.

Our purpose with this volume is to underscore the persistence of the discriminatory actions—processes—and the normalization of the use of race (and class)—conditions—to justify the existing and growing disparity between the quality of life and opportunity for middle-class and more affluent Whites and that for people of color and people of color who live in poverty. As editors of this volume, we wonder what more we could learn and understand about the process and condition of race if we dare to ask bold questions about race and racism and commit to methods and analyses that respect the experiences and knowledges of our research participants and partners.

• Language: English
• Publisher: American Educational Research Association
• Release date: Jan 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9780935302813

Book preview

Introduction

Is Race a Condition or a Process in Education?

A

DRIENNE

D. D

IXSON

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

G

LORIA

J. L

ADSON

-B

ILLINGS

University of Wisconsin, Madison

C

ECILIA

E. S

UAREZ

University of Florida

W

ILLIAM

T. T

RENT

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

J

AMES

D. A

NDERSON

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The question of why we need to think about how we research race demands a conceptualization of race that captures both its social construction and its temporal evolution. We need both an understanding of race and clarity about how we talk about it in our design and conduct of research, but especially in how we interpret and apply it in our findings. What inspires and excites us about this volume is that it extends and deepens our competencies as social and education scientists. It does so by explicitly setting forth theoretical and conceptual reasoning that holds the promise of strengthening our capacity for addressing the persistent and growing educational disparities that students of color and students of color who live in poverty face in U.S. P–20 education.

In 2016, Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States, departed from the White House after serving for eight years. Political pundits predicted that on the heels of Barack Obama’s presidency, the nation would elect its first woman president. Instead, the United States found itself in a moment that critical race theorists had predicted: one of nativist backlash accompanied by White nationalist rhetoric, protests, and violence. Those of us who study concepts of race, racism, and educational inequity find ourselves quite busy in the Trump era of U.S. history. Nearly every facet of Trump’s policy platform has implications for education and the potential to disproportionately impact people and communities of color and poor and working-class Whites. Notwithstanding the unpopularity of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her decision to scale down her department’s Office of Civil Rights, many other public infrastructure issues, such as affordable housing, health care, tax reform, funding to make higher education affordable and accessible, net neutrality, and immigration, will have a disproportionate impact on people of color. Thus, for scholars of race and education, it is not a matter of staying vigilant for the unintended racialized consequences of public policy; rather, it is a matter of analyzing the extent of, and crafting strategies to resist or dismantle, policies that appear to target people of color.

Race: A Condition or a Process?

The title of this book and the book’s content speak volumes in situating and framing the scholarship on race and education. The violent confrontations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2016, along with efforts to particularize the enforcement of immigration and repeal DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy), remind us of the centrality of the problem of race in the 21st century. It is striking to note the coexistence of surprise and outrage, on the one hand, and the absence of surprise or any expression of higher expectations, on the other hand, particularly among so many people of color and underserved communities. As a nation, and indeed as a research field, we can use scholarship in this area to help construct change that is socially just.

The preceding events also remind us that the processes that demand that we attend to issues of race as condition are very much alive, giving clear meaning to the conceptualization of race(ism) as process. The Reagan presidency, in the 1980s, ushered in an era of retrenchment that justified changes to, or the eradication of, legislation aimed at addressing racial discrimination across a number of domains, including education (Crenshaw, 1988). Dismantling funding for the study of segregated schooling, the Reagan administration directed federal funds to education research that focused on disadvantaged students and at-risk students, thereby ending over a dozen years of research focusing on the harms of segregated schooling. Thus, some 28 years after Brown, the energy and enforcement apparatus—processes—and personnel who were needed to continue to pursue the dismantling of the dual school systems under segregation were reduced, sending a reminder that the forces of discrimination—processes—had been given new expression, new voice, new energy, and new power.

We would see these forces also in the academy in the form of the National Association of Scholars; we would see them in the courts as some people began to appropriate the language of the Civil Rights Movement and cast themselves as victims of reverse discrimination. We saw the emergence of the new language of states’ rights framed as privileging choice, and the emergence of privileging the private over all things public, especially in education. Fast forward to 2005, where we would argue that the Reagan era, with help from the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama, set the stage for the wholesale remaking of public education in New Orleans—from a traditional school district with an elected school board directly running schools to a district entirely comprised of charter schools run directly by independent charter organizations. This outcome necessitates a practice of research that seeks to look beyond test score data as measures of success and effectiveness (Dixson, 2011). In the highly politicized and polarized context of education reform, not only in New Orleans but across the country, it is imperative for researchers to document and theorize on how the reforms impact students, teachers, and communities.

Similar in impact to the 1966 Coleman Report (Equality of Educational Opportunity), which generated a cottage industry exploring the question Does money matter? and renewed a policy embrace of the 1965 Moynihan Report (The Negro Family: The Case for National Action), the High School and Beyond Longitudinal Study (1981) initially gave support to the idea that Catholic and private schools performed better even with disadvantaged students. Ideas about the centrality of structure, order, discipline, and choice became popular policy interventions until the first follow-up data from High School and Beyond (1981) became available and researchers were able to conduct a true cohort analysis rather than the synthetic cohort analysis that undergirded the earlier findings. Almost none of the initial findings were replicated with the updated data. Nevertheless, some horses had left the gate, and the challenge to public schools had been mounted; thus, support increasingly went to school choice initiatives and the emerging charter school movement.

The preceding account of the nation’s fits and starts in addressing the challenges of macro-level social change resulting from growing demographic and economic change does not do justice to the rate, breadth, and scale of changes that enveloped and gave shape to those years. Our purpose is to underscore the persistence of the discriminatory actions—processes— and the normalization of the use of race (and class)—conditions—to justify the existing and growing disparity between the quality of life and opportunity for middle-class and more affluent Whites and that for people of color and people of color who live in poverty.

It is this persistent denial of humanity and citizenship rights to some Americans that compels us to offer this volume, which seeks to deepen and enhance our understanding of race, not for our intellectual satisfaction but to continue our search for effective solutions. One growing aspect of the change in well-being for a significant population segment is the social displacement of White, working-class men. Viewed in terms of Wilson’s discussion in When Work Disappears (1996), this phenomenon has clear potential to accentuate the treatment of race as a condition, and to give strong impetus to processes that discriminate in unjust ways.

One can argue that race, viewed as a condition, is used in shaping or influencing the probabilities of a range of outcomes: zip code, exposure to environmental harm, quality of schooling/education, quality of health care, and access to work, among others. Note, for example, how the 1964 Civil Rights Act has come to be interpreted as authorizing protection against the use or targeting of many people’s conditions in ways that disadvantage them: for example, age, pregnancy, national origin, race, ethnic background, religious belief, and sexual orientation.

Despite the legal status of these categorical conditions, we continue to see vivid examples of the direct and indirect effects of being an incumbent in one of them (see Douglas S. Massey’s Categorically Unequal, 2008). The emergence of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989)—a helpful lens for understanding how the confluence of social locations or being at the intersection of particular locations can alter one’s probabilities on any number of attainment measures—has helped us identify the processes that undergird the differentiations among intersections. For race, specifically, the persistent efforts on the part of racialized communities to prevent and limit the exploitation of race is broad-based and well documented. Nonetheless, these efforts have not thus far succeeded in preventing the normalization of racialization—the process—and its consequences—the condition. Note our expanded use of the term condition to indicate the condition of being discriminated against on the basis of race as a condition. This apparent normalization might be viewed as offering one or more examples of what Hansen and Gertsl (1967) have discussed as one of four meanings or uses of the term institution. In their view, racialization is a process institutionalized to address a societal issue/problem that is actually or potentially disruptive. It is like a set of rules, practices, and policies—processes—that are to be invoked or followed, depending on the stipulated racialization features for the targeted intersection.

We raise the issue of intersectionality not as a mere passing thought, but because we believe that future research must contextualize and take seriously the confluence of social locations, particularly those marginalizing social locations—gender, class, sexual identity, citizenship status, and disability, among others—that function as both processes and conditions in education and that work in tandem with race. Thus, if we are to make sense of race and education, our research questions, methods, and epistemologies must be sensitive to, and conscious of, the ways that the processes and the condition of race impact educational equity in terms of both opportunities and outcomes.

The emerging research in Black girlhood studies (e.g., Brown, 2009) and the research on Black girls’ literacies (Richardson, 2007) help to demonstrate that research that takes intersectionality seriously looks radically different in tone, texture, and execution from our traditional ways of knowing. Brown, while illuminating the experiences of Black girls in and out of school, demonstrates that traditional research practices are inadequate in efforts to engage Black adolescent girls. Similarly, Richardson calls upon researchers to think carefully about how we make sense of the linguistic practices of Black girls and how their use of language and ways of reading the world provide rich insights on corporate culture, Black cultural products like rap, and Black girls’ sexuality. Brown’s and Richardson’s research challenges us to move beyond the participantobserver paradigm, to become intentional about the very research spaces we endeavor to create for and with our participants, especially for Black girls and women. As editors of this volume, we wonder what more we can learn and understand about the process and condition of race if we dare to ask bold questions about race and racism and commit to methods and analyses that respect the experiences and knowledges of our research participants and partners.

Overview of the Volume

Although a great deal has transpired since work began on these chapters— for the nation as well as for the contributors and editors—this book is both timely and important. Indeed, it is imperative that we have a volume that can speak directly to the manifestations of race and provide clarity on how we should think about our research on race and educational equity. This book emerged out of generous support from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Research Conferences Program. The conference theme was A Condition or a Process? Researching Race in Education. In keeping with the requirements of the grant competition, we hosted 25 scholars who represented a range of disciplines and perspectives on race, racism, and racial equity in education. The conferees met on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

We organized the presentations into panels, each focusing on one of the following questions: (a) Is race a condition or a process? (b) How do we understand race in education? (c) How do we use or construct race in education research? (d) What is the central role that race plays in education and education research? (e) What counts as quality race research in education in terms of methods/methodology, theory, and analysis? We invited graduate students and junior faculty to attend from the University of Illinois system; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Eastern Illinois University; and Murray State University. Feedback from presenters and attendees was positive, and the theme itself generated a great deal of excitement and requests for follow-up. It was our hope to build on the conference in some way, whether through a subsequent conference, a panel at the AERA annual meeting, or some sort of collaborative project. This book is a reflection of that desire to build on the knowledge and excitement generated by and during the conference.

The chapters in this volume align with the conference theme and research questions. Although not all of the scholars who attended the conference contributed to the book, a majority of the contributors to the book presented their chapters at the conference. We framed the conference on the initial organizing question: Is race a condition or a process? All of our presentations implicitly addressed the second question: How do we understand race in education?

With our framing question—Is race a condition or a process?— we wanted scholars to answer whether racial disparities and differences in educational opportunities, access, and achievement reflect race as a condition (is race an ontological distinction for people of color?), or whether racial disparities emerge out of a set of circumstances or processes. With our fourth question—What is the central role that race plays in education and education research?—we wanted to examine the extent to which race impacts and/or informs education and education research. Scholars who responded to this question did so with divergent, but complementary, perspectives on race research in education. In answering the final question—What counts as quality race research in education in terms of methods/methodology, theory, and analysis?—we wanted to engage in a substantive discussion on the very nature of our research questions and the utility of the methods and methodologies we employ to answer those questions. In other words, do we ask research questions that capture what is happening with regard to racial equity or inequity in education, and do we have sufficient research tools to answer those questions? What must we do differently as researchers to engage in meaningful research on race and racial equity in education? Rather than offer a linear set of guidelines, we believe that these chapters push researchers to think about our commitments for truth and knowledge in an effort to think differently about what counts as quality research on race and racial equity.

Orientation to the Volume

The order of chapters in this volume follows very closely the presentation order of the conference. We invited scholars from a range of academic disciplines whose scholarship focused explicitly on race or on race and education in order to offer a diversity of perspectives. The scholars in education represented educational psychology, sociology of education, education policy, educational leadership, and teacher education. They also represented the full range of educational levels: elementary, secondary, and postsecondary. Two legal scholars (who did not submit their papers to this volume) and one historian who studies race and medicine also participated in the conference.

As a way of anchoring the volume, the first three chapters represent the conference’s disciplinary diversity and offer a perspective on research on race and education that touches on the key issues that inform education broadly. Specifically, Chapter 1, penned by educational psychologist A. Wade Boykin, examines how race impacts classroom dynamics and learning for African American students. Boykin offers a compelling review and discussion of the literature on the influence of pedagogical practices on classroom dynamics for African American students and how particular practices create a classroom atmosphere that in some instances has reversed achievement disparities. Chapter 2, by Kelly M. Harris, Brittni D. Jones, and William F. Tate IV, uses the state of Missouri as a case study to illustrate the relationship between race, space, and education from historical and geographical perspectives. Chapter 3, by historian Richard M. Mizelle, Jr., while seemingly out of place in this volume, illustrates from a different disciplinary perspective the points that Harris, Jones, and Tate raise relative to social environment, race, and place. Mizelle explicates the relationship between race and health care in the tragic story of 12-year-old Deamonte Driver, who in 2007 died essentially from a toothache. These three chapters offer multiple angles of vision on education research and race as we endeavor to better understand race, opportunity, and place.

The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 not only ushered in a new era of national politics but also raised our collective awareness of race and racism in U.S. society. In particular, terms like racial microaggression became popular as Obama was subjected to persistent subtle and overt racial insults, not only from members of Congress, governors, and local politicians but also from rank-and-file Americans who appeared to be angry that he had been elected to the nation’s highest office. In an attempt to minimize his Blackness, discussions about his race were related to his parentage and multiracial background. In this sense, as a nation, we have had a front row seat to understanding how race is constructed. In Chapter 4, Celia Rousseau Anderson examines the construction of race through the lens of multiraciality. Her examination is both personal and academic, as she shares her narrative of identifying as multiracial while examining the extant literature on multiraciality. Her chapter is far from a celebration of multiraciality as putting an end to race and racism; instead, she demonstrates the paradoxes of the multiracial lens that ostensibly applauds the hybridity and assumed border-crossing ability of multiracial persons while also imposing on them a hyper-awareness of their racial differences. With the browning of U.S public education, scholars who study race and education may want to be prepared to account for how racial microaggressions marginalize students, families, and educators of color. In addition, researchers may want to develop a more nuanced understanding of multiraciality and the limits of the postracial or anything but racism discourse. In Chapter 5, Mitchell James Chang examines how researchers on race and education often fail to see particular groups, specifically Asian Americans. Chang challenges not only the Model Minority myth but also the persistent and contradictory discourses about merit and work ethic attached to college admissions policies.

In Chapter 6, Elaine Richardson, an applied linguist and scholar of African American literacies, demonstrates through her work with Black adolescent girls the process of race through linguistic practices and stereotypes about Black women and girls. Her work also captures the ways that the young women understand how they are constructed discursively and how to challenge and disrupt racist discursive constructions of Black girls and women. The authors of Chapter 7, Zeus Leonardo and Jocyl Sacramento, use high school ethnic studies curricula as a case study to argue for examining school curricula as sites of decolonization. These two chapters challenge us to think beyond what are considered commonsense discourses on race research.

We conclude this volume by thinking about epistemology, positionality, and activism in race scholarship. The final three chapters push us to consider our research commitments in an effort to think differently about what counts as quality research. In Chapter 8, Daniel G. Solorzano offers his personal narrative on how he became a critical race theory (CRT) scholar, focusing on his interest in racial microaggressions as a way of identifying and analyzing racial inequity in education. Similarly, David O. Stovall, in Chapter 9, challenges race and education researchers to consider our research as creating fugitive spaces through our utilization of university resources for what he calls justice-centered efforts within communities of color, spaces which many of us who identify as CRT scholars see as sites for our research and scholar-activism. In Chapter 10, Cecilia E. Suarez and Ivory M. Berry recount their personal experiences as newly minted Ph.D.s being interviewed for their first academic positions. Their stories illustrate the first supposition of Harris, Jones, and Tate in Chapter 2: that in U.S. society, racism is endemic and deeply ingrained, legally, culturally, and psychologically. Suarez and Berry found that, despite their training and expertise, in the interview process they were often rendered as nothing more than representations of their racial groups rather than as scholars who could make intellectual contributions to a community of scholars.

Finally, Gloria J. Ladson-Billings’s Afterword pushes us to think about this project of race. That is, what are we looking for? What do we understand race to be? We must think carefully about those questions as education researchers and scholars in a time of intense national discourses about who belongs, what it means to be a nationalist or a globalist, and what it means, for that matter, to be a patriot.

The contributors to this book encourage us not to be blind to color and culture but rather to see and engage them in order to contribute to the full development of the child/student. The contributors encourage us to acquire more knowledge and insight that would enable us to better teach each student. In short, these authors seek to provide insights that would limit

•the inclination of educators to look at persisting differences in performance and not see the reasons for and patterns of those differences;

•the likelihood of educators’ looking at performance differences that widen over time—the longer children of color and their White counterparts are in school together, the more academically different they become—and seeing this as normal;

•the willingness of educators to see the performance of their schools and choose to use the racial, ethnic, and economic composition of a school as the justification for its performance—justifying and tolerating the consistently poor treatment of some of the children in their charge.

In this way, the authors in this volume move our understanding of race as condition and racism as process in ways that could enable us to follow this prescient prescription from W. E. B. Du Bois (1935, p. 328):

The proper education of any people includes sympathetic touch between teacher and pupil; knowledge on the part of the teacher, not simply of the individual taught, but of his surroundings and background, and the history of his class and group; such contact between pupils, and between teacher and pupil, on the basis of perfect social equality, as will increase this sympathy and knowledge; facilities for education in equipment and housing; and the promotion of such extracurricular activities as will tend to induct the child into life.

References

Brown, R. N. (2009). Black girlhood celebration: Toward a hip-hop feminist pedagogy. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Coleman, J. S. (1966). Equality of educational opportunity. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2007-04-27. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR06389.v3

Crenshaw, K. W. (1988). Race, reform and retrenchment: Transformation and legitimation in anti-discrimination law. Harvard Law Review, 101(7), 1331–1387.

Crenshaw, K. W. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and anti-racist policy. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.

Dixson, A. D. (2011). Whose choice? A critical race perspective on charter schools. In C. Johnson (Ed.), Neo-liberal deluge: Hurricane Katrina, late capitalism and the remaking of New Orleans (pp. 130–151). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935). Does the Negro need separate schools? Journal of Negro Education, 4(3), 328–335.

Frankel, M., Kohnke, L., Buonanno, D., & Tourangeau, R. (1981). High School and Beyond sample design report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.

Hansen, D. A., & Gertsl, J. E. (1967). On education: Sociological perspectives. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Moynihan, D. P. (1965). The Negro family: The case for national action. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor.

Richardson, E. (2007). She was workin like foreal: Critical literacy and discourse practices of African American females in the age of hip hop. Discourse & Society, 18(6), 789–809.

Wilson, W. J. (1996). When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York, NY: Random House.

Chapter 1

The Pursuit of Promising Educational Practices at the Crossroads of Race and Culture

A.W

ADE

B

OYKIN

Howard University

For several decades, educational policy makers, decision makers, and thought leaders have pushed to the forefront of discussion the critical importance of improving the quality of education in our society. Many initiatives, many answers, many quests, many urgent and clarion calls for change, and many efforts at school reform have been suggested and undertaken. Yet the results of these initiatives have failed to meet the expectations and goals of their advocates. In this chapter, we will consider the pursuits and panaceas attempted over the years and reflect on where we are today in the continuing quest to educate all of our youth to high levels of learning and achievement.

Even after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, court-ordered busing, the compensatory education movement, the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, efforts at community control of schools, the push for open classrooms, and the Back to Basics movement; even after declaring, in the influential and landmark book A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983, p. 9), that there was a rising tide of mediocrity in the American schooling process; even after the Effective Schools movement, the New American Schools initiative, the standards movement, and the comprehensive school reform movement; even after the call for No Child Left Behind and the pursuit of a Race to the Top; even as the jury is