Race Is...Race Isn't

Critical Race Theory And Qualitative Studies In Education

Laurence Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429983139
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Discriminazione e rapporti razziali

The field of critical race theory has gotten increasingly more attention as an emerging perspective on race, the law, and policy. Critical race theory examines the social construction of the law, administrative policy, electoral politics, and political discourse in the U.S. Race Is ? Race Isn't presents a group of qualitative research studies, literature reviews, and commentaries that collectively articulate critical race theory in secondary and post-secondary educational settings. The editors explore links and conflicts with other areas of difference, including language, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, with the goal of opening a dialogue about how critical race theory can be incorporated into education research methodologies.

1
Just What Is Critical Race Theory, and What’s It Doing in a Nice Field Like Education?

GLORIA LADSON-BILLINGS

Almost five years ago a colleague and I began a collaboration in which we grappled with the legal scholarship known as “critical race theory” (Delgado, cited in Monaghan, 1993). So tentative were we about this line of inquiry that we proceeded with extreme caution. We were both untenured and relatively new to our institution. We were unsure of how this new line of inquiry would be received both within our university and throughout the educational research/ scholarly community. Our initial step was to hold a colloquium in our department. We were pleasantly surprised to meet with a room filled with colleagues and graduate students who seemed eager to hear our ideas and help us in these new theoretical and conceptual formulations.

That initial meeting led to many revisions and iterations. We presented versions of the paper and the ideas surrounding it at conferences and professional meetings. Outside the supportive confines of our own institution, we were met with not only the expected intellectual challenges but also outright hostility. Why were we focusing only on race? What about gender? Why not class? Are you abandoning multicultural perspectives? By the fall of 1995 our much discussed paper was published (Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995). We have held our collective intellectual breaths for almost a year because, despite the proliferation of critical race scholarship in legal studies, we have seen scant evidence that this work has made any impact on the educational research/ scholarly community. Thus, seeing critical race theory (CRT) as a theme in an educational journal represents our first opportunity to “exhale.”

Race Still Matters

It had been a good day. My talk as a part of the “Distinguished Lecture” Series at a major research university had gone well. The audience was receptive, the questions were challenging, yet respectful. My colleagues were exceptional hosts. I spent the day sharing ideas and exchanging views on various phases of their work and my own. There had even been the not so subtle hint of a job offer. The warm, almost tropical climate of this university stood in stark contrast to the overly long, brutal winters of my own institution. But it also had been a tiring day—all that smiling, listening with rapt interest to everyone’s research, recalling minute details of my own, trying to be witty and simultaneously serious had taken its toll. I could not wait to get back to the hotel to relax for a few hours before dinner.

One of the nice perks that comes with these lecture “gigs” is a decent hotel. This one was no exception. My accommodations were on the hotel’s VIP floor—equipped with special elevator access key and private lounge on the top floor overlooking the city. As I stepped off of the elevator I decided to go into the VIP lounge, read the newspaper, and have a drink. I arrived early, just before the happy hour, and no one else was in the lounge. I took a seat on one of the couches and began catching up on the day’s news. Shortly after I sat down comfortably with my newspaper, a White man peeked his head into the lounge, looked at me sitting there in my best (and conservative) “dress for success” outfit—high heels and all—and with a pronounced Southern accent asked, “What time are y’all gonna be servin’?”

I tell this story both because storytelling is a part of critical race theory and because this particular story underscores an important point within the critical race theoretical paradigm—race still matters (West, 1992). Despite the scientific refutation of race as a legitimate biological concept and attempts to marginalize race in much of the public (political) discourse, race continues to be a powerful social construct and signifier:

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. (Morrison, 1992, p. 63)

I am intrigued by the many faces and permutations race has assumed in contemporary society. Our understanding of race has moved beyond the biogenetic categories and notions of phenotype. Our “advanced ideas” about race include the racialization of multiple cultural forms. Sociologist Sharon Lee (1993) suggests that “questions of race have been included in all U.S. population censuses since the first one in 1790” (p. 86). Although racial categories in the U.S. census have fluctuated over time, two categories have remained stable—Black and White. And although the creation of the category does not reveal what constitutes membership within it, it does create for us a sense of polar opposites that posits a cultural ranking designed to tell us who is White or, perhaps more pointedly, who is not White!

But determining who is and is not White is not merely a project of individual construction and/or biological designation. For example, in early census data citizens of Mexican descent were considered White. Over time, political, economic, social, and cultural shifts have forced Mexican Americans out of the White category. Conversely, Haney Lopez (1995) pointed out that some groups came to the United States and brought suit in the courts to be declared White. Omi and Winant (1994) argued that the polar notions of race as either an ideological construct or an objective condition both have shortcomings. Thinking of race strictly as an ideological concept denies the reality of a racialized society and its impact on people in their everyday lives. On the other hand, thinking of race solely as an objective condition denies the problematic aspects of race—how to decide who fits into which racial classifications.

Our notions of race (and its use) are so complex that even when it fails to “make sense” we continue to employ and deploy it. I want to argue that our conceptions of race, even in a postmodern and / or postcolonial world are more embedded and fixed than in a previous age. However, this embeddedness or “fixedness” has required new language and constructions of race so that denotations are submerged and hidden in ways that are offensive without identification. Thus, we develop notions of “conceptual whiteness” and “conceptual blackness” (King, 1995) that both do and do not map neatly on to biogenetic or cultural allegiances. “School achievement,” “middle classness,” “maleness,” “beauty,” “intelligence,” “science” become normative categories of whiteness, whereas “gangs,” “welfare recipients,” “basketball players,” “the underclass” become the marginalized and delegitimated categories of blackness.

The creation of these conceptual categories is not designed to reify a binary but rather to suggest how in a racialized society where whiteness is positioned as normative everyone is ranked and categorized in relation to these points of opposition. These categories fundamentally sculpt the extant terrain of possibilities even when other possibilities exist. And, although there is a fixedness to the notion of these categories, the ways in which they actually operate are fluid and shifting. For example, as an African American female academic, I can be and am sometimes positioned as conceptually White in relation to, perhaps, a Latino, Spanish-speaking gardener. In that instance, my class and social position override my racial identification and for that moment I become “White.”

The significance of race need not be debated at length in this chapter. But as Toni Morrison argues, race is always already present in every social configuring of our lives. Roediger (1991, p. 3) asserts, “Even in an all-white town, race was never absent.” However, more significant/problematic than the omnipresence of race is the notion that “whites reach the conclusion that their whiteness is meaningful” (Roediger, p. 6). It is because of the meaning and value imputed to whiteness that CRT becomes an important intellectual and social tool for deconstruction, reconstruction, and construction—deconstruction of oppressive structures and discourses, reconstruction of human agency, and construction of equitable and socially just relations of power. In this chapter I am attempting to speak to innovative theoretical ways for framing discussions about social justice and democracy and the role of education in reproducing or interrupting current practices.

I will provide a brief synopsis of critical race theory¹ and discuss some of its prominent themes. Then I will discuss its importance to our understanding of the citizen in a democracy, and its relationship to education; and finally, I will offer some cautionary implications for further research and study. As is true of all texts, this one is incomplete (O’Neill, 1992). It is incomplete on the part of both the writer and the reader. However, given its incompleteness, I implore readers to grapple with how it might advance the debate on race and education.

What Is Critical Race Theory?

Most people in the United States first learned of critical race theory (CRT) when Lani Guinier, a University of Pennsylvania law professor, became a political casualty of the Clinton administration. Her legal writings were the focus of much scrutiny in the media. Unschooled and unsophisticated about the nature of legal academic writing, the media vilified Guinier and accused her of advocating “un-American” ideas. The primary focus of the scorn shown Guinier was her argument for proportional representation.

Guinier (1991) asserted that in electoral situations where particular racial groups were a clear (and persistent) minority, the only possibility for an equitable chance at social benefits and fair political representation might be for minority votes to count for more than their actual numbers. Guinier first proposed such a strategy as a solution for a post-apartheid South Africa. Because Whites are in the obvious minority, the only way for them to participate in the governing of a new South Africa would be to insure them some seats in the newly formed government.

Guinier made a similar argument in favor of African Americans in the United States. She saw this as a legal response to the ongoing lack of representation. Unfortunately, her political opponents attacked her scholarship as an affront to the American tradition of “one person, one vote.” The furor over Guinier’s work obscured the fact that as an academic, Guinier was expected to write “cutting-edge” scholarship that pushed theoretical boundaries (Guinier, 1994). Her work was not to be literally applied to legal practice. However, in the broad scope of critical race legal studies, Guinier may be seen as relatively moderate and nowhere near the radical that the press made her out to be. But, her “exposure” placed critical race theory and its proponents in the midst of the public discourse.

According to Delgado (1995, p. xiii), “Critical race theory sprang up in the mid-1970s with the early work of Derrick Bell (an African American) and Alan Freeman (a White), both of whom were deeply distressed over the slow pace of racial reform in the United States.” They argued that the traditional approaches of filing amicus briefs, protests, marching, and appealing to the moral sensibilities of decent citizens produced smaller and fewer gains than in previous times. Before long they were being joined by other legal scholars who shared their frustration with traditional civil rights strategies.

CRT is both an outgrowth of and a separate entity from an earlier legal movement called critical legal studies (CLS). Critical legal studies is a leftist legal movement that challenged the traditional legal scholarship that focused on doctrinal and policy analysis (Gordon, 1990) in favor of a form of law that spoke to the specificity of individuals and groups in social and cultural contexts. CLS scholars also challenged the notion that “the civil rights struggle represents a long, steady march toward social transformation” (Crenshaw, 1988, p. 1334).

According to Crenshaw (p. 1350), “Critical [legal] scholars have attempted to analyze legal ideology and discourse as a social artifact which operates to recreate and legitimate American society.” Scholars in the CLS movement decipher legal doctrine to expose both its internal and external inconsistencies and to reveal the ways that “legal ideology has helped create, support, and legitimate America’s present class structure” (Crenshaw, p. 1350). The contribution of CLS to legal discourse is in its analysis of legitimating structures in the society. Much of the CLS ideology emanates from the work of Gramsci (1971) and depends on the Gramscian notion of “hegemony” to describe the continued legitimacy of oppressive structures in American society. However, CLS fails to provide pragmatic strategies for material social transformation. Cornel West (1993, p. 196) asserts:

Critical legal theorists fundamentally question the dominant liberal paradigms prevalent and pervasive in American culture and society. This thorough questioning is not primarily a constructive attempt to put forward a conception of a new legal and social order. Rather, it is a pronounced disclosure of inconsistencies, incoherences, silences, and blindness of legal formalists, legal positivists, and legal realists in the liberal tradition. Critical legal studies is more a concerted attack and assault on the legitimacy and authority of pedagogical strategies in law school than a comprehensive announcement of what a credible and realizable new society and legal system would look like.

CLS scholars critiqued mainstream legal ideology for its portrayal of U.S. society as a meritocracy but failed to include racism in its critique. Thus, CRT became a logical outgrowth of the discontent of legal scholars of color.

CRT begins with the notion that racism is “normal, not aberrant, in American society” (Delgado, 1995, p. xiv) and because it is so enmeshed in the fabric of our social order, it appears both normal and natural to people in this culture. Indeed, Bell’s major premise in Faces at the bottom of the well (1992) is that racism is a permanent fixture of American life. Thus, the strategy becomes one of unmasking and exposing racism in its various permutations.

Second, CRT departs from mainstream legal scholarship by sometimes employing storytelling to “analyze the myths, presuppositions, and received wisdoms that make up the common culture about race and that invariably render blacks and other minorities one-down” (Delgado, 1995, p. xiv). According to Barnes (1990, pp. 1864–1865), “Critical race theorists … integrate their experiential knowledge (emphasis added), drawn from a shared history as ‘other’ with their ongoing struggles to transform a world deteriorating under the albatross of racial hegemony.” Thus, the experience of oppressions such as racism or sexism is important for developing a CRT analytical standpoint. To the extent that Whites (or in the case of sexism, men) experience forms of racial oppression, they may develop such a standpoint. For example, the historical figure John Brown suffered aspects of racism by aligning himself closely with the cause of African American liberation.² Contemporary examples of such identification may occur when White paren...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to Critical Race Theory in Educational Research and Praxis
• 1 Just What Is Critical Race Theory and What’s It Doing in a Nice Field Like Education?
• 2 Critical Race Theory and Praxis: Chicano(a)/Latino(a) and Navajo Struggles for Dignity, Educational Equity, and Social Justice
• 3 “¡Adelante!”: Toward Social Justice and Empowerment in Chicana/o Communities and Chicana/o Studies
• 4 Research Methods as a Situated Response: Toward a First Nations’ Methodology
• 5 Toward a Definition of a Latino Family Research Paradigm
• 6 Formations of Mexicananess: Trenzas de identidades múltiples (Growing Up Mexicana: Braids of Multiple Identities)
• 7 Race, Class, Gender, and Classroom Discourse
• 8 Critical Race Theory and Interest Convergence in the Desegregation of Higher Education
• 9 Negotiating Borders of Consciousness in the Pursuit of Education: Identity Politics and Gender of Second-Generation Korean American Women
• 10 Separate and Still Unequal: Legal Challenges to School Tracking and Ability Grouping in America’s Public Schools
• 11 Conclusion
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index