Critical Race Theory Matters

Education and Ideology

Margaret Zamudio, Christopher Russell, Francisco Rios, Jacquelyn L. Bridgeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136907685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Over the past decade, Critical Race Theory (CRT) scholars in education have produced a significant body of work theorizing the impact of race and racism in education. Critical Race Theory Matters provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of this influential movement, shining its keen light on specific issues within education. Through clear and accessible language, the authors synthesize scholarship in the field, highlight major themes and assumptions, and examine strategies of resistance and practices for challenging the existing inequalities in education. By linking theory to everyday practices in today's classroom, students will understand how CRT is relevant to a host of timely topics, from macro-policies such as Bilingual Education and Affirmative Action to micro-policies such as classroom management and curriculum. Moving beyond identifying problems into the realm of problem solving, Critical Race Theory Matters is a call to action to put into praxis a radical new vision of education in support of equality and social justice.

PART I
Critical Race Theory Concepts and Education

Over the last several years, critical race theory (CRT) in education has developed as a challenge to mainstream educational policies and practices. To move forward from theory to educational praxis, CRT adherents in education have applied the tools of CRT in new and creative ways within the field of education. The tools of CRT are called concepts. Concepts are components used to build theory. Recall the metaphor of a picture and frame we used to explain the assumptions of CRT. Assumptions frame a picture that CRT practitioners all agree include relevant details. A concept provides practitioners with a sharper focus. A practitioner examining racial inequality might focus on a particular set of details to better define the picture. CRT concepts capture the bundle of details that highlight a particular aspect of the picture we call racial inequality.

To better understand racial inequality, CRT has a tradition of interrogating or questioning the ideologies, narratives, institutions, and structures of society through a critical conceptual lens. CRT educators have borrowed from this tradition to focus their lens on racial inequality in education.

The Myth of Meritocracy: Critiquing Underlying Concepts

CRT educators have relied on CRT concepts to critique the notion of a meritocratic society as it pertains to schooling. Meritocracy assumes a level playing field where all individuals in society have an equal opportunity to succeed. Meritocracy also assumes that one’s work ethic, values, drive, and individual attributes such as aptitude and intelligence, determine success or failure. In a society where education is considered the great equalizer, the myth of meritocracy has more than just ideological connotations. If natural ability and hard work (i.e., merit) are the keys for success, then those who fail to achieve, it is believed, have only themselves, their families, or at best, a random fateful turn of luck to blame. Thus, despite the existing inequalities in society, it is believed that universal education in a free society provides every child with the equal opportunity to achieve his or her potential.

This celebration of an existing contradiction (the belief in the possibility of equality within a vastly unequal society) permeates the American psyche. In fact, the notion of meritocracy is a master narrative that guides our understanding about society in general. As Delgado points out, master narratives represent

…the bundle of presuppositions, received wisdoms, and shared understandings against a background of which legal and political discourse takes place. These matters are rarely focused on. They are eyeglasses we have worn a long time…we use them to scan and interpret the world and only rarely examine them for themselves. (1989, p. 2413)

Failure to critically challenge the lens with which we see the world makes the myth of meritocracy predominant in our understanding of the workings of social institutions.

CRT practitioners interrogate and contest the concept of meritocracy and reveal it as a myth that not only fails to provide equal opportunity but also contributes to racial inequality. By focusing on an individual’s efforts and talents, attention is diverted away from analyzing the thousands of decisions schools make that help some students succeed and push others toward failure. Critical race theorists in education scrutinize the narrative of meritocracy that provides justification and legitimacy to the ways schools are currently structured (i.e., the existing institutional arrangements) where students of color consistently fall to the bottom of the educational hierarchy.

The meritocracy narrative can be considered a foundational societal myth. Like the notion of an American Dream where anyone with the wherewithal to chase his/her desires in the land of opportunity can make it, meritocracy conjures up a society where individuals rise and fall solely on their merit. Created in opposition to British colonial rule, the American notion of opportunity, equality, and merit promised a society where anyone could rise above his/her station in life. However, this notion central to an identity of an emerging nation only applied to white, property-owning men. From the very beginning, then, equality has been celebrated within a broader context of concrete inequality.

Consider the Jim Crow (1880s–1950s) era when laws were explicitly being made to assure racial oppression. The Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1898), established a “separate but equal” standard that embraced the principle of equality. In this landmark ruling, racial segregation was deemed constitutional and consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment as long as separate facilities were equal. In the Plessy case, the facilities in question were passenger cars, but the ruling resulted in almost 60 more years of school segregation. Under these arrangements, those with merit were to rise beyond their station in life even though that process was to take place in a separate but equal world.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) overturned the separate but equal doctrine half a century after Plessy, noting that segregation was intended to maintain the dominance of whites. The opinion in that case used equality as the guiding principle to rule that separate was not equal. While American society embraced the myth of meritocracy even in the pre-civil rights era when discrimination was encoded in our laws, the myth took on a new vigor after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when discrimination in all public places was supposed to be officially banned.

In light of the victory of equality over discriminatory practices, the myth of meritocracy was rescued from the turbulence of a Civil Rights Movement determined to expose its contradictions. But did we really save this founding principle? The dominant voices in society answer in the affirmative. They point to the vast opportunities available to all regardless of class, creed, or color especially in a post-civil rights America. In their view, merit is indeed the primary vehicle to succeed in an egalitarian society. Most recently, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency has become the myth of meritocracy’s most concrete manifestation.

In the 21st century where state-sanctioned discrimination is relegated to the history books and dealt with during black, Latino, or Native American history months, the myth of meritocracy shines all the brighter. Indeed, society has come a long way from the days when white Americans turned pressure hoses on black protestors, or forced Indian children into boarding schools, or made it policy to limit the education of Latino children to primary school; just enough education to “keep the Mexican on his knees in an onion patch” (Takaki 1998, p. 156).

Today, most Americans abhor the blatant acts of racism that permeate so much of our history. The ordinary citizen grimaces at the conditions in schools in East St. Louis or San Antonio or New York as exposed by Jonathon Kozol’s (1991) Savage Inequalities. Some citizens even demand that more be done. In fact, more has been done and some gains have been made. But more than 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, African American, Native American, and Latino students continue to lag educationally behind their white counterparts on just about every measure of school achievement: from higher suspension rates, grade retention rates, and special education placements to lower scores on standardized tests, gift ed program placements, and graduation rates. Rather than questioning the validity of the principle of meritocracy in a structurally unequal society, traditional educational approaches focus on the individual student (and his or her race and its value system) to explain these failures.

The chapters in Part I of this volume challenge the notion of meritocracy as it takes on new life in the post-civil rights era. In doing so, CRT turns our attention back to the role of racialized structures of inequality to better understand not only the weaknesses and contradictions of abstract notions of equality, but their concrete impact on students of color. CRT both critiques existing concepts and provides alternative lenses for understanding racial inequality. Thus, the following chapters in Part I introduce the major CRT conceptual critiques and advance CRT specific concepts to deconstruct the notion of schools as meritocratic institutions. The first two chapters critique the concepts of “liberalism” and “color-blindness.” The third chapter develops the CRT concepts of “whiteness as property,” “interest convergence,” and, “intersectionality.”

Collectively, these chapters provide the intellectual framework for a CRT analysis on the various ways in which schools reproduce and legitimate inequality. This new framework in education also guides the movement in education directed at restructuring schools to more effectively address the needs of students of color.

CHAPTER 1
Critical Race Theory Critique of Liberalism

The critical race theory (CRT) critique of liberalism provides educators and students with a powerful tool to deconstruct the nature of society and its institutions. The concept of liberalism underlies the political and economic principles of modern capitalist societies. The term liberalism as we use it should not be confused with the conventional use of liberal as a political designation. Politically, both liberals and conservatives often support the principles of liberalism underlying modern capitalist democracies.

Liberalism equates the “rights of man” with individual political and property rights, as well as with the freedom to pursue one’s self-interest unrestrained or unfettered by government intervention. Liberalism is a product of the Enlightenment, and the battle cry for the overthrow of oppressive monarchies. Equality, freedom, individual rights, and meritocracy are some ideals often associated with liberalism. These ideals are firmly embedded in Western culture and society. The assumptions of liberalism permeate Western systems of knowledge and values as well as political, legal, economic, and educational policies. At face value, students may consider these ideals worthy, and some may even consider these ideals superior in structuring modern society.

In fact, CRT also embraces the goal of equality, freedom, and merit. However, CRT challenges the viability of achieving genuine equality, freedom, and merit in the absence of a critique of liberalism. The major critique of liberalism is that it constructs an image of society as fair and egalitarian where individuals rise and fall based on their own merits. Liberalism presents society as a meritocracy where individual actors compete on a level playing field. Liberalism sees inequality as a natural product of fair competition. Liberalism refuses to examine the structural causes of inequality (such as capitalism, racism, and patriarchy) that CRT scholars highlight. Liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights precludes any consideration of special protections under the law for minority groups. In fact, liberalism rejects any consideration of the structural rather than natural or individual causes of inequality because it might lead to the transformation of unequal power relations (Daniels 2008), a prospect feared by those in power. Ultimately, the liberal perspective fails to consider the multiple power relationships that give some individuals much greater advantage over others, and that allow some people to be freer than others.

From the very beginning, liberal societies were constructed along the status lines of class, race, gender, and citizenship. In America, blacks and indigenous people were denied even the most basic human rights. Women were relegated to second class status and denied the rights of citizenship. Birthrights, not human rights, protected only those privileged enough to be born white, landowning males. As a society, we have never practiced justice and liberty for all. Liberal societies use the slogans of equality to benefit an exclusive, privileged group. And while over the years liberal societies have extended legal and political rights to a greater number of people, they have never addressed the fundamental material inequality passed down through generations of modern capitalist development. From the very beginning, then, the ideal of equality in the abstract has been celebrated within a broader context of concrete inequality.

Liberal Education

The liberal notion that universal schooling provides equal educational opportunities forms the basis of an idealized meritocratic society. Critical race theorists in education examine the profound contradiction that exists between the promise of schooling as the great equalizer and the concrete reality of educational inequality. Sonia Nieto (2005), for example, called schools both the dark and the light of contemporary U.S. society. The light is the promise and potential of education to vastly expand the human potential of students while the dark represents the reality of systematic racially based educational inequalities. From our kindergarten classrooms to our university seminar rooms, CRT asserts that racial inequities determine the educational experiences of minority children and youth. These experiences translate into poorer schools, deficient teaching, lower achievement, and inadequate preparation for meaningful economic engagement (Brayboy, Castagno, and Maughn 2007). Brayboy et al. (2007) point out that “although there have certainly been structural changes to schools throughout the past 100 years, inequality has remained, with students of color consistently provided a lower quality education in a system that purports to provide equal educational opportunities” (p. 165).

After 50 plus years of liberal educational reform since the passing of the Civil Rights Act, our understanding of the consequences of racial inequities has mostly focused on reforms that emphasize the deficiencies of students rather than those that promote a social justice understanding of racial equity. In other words, the dominant perspective suggests that since the Civil Rights Movement schools have instituted a number of programs to integrate students of color into the opportunity structures education has to offer. For example, affirmative action, bilingual education, and school desegregation were policies designed to promote the achievement of students of color (see, this volume, chapters 4–6). The failure of students to achieve given these extra opportunities must then be rooted in the deficiencies of the students, their families and culture(s) rather than in the educational institutions. In reality, much of the major educational reforms have worked to open access to schools but have not focused on the quality of education once minority students pass through the schoolhouse door.

CRT scholars in education have taken up an alternative line of inquiry rooted in the legal scholarship of critical race theorists to explain the continued disadvantage of students of color in the post-civil rights era. CRT scholarship in education challenges the viability of traditional civil rights policies and legislation in repairing the educational infrastructure to better serve minority students. CRT offers an alternative to models that focus on the deficits of students of color. It interrogates or calls into question the assumptions underlying the political economy of race and racism and it constructs the necessary theoretical concepts needed to expose the dynamics underlying contemporary racial inequality.

A major assumption underlying CRT is the view that racism is a salient and nearly permanent feature of American society (Brooks 2009; Delgado and Stefancic 2001). CRT seeks to uncover the relationship between the historical and contemporary nature of racism and roots the social construction of race in the commodity function it has played in the process of capitalist accumulation (Zamudio and Rios 2006). That is, the land and labor acquired for the accumulation of capital led to the racialization of people of color. For example, race was created in order to justify the slave trade, the extermination of Indians for their land, and the colonization and exploitation of Mexicans for their land and labor. Manifest destiny, the belief of white superiority and rights over these groups for the purpose of economic enrichment, justified these processes and elevated whites over others both socially and economically. The subsequent institutionalization of these relationships for the continued acquisition of material wealth serves to reproduce the current impoverishment of large segments of communities of color. CRT posits educational institutions as one key site in the maintenance and reproduction of these historical relationships (Bowles and Gintis 1976).

The groundbreaking work of Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976), Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life, for example, argues that schools are organized in such a way as to reproduce and legitimate inequality. For Bowles and Gintis, universal liberal schooling developed to prepare students not for the promised expanded opportunities but for the exploitative needs of a capitalist economy. While liberal educational reformers believe that education provides a means to equalize the disparities of wealth and poverty by providing individuals with the opportunity to compete and rise to their natural potentials, the Marxist perspective of Bowles and Gintis posits that schools in fact reproduce the inequalities of the broader society. The organization of schools into a hierarchy—the instruction of some pupils in technical and operational skills, the emphasis on obedience and authority, and the reproduction of the liberal ideology designed to accommodate the capita...