Critical Perspectives on Race and Schooling (Perspectives in Education)

Although race has been a ubiquitous topic in U.S. education, increasingly scholars have raised questions about its under-theorization and dynamic nature. This essay examines some of the theoretical discussions surrounding our understanding of race and how it affects schooling. The structure of this essay includes a brief discussion of what is meant by race, an examination of the new scholarship regarding race, and the impact that race thinking has on schooling and education outcomes.

Perhaps no term has undergone more scrutiny and simultaneously created more confusion than the notion of race. Ancient literatures used the term to distinguish between ethnic, linguistic, and national origin. Thus, [Page 482]the Irish, the French, the Ancient Greeks, and the Jews all were considered “races.” However, with the European exploration of the Western Hemisphere, the term race became firmly located in what came to be thought of as biological distinctions. The scientific community has long agreed that there is no basis in biology for the concept of race. The ambiguous criteria of skin color, hair texture, and facial features (e.g., shape and color of eyes, width of nose, or thickness of lips) were nominally used to determine racial classification. These categories have held sway for more than 4 centuries.

Most Americans do not realize how arbitrary racial designations are. Because they have become a part of an “accepted regime of truth” (Foucault's term), they are accepted as normal and natural. However, I have been in contexts where others fail to recognize the distinctions that we as natives and longtime residents of the United States see as biological fact. During my graduate school years, I had the opportunity to serve on a research team whose responsibility was to designate the interactions that occurred between classroom teachers and Latino students. Our simple task was to tally the number of times the teacher made any move toward Latino students. However, our international graduate student colleagues had trouble determining who the Latino students were. The U.S. research assistants had no trouble making these distinctions regardless of the skin, hair, or eye color of the students. We knew who the Latino students were, or more pointedly, we knew who was not White. Identifying by race seems such a natural and commonsense undertaking in a highly racialized environment. To recognize race as a social and cultural construction requires educators to reorient their perspectives and worldviews.

Modern formulations argue that race is a social construction. Instead of focusing on the notion of race as a fixed, immutable category, Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue, “Race [is] an unstable and ‘de-centered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle” (1994, p. 68). Their definition pushes educators to consider the ways social relations strongly affect their notions of race. For example, in several racial memoirs and fictional works, such as those by Danzy Senna and Gregory Howard Williams, the authors detail the ways life circumstances have forced people to move across racial lines. In Williams's case, he and his brother lived their early lives as “White.” It was not until their parents' marriage dissolved that they learned a move from Virginia to Muncie, Indiana, would mean that they would “become Black.” Similarly, Senna's parents' divorce forced her to move with her mother who was White while her darker-complexioned sister remained with their Black father. In both cases, the individuals' biology did not change, rather their social relations/circumstances did.

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