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Translating Theory on Color-blind Racism to an Engineering Education
Con-text: Illustrations from the Field of Engineering Education
Dr. Alice L. Pawley, Purdue University, West Lafayette Alice Pawley is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering Education and an affiliate faculty member in the Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Program and the Division of Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University. Prof. Pawley’s goal through her work at Purdue is to help people, including the engineering education profession, develop a vision of engineering education as more inclusive, engaged, and socially just. She runs the Feminist Research in Engineering Education (FREE, formerly RIFE, group), whose diverse projects and alumni are described at feministengineering.org. She received a CAREER award in 2010 and a PECASE award in 2012 for her project researching the stories of undergraduate engineering women and men of color and white women. She has received ASEE-ERM’s best paper award for her CAREER research, and the Denice Denton Emerging Leader award from the Anita Borg Institute, both in 2013. She was co-PI of Purdue’s ADVANCE program from 2008-2014, focusing on the underrepresentation of women in STEM faculty positions. She helped found, fund, and grow the PEER Collaborative, a peer mentoring group of early career and recently tenured faculty and research staff primarily evaluated based on their engineering education research productivity. She can be contacted by email at apawley@purdue.edu. Dr. Joel Alejandro Mejia, University of San Diego Dr. Joel Alejandro (Alex) Mejia is an assistant professor of General Engineering at the University of San Diego. His current research investigates the funds of knowledge of Latinx adolescents, and how they use these funds of knowledge to solve engineering problems in their communities. Dr. Mejia is particularly interested in how Latinx adolescents bring forth unique ways of knowing, doing, and being that provide them with particular ways of framing, approaching, and solving engineering problems. Dr. Mejia’s primary research interests lie at the intersection of engineering education, literacy, and social justice. He is particularly interested in engineering critical literacies, Chicanx Cultural Studies frameworks and pedagogies in engineering education, and critical consciousness in engineering through social justice. Dr. Renata A. Revelo, University of Illinois at Chicago Renata A. Revelo is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engi- neering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She earned her B.S. and M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and her Ph.D. in Education Organization and Leadership from the University of Illinois. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2018
Translating theory on color-blind racism
to an engineering education context:
illustrations from the field of engineering education
Abstract Researchers across the engineering education research spectrum are investigating engineering and engineering education’s persistent racial homogeneity. Administrators and instructors alike talk about how they want their classrooms to be more racially diverse, and yet despite the herculean efforts of “minority in engineering” programs and the like, the needle has moved little. In this position paper, we describe a theoretical lens developed in critical race theory that has so far had little influence in engineering education to thinking about race although we consider it to have ample affordances. This lens is a theoretical framework developed by sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva called “color-blind racism,” and comprises 4 frames: abstract liberalism, cultural racism, naturalization, and minimization of racism. Because the author team sees great value in understanding how cultural values and practices associated with a US experience of Whiteness have been built into U.S. engineering education, we offer here an articulation of these frames, and illustrate each frame through a curated set of stories drawn from our experiences as K- 12 students, as undergraduate engineering students, and as engineering faculty at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). We note some limitations of the color-blind racism theory as we have applied it, offer some practical applications of the theory to consider, and issue a call to action for both engineering education researchers and engineering instructors. Introduction This position paper aims to prompt engineering education researchers and engineering instructors to think about how engineering as a profession, and engineering education, have been structured as a predominantly White discipline, and how it maintains this demographic imbalance despite decades of calls and work to diversify it. As many researchers and federal reports have noted [1-3], women and men of color and White women participate in much lower rates in US engineering education compared to their representation in the general population, despite many overt efforts at many levels of U.S. society to broaden participation. There are calls to remedy this persistent problem; however, some of us have argued [4] that engineering education researchers can take as given the value of a diverse engineering profession, particularly with regards to gender and race. A wealth of diversity research in engineering education research (EER) investigates race statistically – that is, demonstrating racial disparities by looking at the racial identifications of engineering students, faculty, or others, and noting statistically significant differences between racial groups along particular measures or constructs. While this research is no doubt valuable, most of the time the concept of race is itself uninterrogated. Researchers adopt the racial categories laid out by the National Science Foundation, themselves built on the Office of Management and Budget federal guidelines. But what does “race” itself mean? [5].
Americans during the Civil Rights Movement [11] only came about because the interests of African Americans converged with the self-interests of Whites in that White elite groups needed a breakthrough for African Americans for the sake of global appearances and competition [12]. In the end, however, he argued there were minimal to null gains in education after the Brown v. Board of Education decision because the decision also led to many schools closing and Black administrators and teachers being dismissed, which produced limited access to high-quality school curricula for many people of color [11]. The third tenet is the social construction of race , which indicates that race and races are the product of social thought that “invent[s and] manipulate[s]” what can be considered “pseudo- permanent characteristics” for race when convenient by the dominant race, and are “retired” when no longer convenient [8, p. 8-9]. For example, there have been a wide list of categories and characteristics used to measure race in the United States that have changed over the years. People could not self-select their own racial category in the census until after 1960 – instead, they were assigned a race based on phenotypical and linguistic features that conformed to the census takers’ conceptual models of race [13]. In some parts of the US, race was assigned primarily based on skin color and this determined what racially-segregated school children could attend. School segregation in the Southwest was considered a normative practice because definitions of race and the ideology of deficit thinking were manipulated to provide inferior schooling opportunities to communities of color. Children were forced to speak English and prevented from speaking any other language. Many Mexican American children were segregated into “Mexican” schools, and not allowed to speak Spanish in the classroom; those who were not perfectly bilingual in English were therefore perceived as intellectually inferior, dull, and phlegmatic [14]. Some school districts opposed segregation not because it was a discriminatory practice, but because it was too expensive and cumbersome. Instead, schools placed Mexican American children who could pass as “White” in the same schools as White children, as long as they “looked White” and showed symbols of apparent prosperity and cleanliness [14]. This flexibility of racial segregation helps illustrate the social construction of race itself. The fourth tenet is differential racialization , which indicates that racial groups have been racialized in different ways in response to different needs of the majority. For instance, the Bracero Program included a series of diplomatic agreements initiated during World War II that allowed Mexican nationals to temporarily work in farms in the United States [15]. It has been well documented that the Bracero Program had a significant positive impact in the business industry and economy of the United States [15,16]. However, at the same time, racist images of Mexicans as inherently dirty provided justification for spraying Mexican workers with dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) - a virulently toxic substance - before working in the fields [17]. This and other similar racist images also functioned to deport (“repatriate”) many Mexican Americans to Mexico even though they were U.S. citizens [15]. Some states did not follow the workers’ rights stipulated in the Bracero Program agreements, which led people – racist extremists to average Americans – to discriminate against Mexicans by promoting segregationist practices [17]. This episode illustrates how a dominant White culture racialized Mexicans and Mexican Americans as a racial group to justify their inhumane treatment undergoing DDT contamination while simultaneously making use of their labor for economic gain.
The fifth tenet is intersectionality , which indicates that race and racism intersect with gender, class, sexuality, language, nationality, ethnicity, culture, and immigrant status among others [8]. As Delgado and Stefancic have articulated, “no person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity” [8, p. 10]. This tenet also acknowledges that racism is not a binary issue (e.g., Black vs White), but that it affects everyone in society because of the complex system of social advantages and disadvantages associated with race and other social constructs and identities. Intersectionality reminds us that it is important to recognize that when one type of oppression is discussed without acknowledging that there are other oppressions connected to multiple social identities, the dialogue only revolves around the experiences of the most privileged while dismissing and erasing the experiences of the more socially marginalized [18,19]. Crenshaw [19] developed the framework of intersectionality to describe how power collides and intersects with different social identities, and how individuals, groups of people, and social problems are created by multiple sources of oppression. The sixth, and final, tenet is counterstory, which recognizes experiential knowledge as legitimate, appropriate ways to critically theorize systems, organizations and structures [8]. CRT recognizes the experiential knowledge of people of color and other subordinate groups (e.g., women and those of the LGBTQ community) as valuable and necessary to understanding, analyzing, and teaching about racial subordination [8,20]. CRT explicitly acknowledges the lived experiences of subordinate groups through storytelling, family histories, parables, and narratives. CRT also disputes claims of objectivity, meritocracy, color-blindness, race neutrality, and equal opportunity, asserting that these claims hide the self-interest, power, and privilege of dominant groups. Proponents of CRT believe in a social justice agenda with the goal of eradicating racism for all subordinate groups. CRT is analyzed and examined through historical and contemporary lenses knowing that ideologies from the past inform and dictate current practices. Critical Race Theory as a Framework. CRT has been used as a research framework to analyze issues of prejudice, discrimination, and inequality in different fields. In legal studies, for example, critical race theory transformed critical legal scholarship by diversifying its discourse [21]. CRT originated from the need to address “issues of power, race, and racism to address the liberal notion of color blindness” [22, p. 9], and to challenge the status quo of a legal system that was deeply unjust to racial minorities [8]. Some of the most prominent contributors to this type of legal scholarship include Derrick Bell [11,23-25], Alan Freeman [26], Richard Delgado [8,27-29], Patricia Williams [30,31], Kimberlé Crenshaw [18,32-34], and Mari Matsuda [35,36], among others. CRT in legal studies recognizes that racism remains a foundational factor in U.S. society [8]. Using an analytical and critical lens, legal scholars have examined power structures created in society through the operation of “normal” White supremacy and White privilege [22]. It is through CRT that scholars have been able to deconstruct issues of racism, discrimination, and more broad systemic inequities impacting people of color through the legal system. For instance, Delgado criticized the argument that affirmative action provided “role models” for people of color [28]. He argued that affirmative action created a system where, instead of creating role models, the role model argument provided a disempowering device that served the dominant majority more than people of color. Delgado argued that people of color would be “hired if you speak politely, have a neat haircut, and above all, can be trusted, not because of your accomplishments, but because of what others think you will do for them” [28, p. 1226]. Matsuda also problematized the impact that
CRT in Engineering Education Research Scholars doing engineering education research are beginning to incorporate CRT into their work on diversifying engineering. We did a somewhat systematic review of the literature to assess where EER scholars are adopting and applying CRT. We did a full-text search of the Journal of Engineering Education, the International, European, and Australasian Journals of Engineering Education, Advances in Engineering Education, and the proceedings for the annual national conferences of the American Society for Engineering Education and Frontiers in Education. We used the search terms “critical race theory,” “colorblind,” “color-blind,” “funds of knowledge,” “community cultural wealth,” “race discrimination,” and “racism,” based on an assessment of controlled search terms offered by Academic Service Premier and our expertise working in the field. We included the specific theories of funds of knowledge and community cultural wealth because of how they derived from asset-based approaches to education through a CRT lens [20,38,40]. We decided to exclude the term “intersectionality” even though it is a core idea of CRT, because of the explosion of usage of the term of which we were already aware. In Table 1, we report the number of instances we found prompted by the collection of search terms. Table 1 Engineering Education Research Source, ordered by frequency of findings Number of instances prompted by search terms ASEE Conference Proceedings 75, excluding those generated by term “racism” which brought an additional 120 instances Frontiers in Education Conference Proceedings 14 International Journal of Engineering Education 12 Journal of Engineering Education 8 European Journal of Engineering Education 4 Australasian Journal of Engineering Education 0 Advances in Engineering Education 0 AAEE Conference Proceedings 0 Archival journals : Of the set of papers published in JEE , four used the phrase “critical race theory.” While in one it was a trivial reference (CRT was in a reference and nowhere else in the paper), the other three had aspects of CRT core to their argument, design, or analysis [44-46]. Of the remaining four papers in JEE , one had community cultural wealth at its core [44], and one used multiple concepts associated with CRT throughout [47], while the remaining two were minor [48] or tangential references [49]. We found 8 initial hits in EJEE but four were false hits - “blind” didn’t refer to color-blindness even in the visual sense, let alone the racial sense. The remaining four in EJEE listed in the table were identified through the term “racism” and did not relate to CRT. In IJEE , 8 papers related to “racism,” one to “race discrimination”, one to visual
color-blindness, none to community cultural wealth, but one each to CRT [50] and funds of knowledge (although this latter reference was very minor) [51]. Conference proceedings : The patterns in the ASEE and FIE proceedings are more heartening. There is a considerable amount of material that make the tenets of CRT the core of their argument, method, or interpretation. Fourteen out of 89 papers reference more than one search term; only 1 of these referencing multiple terms was published at FIE. Across these two conferences, we see 36 references to funds of knowledge, 18 to colorblindness in some form, 12 to community cultural wealth, and 45 to CRT more generally. A rough scan of titles and abstracts suggest that the majority of the sources authentically referenced these theories (such as in the “colorblindness” example mentioned earlier), although some also included trivial instances (in that the terms appeared in author biographies or in references only). There were no references to any of the search terms found in the AAEE conference proceedings. From this rough overview, it seems clear that engineering education’s conferences are the places where CRT is increasingly being used. This is unsurprising, given that conferences are the places where new ideas might be offered and accepted sooner than in archival journal publications, conferences are where new scholars may be bringing in more new or interdisciplinary theory, and conferences have a lower bar for scholarship allowing adoption of more controversial ideas. We note also that race as constructed in the United States is its own peculiar thing, which could explain why there are no relevant sources in IJEE, EJEE, AJEE, and AAEE ; that being said, CRT has also started to be adopted in broader educational (but not engineering educational) contexts in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, despite these countries’ different histories and relationships to race. Color-blind racism theory For the purposes of this paper, we adopt the theoretical framework offered by Eduardo Bonilla- Silva, in his book Racism without Racists [6]. Based on an empirical study of White university students and older workers, he articulates a structure with four main frames. Bonilla-Silva defines abstract liberalism as the practice of using ideas drawn from political and economic liberalism to explain racial matters (such as using “equal opportunity” as a means to achieve social policy, or “choice” to explain neighborhood segregation) and sees it as the most important of the color-blind racism structure. He describes cultural racism as “a frame that relies on culturally based arguments to explain the standing of minorities in society”, and naturalization as an explanation of race-based patterns as “natural” occurrences. The last frame is minimization of racism , which is the idea that racism no longer materially affects racial minorities’ experiences and opportunities. This framework is not the only one available to scholars to investigate color-blindness. An alternative frame is offered by Forman, Reason and Evans and includes four tenets: “1. racial groups receive merit-based privileges, 2. most people do not notice nor are they concerned about race, 3. social inequality today is due to "cultural deficits" of individual people or racial or ethnic groups, and 4. given the previous three assumptions, there is no need to pay "systematic attention" to any current inequities [52]. They argue the prevalence of color-blindness is partially attributed to lack of knowledge or lack of exposure. Due to segregation that exists in housing and education, many Americans may not have direct contact with the discrimination that still exists” [53]. We have chosen to adopt Bonilla-Silva’s framing of color-blindness because of its
…regarding each person as an “individual” or with “choices” and using this liberal principle as a justification for whites having the right of choosing to live in segregated neighborhoods or sending their children to [de facto] segregated schools. This claim requires ignoring the multiple institutional and state-sponsored practices behind segregation and being unconcerned about these practices’ negative consequences for [racial] minorities [6, p. 76]. Taking these two examples, we look to see where the frame of abstract liberalism makes itself useful in maintaining engineering education as a predominantly White space. In conversations about the low numbers of people of color admitted into engineering education, we hear two regular lamentations. One is that the few people of color who do apply and who we (as an institution) want to admit have so many other schools also wanting them to attend. Because these prospective students of color have so many options, it is unlikely they will choose to come to our institution, and so perhaps we should not admit them in the first place. We see this logic as a form of abstract liberalism, analogous to the idea that people get to choose where they live: governments/organizations can’t force people of color to (in this case) choose to come to our university, and we don’t want to admit people who will turn us down, therefore we don’t admit them and continue to have low numbers of people of color. However, the consequence of therefore not admitting students of color because they will likely have other options is a self- justifying rationale: by not admitting them, students of color will certainly not come to one’s institution. The second lamentation comes from a contrasting logic: that we need to treat all applicants the same, so we cannot recognize how race may adversely influence some individuals’ circumstances. This tends to be offered in conversations that also involve the argument about “lowering standards” or “dumbing things down” - that we as an institution cannot “lower our standards” in order to admit more people of color or to meet students where they are academically when they enter our programs. This argument ignores that the access of applicants of color to high quality education may be markedly different from White applicants with the same application profile. In other words, a student who comes from a poor school district with no AP course offerings getting a reasonably high standardized test score may arguably demonstrate markedly more merit than a student who comes from a wealthy school district with many AP course offerings with that same standardized test score. Because of the intersection of race and class in the U.S. as a function of historical racist economic policy and a history of residential segregation, K-12 students of color are more likely than their white peers to come from poorer K-12 school districts [54,55]. In connection to color-blindness, by using abstract liberalism around the idea of equal opportunity, this lamentation and desire to “treat all applicants the same” fails to acknowledge unequal pre-college preparation as a systemic factor. The third example we offer is the belief in meritocracy; Bonilla-Silva explicitly includes meritocracy in the “abstract liberalism” frame [6]. The idea of meritocracy is that people receive reward based on merit - that they earned reward through their actions. The corollary of this claim is that people without reward earned their lack of reward, or otherwise did something to deserve that reward. Applied to higher education, students deserve to be admitted to universities through their hard work and accomplishments, and people should not be admitted to university if they have not worked hard and earned the admission. Considerable research debunks this belief from
reality, offering empirical and theoretical evidence as to how hard-working people of color and White women throughout education and employment do not receive the same rewards as White men, demonstrating how the majority of people do not operate in a meritocracy [47,56]. Seymour and Hewitt’s Talking about Leaving [57] may be one of the most well-respected studies debunking this myth, demonstrating that a large majority of students who left STEM undergraduate majors left not because their grades were poor (as would be suggested from the meritocracy myth) but because there are other factors that push them out. In our experiences as engineering faculty, we hear versions of the meritocracy myth through the idea that students must prove themselves to be engineers, and they will make it only if they work really hard through the “death march” of math and science courses [58]. In this example, we argue that the idea that students need to prove themselves in the curriculum and that if they work hard enough [59], they will make it is a form of abstract liberalism. Using this perspective allows us to overlook or ignore factors other than “not working hard enough” to explain why students are “leaving” engineering. In other words, we come to accept that only those students who make it through engineering on “their own merit” (because they worked “really hard”) are the students worthy of the profession. Operating from this meritocratic point of view can lead to practices that enable pushing out students via unrealistic policies and expectations. Instead, this idea could be reframed (as some engineering programs and institutions have done) as: given the varied pre- college experiences that engineering students have, what aspects of engineering education are unnecessary or unrealistic, and for which students? We also regularly hear fears from racial majority students about how a meritocracy may be working against them. For example, one of us offered the example that our White students feel like they are being marginalized because they do not receive academic scholarships, and theorize that this is because “most scholarships are for students of color.” The implication is that the White student his or herself is worthy of a scholarship, but that a student of color only received it because of their race, not their worth. Another example is from engineering graduate students, particularly White men, who express concern that they will not get a job because all the desirable jobs will go to women and people of color. By observing how industries use the pipeline metaphor to explain why they hire even smaller proportions of people of color than are available from undergraduate programs, we can see these fears are not borne out by reality. However, the fear persists, bolstered by a belief that a functioning meritocracy should reward predominantly White people for their accomplishments, but if it rewards people of color, then the meritocracy must not be operating correctly. One of the consequences of engineering education maintaining the myth that it operates a meritocracy is that it (and the actors who work within it) remains absolved of any responsibility to rehabilitate how race is built into earlier stages of the educational system. The primary idea of meritocracy is that individual accomplishment will result in individual benefit and reward. However, it is also the idea that individual accomplishment can be segregated, divorced from a history of exploitation on one’s behalf. So the meritocratic myth applied to race in engineering education will imply that White people (and male White people in particular) have not received affirmative action over history to position specific White individuals in such a place that their individual accomplishment is rewarded. In other words, the implication is that White people have secured their position as the dominant race in engineering and engineering education in particular through their own merit, not because of a history of affirmative action operating on
In another example, some of us have experience being educated in English as a Second Language (ESL) programs in K-12 contexts, bringing together the intersection of race, ethnicity, and language. It was our understanding in those experiences that the existence of an ESL program - that is, the philosophical choice to isolate in a segregated environment second- language learners from native English speakers - was a “natural” thing to do, that its worth was not questioned. As participants in those ESL systems, we also experienced the poor quality of science and math courses offered to ESL students compared to AP coursework offered to native English speakers. In some cases, staying in the ESL track precluded us from taking any college preparatory math or science courses [65]. While we might understand the logistical difficulty in finding instructors who can offer college preparatory courses to students who also are simultaneously learning English, it is clear that such an approach also functions to track academically talented ESL students into educational tracks that are not expected to go directly into four-year institutions [65]. Given that engineering curricula favor students who take math and science college preparatory courses in high school, the naturalized idea that dual-language learners should be isolated in ESL courses also functions to prepare them more poorly than native English speakers – those who dominate what is considered the lingua franca for science [66] – for enrolling in engineering bachelor’s programs. Cultural racism Bonilla-Silva introduces the concept of cultural racism as defined as “a frame that relies on culturally based arguments such as “Mexicans do not put much emphasis on education” [...] to explain the standing of minorities in society” [6, p. 76]. This is a frame that relies on negative culturally-based arguments to create cultural explanations of why people of color are inferior. The frame also presumes a biological inferiority that is based on race or ethnicity to portray their cultures in a negative way, despite the wealth of evidence demonstrating how race is a social construct and not a biological reality. Recently, a legal scholar working at one of our institutions co-authored an op-ed claiming that “all cultures are not equal” [67]. The article claimed that there are some cultures that are more suitable to be productive in advanced economies like the U.S. African Americans, Latinxs, and Native Americans were portrayed as individuals whose cultures were “incompatible” with what is required by democracies and free-market economies. The authors also claimed that the “bourgeois norms” of the “ordinary Americans” has been abandoned and replaced by the cultures of people who simply do not fit in [67]. To quote the op-ed: All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti- “acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.
Despite the problematic rhetorical strategies these authors employ (such as failing to provide evidence for upper-middle class people “hesitating” to preach the benefits of education, and making a racial argument which conveniently overlooks the racial overtones of who constitutes an “upper-middle class”) we expect there are many in engineering who agree with the substance of this argument. While this example is not directly situated in engineering, our students and faculty are still impacted by this problematic rhetoric. Engineering students and faculty do not just engage in engineering culture; they also engage in broader academic or public culture where such arguments – that cultural factors are to blame for the systemic injustices faced by people of color – are common. This type of narrative sets the tone to blame the victim. People use similar rhetoric to minimize the contributions of people of color to society [68-70], even though there are of course a wide variety of contributions to engineering, and society in general [71-73] that emerge from the cultures of those who are described as “incompatible” and not aligned with “bourgeois norms.” In engineering education, hard work, self-discipline, and respect for authority are the “bourgeois norms” that must be followed to achieve success in engineering. Godfrey and Parker argued that, for many students and faculty, learning engineering involves engaging in difficult tasks, and those who succeed are those that can endure the workload [59]. Only those who are willing to take up this challenge and work extremely hard accomplish the goal of becoming engineers. This problematic belief is echoed in the “weed out” system engineering departments create and described by Seymour and Hewitt [57]. This belief creates a culture where engineering is seen as a field that is reserved for those who can endure the tough courses. At the same time, the realities and lived experiences of students of color such as around microaggressions and daily discrimination are neglected. There is an “unquestioned assumption” that knowledge in engineering is race- and gender- free [57]. There seems to be no recognition of the ethnocentricity of the curriculum and the accepted epistemologies. Although students of color are “holders and creators of knowledge” [68, p. 106] and contribute to the engineering field, this knowledge differs from the perceived “bourgeois norms” in engineering. Classical engineering education philosophy situates engineering as a field where the ways of thinking, doing and being are methodological, technological, and objective [74]. It is a field that has been mostly established by White men who have decided what is engineering and who gets to participate [74]. There is also no recognition to different epistemologies and solutions to engineering problems, and designs are thought to be race and gender free [59]. In the United States, engineering has seldom been framed as a social justice profession and, as Cech has argued [75], ideologies of depoliticization and meritocracy held by many engineers make it extremely difficult to frame the profession in such a way. Instead, engineering is framed as purely objective, meritocratic, and composed of rigorously-constrained problem solving [75]. While “improving society” is part of many definitions of engineering as a profession, doing engineering work to claim justice for a specific group of people or cause takes a back seat and is unmarried from the goal of “improving society.” Instead, the idea of improving society is often broad or vague and does not necessarily address tenets of social justice. One of us offers the illustration that, while in discussion with fellow faculty members about the student body at one of our institutions, a faculty member expressed that minoritized students choose majors outside of engineering because these students are attracted to social justice professions instead of engineering. This faculty member’s statement was left unchallenged at this discussion.
minimized and relegated to “special topics,” or how social studies curricula reinforce colonizing notions of “us” vs “them,” relating “us” to White accomplishments and “them” to indigenous people colonized by White people, and erases how racism complicated the purported goodness of the Founding Fathers and their peers [78]. Even if we limited our gaze to these few examples, we could argue that students (of all races) leaving K-12 schools where these ideas are normalized have been pushed to adopt White supremacist logics, naturalizing as good and representative the actions of White people, and framing the contributions of people of color as isolated and problematic. By claiming value-neutrality while failing to problematize those racist logics when high school graduates come to engineering education at university, engineering education as an institution (and the actors who make use of this claim in engineering education, including instructors, administrators and policymakers, and researchers) becomes complicit in maintaining them. So engineering education has minimized the structural racism both White students and students of color experience in K-12 systems by accepting students who are a product of those systems while pretending itself meritocratic. In blunt terms, engineering education lets K-12 education do its dirty work for it, and keeps its hands clean - “lily-white,” one might pun. Discussion We summarize the 4 frames of color-blind racism and our illustrations in Table 2. This color-blind racism framework allowed us to dig deeper into the comments, lamentations, arguments, and ideas we have heard in the past, and continue to hear regularly in our experiences as engineering faculty. In our conversations, writing, and analysis of these illustrations, we regularly wrestled with how to characterize each illustration, with one person arguing for its filing in one category, and another pushing a different one. Bonilla-Silva notes that people use these frames in combination more often than in pure form [6, p. 78] and with different emotional tones. This seems to explain our experience, and perhaps our difficulties show us how the illustrations don’t fall neatly into one category or another. Because of our interest in how race is built into structure, and engineering education institutional structure in particular, we have tried to maintain a clear line of sight onto how the particular story related to structure. In future work, some of us are interested in pursuing how these logics, either singly or in combination, are built into the structure of engineering education institutions through policy, written documentation, and practices. We also feel there are many opportunities for future work to link the color-blind racism framework to other critical theories around power and oppression. For example, while intersectionality is a core tenet of CRT, we did not see much discussion of it in Bonilla-Silva’s original work, although Crenshaw’s original theorizing [19] came early enough for there to be, and although we see clear opportunities for overlap (in our illustrations, we have noted the confluence of race and language discrimination, or race and class). In addition, we want to acknowledge the contributions of other critical theorists that have noted how thinking about multiple oppressions can prompt us to generate hierarchies of oppression [79], an insidious logic which advances identity politics over solidarity politics, to the subordination of all. We want to be clear that, while we focused this paper on color- blind racism theory, it is not with the intent to communicate that racism is somehow “the worst” of the various oppressions people maintain and
Table 2 Summary of color-blind racism (CBR) theory and illustrations from engineering education CBR frame Abstract liberalism Naturalization Cultural racism Minimization of racism Bonilla-Silva “involves using ideas “a frame that allows “ a frame that relies “a frame that definition associated with whites to explain on culturally based suggests political liberalism away racial arguments […] to discrimination is no […] and economic phenomena by explain the standing longer a central liberalism […] in an suggesting they are of minorities in factor affecting abstract manner to natural occurrences.” society.” [6, p. 76] minorities’ life explain racial [6, p. 76] chances” [6, p. 77] matters.” [6, p.76] Summary of The expressed worry The excuse that The explanation for Failing to illustration that unworthy people universities are not small numbers of acknowledge and of color are being admitting more people of color in intervene in student admitted to people of color engineering that not teams engaging in engineering education because “they’re not all cultures are equal, explicit racism over worthy White in the applicant pool” or that some do not people. or “the pipeline is so value engineering Relying on a K- 12 small,” while White system with The expressed worry student admissions “Weed out” models acknowledged racist that a university would go unquestioned as a norm in flaws to produce a be “lowering its engineering sufficient supply of standards” to admit The acceptance that education diverse and inclusive more people of color, students in ESL students. because they must be programs won’t have Positioning unworthy of access to college prep engineering as about admission, while the courses in ESL “improving society” “lower standards” tracks, while native rather than about narrative is not part of English speakers are social justice discussions when expected to take White students are advanced placement involved courses The myth of meritocracy persisting in engineering education experience in the United States, including in engineering.^1 As one of us tells her kids, it is not a competition. There are great opportunities for future work in exploring how logics of hierarchies of oppression permeate engineering education culture. With these caveats, we have found CRT and color-blind racism theory a rich theoretical environment for “shaking up” engineering education work focused on broadening participation, (^1) We appreciate the comments of our anonymous reviewers who remind us to make these points about intersectionality and multiple oppressions.
development programs, or when we fail to acknowledge different epistemologies students bring into our classrooms) versus policies/practices that challenge these. We want to acknowledge that using this framework may be difficult for many people, whether researchers or instructors. It can be particularly hard for domestically-born White people, as one of us is, because Whiteness in the U.S. has come to mean that White people can largely avoid conversations about race, and that they have been able to think about their own experience as a raceless “American” experience. Through our experiences thinking and talking about race in engineering education, we have found the following challenges that also make conversations about race difficult: ● That people, particularly White people, don’t want to be perceived as racist; ● That people believe a conversation about race is itself racist, and that having a conversation about race would make them racist; ● That people believe that because race is a social construct that means it is imaginary, and that conversations about race and its real effects somehow will make it more “real”; ● That people recognize conversations about race might mean they are confronted by their own racial privilege, which can be painful and they would rather avoid; ● That people believe that conversations about race and privilege end in the necessity to shift oneself from a passive beneficiary of racism and instead take personal responsibility to help end racism, and that is uncomfortable; and ● That conversations about race somehow unduly spotlight or make uncomfortable the small numbers of students of color or faculty of color we have in our schools, without recognizing the responsibility that White students and faculty have for creating a supportive climate with respect to race. We also think that one indicator of the importance of using these sorts of theoretical frameworks to understand how engineering education remains so dominated by White people is how embedded the notion of meritocracy is in engineering’s culture, and how a belief in meritocracy is also incorporated into abstract liberalism, the most important frame of Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind racism theory. In engineering, meritocracy may be repurposed as, or operate under the veil of, maintaining an environment of “healthy competition” or “being worthy of the profession” instead of being recognized as a way to leave unquestioned color-blind racist practices and perpetuate racist ideologies about what it means to be an engineer in the United States. Conclusion We embarked on this illustrative exploration of Bonilla-Silva’s colorblind racism theory because we think the theory has the potential to expand the imagination of both engineering education researchers and engineering instructors of how race plays out in engineering education at the higher education level. We used this paper to lay out an illustrated argument in order to advance some of the thinking that would be necessary to then use the colorblind racism theory in engineering education research and practice. While there are many ways to continue with this work through research, we hope that this paper serves to continue work that connects practice, policy, and research. As may be noted, the majority of our illustrations stem from experiences that are connected to practice in engineering education not just via teaching, but through our roles in shaping the engineering environment (e.g., hiring, student admissions, faculty governance).
We hope that reading this paper spurs at least some readers to action. On our part, we hope to develop this paper into an archival journal paper, and are exploring ways to adapt this type of work into a tool for engineering educators and administrators. We hope that some more EER researchers explore and adopt theories from CRT, joining a developing community already publishing at ASEE and FIE, and start to methodically investigate engineering education’s Whiteness as a manifestation of systemic White supremacy rather than deficiencies expressed by people of color. We hope that instructors begin to notice the times they blame K-12 systems for failing to “supply” engineering education with adequate quantities of people of color for their programs, and start to use their creativity to find ways to circumvent or dismantle policies and practices that were set up to predominantly, and unproblematically, supply White people to engineering education. Acknowledgements This material is partially based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1055900 and 1644976. The authors appreciate the thoughtful and substantial feedback offered by the anonymous reviewers. References [1] National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2007. [2] National Academy of Engineering, Changing the Conversation: Messages for Improving Public Understanding of Engineering. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2008. [3] B. L. Yoder, "Engineering by the Numbers," in American Society for Engineering Education , 2012. [4] A. L. Pawley, "Shifting the “Default”: The Case for Making Diversity the Expected Condition for Engineering Education and Making Whiteness and Maleness Visible," Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 106, pp. 531-533, 2017. [5] T. Zuberi and E. Bonilla-Silva, White logic, white methods: Racism and methodology : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. [6] E. Bonilla-Silva, Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America : Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. [7] S. Marx and L. L. Larson, "Taking off the color-blind glasses: Recognizing and supporting Latina/o students in a predominantly White school," Educational Administration Quarterly, vol. 48, pp. 259-303, 2012. [8] R. Delgado and J. Stefancic, Critical race theory: An introduction : NYU Press, 2017. [9] E. Bonilla-Silva and T. A. Forman, "“I Am Not a Racist But...”: Mapping White College Students' Racial Ideology in the USA," Discourse & society, vol. 11, pp. 50-85, 2000. [10] C. O'Neil, Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy : Broadway Books, 2017. [11] D. A. Bell, "Brown v. Board of Education and the interest-convergence dilemma," Harvard Law Review, pp. 518-533, 1980. [12] R. Delgado, "Explaining the Rise and Fall of African American Fortunes- Interest Convergence and Civil Rights Gains," ed: HeinOnline, 2002.
