I Pulled Up a Seat at the Table: My Journey Engaging in Critical Quantitative Inquiry

• In Event: 25.027 - Multimethod Approaches to Research for Social Justice and Equity in Education

Abstract

Historically, statistical research has been used as a tool of oppression attempting to “prove” the intellectual and cultural inferiority of communities of color (i.e. bell curve, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, eugenics, IQ testing) and obscure the reality of racism. As identified in this year’s Call, such scientific racism is the foundation of the American education system and contextualizes many of the contemporary issues of racial and social stratification today. Too often communities of color are over-researched, exploited for capital gains, and dehumanized as a statistic. Further, findings from statistical studies often remain unchecked due to the perception that numbers represent objectivity, truth, and real evidence. Consequently, there is a widely held belief that “quantitative methods are antithetical to social justice,” which situates the problem with statistical methods rather than the users of the methods (Cokley & Awad, 2013, p. 27). In this poster session, I present narratives and reflections on pursuing a quantitative research agenda related to social justice and equity in education. Through this quest, I discuss how quantitative analysis, particularly racialized statistics, is one of the most powerful engines used to serve racist agendas and ideologies throughout history and especially in this post-truth era. I discuss the need for critical quantitative inquiry, where researchers disrupt and push for the re-imagining of ways to engage in more culturally inclusive and sustaining approaches to quantitative inquiry that will drive us all to critically interrogate and self-appraise our beliefs, probe our research designs, humanize the data, and approach understanding the story behind the data with curiosity and humility. I argue that statistics is a powerful tool that can be used to resist oppression through community-driven, justice-oriented work. I stress the importance of making our data and interpretations accessible to broad audiences, especially understanding the prevalence of the shaping of consciousness and mobilization of bias that keeps marginalized communities and other “non-statisticians” intimidated by the numbers. I also urge more members from historically marginalized groups to engage in this work as we have a duty to not only take the opportunity to sit at the tables where our ancestors were previously denied, we must do so with the conviction of course correcting the injustices that still remain.

Author

• Lolita A. Tabron, University of Denver