Unmasking the Intersection of Race and Disability in Students With Significant Support Needs

• In Event: Understanding Intersectional Lines of Inequities and Diverse Pathways of Resistance

Abstract

This paper address ways that Disability Critical Race Theory, or DisCrit (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013), can further account for differences not fully attended to regarding children with significant support needs. Specifically, we propose to put forward an account of a post-critical ethnography in which race is masked by disability for a group of children with significant support needs in a public, separate special education school. While the fact that racism and ableism are mutually constituted and collusive is a tenet of DisCrit, we find that ableism works in a very particular way with children with significant support needs by obscuring or “masking” racism.

Authors

• Nitasha M Clark, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Charna D'Ardenne, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill