When "Black and Brown" Implies "White and Asian": How Progressive Teachers Conceptualize Racial Equity

• In Event: Education and the Production of "Asian American": Institutional Racial Logics, Community Negotiations, and Their Implications

Abstract

It is common for both education researchers and practitioners to speak of “Black and brown” as a racial category of students. This implies someone who is not “Black and brown” -- usually, White people. However, how does the racial category become “White and Asian,” posed in contradistinction to “Black and brown?”

In this study, I show the processes, within a single school community, that allow for the relational racialization -- described as “White and Asian, Black and brown” -- that allows teachers, school participants to make sense of local academic inequalities. To consider this relational racialization, I draw upon theoretical frameworks that emphasize the discursive, metalinguistic, and cognitive dimensions of race and racialization. This approach emphasizes race as an instrument of categorization and rationalization, often by people acting within the state (including teachers), which differs from alternative frameworks that use race as a category of analysis.

This study comes from my two-year-long ethnographic study, from 2018 to 2021, of Mandarin Chinese language programs in public high schools in urban California, including “Santa Maria High School.” The school is located in one of the Bay Area’s last former Whites-only sundown towns; its image has recently been refashioned as a racially diverse immigration hub. During fieldwork, I became increasingly attentive to the teacherly discourse of racial equity that underlay the school’s Mandarin program, which sought to attract Black and Latinx students to a predominantly Asian-American classroom on an Asian-racialized learning subject. This discourse was representative of a larger school-level discourse of equity that largely used race to make sense of Santa Maria High School. Whereas teachers of the “old guard” and administration sought to promote an image of the school as unproblematically racially diverse, young challengers drew attention to the school’s ongoing racial inequalities.

Yet in a school that is over 65 percent Black and Latinx, about 25 percent Asian, and less than 10 percent White, academic inequalities resist a framing of “Whites” and “people of color.” Instead, proponents of equity advocate a distinction of “White and Asian, Black and brown” to highlight academic inequity. In order to advocate for equity, progressive “young challengers” must at once racialize students as Asian and also position them as proximate to Whites. I argue that this does not represent a recapitulation of the model minority myth -- the intent, after all, is to attack racism, and nearly all of the young challengers are aware of the myth. Nevertheless, this relational racialization reproduces one of the myth’s paradoxes: that the relative valorization of Asians in America implies not their assimilation (into Whiteness) but the reinforcement of their racialization as Asians, and thus the reification of American rubrics of race.

I consider two implications of this relational racialization: (1) How “young challengers” regard it as a necessity in advocating for equity, even as they ponder the possibilities of dissociating “Asian” from “White;” and (2) How Asian students react to it, often with resentment over being “merged” with White students or the perceived reproduction of the model minority myth.

Author

• David Shuang Song, University of Oklahoma
  Presenting Author