Toward a Relational Race Framework in Research With Men of Color Teachers

• In Event: Using Justice-Oriented Conceptual Frameworks in Research With Boys and Men of Color

Abstract

Background/Objectives
Recently, there has been considerable effort to recruit more men of color (MOC) into the teaching profession (Woodson & Bristol, 2020). Despite the popularity of these efforts, researchers point to the ways racial logics can dictate the goals of MOC teacher recruitment in ways that reproduce deficit narratives of students and position teachers as saviors and models of respectability (Pabon, 2016). In response, critical race scholars have called for more robust theorizations of racism in this work (Brockenbrough, 2018). My objective in this conceptual paper is to explore the utility of a relational race framework in research with MOC teachers.

Theoretical Framework
A relational race framework conceptualizes racialization as an interactive and dynamic process in which group-based racial constructions are formed not only in relation to whiteness, but also in relation to other racial groups (Molina et al., 2019). Relational theories of race are rare in education research. Instead, researchers have frequently taken a one-at-a-time approach to race (studying a single group in isolation) or treated race as a catch-all phenomenon (all people of color experience racism similarly). These approaches conceptualize racial formation as simply an independent constituency. However, racialization, particularly in the age of liberal multiculturalism, is a dynamic and ongoing process (Omi & Winant, 2014). Utilizing a relational race framework is especially advantageous when studying “MOC teachers”—a term commonly used but rarely deconstructed (Davila, 2019).

Methods/Data
This is a conceptual paper. However, I also bring my own embodied knowledge as a Latino male educator (see Bernal, 1998) and reflections on past empirical research to help theorize the utility of relational race frameworks.

Results
This paper argues that relational race frameworks are critically needed in research with MOC teachers. Dominant discourses on MOC teachers treat a range of racial positionalities among teachers (Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian American) as monolithic. However, a relational race framework reveals the ways group-specific racial discourses (e.g., antiblackness, nativism, indigenous erasure) can function in ways that can signal one group’s multicultural acceptance at the expensive of another’s pathologization and othering.
In one example, I engage with theories of antiblackness and Latinidad (Hernandez, 2003). Combining theory, experiential knowledge, and past interviews with non-Black Latino male teachers, I demonstrate this framework in practice by exploring the ways antiblackness influences the goals of popular MOC policy initiatives (See Dumas, 2016). Here, I argue non-Black Latino men can be positioned as models of legitimate multicultural and patriarchal respectability through their distance and distinction from blackness in urban schools. This theorization is done in the spirit of solidary and uses race relationality to help articulate a racial justice politics beyond liberal multiculturalism.

Significance
Overall, this paper is among the few works on MOC teachers that deconstructs the category itself. A relational approach to race, which is seldom used in education, holds immense value in this conversation. As research on MOC teachers continues, this paper will offer a new conceptual tool to disrupt homogenization and instead better trace the workings of racism in the era of liberal multiculturalism.

Author

• Michael V. Singh, University of California - Davis
  Presenting Author