Linking Color-Evasion and Individualist Deficit Ideology: A Typology of Color-Evasive Strategy in Parental School Discourse

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 3:35 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Racial and Social Structures Within K-12 Institutions (Table 8)

Abstract

The everyday discursive practices that covertly racialize persons, settings (e.g., schools), and practices are key to understanding the construction and normalization of race as a social structure. Drawing on the concept of color-evasiveness as a discursive process of power, this critical discourse analysis examines a set of parental interviews in the racialized context of highly selective public magnet high schools in order to analyze (1) the specific strategies and tactics of color-evasion and (2) the ideological effects of covert racialization in an educational context. After identifying a typology of color-evasive tactics mobilized by parents, this paper seeks to make clear the ways that color-evasion is ideologically tethered to individualist deficit explanations of racial inequality.

Author

• Christopher Hu, University of Alabama