QuantCrit: education, policy, ‘Big Data’ and principles for a critical race theory of statistics

Quantitative research enjoys heightened esteem among policymakers, media, and the general public. Whereas qualitative research is frequently dismissed as subjective and impressionistic, statistics are often assumed to be objective and factual. We argue that these distinctions are wholly false; quantitative data is no less socially constructed than any other form of research material. The first part of the paper presents a conceptual critique of the field with empirical examples that expose and challenge hidden assumptions that frequently encode racist perspectives beneath the façade of supposed quantitative objectivity. The second part of the paper draws on the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to set out some principles to guide the future use and analysis of quantitative data. These 'QuantCrit' ideas concern (1) the centrality of racism as a complex and deeply rooted aspect of society that is not readily amenable to quantification; (2) numbers are not neutral and should be interrogated for their role in promoting deficit analyses that serve White racial interests; (3) categories are neither 'natural' nor given and so the units and forms of analysis must be critically evaluated; (4) voice and insight are vital: data cannot 'speak for itself' and critical analyses should be informed by the experiential knowledge of marginalized groups; and (5) statistical analyses have no inherent value but can play a role in struggles for social justice.

Thinking Problems

In the light of recent media reports of racism in South African schools, this paper examines the role of school principalship standards in addressing race in South African educational leadership. The paper draws on tenets of critical race theory to examine how issues of race are addressed in the Policy for School Principalship Standard in South Africa and the implications thereof for leadership preparation and leadership practice. The methodology involves the employment of content analysis underpinned by key tenets of critical race theory that challenge notions of colour-blindness, meritocracy and neutrality. The analysis reveals that there is no explicit mention or treatment of race and ethnicity as social constructs in the principalship standards. It also reveals that diversity and culture are used more, suggesting the emphasis on difference rather than inequality. The paper argues that, although driven by principles of social justice, the Policy for School Principalship Standard is colour-blind. Through this omission, the policy denies the existence of racism and fails to recognise the power and influence of school leaders (and principals, in particular) in shaping the race dynamic in schools. The paper ends with implications for the improvement of leadership policy and practice.

[A four volume collection of canonical and cutting-edge writing in the field of critical race theory.] Critical Race Theory (CRT) offers an account of society based on systemic, deep-rooted racist oppression that saturates our commonsensical judgements to such an extent that all but the most extreme racism appears normal and unexceptional, simply ‘business as usual’. CRT is one of the fastest growing and most controversial fields of contemporary social theory, and education is the discipline where its most dynamic and challenging work is taking place. Now, answering the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this sometimes shocking and often contentious body of thought, Routledge announces a new title in its Major Themes in Education series. In four volumes, Critical Race Theory in Education provides a unique ‘mini library’ that encompasses the very best CRT scholarship in education. As with other titles in the series, the collection’s hallmark is its combination of the canonical and the cutting edge: every selection is either an established ‘classic’ or significantly challenges and advances thinking on current issues. The first volume (‘Tenets of Critical Race Theory in Education’) sets out the core themes that distinguish the CRT approach. Volume II (‘Whiteness and White Supremacy’), meanwhile, explores the construction and maintenance of assumptions and practices that take for granted the elevated status of white people’s interests and perspectives. The third volume (‘Global and Specific: CRT Off-shoot Movements’) focuses on the development of CRT as an approach with an international reach, while simultaneously retaining space for distinctive developments that prioritize individual social groups within their particular historic, cultural, and economic contexts. The collection’s final volume (‘Doing CRT in Education’) is dedicated to questions of method, ethics, and praxis in the everyday struggle to advance research and effect genuine anti-racist change amid systems that normalize racism and deny the legitimacy of race-conscious scholarship. David Gillborn, the editor of the collection, is recognized internationally as a leading scholar of race inequity in education. He was one of the first writers to apply CRT outside North America.

While critical race theory is a framework employed by activists and scholars within and outside the confines of education, there are limited resources for leadership practitioners that provide insight into critical race theory and the possibilities of implementing a critical race praxis approach to leadership. With a continued top-down approach to educational policy and practice, it is imperative that higher education leaders understand how critical race theory and praxis can assist them in utilizing their agency and roles as leaders to identify and challenge institutional and systemic racism and other forms/manifestations of oppression (Stovall, 2004). In the tradition of critical race theory, we are charged with the task of operationalizing theory into practice in the struggle for, and commitment to, social justice. Though higher education leaders and leadership programs are often absent in this process, given their influence and power, higher education leaders need to be engaged in this endeavor.The objective of this edited volume is to draw upon critical race counter-stories and praxis for the purpose of providing higher education leaders-in-training and practicing higher education leaders with tangible narratives that demonstrate how racism and its intersectionality with other forms of oppression manifest within higher education. An additional aim of this book is to provide leaders with a working knowledge of the central tenets of critical race theory and the tools that are required in recognizing how they might be complicit in the reproduction of institutional and systemic racism and other forms of oppression. More precisely, this edited volume intends to draw upon and center the lived experiences and voices of contributors that have experienced racism in higher education. Through the use of critical race methodology and counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), contributors will share and interrogate their experiences while offering current and future higher education leaders insight in recognizing how racism functions within their respective institutions, and how they can address it. The intended goal of this edited volume is to translate critical race theory into practice while emphasizing the need for higher education leaders to develop a critical race praxis and anti-racist approach to leadership.

This chapter gives readers not only a sense of what Critical race theory (CRT) is but of what / how struggles for education equity and social justice can form the basis of critical race praxis. It demonstrates what the field of education has to offer to the discourse on race and the law. The chapter provides readers with an overview of CRT and its importance to educational research, policy, and practice. It shows how the CRT lens is useful in analyzing Chicana and Chicano students’ struggles for equity and social justice in the classroom and at the state and national levels as legislation assaults their identity, national origin, and culture. The chapter links critical race theory with gender and class analysis through examining how Latina mothers in North Carolina create spaces for reclaiming dignity amidst the framing of their families as deficient.

In this article, the authors present a qualitative study focused on preservice teachers employing a framework using tenets of critical race theory (CRT)—permanence of racism, experiential knowledge and counter-storytelling, interest convergence, and critique of liberalism—in literature study. Drawing on critical English education, critical race English education, and CRT, the proposed framework integrates key tenets of CRT with literature in classrooms. Our findings demonstrated engagement by preservice teachers in identification, analysis, and reflection of CRT tenets in texts. This framework has the potential to provide a tool for students and teachers in K-12 schools to connect tenets of CRT to their knowledge of society and race in the texts they read.

This chapter utilises the findings to show the contemporary relevance of the research framework for the broader, international context. ‘By situating Critical Race Theory within the context of Criminological research, it makes a case for a Critical Race Theory of policing. Reasserting the counter story that emerges from the key findings, it emphasises the utility of the counter story as a tool to challenge dominant police narratives of race and policing. In adopting one of the key tenets of Critical Race Theory, the centering of race in research, the chapter argues that both individual and institutional forms of racism must be understood in the context of a global political system premised on ‘White supremacy’ (Mills 1997). Through research participants voices it considers some suggestions for improving Black and Black mixed-race people’s experiences of policing. Further, it identifies the potential for this research to inform future knowledge production through Critical Race Theory research. In concluding, this chapter challenges those within and outside of the police institution, to accept the inevitability of racism within a racially predicated society, rather than engaging in strategies of denial. It asserts that this is the only way to truly challenge the longevity of racism within the institution.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is now a prominent framework for critical scholarship on race and racism in the field of education. Our goal is to introduce CRT as a formative theoretical and methodological framework for social justice and equity-minded educational researchers. The chapter is divided into three sections: (1) key terms and concepts, (2) broader history of CRT, and (3) critical race methodologies in education. By tracing CRT’s trajectory in educational research and analyzing the significance of its legacy, we provide an alternative framework to analyze how racism is institutionalized through research-based or legalized “truths” that too often continue to perpetuate the oppression of minoritized communities. In doing so, we illuminate the significance of critical race analysis in educational research and the implications to reframe current discussions regarding the relation of research and the struggle for social justice.

The field of sociology has largely ignored critical race theory (CRT) as a relevant theoretical and pedagogical framework for the study of white supremacy and Indigenous and Black race relations in Canada. In the United States, CRT has long been a theoretical framework tethered to and contextualizing the underpinnings of systemic racism and white supremacy as the cornerstone of structural oppression in American legal society. The initial focus of this work was to study the operationalization of the myriad ways in which race and racial power were constructed and represented in American law and society and the attendant ways in which Black civil rights under American law could never be achieved through the application of legal jurisprudence. CRT’s theoretical milieu has expanded beyond legal research to examine the sphere of racist structural oppression as systemically embedded in immigration, housing, education, employment, healthcare, and child welfare systems. The writing of this article has been an intentional active disruption to the claims that multiculturalism has the answers to race relations in an ever-changing Canadian society. While there are six main tenets of CRT, this article specifically focuses on three core tenets of CRT which argue that (1) racism is an ever-present dynamic of life in Canada; (2) racial subordination remains endemically tied to the political, cultural, and social milieu of white supremacy impacting the lives of Indigenous and Black peoples in Canada; and (3) racism has contributed to all historical and contemporary manifestations of structural oppression related to land theft and anti-Black racism. As such, CRT has much to contribute to race-radical research, pedagogy, and praxis when it comes to understanding race relations in a Canadian society grappling with an ever-changing multicultural narrative.

Racism is still exercised in various social, political and academic spheres and remains to be deconstructed by constituting new discourses. One of these deconstructive discourses has been critical race theory which can be regarded as a productive realm where the oppressed individuals or communities have found the opportunity to address socio-political issues and take collective action where necessary. This study aims to incorporate critical race theory, critical antiracist pedagogy, radical pedagogy, critical consciousness and critical resistance into ELT, EFL and ESL settings and curricula since whiteness and white supremacy have been the dominant discourses in the west perceiving whiteness as Self and blackness as Other. A civil society organization, The Critical Resistance Organization, shown as an example of collective action, was introduced to emphasize how the black movement could produce meaningful changes in a given society. ELT departments in Turkey can adopt an inclusive educational policy and radical pedagogy by taking the issue of racism into consideration to open room for a more liberal, equal and just society. The normalizing discourses regarding whiteness ought to be criticized and displaced by adopting the tenets of critical race theory.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) seeks to apply the negative dialectics of critical theory to the intersection of race, law, and power in the pursuit of racial and ethnic equality in Western society. That is to say, critical race theorists seek to convict Western society for not identifying with their values due to the prevalence of racial and ethnic oppression and subordination in the society. I argue here that this pursuit of racial emancipation and anti-subordination through the negative dialectics of critical theory by critical race theorists offers a false sense of racial difference which is convicting the values of the West for an alternative ontology and epistemology upon which to re-constitute its ideals in particular and society in general. I conclude that the postmodern/poststructural emphasis on the politics of the racial and ethnic physical bodies as offering an ontological and epistemological difference from the episteme of the West is baseless. The tenets of critical race theory are a reflection or inversion of the values and ideals of the West against themselves for their non-identification, and do not offer an oppositional alternative discourse from which to replace Western ontology and epistemology for its oppression and subordination against humanity and the earth. As such, I conclude that critical race theory is a conservative discourse that offers no real substantive solution to the crisis facing humanity and the earth in the face of the Protestant Ethic and spirit of capitalism9s exploitation and oppression. In fact, I want to go so far as to suggest that CRT prevents social change amidst the social and ecological devastation Western episteme has unleashed unto the world.

This article maps out two critical race media projects – a documentary and a Chicana/o-centric student newspaper – developed by Chicana/o scholars seeking to fulfilll the promise of praxis hailed by critical race theorists. Fortified and guided by the quintessential tenets of critical race theory and Latino critical race theory, these critical race media projects not only apply, but also extend these principles to seek educational and community transformation. As such, the production process for both documentary and student newspaper merge research and activism in order to cultivate figurative and literal spaces that encourage and allow for the recuperation of memory, archiving forgotten history, and the self-determination of contemporary identities and belonging. By harnessing critical race theory’s counter story-telling focus, these projects cultivate the voices of resistance and reclamation in Latina/o communities, transcending the Black/White paradigm that bounds a majority of critical race scholarship. In addition, both the film and quarterly newspaper uniquely sharpen the theoretical framework’s analytic critique of language, discourse and representation, exemplifying the inimitable power of words to both heal and wound.

AimsTo explore how students participating in Trio Upward Bound, a federally funded program for low‐income and future first‐time college students, experience bias when seeking healthcare.DesignQualitative group discussion.MethodsTwenty‐six Trio Upward Bound students participated in a group discussion about their experiences in healthcare. Questions for the discussion were developed using Critical Race Theory. Student comments were analysed and coded using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results were reported using Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research.ResultsStudents reported experiencing bias in the healthcare setting because of age, race, native language, traditional dress and/or ability to advocate for their rights. Three themes emerged: communication, invisibility and healthcare rights. Through these themes students expressed how their experiences with healthcare lead to further cultural mistrust and mistrust of healthcare providers. The comments provided by students included examples of the five tenets of Critical Race Theory: the permanence of racism, colorblindness, interest convergence, Whiteness as property, and the critique of liberalism. Among this group of adolescents, early negative experiences in healthcare have led some to avoid seeking treatment. As this continues into adulthood it may further health disparities in these groups. Critical Race Theory is a valuable tool in understanding how race, class and age intersect to create disparities in healthcare.

How do we challenge anti-Black racism within the social work curriculum? As a requirement of all BSW and MSW programs, Human Behavior and the Social Environment (HBSE) coursework provides students with foundational knowledge about human development that is essential to theory-driven social work practice. Traditionally, conceptions of human development center the experiences of white, heterosexual, cis-gender young people and label other identities as “divergent” or “diverse,” thereby devaluing the lived experiences of marginalized populations and reducing disparities to a misjudged application of “equal opportunity.” Centering the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) within HBSE course curricula enables us to examine the impact of race and racism upon human development and to challenge anti-Black racism. This article will expand commonly used frameworks (e.g., ecological systems theory, life course theory) to consider how CRT helps us understand the impact of race and racism on human development, and specifically on the development of Black youth. We explore recent frameworks that center Black youth’s experiences and highlight the impact of racial stress and trauma on development from infancy to adolescence. Five social work educators of an MSW HBSE course offer examples of class activities and assignments that enabled students to apply CRT to HBSE topics.