Some recent examples from the world of Higher Education make the point that I’ve been at pains to impress upon readers, namely that for as sprawling as is the Academic-Industrial-Complex (AIC), it is essentially a function of an even more expansive Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC).
[1] There’s Brooklyn College’s Laurie Rubel, professor of math education. According to the student journalists who run the college watchdog publication Campus Reform, Rubel wrote an article for the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education in which she contends that the concepts of “meritocracy” and “color-blindness” are both “tool(s) of whiteness.”
The problem with meritocracy, Rubel asserts, is that it “ignores systemic barriers and institutional structures that prevent opportunity and success.”
As for color-blindness, Rubel remarks: “Teachers who claim color-blindness—that is, they claim not to notice the race of their students—are, in effect, refusing to acknowledge the impact of enduring racial stratification on students and their families.”
Rubel continues: “By claiming not to notice, the teacher is saying that she is dismissing one of the most salient features of the child’s identity and that she does not account for it in her curricular planning and instruction.”
So, by aspiring to know and evaluate their students independently of their racial backgrounds, teachers promote “whiteness.”
However, Rubel also contends that if teachers notice the racial backgrounds of their students, they’re guilty of promoting “whiteness.” For example, when teachers say of their students that they “can’t relate” to them, they note differences. But, Rubel laments, these “differences are typically cast in terms of deficit constructions about students, their places, and their families.”
In order to walk this tightrope, Rubel proposes that teachers include “social justice” issues into their math lessons.