In the Pursuit of Justice: Moving Past Color-Evasive Efforts

Abstract

In this issue, titled “In the Pursuit of Justice: Moving Past Color-Evasive Efforts” we focus on educational efforts that were conceived of to improve and expand equity in U.S. public schools, but rather than interrupting injustice, they have often resulted in harm. Our orientation to this tension is grounded in Critical Race Theory, and its central tenet of racial realism (Bell, 1992), meaning the awareness that race and racism are omnipresent even when unnamed. Our work with educators in various spaces and roles has deepened our awareness that educators are, writ large, deeply committed to their students’ well-being. However, the impact of their commitments is variable and vulnerable to the sway of racist systems––especially when educators do not attend to the role of race and racism; or, even worse, when they deliberately obscure or evade the constructs of race and racism. The harmful pervasiveness of colorblindness in schools is well-documented (Milner, 2010, 2012). Annamma et al. (2017) challenged critical scholars to build upon understandings of colorblindness and advocates for a racial ideology of color-evasiveness. We take up the construct of color-evasion in this volume. Annamma (2017) extended Gotanda’s (1991) critique of colorblindness, pointing in particular to its ableist underpinnings and to the passivity implied by the term. These scholars elaborate how, historically, colorblindness has been hailed as a moral highroad for policymaking and designing. Elaborating these points, they provided multiple examples, from the U.S. Constitution’s insistence that all men are created equal to the standards-based movement in educational reform efforts. Wells (2014), for example, critiqued NCLB as “a reflection of the most ‘colorblind’ approach to addressing racial disparities in education: Ignore glaring racial inequality when implementing policies and then bemoan stark racial inequalities in educational outcomes” (p. 1). Annamma and colleagues (2017) thus advocate for a shift to recognizing and intervening upon color-evasiveness to directly confront these tendencies: