Making whiteness visible: The promise of critical race theory in engineering education

Abstract

In the summer of 2020, the United States erupted in a series of protests designed to confront this nation's problem with race. As conversations about racial justice took hold in the public sphere, attention was drawn to critical race theory (CRT) and what role it might have in explaining why the United States remains rooted in racism. However, on September 4, 2020, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Russell Vought sent a letter mischaracterizing CRT that subsequently incited a crusade of disinformation and misguided rage (Cineas, 2020). The ensuing fallout has led to an educational crisis as educators grow fearful of teaching the United States' history comprehensively (Griesbach, 2021; Herman, 2021). Rather than critically evaluate how the systems (e.g., educational, judicial, political) within the United States reinforce White supremacist ideology, the focus shifted toward the very theories used to understand this phenomenon. What had the potential to be a racial reckoning instead became an attack on CRT. Across the United States, politicians, school boards, colleges, and universities attempted to ban and eliminate CRT (or topics associated with it) from discussion. While critics of CRT framed their opposition as an attempt to decrease racism by not giving it any attention, the pushback against this theory actually reflects a hard truth: that the historical accuracy CRT demands is an existential threat to White supremacy. Trying to censor theories of race is an example of the very thing CRT highlights—that systems are designed to reinforce whiteness—and legislating the erasure of CRT is one form of this White supremacy. We want to make clear that those in strong opposition to CRT are not the primary audience for this editorial. This editorial is for those who want to do better in calling out the role of whiteness in their research that employs a CRT framework. We start with contextualizing the relevance of CRT, then provide a brief overview of it as a theorizing space (as opposed to a theoretical framework), discuss it within engineering education research (EER), and conclude with questions scholars engaging with this theory should consider as they move forward. In this Year of Impact on Racial Equity, the EER community would do well to scrutinize the recent, and ongoing, campaign against CRT taking hold in various educational spaces (American Society for Engineering Education [ASEE], n.d.). The ASEE has endorsed this yearlong effort “to help leverage and extend the societal momentum toward greater awareness and action to dismantle white supremacy and racism” at a time when White supremacy is flexing its political and social muscle (ASEE, n.d.). This type of attention is particularly important as mention of CRT grows within EER. While some scholars have mentioned it as a useful theory in understanding the experiences of racially excluded people in EER (e.g., DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2009; Ong et al., 2020; Trytten et al., 2013), others have suggested that the use of frameworks like CRT in this domain has largely characterized racially excluded students from a deficit perspective (Mejia et al., 2018). In noticing this trend, we ask, how can EER best apply CRT? Despite the wide range of scholarship on CRT, both the public discourse and many of the published papers mentioning it in engineering make clear that this theory is misunderstood. Too often CRT discussions involve only two of its primary tenets: (1) racism is endemic and (2) the centrality of experiential knowledge. However, these tenets do not directly name a critical component for understanding race in the United States. Any use of CRT within the EER community should center whiteness. This is the only way to make any significant progress on actualizing racial equity and confronting the ways White supremacy operates within engineering classrooms. In 1998, Gloria Ladson-Billings asked, “Just what is critical race theory and what's it doing in a nice field like education?” (p. 7). That question set forth several decades of scholarship that explored the relationship between CRT and