Translating Theory on Color-blind Racism to an Engineering Education Context: Illustrations from the Field of Engineering Education

Researchers across the engineering education research spectrum are investigating engineering and engineering education’s persistent racial homogeneity. Administrators and instructors alike talk about how they want their classrooms to be more racially diverse, and yet despite the herculean efforts of “minority in engineering” programs and the like, the needle has moved little. In this position paper, we describe a theoretical lens developed in critical race theory that has so far had little influence in engineering education to thinking about race although we consider it to have ample affordances. This lens is a theoretical framework developed by sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva called “color-blind racism,” and comprises 4 frames: abstract liberalism, cultural racism, naturalization, and minimization of racism. Because the author team sees great value in understanding how cultural values and practices associated with a US experience of Whiteness have been built into U.S. engineering education, we offer here an articulation of these frames, and illustrate each frame through a curated set of stories drawn from our experiences as K-12 students, as undergraduate engineering students, and as engineering faculty at Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). We note some limitations of the color-blind racism theory as we have applied it, offer some practical applications of the theory to consider, and issue a call to action for both engineering education researchers and engineering instructors. Introduction This position paper aims to prompt engineering education researchers and engineering instructors to think about how engineering as a profession, and engineering education, have been structured as a predominantly White discipline, and how it maintains this demographic imbalance despite decades of calls and work to diversify it. As many researchers and federal reports have noted [1-3], women and men of color and White women participate in much lower rates in US engineering education compared to their representation in the general population, despite many overt efforts at many levels of U.S. society to broaden participation. There are calls to remedy this persistent problem; however, some of us have argued [4] that engineering education researchers can take as given the value of a diverse engineering profession, particularly with regards to gender and race. A wealth of diversity research in engineering education research (EER) investigates race statistically – that is, demonstrating racial disparities by looking at the racial identifications of engineering students, faculty, or others, and noting statistically significant differences between racial groups along particular measures or constructs. While this research is no doubt valuable, most of the time the concept of race is itself uninterrogated. Researchers adopt the racial categories laid out by the National Science Foundation, themselves built on the Office of Management and Budget federal guidelines. But what does “race” itself mean? [5]. Scholars in other areas, including Critical Race Theory (CRT), offer frameworks in which to investigate race and racism other than looking at the statistically significant disparities among racial groups. In this paper, we offer Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s theory of color-blind racism as a specific frame from CRT that we believe might prove fruitful to investigate race and racism in engineering education. Bonilla-Silva and other CRT theorists have argued that, after Jim Crow laws were deemed unconstitutional, there arose a new means to maintain segregation without overt racism: through what Bonilla-Silva calls “color-blind racism” [6]. We situate color-blind racism theory in the context of CRT, note the places theorizing around colorblind racism is occurring in educational research, and offer several illustrations of its applicability to contemporary engineering education practices. We close with some ideas for EER researchers and engineering instructors to explore and consider in a call to action. While this paper is not empirical in the standard sense, even though it is based on experiential data, it offers an exploration of the color-blind racism theory situated in an engineering education context. We offer our experiential analysis as a jumping off point to encourage other researchers to adopt it as a theoretical or methodological framework for empirical studies in EER, and for program designers to consider while designing future interventions to broaden participation in engineering education.