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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.
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Racialized Organizations and Color-Blind Racial Ideology in Brazil
Although the relationship between organizations and structural racism is well established, less is known about how racialization occurs within organizations. Overlooking how racial ideology is imbued in organizational logic obscures the role organizations play in reproducing structural racism. The prevalence of color-blind racial ideology further complicates the study of racialization, as most societies deny the existence of racism targeting people of color. In this article the author asks, How does color-blind racial ideology guide management decisions and the rationalization of racially unequal organizational practices? Using an extended case study method, the author examines sugar-ethanol mills in Brazil, where nonwhite workers are disproportionately exposed to hazardous risks. The author argues that the racialization of organizational practices occurs through a twofold process in which white elites use nonracial discourse to rationalize unequal outcomes and to reproduce the social conditions that steer nonwhite peoples into hazardous worksites. This article makes two contributions to the literature. First, through the discursive frames of cultural racism, naturalization, victimization, and politicized markets, the author shows how the allocation of resources and opportunities at the organizational level shapes and is shaped by racialized social systems. Second, by studying unequal relations in Brazil, the author elucidates the long-standing presence of color blindness in Iberian America while also tracing similarities and differences with color-blind racism in the United States.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1810179
- PAR ID:
- 10178703
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2332-6492
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 56-70
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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