Color-evasion and the production of individualist deficit accounts of educational inequality: The case of parental discourse on selective schools

Abstract

Color-evasion is a discursive process of power that upholds and reproduces dominant race-blind ideologies, but the discursive strategies and tactics—along with their ideological effects—that individuals mobilize to evade race require further and more specific examination. Drawing on interviews with parents of children who attend highly selective and racially disproportionate public magnet high schools in the United States, I offer a typology of color-evasive strategies used to actively evade race, arguing that such tactics allow people to circumvent taking a critical stance toward systematic educational inequality while reinscribing racism in the form of individualist deficit discourses. This critical discourse analysis demonstrates how individualist deficit thinking is ideologically tethered to color-evasion and how evading race makes race significant.

Introduction

Race is a sociohistorical formation and an organizing structure of self and other that imbues every facet and institution of U.S. society (Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995; Omi and Winant, 2015). But due to its ordinariness and concealment within the status quo, racism is rarely acknowledged under the formal colorblind façade (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017). In fact, its very denial is a fundamental property of contemporary racism (van Dijk, 1992). While denials of racism have been examined in varied contexts, educational researchers have recently taken an interest in examining how educators, school leaders, and others deploy practices to evade overt racial discourse, seeking to understand how such practices may reproduce dominant ideologies of objectivity, color ‘blindness,’ equality, neutrality, and meritocratic achievement (Augoustinos et al., 2005; Pollock, 2004; Rojas-Sosa, 2015; Shah and Coles, 2020; Wilt et al., 2022).

This critical discourse analysis focuses on color-evasion, or the discursive processes and strategies involved in actively avoiding and eluding explicit discourse around race and racism (Annamma et al., 2017). Color-evasion is not a mere disregard or denial with benign intentions but rather acts of power that produce specific ideological effects that further entrench racism in educational contexts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with parents of children who attend highly selective public magnet high schools, an educational context mired in racial controversy, I examine the specific discursive moves and strategies shared among parents to evade race and then analyze the ideological effects of such tactics.

In doing so, I offer a typology as a form of classification to better understand how discursive interactions are linked to macro-level ideologies. By focusing on four broad categories of race-evasive tactics, my analysis demonstrates how color-evasion—although seemingly mobilized for the sake of avoiding race—instead makes race consequential. Furthermore, I argue that the racial ideology of color-evasion reproduces individualist deficit accounts of educational ‘failure,’ explanations that provide interlocutors an avenue through which they can bypass reckoning with systemic racial inequality. Thus, this analysis emphasizes the importance of understanding how color-evasion occurs in social interaction (i.e. the tactics and strategies) and why or for what purposes color-evasion is deployed (i.e. its ideological effects).

The racial ideology of color-evasion

An ideology is a ‘collection of historically contingent claims to truth that are presented as common sense’ (Zotzmann and O’Regan, 2016: 116). Though normalized as ‘common sense,’ ideological truth claims are dynamically negotiated, contested, and reproduced through discourse, which Silverstein (1998) described as the ‘ideological field of contestation’ (p. 421). One such ideological claim is that of ‘color-blindness’ (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995), a dominant paradigm of ‘atomized individual[s] in an abstract universe of rights and preferences’ (Guinier and Torres, 2014: 101). To be color-blind is to purportedly not see race.

Color-blind ideologies are based on multiple forms of denial, ranging from strategic self-denials to avoid individual charges of racism (Augoustinos and Every, 2010; van Dijk, 1992), denial of race as a relevant social construction with material consequences, and/or temporal and spatial deflections that cast racism as a merely historical or ‘other-place’ social issue (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2013; Nelson, 2013). Acknowledgements of race are also fundamentally antithetical to the color-blind paradigm due to the underlying belief that abiding by the principle of color-blindness can solve any remaining issues of racial injustice. This racial ideology of color-blindness permeates educational discourses, policies, pedagogies, and reforms (Chapman, 2013; Su, 2007; Wells, 2014).

As argued by DisCrit scholars (Dis/ability Critical Race Theory), color-blindness is indeed an inadequate ableist metaphorical descriptor of racial ideology because it ‘conflates lack of eyesight with lack of knowing’ and ‘equates blindness with ignorance’ (Annamma et al., 2017: 154). Alternatively, Annamma et al. (2017) propose ‘color-evasiveness’ as a preferred substitute because color-blindness—by implying a degree of passivity—does not adequately account for the power that affords individuals the discursive resources to actively evade discussions of race (see also Annamma et al., 2018). Building on the practices of racial silencing and coding that have been well-documented in educational settings (Castagno, 2008; Fine, 1987, 1991; Pollock, 2004), color-evasiveness therefore conceptualizes the ability to evade naming race as an act of power itself.

As Gotunda (1991) pointed out, a ‘subject is defined by its negation’ (p. 23), and in the case of race, the denial and purposive non-recognition of race necessarily implies its presence and consideration. Pollock (2004) previously highlighted this tension: ‘although talking in racial terms can make race matter, not talking in racial terms can make race matter too’ (p. 172). We can extend this statement by rephrasing it as ‘not talking about race involves thinking about race and then strategically evading its recognition.’ Thus, an ideology of color-evasion is neither passive nor ignorant; adhering to it involves active and deliberate evasions of racial discourse.

Recently, the theorization of color-evasiveness has proven to be a useful concept particularly in teacher education research (e.g. Galloway et al, 2019; Shah and Coles, 2020). For instance, in his poststructural discourse analysis of interviews with teacher educators, Chang-Bacon (2022) identified strategies of outright omission and racial proxies (i.e. the use of coded language) when teacher educators addressed topics related to race and racism, emphasizing that ‘active discursive work must take place in order for race-evasiveness to be achieved’ (p. 20). In another study, Wilt et al. (2022) demonstrate how white educators construct the ideological frame of post-racial progressivism through specific discursive tools. Building on these ideas of intentionality, discursive effort, and discursive ‘tools,’ I have opted to use the term ‘color-evasion’ in place of ‘color-evasiveness’ in order to invoke a more active and processual connotation. In this paper, I draw on the highly racialized and controversial context of highly selective public magnet high schools as a means to examine how a set of relatively advantaged parents mobilize and engage in specific color-evasive tactics and then analyze how such strategies reinforce certain ideological positions.

Research context

The data examined in this analysis are drawn from a set of semi-structured interviews (n=12) that I conducted with parents of children who attended highly selective public magnet high schools on the East Coast of the United States. The public schools represented in this study require students to earn admission via a competitive and selective process typically involving standardized testing, applications, and/or interviews. Furthermore, each of the high schools is consistently ranked within the top 150 high schools in the U.S. and within the top 10 high schools in their respective states (according to the U.S. News & World Report rankings). The approximate racial composition of all the high schools represented in the interviews discussed in this critical discourse analysis are as follows: 55% Asian, 30% white, 5% Black, and 10% Hispanic.

The duration of the semi-structured interviews ranged from 30 to 60 minutes. Of the parents interviewed (n = 12), 5 self-identified as White, 5 as Asian, 1 as Latinx, and 1 as Black. 8 of the participants were mothers, while 4 were fathers. Importantly, at the time of the interview, each of the parents interviewed volunteered and served on the parent-school organization. Thus, the parents were both willing and able to be actively involved in supporting school matters and activities. By serving in these public-facing leadership positions, the parents functioned as official representatives who served students, families, and school personnel alike and who needed to maintain respectable and professional appearances as public figures.

Highly selective public magnet high schools constitute a highly racialized and controversial educational context in the U.S., as made evident by several high-profile legal cases (e.g. Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board regarding Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, VA). The crux of the controversy revolves around the racial disproportionality of the student population, namely that Black and Latino students are significantly under-represented while white and Asian students are generally over-represented (Corcoran and Baker-Smith, 2018), and the extent to which school districts should reform admission policies to achieve a more diverse student body (and whether this constitutes race-based discrimination). Initially intended and designed to promote racial integration across traditional school district boundary lines, these highly selective public magnet schools can often instead institutionalize and contribute to furthering racial segregation (Davis, 2014). Thus, while the selection processes at these selective schools operate under the auspices of the ‘color-blind’ ideologies of meritocratic achievement and objectivity, race—as we will see—remains highly salient and particularly heightened in this context.

Methodological approach: Critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis is an approach to understanding the intersection of language and social structure by using the key constructs of discourse, power, and ideology with the aim of revealing and making clear the effects, outcomes, and processes of power (Blommaert, 2005; Fairclough, 1995; Gee, 2011). I sought to examine the ways that actual spoken language use in the interview context contributes to processes of racialization, and more specifically the processes of how and why race surfaces and is introduced in dialogue and ordinary interactions (Whitehead, 2011). Analyzing the ways that race becomes imbued in everyday discourses and interactions is critical to understanding how race continues to be a salient and hierarchical form of social differentiation (Dick & Wirtz, 2011; Holt, 2000).

For each interview, I inquired about the rigorous application and selection process of earning admission into the selective magnet high school, asking parents about their experiences on guiding their children through this process and their perspectives on merit and selection. I also asked parents to reflect on their children’s educational experiences. It is critical to note that I never explicitly asked about race or the racial composition of the school. Nonetheless, the parents I interviewed frequently made allusions to race, mostly in implicit and color-evasive ways. When this occurred, I asked follow-up questions for further elaboration and explanation. Therefore, the data analyzed are parent-initiated moments of racial discourse.

I initially analyzed the semi-structured interview data using traditional thematic analysis without explicit attention to race (Hu, 2024). However, after several years of prolonged engagement with key excerpts from the data (Lincoln and Guba, 1985), I re-examined the data with a race-focused lens with the following questions guiding my inquiry: (1) What discursive tactics or strategies were used by parents to evade race? (2) What ideological effects are produced as result of these color-evasive discursive strategies? I first focused on a subset of 3 interviews in developing an initial typology of color-evasion, and then after defining the categories, I examined the remaining interviews to identify shared patterns and to reconfigure and modify the classification.

Analysis: A typology of color-evasive strategy

In this section, I first provide an overview of each category of color-evasive strategy (coded euphemism, third-party transfer, self-/other-representation, and the invocation of other diversities), followed by an example from the parent interviews that exemplify the tactic. Then, I discuss select excerpts that demonstrate the ways that multiple color-evasive strategies were deployed and mobilized simultaneously.

Coded euphemism

Using euphemistic and racially coded language is a prevalent strategy of denial that functions to minimize the connotations of particular actions or concepts. Fairclough (1995) defined euphemism as ‘a word which is substituted for a more conventional or familiar one as a way of avoiding negative values’ (p. 117). Coded euphemisms are mobilized in order to mitigate negative connotations and create a sense of vagueness for the purposes of avoiding direct mentions of race. The use of racially coded euphemisms was widely prevalent across all the interviews I conducted. Its purpose is not necessarily to avoid racial discourse altogether but rather to make implicit racial statements based on shared understandings.

For example, Lucy, a white parent, explained to me that her daughter wanted to attend their magnet high school for this specific reason, ‘She just felt that it was going to be more challenging . . . going to meet different people who are very motivated. She wanted to be around motivated students.’ In passing, this statement appears to be race-neutral. However, a few moments later in the interview, Lucy used racially coded language to describe the public high schools of the local districts in the county, ‘Some people’s sending districts are just awful. Awful. They’re under-funded. Very low expectations of the children, and um . . . that kind of thing. You know, rough neighborhoods. Gangs in schools.’ In this statement, Lucy never explicitly mentioned any racial terms, but the use of ‘rough neighborhoods’ and ‘gangs in schools’ invoked racializing discourses of Black violence. In this way, the local high schools were ideologically ‘Blackened’ in discourse and associated with poor performance, lack of resources, low expectations, neighborhood violence, and danger, while on the other hand, the magnet high school was diametrically positioned as being attended by ‘motivated’ students. Thus, the descriptor of ‘motivated,’ though seemingly race-less, takes on a racialized connotation of whiteness. These euphemistic allusions to race are effective at providing speakers a way to ‘imply or “plant” a racial meaning in their talk to convey it indirectly and inexplicitly’ (Whitehead, 2009: 335).

Third-party transfer

An act of third-party transfer is a color-evasive strategy through which ‘individual denials of racism may strategically be made by comparison to others’ (van Dijk, 1992: 91). Consider this illustrative example: ‘I have nothing against them, but you know my customers don’t like to deal with Black personnel’ (van Dijk, 1992: 9). The speaker invokes the opinion or perspective of a third-party not present in the social interaction. This discursive act can function to express the speaker’s opinion, but by using a third-party, the speaker deflects personal responsibility or ownership of the opinion itself.

Jennifer, another white parent, explained that the student population of her son’s magnet high school is highly motivated and driven because of parental pressure. But to discuss the school’s student and family population, Jennifer avoided racial terms and relied upon a variety of color-evasive strategies, one of which was the strategy of third-party transfer. She mobilized this tactic in the following statement: ‘It’s a little much. I had a conversation with the nurse who was there a couple of years ago, and she was just like, “Oh my gosh! The level of demand upon the kids from their families is overwhelming.”’

Here, Jennifer performed the strategy of third-party transfer by invoking the school nurse to communicate that the families at her son’s school place an overwhelming level of demand, pressure, and expectation upon their children. Invoking the voice of another person accomplished at least two functions: first, a view with which Jennifer agrees was communicated through the voice of another, and second, the act of third-party transfer functioned to legitimize the claim because it emphasized that another person (and not merely any person but a school employee with medical authority) also held the same viewpoint. Again, at first glance, Jennifer’s statement appeared to be race-neutral and plausibly applicable across all racial categories, but in the context of her son’s predominantly Asian high school, her statement likely referred to Asian families. Race was never explicitly mentioned but can be inferred based on a shared implicit understanding on the part of the interlocutor. In other words, speakers can force their audience to ‘supply the common sense knowledge’ required to ‘hear’ race, which Whitehead (2009) termed ‘racial common sense’ (p. 338).

Self-/other-representation

The third category of color-evasive strategy is self- and other-representation, a set of acts that protects or enhances one’s own self-image by simultaneously comparing oneself to the other. The other is presented as negative in some form, which concurrently and consequently presents the self as more positive (Chiang, 2010). van Dijk (1992) explains that speakers often ‘follow a double strategy of positive self-representation . . . and a strategy of expressing subtle, indirect or sometimes more blatant forms of negative other-presentation’ (p. 89). In many instances, this self-/other-representation is structured according to racial categorization.

Returning to my interview with Jennifer, I asked her in clarify, ‘Where does that drive to succeed, to excel, to achieve come from?’ To this question, Jennifer responded:

I have to say, for my son, it’s sort of an internal drive. I mean, I don’t think we parent in that way. I mean we certainly applaud the successes, but it was not a demand placed upon my kids . . . I am grateful they both are internally driven but um I think it’s uh . . . cultural. It’s a family-driven thing.

In this statement, Jennifer mobilized the strategy of self-/other-representation by first presenting herself as an exception to what she previously claimed about fellow magnet school parents. While the majority of other parents are demanding and rely upon extrinsic motivation, Jennifer represented herself as a parent who does not engage in such a parenting style and whose children are intrinsically motivated.

In this tactic of self-/other-representation, Jennifer portrayed herself in a more positive light, a discursive move that occurred in tandem with a negative representation of other families. In her attempt to describe this parenting phenomenon, Jennifer described it as ‘cultural,’ a coded euphemistic term often used in place of race. In the context of her son’s high school which is disproportionately Asian American, Jennifer’s statements indeed connotated racialized meanings. This ‘cultural’ phenomenon she referred to invoked an Asian American racializing discourse of stereotypically harsh and demanding ‘tiger mom’ parenting. These color-evasive strategies functioned to legitimize the stereotypical trope that Asian families are highly demanding on their children while also casting a value judgement to imply that such strict parenting that relies on extrinsic demands is inferior to the parenting style practiced by Jennifer which produces intrinsic motivation. By extension, the concept of parenting itself becomes racialized via self-/other-representation: parenting that relies on extrinsic motivation becomes racialized as Asian, while parenting that produces intrinsic motivation becomes racialized as white.

Invocation of other diversities

The final category of color-evasive strategy I identified is the deliberate and explicit mention of other forms of diversity (e.g. socioeconomic, gender, geographic) as a tactic of avoiding discussing issues of race and racism. In such instances, words such as ‘diverse’ or ‘diversity’ are used to generate positive connotations, as appreciating and celebrating diversity has emerged as a core value of modern liberalism. This way, individuals can explicitly name ‘diversity’ while circumventing discussions of racial diversity and racism.

For example, when I asked why he wanted to send his daughter to their magnet high school (if admitted), Ram, an Indian father, explained one of his reasons:

There’s also more diversity. A lot of her friends are coming from [lists several towns]. So, there’s a bigger . . . there’s a more diverse geography of her friends. And that gives her different perspectives as well. She’s exposed to people outside of [their town] with different demographics, different you know . . . different socioeconomics.

Here, Ram mobilized the tactic of invoking other diversities, which deflected and circumvented racial discourse. Because the magnet school draws students from numerous municipalities and school districts, Ram explained that his daughter’s friend group is geographically diverse while also being purportedly socioeconomically diverse. The explicit invocation of these other forms of diversities (while important in their own ways) functioned to modify the meaning of the word, ‘diversity,’ itself in an attempt to erase its racialized meanings. That is, instead of racial diversity, diversity became synonymous with geographic, socioeconomic, and other forms. Interestingly, by attending the selective magnet school instead of their local public high school, Ram’s daughter attended a much less racially diverse school.

Color-evasive strategies in action

With each category of color-evasive strategy introduced, I now turn to a few excerpts from the interview data to demonstrate how this typology can provide a useful interpretive frame for understanding color-evasion in discourse. I focus on how multiple color-evasive tactics are mobilized simultaneously.

Kelly

Kelly, a white parent, commented on her son’s magnet school’s population in this way, ‘But I think you’ll notice as you interview others that there’s a concentration, and it’s not just a concentration in the area, and also in the ethnicity. That was my other concern . . . the the the racial . . . I don’t know. Just you know.’ Kelly mobilized third-party transfer by mentioning that others who I will interview will confirm a notable characteristic of the magnet school (i.e. disproportionately Asian). She did not need to explicitly explain this phenomenon to me because ‘others’ will inevitably do so at a later point. Kelly referred to a ‘concentration’ in ‘ethnicity,’ and after a series of pauses and rhetorical incoherence, Kelly blurted the word, ‘racial,’ before cutting herself off. Forcing me to supply the racial common sense, these coded cues were sufficient to understand that she was referring to the Asian American students concentrated at the magnet school.

Later in the interview, I sought clarification on what she meant by a ‘concentration’ of students and families. She elaborated on this issue:

Okay, this was a concern. This was a legitimate concern. So obviously, we’re white. My son’s white. Just in case you couldn’t guess . . . when you think about it, it’s a technology base, so there’s a very heavy concentration of one ethnic group . . . I would encourage you to look at the statistics online. So that was one of concerns that he was going to go into a school where he would be the minority, and he might be the only one in the whole grade.

Here, Kelly explicitly identified herself and her son as white, but while she did not evade self-classifying using racial terms, she nonetheless continued to use coded language to refer to Asians. Kelly once again engaged in a tactic of third-party transfer by encouraging me to ‘look at the statistics online,’ as these statistics would provide me the information she is unwilling to state. Furthermore, in explaining her racialized fears, Kelly opted to refrain from saying that her son might be the only white student in his class, omitting the racial term, ‘white.’ In my interview with Kelly, she never once discussed the magnet school’s population in explicit racial terms, but by using these color-evasive strategies, Kelly still communicated her racialized fears about her son potentially being a racial minority within a non-white-majority.

Randy

Randy, a white parent, deployed the strategy of invocating other diversities, specifically geographic diversity as a means to cast race as irrelevant. In describing the selection process, Randy explained:

You look at grades and scores on the admissions test, and that’s pretty much all they use to determine your admission . . . It’s a little bit different than some of the other schools when you have this political controversy. We’ve had less of that because already have this geographic system . . . It’s not quite like Fairfax County, Virginia, where everyone in town is making 6 figures. That’s an upper middle-class county.

Randy claimed that the magnet school that his son attended is somewhat exempt from ‘political’ controversy precisely because the magnet school draws students from a broad geographic region of numerous districts. The use of ‘political’ is a euphemistic stand-in for race, while referring to geographic diversity is a color-evasive tactic that presents geography as a solution to the racial inequities commonly found in selective magnet schools. Then, when he explicitly compared his magnet school to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax, Virginia, which has been at the center of national scrutiny, Randy reframed the racial contention as a socioeconomic one. That is, the core issue with Fairfax County is not racial disproportionality but upper-class socioeconomic privilege.

By explicitly mentioning Fairfax County, Randy mobilized the tactic of self-/other-representation in a more communal sense. He presented Fairfax County as the ‘other’ school district dealing with racial controversy and socioeconomic privilege, which therefore presented his own district as one that does not suffer from the same issues. In reality, the county that operates Randy’s son’s magnet school is predominantly white and highly affluent in very similar ways to Fairfax County. Invoking geography and socioeconomic status is indeed a tactic to evade race. Later in our interview, Randy defended the existence of highly selective magnet high schools because these top schools can ‘identify and develop talent.’ But once again, Randy evaded race, ‘The next strong mathematician of any demographic group, like some under-represented one, it would be good if they had gifted programs. It’s probably even more necessary among under-privileged communities.’ By using these euphemistic terms, ‘under-represented’ and ‘under-privileged,’ Randy implicitly acknowledged inequitable access to magnet schools on the basis of race. Black and Latino communities are systematically excluded from opportunities to attend selective magnet schools like his son’s school.

Lucy

Previously, I showed how Jennifer’s color-evasive discourse about parenting was implicitly racialized. The interpretation that demanding and ‘high-expectations’ parenting should be understood as an Asian American racializing discourse can be further corroborated by returning to Lucy who made similar comments:

If you’re talking about the population of the schools that my kids go to, a lot of is parental pressure, I think. And I’m guilty myself, to be honest. They call me the ‘tiger mom.’ I’m one of the tiger moms. I was the one at the Kumon school with the kids. I was the only non-ethnic mom at the Kumon school or whatever.

In this instance, the popularized notion of ‘tiger mom’ parenting re-emerged as an explanatory concept. Lucy explained that she is like her fellow parental peers in this regard. She never explicitly stated or referred to Asian parents but instead used several color-evasive strategies. First, Lucy admitted that she herself is ‘guilty’ of engaging in ‘tiger mom’ parenting, a statement that reflects how the racialized other is positioned. The ‘other’ is framed as engaging in an inferior parenting approach that is not looked upon favorably. Only in the context of this negative value judgment does it make sense that Lucile confessed her complicity in practicing such parenting.

But unlike Jennifer who created distance from the stereotype of demanding Asian parenting, Lucy’s confession indicates that she did not attempt to enhance her own image in this regard. Like Jennifer, however, Lucy employed coded euphemistic language when she stated that she was the only ‘non-ethnic’ mom at the Kumon school, with ‘non-ethnic’ substituted for white. The choice to mention Kumon also confirms this Asian American racializing discourse as Kumon is a well-known Japanese educational program. Thus, via other-representation and coded language, Lucy’s discourse was filled with racialized statements particularly about Asian families, and these statements were made without any explicit mentions of race.

Cindy

As a final example, Cindy, a Filipina parent, was willing to engage in explicit racial discourse with me but only conditionally. She too mobilized a host of color-evasive strategies. In describing the preparations needed for the admissions test, Cindy explained:

However, I’m Filipina. I’m Asian. I know, I know a lot of Chinese families and Korean families that start in 5^th grade, which I think is insane. They send their kids to cram school. I’m not kidding you. I have friends who tell me this. I’m like, ‘What?!’ I can’t do that. I did not do that obviously. I know a lot of Chinese families and Korean families, even if they’re not rich families by any stretch of the imagination, but the first thing they do: 5^th grade. Bam! Go to cram school.

Cindy referenced and invoked her ethnoracial identity in order to project a position of legitimacy and authority for her subsequent statements. She mobilized the color-evasive tactic of third-party transfer by invoking her ‘friends’ who have told her that many Chinese and Korean families engage in the ‘insane’ practice of sending their children to cram school as early as 5^th grade. But then, Cindy employed a form of self-/other-representation by first casting a negative value judgment on the practice and also by denying that she did not do this with her own child. In doing so, Cindy differentiated herself from the Chinese and Korean families who are known to engage in this ‘insane’ parenting practice. Like Jennifer, Cindy distanced herself from the intense ‘tiger mom’ parenting that carries negative connotations, thereby presenting herself as a more reasonable parent.

Later in the interview, I asked Cindy about her perspective on the admissions test. She explained her viewpoint:

But for me, I think it’s the most equitable criteria for admissions. Of course, a lot of people still feel that privilege goes into it. But I don’t think so because I know a lot of these Asian families . . . it will sound a little bit racist, but a lot of Asian families, even if they’re poor, send their kids to the school. For some type of families, it’s not the priority. That’s why in terms of other demographics, their enrollment . . . is very small.

Here, Cindy, perhaps as a function of shared racial identification with me, explicitly named Asian families. She mobilized self-denial and hedged with a caveat that what she will say may ‘sound a little bit racist,’ but she contrasted these Asian families with ‘some [other] type of families’ without naming who these families are. Cindy, once again, deployed coded language when offering her explanation of why ‘other demographics’ fail to be represented at the magnet school. She never specifically named who these ‘others’ are, but it can be deduced that Cindy was referring to Black and Latino students who are significantly under-represented. As these excerpts demonstrate, the purpose of these color-evasive tactics is not to evade racial statements altogether but to make racial comments and to convey racial meanings in subtle and hidden ways. In mobilizing this set of strategies, Cindy advanced her perspective that the racial disparity in magnet school enrollment can be explained because ‘other’ families simply do not prioritize schooling and education.

Discussion: Linking color-evasion and individualist deficit discourses

This critical discourse analysis has offered a typology of color-evasive strategy in the racialized context of highly selective public magnet high schools. I have detailed four broad categories of color-evasion and, using excerpts from interviews with parents, I have demonstrated how such tactics are mobilized in discourse, highlighting color-evasion as a process of making racial statements and conveying racial meanings without explicit mentions of race. But what are the ideological effects of engaging in color-evasive acts of power? Based on this analysis, my principal argument is that one of the key ideological effects of color-evasion is the reproduction and naturalization of individualist deficit explanations of racial inequality in education. The strategies and tactics discussed here are discursive tools that uphold the dominant frame of individualist deficit ideology.

Given that highly selective public magnet schools are highly racially disproportionate, there are several ideological interpretations or explanations of this observed pattern. The first ideological interpretation or truth claim is pseudo-scientific (Sharma, 2018). For instance, using a concept like motivation as an explanation (as seen with Lucy and Jennifer) draws on an individualist and pseudo-scientific deficit paradigm in which the racial imbalance in these magnet schools of choice is a logical outcome of the unequal distribution of ‘motivation’ across racial categories—the insinuation being that Black and Latino students lack the educational motivation required to earn admission. This pseudo-scientific view mirrors that of eugenic and racist notions of intelligence in a more palatable form. Such an account is individualist in that it locates the source of failure within the individual, ‘blaming the victim’ for their own failure.

A second ideological interpretation evident in the interviews I conducted is the cultural deprivation explanation, which relies on the notion of parenting and concomitant so-called ‘cultural’ values as explanatory concepts. In explaining these nurture deficit theories, Pearl (1997) explained:

Although culture (or the alleged lack of it, as indicated by the notion of deprivation) was central to the cultural deprivation model, the family was key to this deficit framework. The family unit—mother, father, home environment—was pegged as the carrier of the pathology. (p. 133)

When the ‘success’ account is explained on the basis of involved and demanding parenting (as Jennifer argued), the implied deficit account is that the racial imbalance can be explained as a consequence of the lack of such parenting in other communities of color. Cindy, for instance, clarified this connection by stating that ‘other’ families are not represented in the magnet school simply because they do not value or prioritize education and schooling. That is, deficient parenting is the source of failure, which like the first ideological interpretation, locates the source of deficit within an individual unit (i.e. the family). Both of these deficit accounts—pseudo-scientific and cultural deprivation—are forms of individualist deficit thinking commonly found in educational discourse (DePouw, 2012; Valencia, 2010; Valencia and Solórzano, 1997) that have become more acceptable and socially sanctioned forms of racist discourse (Durrheim & Dixon, 2000).

My analysis demonstrates how color-evasion as a discursive process is ideologically linked to these individualist deficit accounts. These tactics and strategies of color-evasion, as evidenced by the interviews analyzed here, are the means by which individuals can make racial statements that uphold and preserved individualist deficit explanations—interpretations that fail to recognize the unequal organization of resources and opportunities made available to students and families based on race and the hierarchical social system that continuously reproduces educational disparities (Merolla and Jackson, 2019; Pak, 2021). Color-evasion therefore functions to masquerade structural inequalities as individualized deficits through racial insinuation. By speaking of highly motivated students, parents implicitly make statements about those who are supposedly unmotivated. By speaking of families who value and prioritized education, they are also making statements about those who, in their eyes, do not. In addition, color-evasion not only reproduces race-neutrality and individualist deficit thinking but these altogether protect and reinforce dominant beliefs in meritocratic systems (Liu, 2011; Markovits, 2019). The myth of meritocracy coupled with possessive individualism make color-evasion a particularly salient process in the U.S. These ideologies therefore make race ‘unspeakable’ because to speak race explicitly would be to acknowledge the ongoing significance and relevance of race, which might begin to jeopardize the mirage of colorblindness and post-racial equality.

Furthermore, these findings also highlight the need to understand the differentiated racialized positioning of minorities in the U.S. and specifically the complex racialized position of Asian Americans. In this context, many parents were willing to make tacit allusions to Asian Americans in ways they did not for both white families and other non-white minorities. In educational discourse, Asian Americans as a racialized group have become associated with academic achievement, and because this association is widely viewed as positive, it is now perhaps more permissible to talk and speak on Asian Americans relative to other non-white minorities.

In addition to their over-representation, this featuring of Asian Americans in educational discourse may also reflect the unique role of Asian Americans in the U.S. racial order as ‘racial wedges’ (Oh & Eguchi, 2022; Wing, 2007). That is, Asian Americans are frequently appropriated and positioned as model minorities to demonstrate the meritocratic arrangement of U.S. society and to downplay structural racism, but at the same time, as evidenced by the ‘tiger mom’ trope, Asian Americans are also cast as immutably foreign and inferior (Hu, 2023; Lee et al., 2017). Therefore, white and Asian families are positioned and accounted for differently in discourse about educational success: attributions of educational achievement to ‘demanding’ parenting abound for Asian families but not to the same extent for white families. Allusions and references to Asian Americans (along with their achievement and their parenting practices) are becoming a prominent means to justify systemic educational inequity.

As an important contextual caveat, the sample of parents interviewed in this study were highly involved parents who seemingly desired to be model and active parents by volunteering to serve the broader school community. This is perhaps why these parents were more likely to engage in more covert color-evasion tactics to ultimately maintain and protect their image as public representatives and figures, a pattern that may differ from overt forms of explicit racism that are becoming increasingly common in mainstream discourse. Nonetheless, this research suggests that we move toward examining the deliberate intent of ignoring and evading race to reinforce and entrench deficit accounts. In the case of highly selective public magnet schools, color-evasion perpetuates individualist deficit accounts not to deny the existence of racial inequality but to deny that it is an educational problem that should be remedied. In other words, color-evasion justifies the status quo and has a particular ideological effect of reproducing dominant narratives and of circumventing analysis of the institutional arrangements and structures of opportunity made available across racialized groups.

Conclusion

Using the context of highly selective public magnet schools, this critical discourse analysis has examined some of the specific ways that color-evasion occurs in social interaction. This research has examined the specific discursive tools and strategies used to evade race, without which we cannot understand their ideological effects. Color-evasion, as practiced in everyday talk and conversations, is a mechanism through which individualist deficit ideologies are perpetuated and normalized and denials of structural racism can be made. Elucidating this connection between color-evasion and individualist deficit accounts of racial inequality helps us to understand why deficit perspectives continue to retain hegemonic dominance in educational discourse despite a multitude of attempts to problematize and dismantle them. As a way forward, explicit discussions of systemic and institutional racism with students, parents, and school leaders in education that provoke learning and understanding and that are attentive to these processes of color-evasion may be a prudent step toward disrupting the naturalized status quo of color-evasive individualist thinking.