Some Framing Questions About Racism and Evaluation: Thoughts Stimulated by Professor John Stanfield’s “Slipping Through the Front Door”

Abstract

Professor Stanfield’s article (this issue) stimulated several questions that are briefly discussed. How does the lens of race shape and effect our understandings and actions? How do we talk with each other about race and racism? How do we engage each other on these issues authentically at a time dominated by political correctness? What methods and measures fairly capture and communicate the experiences of people of color and the poor? Given the reality-shaping power of racial categories, what variables and categories are meaningful and appropriate? What program outcomes and evaluative judgments are conditioned by racially-shaped assumptions, presumptions, and politics? How do we make ourselves aware of such conditioning and its implications? How do we understand and deal with the paradoxes of race relations without trivializing them by the very act of labeling them as paradoxes? For those of us who are white, where do we look for guidance in matters of race and racism? For those so inclined, how do we find and follow the path to transformation?

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