How the Question We Ask Most About Race in Education Is the Very Question We Most Suppress

Abstract

The race question that appears perhaps most in American achievement talk (“How and why do different ‘race groups’ achieve differently?”) is also our most often deleted race question, as it provokes our most difficult explanations. While Americans think about school achievement routinely in racial terms, this article suggests, whether or not we describe achievement publicly in racial terms depends upon who is listening. Expanding from an ethnographic study of a school and district in California, this article examines how adults both asked repetitively how achievement was linked to race and repetitively suppressed this very question. It also begins to explore the role educational research plays in these dynamics of talk and silence. An explanatory habit of framing isolated players as particularly responsible for racial patterns, I suggest, appears throughout both professional and lay analysis: Indeed, schooling analysts seem to name existing racial patterns primarily when holding other players responsible for them. In failing to frame racial achievement patterns as communal productions, however, we preclude joint discussions of how exactly these racial patterns might be avoided.