The story of schooling: critical race theory and the educational racial contract

Abstract

This article is an engagement of methodology as an ideologico-racial practice through Critical Race Theory's practice of storytelling. It is a conceptual extension of this practice as explained through Charles Mills' use of the ‘racial contract (RC) as methodology’ in order to explain the Herrenvolk Education – one standard for Whites, another for students of color – that is in place in the USA. At its most general, the article introduces the full offerings of Mills' RC methodology for a study of educational research. Once deployed, the RC as methodology unveils a school system's foundation as deeply racial rather than universal or race-neutral.

Keywords:

• race
• racism
• critical race theory
• methodology
• ideology

Notes

1. Of course, this is not the wholesale rejection of Western thought. Just as Said depends on an appropriation of Foucault in Orientalism, Smith also gets much mileage out of French poststructural philosophy applied to the problem of colonialism and schools. Western thought does not merely come from Western thinkers but is a whole way of thinking about social phenomena, from Aristotle's Manichean ethics, to Kant's rationalism and Marx's determinisms. It is a project. Scholars like Said and Smith appropriate Western thinkers against the project of Western thought.

2. Despite these misgivings, I will use research throughout the essay because we do not yet have an appropriate replacement for it.

3. See particularly Mills' Introduction to The Racial Contract (1997) and Chapter 9 from From Class to Race (2003) on the RC as a methodology.

4. There are two senses of ‘ideal’ worth mentioning. First, ideal represents a Utopia, a projected state of affairs. Second, ideal suggests a philosophical variety of idealism, which – from Plato and then, later, Hegel – gives us a theory of ideal forms from which a society is created. Its opposite is materialism, championed by Feuerbach and Marx. The social contract theory is an instance of both senses of the ideal, a projection and an idea. Mills' favors a materialist RC, one based on an actual relationship, not unlike Marx's treatise on capitalism.

5. Although Mills mentions non-Black minority histories, he was concerned mainly with explicating the Black experience. But his general framework is portable and makes it possible to extend his arguments to include other minorities within their own specific histories.