Racisms of commission and omission in educational psychology: A historical analysis and systematic review

Abstract

Educational psychology as a field and area of inquiry has gone underexamined in terms of its role in and contributions to racism and antiblackness. We position educational psychology as a racialized organization relative to the institution of education, a widely recognized site of institutionalized racism. We, therefore, explore the role the history, content, norms, and practices of educational psychology have played in creating and sustaining racial inequity in U.S. education. We draw attention to the racism of commission in the field’s origins by tracing the founding scholars’ white supremacist commitments and motives. Using a systematic review, we then describe the contemporary complicity of the field in sustaining racism through the omission of Black lives, perspectives, and scholarship in teaching, research, and publishing. In doing so, we demonstrate that educational psychology, by and large, fails to engage with its racist history and roots and its modern entanglements. The field also has not taken up questions of racism in educational psychology research in engaged and central ways. We conclude with a call for educational psychologists to turn toward critical frameworks, to center equity and justice in their work, and to honestly and intentionally grapple with our collective racist history.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here, we briefly note that our use of micro- meso- and macro-level organizations is drawn from Ray’s (2019) theory of racialized organizations, which draws on sociological theories of racism rather than ecological models such as Bronfenbrenner’s model.

Additional information

Funding

This project was partially funded by a grant from the American Psychological Association, Division 15.