Can Numbers Be Gender and Race Conscious? Advocating for a Critical Race Feminista Quantitative Praxis in Education

ABSTRACT

In this article, we (re)imagine quantitative approaches in educational research to (re)evaluate our experiences as Chicana/Latina feminists, which are always inextricably both raced and gendered. Using a Chicana feminist epistemology in education, a framework that explicitly challenges the perceived objectivity and universal foundations of knowledge that undergird traditional qualitative approaches, and quantitative critical (QuantCrit) research in education, which centers how statistics have long been racist and racialized, we consider whether numbers can be race and gender conscious. We put forth a critical race feminista quantitative praxis in education through an empirical application that explores Chicana educational attainment and occupational outcomes using secondary data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We conclude with implications for educational research.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. We use the term “Communities of Color” (and other “of Color” terms) to refer to Latinas/os, Black, Indigenous, and Asian Americans as nonwhite and nondominant groups that have histories of marginalization, oppression, and erasure in the United States. “Latinx” is a term that represents a move toward gender inclusivity for non-gender-conforming people. Although we appreciate these discursive moves, we remain consistent with terminology that we have used in our past work that honors the histories of careful theorization, conceptualization, and struggle for the terms we use in this article. These terms include “Communities of Color” (intentionally capitalized to reject the power that discursively operates in grammatical norms) and “Latina/o.”

2. We use “color-evasive” in lieu of “color-blind,” the more traditional term for this ideology, (a) to problematize an assumption that equates blindness with ignorance that inaccurately conveys and distorts the unique way blind individuals interact with the world and (b) to rethink and remove ableist language as core to our explicit efforts toward social justice in all aspects of our work, particularly in research and scholarship (Annamma et al., 2014).

3. Chicana feminist scholarship disrupts dominant Western paradigms that separate the physical (body), psychological (mind), and metaphysical (spirit), a consequence of colonial social formations. Lara (2002) brought together these entities to suture the ruptures of human wholeness and Chicana/Latina well-being through the concept of bodymindspirit—words (and meaning) once separate and now brought together.

4. Racial realism is a theory developed by critical race legal scholar D. Bell (1992) that holds racism as an endemic and permanent fixture of U.S. society. He argued that all strategies and struggles for anti-racism and social justice must consider this fact.

5. The term “helping professions” is often used to describe professions that aim to offer services to people who seek to improve their social, mental, and physical well-being (Hladik, 2014). Education, social work, health, psychology, and law have been considered helping professions (Anguiano & Harrison, 2002). We add that helping professions also can contribute toward social advancement.

6. Ancestry identifies the ethnic origins of the population.

7. The U.S. Census Bureau does not collect information on whether a person is undocumented. Undocumented individuals form part of the broader category of “not a citizen of the U.S.,” which also includes permanent residents.

8. Only individuals 25 and older were included by the U.S. Census Bureau. This is standard practice in measuring educational attainment, because if younger ages were included, data would misrepresent who is completing advanced degrees. See https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2018/demo/education-attainment/cps-detailed-tables.html.

9. We disagree with how this is measured, because it refers to gender.

10. In this study, we employed the 2018 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) System, which is used to categorize occupational data in several U.S. Census Bureau databases, including the ACS. All U.S. workers are classified into one of 867 detailed occupations according to their occupational definition. To facilitate classification, detailed occupations are combined to form 459 broad occupations, 98 minor groups, and 23 major groups. Detailed occupations in the SOC with similar job duties—and, in some cases, skills, education, and/or training—are grouped together.

11. We remembered these data once mentioned by our mentor, Daniel Solórzano, which led us to search for data collected on Chicanx/a/o specifically.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nichole M. Garcia

Nichole M. Garcia is an assistant professor of higher education in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. As a Chicana/Puerto Rican and mixed methodologist, her research focuses on the intersections of race, feminism, and Latina/o communities in higher education.

Verónica N. Vélez

Verónica N. Vélez is an associate professor of secondary education and education and social justice in the Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University. Her work aims to develop conceptual and methodological approaches that deepen a spatial consciousness and expand the use of geographic information systems in critical race research in education.

Lindsay Pérez Huber

Lindsay Pérez Huber is an associate professor in the Social and Cultural Analysis of Education master’s program in the College of Education at California State University, Long Beach. Her research agenda is concerned with using interdisciplinary perspectives to analyze racial inequities in education, the structural causes of those inequities, and how they mediate educational trajectories and outcomes of students of color.