Equity, inclusion, and antiblackness in mathematics education

ABSTRACT

Despite decades of equity- and inclusion-oriented discourse and reform in mathematics education, Black learners in the U.S. continue to experience dehumanizing and violent forms of mathematics education. I suggest that equity for Black learners in mathematics education is a delusion rooted in the fictions of white imaginaries, contingent on appeasing white logics and sensitivities, and characterized at best by incremental changes that do little to threaten the maintenance of racial hierarchies inside or outside of mathematics education. Moreover, the forms of inclusion offered up in equity-oriented discourses and reforms represent contexts of containment and enclosure that keep Black people in their same relative position. Refusal is suggested as a strategy for Black learners to resist the anti-Black character of mathematics education, and as a first step in actualizing forms of mathematics education that are worthy of Black learners.

KEYWORDS:

• Equity
• antiblackness
• reform; mathematics education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As I do elsewhere (Martin 2009b), I distinguish mainstream mathematics education research and policy as that which has relied on traditional theories and models of teaching and learning (e.g. information processing, constructivism, situated cognition) and research approaches (race-comparative analyses or the minimization of race through its absent presence) developed primarily by white researchers and policy-makers to normalize the mathematical behavior of white children. Simultaneous to their use for normalization and generalization, these theories and models have generated and validated conventional wisdoms about Black children and mathematics.

2. Epp and Watkinson (1997) defined systemic violence as:

Any institutionalized practice or procedure that adversely impacts on disadvantaged individuals or groups by burdening them psychologically, mentally, culturally, spiritually, economically, or physically. It includes practices and procedures that prevent students from learning, thus harming them. This may take the form of conventional practices and policies that foster a climate of violence, or policies and practices that appear neutral but result in discriminatory effects. (190)

3. This is not an argument against the use of statistics to document real discrepancies that need to be addressed on behalf of Black learners. It is an argument against statistics in service to epistemological violence.

4. While the analyses offered here focus on the dominant, mainstream reforms in mathematics education, there have been efforts that lean in the direction of Black liberation, including the Algebra Project, founded by civil rights pioneer Robert P. Moses, and that foregound mathematics-as-a-civil-right as one of its core principles. Also notable is the approach of teaching mathematics for social justice (Gutstein, 2016) that draws on Freirian principles within the larger critical mathematics movement in mathematics education.