When Race Disappears

Abstract

What happens to race in public discussions about “race-neutral” college admissions policies? This article shows how race disappeared from elite political debate during hearings on Texas Senate Bill 175 (2009), the Top Ten Percent Plan (the Plan), which guaranteed college admissions to high school graduates from the top 10% of their classes. Findings indicated that race disappeared from the discussion of college admissions policy in Texas. Instead, policy makers emphasized students’ opportunity to compete for college admissions ignoring that the opportunities for and impediments to success at different high schools varied widely across the state. The implication of these findings is that as policy becomes race neutral, discourse also becomes “colorblind” potentially disguising structural and secondary school inequalities.

Achieving Racial Equity From the Bottom-Up? The Student Equity Policy in the California Community Colleges

“…Combining the insights from earlier work on racial equity policies and reforms (e.g., Pollock, 2004; Stevenson, 2016; Winkle-Wagner et al, 2014) with the findings of this study, policy makers should work to ensure that race and racial equity are centrally framed in the policy. The tendency for race to be removed (e.g., as with Proposition 209), to slip from view (e.g., as with equity for all student approaches), or to be crowded out by other considerations (e.g., as with the SEP)—even when data indicates that racial inequity is a long-standing and systemic issue—means that policy makers in California and elsewhere who care about the outcomes of racially minoritized students should take explicit, proactive steps against efforts that seek to diminish the framing of race in equity policies.…”

“…In addition, this study contributes to the small but expanding body of work on equity policies in higher education (e.g., Harper et al, 2009; Mansfield & Thachik, 2016; Winkle-Wagner et al, 2014). Like these studies, our analysis demonstrates that equity policies often seem to be explicitly or effectively race-neutral, which can undermine the achievement of racial equity goals and/or hamper the implementation of race-conscious efforts.…”

“…Pollock’s (2004) ethnography of a high school in California illustrates how muting race in everyday talk can challenge efforts to address the root cause of racial inequity. Winkle-Wagner, Sulè, and Maramba’s (2014) discourse analysis of policy discussions around Texas’s Top 10 Percent Plan show how talk about race moved “underground” (p. 538), where it can be ignored and/or decoupled from the structural inequalities that shape the educational opportunity of racially minoritized students. And early data from a state-mandated redesign of developmental math at the Community College of Aurora in Colorado indicate that while average success rates increased, White students were the chief beneficiaries of the reform and outcome gaps for African American and Latinx students widened; only when subsequent efforts took an explicit, race-conscious approach did success for African American and Latinx students increase at a higher rate than Whites, resulting in more equitable outcomes (Stevenson, 2016).…”

Planning as strategy for improving Black and Latinx student equity: Lessons from nine California community colleges

“…The state provided all equity plans submitted as well as other documents such as internal memos and guidelines used to evaluate plans. Possessing formally submitted equity plans increases the validity of the data collected as they are stable, precise, and obtained in an unobtrusive manner (Winkle-Wagner et al, 2014). The data collected was the most accurate and up-to-date versions and allowed for an assessment of how Black and Latinx students were (or were not) addressed in student equity plans.…”

“…In recent years, there has been an increase in the enactment of state-level higher education policies, but few, if any, have focused on the notion of equity or have explicitly named racial and ethnic groups as policy beneficiaries. The inability of prior reform efforts to focus on racial/ethnic groups or target racial disparities may fail to appropriately acknowledge or address consistent gaps among minoritized student groups such as Black and Latinx students (Winkle-Wagner, Sule, & Maramba, 2014). To be sure, various state-level policies have focused on improving college completion or closing achievement gaps (Perna & Finney, 2014), but most have concentrated on aggregate student improvement rather than targeting specific subgroup populations (i.e., racial/ethnic groups, foster youth, veterans).…”