Abstract
White supremacy and anti-blackness are as American as apple pie. Slavery, settler colonialism, and genocide are inescapable elements of the founding of the United States and shape the current inequality that plagues U.S. schools. Unfortunately, much of the social science research on education is ahistorical and downplays the significance of white supremacy in examining racial disparities in educational outcomes. It therefore often fails to theorize how the historic roots of race reverberate in the contemporary context.
Derrick Darby and John Rury’s The Color of Mind: Why the Origins of the Achievement Gap Matter for Justice enters the discussion in part to correct for this limitation in previous work. As a philosopher (Darby) and an education historian (Rury), they argue that white supremacy and dignity injustice are at the core of racial differences in educational outcomes. These ideas form the basis on which dehumanizing practices toward people not defined as white are justified and challenged. While recognizing that race is not simply a black/white binary, they focus on this division because of its centrality in the U.S. racial divide.
Darby and Rury add to recent work in history and philosophy that has laid bare the development and institutionalization of white supremacy. They make a convincing case that the “color of mind”—the enduring belief in white intellectual and moral superiority over black people—is key to understanding black/white gaps in educational outcomes. The authors emphasize the relationship between school sorting practices that place black students in lower status positions than their white counterparts, dignity injustice (treatment that assaults a group’s dignity and worth), and black/white disparities.
Rooted in ideological pseudoscience and institutionalized in legal decisions, social structures, and social practices, the color of mind forms the foundation of racial inequality in education. While social scientists who draw on Weberian notions of social status and sociologists of race who emphasize the endemic nature of racism in the United States have made similar arguments, Darby and Rury dig deep into the formation of white supremacy as a potent myth that shapes educational access. And while some social scientists do analyze the formation of white supremacy, this history is sometimes dealt with in a perfunctory manner in order to detail the mechanisms through which racial stratification continues to be reproduced.
In the first three chapters of the book, the authors detail how the color of mind was constructed by whites to justify their race-based brutality. White elites constructed racial distinctions that defined black people as less than human and thus unworthy of dignity and equal treatment. The creation of the color of mind was essential for white men like Thomas Jefferson, whom the authors call a “great statesman,” to justify enslaving hundreds of black people (including his own children) while penning the words of the Declaration of Independence. Darby and Rury show that ideas about justice and race intertwined to establish a toxic mix of intellectually and empirically bankrupt scientific racism. It is telling that the foundations of these white supremacist justifications often came from the very disciplines (including sociology) that currently dominate the discourse on race and school outcomes.
The color of mind was also a driving force in debates regarding how black people should be educated and in the construction of the Jim Crow education system. Borrowing from sociological work on opportunity hoarding and philosophical work on justice, the authors show how whites have monopolized educational resources for their children at the expense of black children through segregation, political disenfranchisement, racial violence, funding disparities, IQ testing, and the emphasis on vocational and industrial training for African Americans. In this context, the authors recognize African American resistance to the color of mind. Darby and Rury demonstrate the agency of black educators and intellectuals who built institutions and challenged baseless claims of white supremacy. They make a convincing case that while the strategies advocated by activist intellectuals such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper varied, the appeal to dignity justice was consistent.
As the authors discuss the evolution of the color of mind, they highlight the cultural turn that racial ideology has taken. As several social scientists have documented, cultural racism has become a potent racial frame. In Chapter Five, Darby and Rury interrogate the implications of these perspectives, while the following chapter suggests that there are big challenges in black communities that are outside of the control of schools. It is a delicate balancing act to call out cultural racism in one chapter and then discuss community challenges in the next. The authors are largely successful, but they use deficit language about communities of color at times.
Darby and Rury then discuss how the color of mind becomes embedded in schools. Here they emphasize how sorting practices in tracking, discipline, and special education are rooted in racist assumptions about black youth and simultaneously perpetuate dignity injustice. They unpack why we sort students in the first place and conclude that the empirical evidence for why disproportionality exists is inconclusive. From their perspective, however, this is less important than the fact that black students are placed in lower-status educational positions, which is a form of dignity injustice.
To address race-based disparities in educational outcomes, Darby and Rury argue that educational leaders should provide teachers with information about the color of mind and make an appeal to dignity justice as a motivator for transformation. To do this, they suggest that a “dignity justice index” that tracks disproportionality across educational tracks, special education, and school discipline could provide an empirical basis for addressing dignity injustice in schools.
On an intellectual level, I am persuaded that school leaders need to know the history of white supremacy in education, share it with their teachers, and use evidence to speak directly to dignity injustice. However, on a practical level, I am less convinced that this will change schools. As recent work on the sociology of race has shown, white supremacy is supported by an adaptable set of ideas that are creatively deployed to sustain the racial status quo. Disrupting racial oppression requires more than showing whites how and why they are wrong or convincing them of black humanity. The slaveholding authors of the constitution and Declaration of Independence knew slavery was wrong, but their thirst for power and wealth was stronger than their commitment to justice. Likewise, when white parents hoard opportunities, they choose power over justice. I would have also liked to see the authors add more specificity about the mechanisms through which the color of mind becomes embedded in organizational practice and the processes through which their proposed interventions would lead to change.
Even with these criticisms, I believe the book is an important addition to the literature on race and educational outcomes. It adds to a set of studies that has begun to make the connection between white supremacy and educational opportunity and brings history and philosophy to bear on these questions. This text is a welcome addition to the field and will be of interest to sociologists and other education scholars who seek to understand how to dismantle white supremacy and create more educational equity.