Engaging the “Race Question”: Accountability and Equity in U.S. Higher Education by Alicia A. Dowd & Estela Mara Bensimon (review)

The significance of this book is unmistakable. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Yvette Smith, Andy López, Miriam Carey, and Trayvon Martin are all people of color whose deaths are palpable reminders of racism’s hold on American society and our shared inability to actually involve ourselves, to enlist our collective morality in the invalidation of racist prescriptions. For higher education scholars and researchers, Engaging the “Race Question” carries out this critical obligation.

The fundamental message in Engaging the “Race Question” is that research can be enlisted to undo educational racism. Through active, critical design and implementation, higher education research can untangle the messy and knotted racism situated in our practices, which are continuously calcified by inattention or uncritical benevolence. If not obvious just by its title alone: Engaging the “Race Question” is a book that reminds us that research—and higher education accountability research in particular—should be an active scholarly commitment to unravel racist practices in our educational institutions. Further, as the authors note, higher education accountability policy’s complicity in the inequitable “racialization of educational opportunities and outcomes” (p. 3) needs scholarly undoing through action research.

For several years now, I have consciously and unknowingly orbited the creation of this book. As a participant in the ASHE Institutes on Equity and Critical Analysis, I became familiar with the Equity Scorecard Project (formerly the “Diversity Scorecard”) and used many of its underlying principles to inform my own work. Some time ago, the authors reached out to me to read and comment on autobiographical narratives that I did not quite connect to what became Engaging the “Race Question.” Framed by James Baldwin’s essay, “The Discovery of What it Means to be an American,” I read the authors’ first-person narratives unaware of their intended purpose. I wondered then about what function each author’s conscious considerations of how she constructed her understanding of “race” would serve. Privately, I speculated that these genuinely personal reflections about the manner in which “color blindness” and race-consciousness evolved for each author in generational, class, gender, and culture-specific contexts would be included in scholarly work conducted at USC’s Center for Urban Education. I was half-right.

The authors’ accounts of coming to race-consciousness that appear in the Preface to “Engaging the “Race Question,” serve a more commendable purpose. Akin to Ruth Behar’s (1993) use of the “set of mirrors” and “shadow biography” in her pioneering anthropology, these accounts of race consciousness are essential signposts in methodical, careful inductive action research. In these introductory narratives, we are reminded of the researcher’s obligation to consider her positionality, to piece together the threads of understanding that compose her perception and impressions. Marking our researcher positionality is what poet Claudia Rankine would characterize as that which is suppressed in us, those ideas that make up the inventory of our interpretations and historical amnesia that come from being in our worlds. Essential in action research, it is even more necessary in projects that aim to remedy racial injustice in educational settings. Identifying researcher subjectivity within social and cultural constructs such as race and racism is a framing technique compulsory for critical researchers. For that reason, Engaging the “Race Question” is a commendable model for those new to this methodology, especially young scholars and students, and for established action researchers.

As the focus of research, then, the “race question” demands self-awareness and mindful, sophisticated discernment on the part of the researcher. But the “race question” is especially complex and as the authors note, its nature is “muddled” (p. 145). So how best to sort through and scrutinize this cultural tangle so that clear and intelligible remedies can be recommended? This is a two-pronged proposition that assumes change as a terminus. Consequently, researchers attending to...