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86 Section 4 Rejoinder: In the United States of America, in Both Our Souls and Our Sciences, We Are Avoiding White Racism James Joseph Scheurich and Michelle D. Young [T]he time has passed when the so-called race question can be relegated to secondary or tertiary theoretical signi¤cance. In fact, to take seriously the multi-leveled oppression of peoples of color is to raise fundamental questions regarding the very conditions for the possibility of the modern West, the diverse forms and styles of European rationality and the character of the prevailing modern secular mythologies of nationalism, professionalism, scientism , consumerism and sexual hedonism that guide everyday practices around the world. (West, 1993a, p. 251) White racism is the real specter that haunts us. Its massively destructive effects continue to be readily apparent in who fails in school—who gets the lowest tracks, the least experienced teachers, the worst hidden curriculum, disproportionate assignment to special education, culturally biased pedagogies, excessive disciplinary actions, underrepresentation in textbooks, the least money spent on them, and the worst buildings (see, e.g., Scheurich & Laible, 1995, p. 314; see also Banks, 1993, 1995; Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Cuban, 1989; Cummins, 1986; King, 1991; Valencia , 1991, among many, many others)—and in who disproportionately goes to prison, gets “legally” executed, is relegated to low-paying jobs and poverty, is the object of racially oriented violence, is discriminated against in employment and banking, and is pushed into racially segregated neighborhoods with the worst housing (see Coramae Richey Mann’s Unequal Justice: A Question of Color [1993] for but one of literally hundreds of discussions of the effects of white racism in the United States).1 In the United States of America, then, our socially constructed reality is itself “wholly racialized”—deeply, subtly, and pervasively (Toni Morrison, 1992, p. xii). However, even in education, where the destructive effects are so obvious and so persistent, we are avoiding white racism in both our souls and our sciences. And Rejoinder 87 one of the principal ways we researchers in education avoid white racism is by believing or presuming that somehow it does not infect our research assumptions, questions, epistemologies, and methodologies, that somehow we in the university have a special immunity that protects us from reproducing white racism, even though education and education research continue to be replete with racist concepts like the “de¤cit model” (see, e.g., Valencia, 1997), which is the assumption that the reason children of color do not do well academically is because of their attitudes , their parents, their neighborhoods, their cultures, their socioeconomic status their genetics, or their race. In short, we blame the effects, not the source (see Derman-Sparks & Phillips, 1997, for an insightful and educative discussion of victim-blaming). In “Coloring Epistemology” (Scheurich & Young, 1997), we concluded that “[t]he single most important effort needed [among education scholars for the purpose of addressing white racism in our research was] to initiate a vigorous debate /dialogue among scholars of all races” (p. 11). In this vein, we truly appreciate the two respondents who have joined this “debate/dialogue.” We also are aware that others have sent responses to Educational Researcher, and while the work of these others has not been accepted for publication, we appreciate their efforts as well. Furthermore, we know that there has been ample commentary and debate about “Coloring” within internet user groups, and we appreciate these interactions . Even if we disagree with many of the viewpoints—some of them blatantly racist, expressed within various venues—we believe it is much better to explicitly toil and trouble over the problem of white racism than it is to ignore it. In many ways, white racism is like a monster standing amid us, affecting so much of what we do—or do not do—while we, particularly we white people, appear to hope that if we avoid it, ignore it, or don’t look at it, it will quietly go away. It won’t. It is not surprising, then, that there are radically and even vehemently different disagreements with our perspective. Because we cannot, however, address the entire range of disagreements, what we will do here is reply just to the two responses ER has decided to publish, even though we are hopeful that this is not the end of this discussion. Of these two responses, Cynthia Tyson’s is, in our view, considerably superior to the other. She offers a more provocative and more fundamental critique and an insightful one of “Coloring...

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