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“You can’t just check the box”: the mathematics of ethnoracial contortions at a California high school

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Abstract

This article brings critical and postcolonial theories together with extended ethnographic research in a predominantly Latinx high school in California’s “South Bay” to theorize the co-production and co-naturalization of mathematical and racial essentialization. Analysis of vignettes and interview excerpts illuminates both student uptake and resistance to homogenizing narratives of mathematics and racial personhood. Student voices from Sierra High School both evidenced the existence, stakes, and personal consequences of narrowly bounded, taken for granted, conceptions of mathematics and racial personhood and challenged these homogenizing categories. This paper contributes theory illuminating the co-construction of mathematical and racial essentialization along with examples of local critique and resistance from youth and their adult allies at one high school in the USA. Implications suggest that decolonial work in mathematics education must jointly address the narrow and essentializing frames for race and racialization and for mathematics itself as co-producing and co-naturalizing each other. This study contributes insight into mechanisms that perpetuate and also resist or disrupt these processes.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to confidentiality agreements between the researcher, IRB, the school district and school, and students and families.

Notes

  1. “Title I” is a US federal designation based on the percentage of student families in lower income brackets, making the school eligible for funding for a school food program.

  2. “DREAMers” references a US policy called the Dream Act that makes some immigrant youth who arrived in the US without legal authorization eligible for permanent resident status.

  3. The notion of the “cunning” of legibility is rooted in Povinelli’s (2002) work on the cunning of recognition in which she examines the movement for multiculturalism in Australia and the politics of recognition.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Jennifer Osuna and Jonathan Rosa for their generous mentorship and specific feedback on this paper. This paper is dedicated to the young person who asked to be called Selina (2003–2019) who guided me through Sierra High School and whose brilliance shone with intensity in her life cut short.

Funding

Financial support for dissertation research, from which this study draws, was generously provided by the Gerald J. Lieberman Fellowship and the Stanford Graduate School of Education Dissertation Support Grant.

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  1. Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Emma C. Gargroetzi

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Gargroetzi, E.C. “You can’t just check the box”: the mathematics of ethnoracial contortions at a California high school. Educ Stud Math (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-023-10258-5

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