While researching racially segregated education, I came across speeches delivered in the 1940s by two educational leaders—one a black man and the other a Native American man. G. B. Buster, a longtime African American teacher, implored his African American listeners to work with white Americans on enforcing equal rights for all. A few years before Buster delivered his speech, Henry Roe Cloud (Winnebago), a Native American educator, was more critical of white Americans, specifically the federal government, which he blamed for destroying American Indian cultures. At the same time, Roe Cloud praised more recent federal efforts to preserve cultural practices, study traditions before they completely disappeared, and encourage self-government among Native American tribes.
In each speech, Buster and Roe Cloud represented ideas that members of their respective communities had been espousing for decades: African American parents, leaders, and teachers wanted complete social integration and equal rights in their schools and other public places. At the same time, Indigenous teachers, parents, and students pushed back against decades of assault on their cultures, beliefs, and traditions. Instead, they could claim identities as American citizens by embracing the behaviors, habits, and practices that whites demanded while simultaneously holding on to their traditional customs. In other words, black communities wanted inclusion and integration, while Native American communities wanted to embrace bicultural identities—and both thought that their approaches perfectly defined American citizenship in the twentieth century.Footnote 1
The cases of the Buster and Roe Cloud speeches highlight the value of comparative race studies in the history of education. As young students, these two educators had experienced racially segregated educational environments: Buster in black schools and Roe Cloud in Indian boarding schools. Each advanced his own education at Wilberforce University and Yale College, respectively; as adults, each became leading educators in segregated schools. Their paths never intersected, even though they spent a good portion of their careers in geographic proximity in the state of Kansas during overlapping time periods. Ideologically, their paths remained divergent as well. Buster and other black educators wanted full racial integration for African American students, while Roe Cloud espoused a philosophy that placed value on separateness and self-governing for Native American students. Even though both rejected ideologies of racial hierarchy that permeated early twentieth-century thinking, each employed strategies for equality by using their schools to confront structural oppression.
Buster's and Roe Cloud's experiences illuminate a perspective embedded in recent scholarship that brings into sharper focus the study of comparative race and ethnicity in education. This essay will use classic articles by Victoria-María MacDonald, Eileen Tamura, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima as a starting point for exploring some of the insights that a comparative method to studying race and ethnicity brings to the field.Footnote 2 My approach is more illustrative than comprehensive, as the field has dramatically grown in a multitude of directions since 2001. MacDonald, Tamura, and Lomawaima called for expanding scholarship to employ race and ethnicity as categories of analysis, and, in short, historians of education responded in a variety of ways. For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on intellectual trends that have both broadened and deepened our understanding of the field. Specifically, the scholarship highlights the ways that scholars have challenged us to rethink defining categories of race and to push beyond simply comparing racial minorities to white communities. Furthermore, I will foreground scholarship that challenges earlier definitions of race that do not necessarily stand in for the ways that ethnoracial groups have identified themselves and interacted with each other. And, finally, I will focus on scholarship that offers new approaches to transform studies of underrepresnted populations by reconsidering the ways that schools have been part of imperial projects in the United States.
Rethinking Categories of Race and Their Functions
The field of comparative race studies is part of a larger turn that asks us to rethink the categories of race that scholars relied upon through the 1990s. Shirley Hune's 1995 article, “Rethinking Race,” called for scholars to move beyond the Black-White, Asian-White, Hispanic-White paradigm that had anchored multicultural studies in the past.Footnote 3 As a research strategy for historians of education, Tamura agreed with Hune, concluding that scholars should think in more nuanced and specific ways about defining racial groupings. Tamura proposed, for example, more studies of more specificly defined Asian American groups and studies among Asian American and non-White/non-Asian groups to deepen our understanding of race relations. A more sophisticated comparative framework pushes scholars to be more specific in the ways that they distinguish between ethnic groups (e.g., Han, Hmong, or Ilokano) versus groups identified by racial categories, (e.g., Asian).Footnote 4 Tamura also cites Jeff Chang's studies of schools and the hiring of public school teachers by reminding us that a more specific understanding of Asian American groups will not only lead to better comparative race studies but also to a richer understanding of interethnic and intraethnic relations, such as those between Hawai‘i's locally born Asian Americans and the islands’ immigrant Asian Americans.Footnote 5 Tracy Lachica Buenavista, Uma M. Jayakumar, and Kimberly Misa-Escalante also use a more critical approach to race studies in education by challenging stereotypes of Asian American college students as model minorities.Footnote 6
Other scholars have thought outside of traditional racial categories and comparisons, including Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres's After Race: Racism after Multiculturalism. This study of American capitalism examines the ways in which socioeconomics affects the educational experiences, standardized testing, housing and school access, and bilingual education of students of different racial groups. Darder and Torres “contest the notion that the color of a person's skin, and all it has historically come to signify within the sociological, political, or popular imagination, should continue to function as such.” They anchor their study in the “centrality of ‘race’ as an ideology and racism as a powerful, structuring, hegemonic force in the world today.”Footnote 7
In a broader way, theorizing about the construction of racial categories and comparing those categories has encouraged scholars to examine more distinctive self-identification processes that create more possibilities for cross-racial, multiethnic, mixed-race, and panethnic identities—processes that go far beyond checking a single box on a census form. Tanya Katerí Hernández's study of Afro-Latino/a students within the context of Latino Studies provides a cross-racial context in considering the perception of “authenticity” and racial identities.Footnote 8 Redefining racial categories and thinking about interactions between racial minority groups—and not just in comparison to white groups—also responds to Tamura's call for better examinations of interethnic relations among students, teachers, and parents “to illuminate ways in which minorities interacted among themselves, cooperating and forming alliances, or dominating, competing, and clashing.”Footnote 9
Expanding Racial Categories and Ethnoracial Definitions
Just as the field of comparative race studies has helped scholars to rethink categories of race, it has also helped scholars think more carefully about different categories of ethnic identity, how they compare to each other, and how they work in partnership with more refined racial categories. Allison Varzally defines what she calls ethnoracial, a term that does more than use ethnicity and nationality to “explain differences once understood as racial.” She explains that this shift in viewpoint can both “accommodate these changing definitions and still acknowledge the distinct positions of groups and the contingent character of those positions.” Varzally argues that the term ethnoracial indicates the “perceived biological, historical, and behavioral qualities by which groups bounded themselves and were bound by others at different times and different places.”Footnote 10 The concept requires more attention to a group's self-definitions along with ways they might distinguish themselves from other ethnic groups within a larger racial category. As I examined the experiences of black and Native American students in Kansas, I found that each group did not self-define using the same concepts, but both groups were equally engaged with resisting definitions imposed upon them by others—their teachers, the government, or religious leaders. Like Varzally, I found a strong desire among Native American and African American communities to define their own ethnoracial identities.
An ethnoracial perspective helps to expand definitions of cultural diversity in the United States, such as in David Hollinger's work on religious affiliations and identity through solidarity. In the context of identity formation, according to Hollinger, an ethnoracial framework helps individuals to see their identities as “less as something to be preserved and perpetuated than as the voluntary formation of new and wider solidarities.”Footnote 11 Solidarity that developed through interethnoracial interactions gave scholars a better understanding of how multiethnic neighborhoods came to establish housing, community organizations, and schools.
Mark Wild employs a similar context in examining Los Angeles as a series of multiethnic neighborhoods.Footnote 12 Wild's focus on immigrant neighborhoods challenges the notion that such groups were consistently segregated from other ethnic groups and homogenous within the confines of their own communities. Instead, diversity and multiethnicity existed within such neighborhoods, and groups of working-class Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Italian, African American and Jewish families had a long tradition of interacting with each other in the early twentieth century.
Mark Brilliant's book, The Color of America Has Changed, adds to this comparative format by examining legal and civil rights histories in the context of school segregation, anti-miscegenation and housing policies. He argues that multiracial and multiethnic groups in California that each faced discrimination interacted with each other to push civil rights agendas. Recalling W. E. B. Du Bois's “problem of the color line,” Brilliant posits that if multiple color lines existed in California, specifically, then multiple color lines must have existed throughout the nation as well.Footnote 13
Taken together Varzally, Hollinger, Wild, and Brilliant explain more fluid ways of contextualizing self-identification in racial and ethnic groups. They also broaden the scope of comparative race studies by illustrating a number of ways in which minority groups have interacted with each other as well as with white communities in the context of political, social, economic, religious, and educational activities. Works like these complement Tamura's focus on multi-ethnoracial communities in the Pacific Northwest as a way of examining civics and citizenship in the context of community building. These new frameworks allow us to think about the history of segregation in the United States in a much more complicated way, including an understanding that strict boundaries between groups of different races and ethnicities were permeable and shifted at various times in history. The field has already demonstrated an understanding of inter- and intraracial relations, but more work can be done to uncover experiences of students who do not gravitate toward a distinctly defined racial identity, such as many mixed-race students.
Schools and Empire-Building
Another way that comparative race studies has helped to expand our understanding of the history of education in the United States is in the context of empire-building. Although US historians have acknowledged Euro-American cultural and US diplomatic imperialist strategies only in the past few decades, historians of education have routinely explored schools as mechanisms of empire-building. Scholars have shown that students in minority racial and ethnic groups have often been the target of imperial projects and have sometimes worked together or in tandem to resist and negotiate with imperial efforts. David Wallace Adams's Education for Extinction, Brenda J. Child's Boarding School Seasons, and James D. Anderson's The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 influenced my own comparison of Native American and African American schools in The Quest for Citizenship.Footnote 14 These groundbreaking works understand the ways in which a school's focus on citizenship training was part of larger Americanization efforts. Tamura's essay points to the kind of scholarship that examines Americanization and acculturation with questions about how competing imperial powers shaped colonial education projects. Scholars have used this body of research comparing the experiences of different racial and ethnic groups to rethink the role of empire-building as part of the construction of educational institutions.
What is new in recent scholarship is the comparative focus on different nonwhite groups of people within the context of imperialism. Such a shift also created more opportunities to examine school segregation outside of the American South. Elisabeth M. Eittreim's Teaching Empire is a comparative work that examines the ways in which the US government used education for both civilizing and citizenship campaigns among Native American and Filipino students.Footnote 15 Sieglinde Lim de Sánchez explores the relationship between imperialism and education by focusing on the structural dynamics of the labor migration of Chinese immigrant workers and formerly enslaved African Americans.Footnote 16 Matthew Gardner Kelly's focus on segregated schooling in nineteenth-century California reveals white Americans’ understanding that the new schools created for various California children showed the “secret of Britain's success as a colonizing power.”Footnote 17
Davison M. Douglas shifted our attention from the American South to northern cities in his study of school segregation, Jim Crow Moves North, to point out that black students where not the only racial or ethnic group historically subjected to school segregation. “Various states, particularly in the West, also segregated other groups of schoolchildren during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including children of Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, and Korean ethnicity, as well as Native Americans and, later, children of Hispanic ethnicity,” Douglas writes.Footnote 18 Clif Stratton's study Education for Empire explains how racial categories intersect with large economic systems, public institutions, and shifting immigration policies to inform what he refers to as “multiple and uneven paths” for citizenship for Mexican American, African American, and Puerto Rican colonial subjects.Footnote 19 Kathryn Schumaker examines the intersections of African American and Mexican American student movements within the broader context of students’ legal rights in a study that is “both national and intensely local.”Footnote 20
Taken together, using the concept of empire as a framework for thinking about education has changed the field and opened new avenues of thinking about both race/ethnic self-identities and colonized identities. Employing a comparative race methodology within the context of imperialism is a dramatic shift away from earlier scholarship that simply compared histories of white students and nonwhite students. Such a break from an older black/white dyad responds to the overarching question that MacDonald asks in her essay about what should be considered “American history”: “The question of what constitutes American history is presently undergoing serious critique and revision [emphasis in original].”Footnote 21 She notes that US historians have already started broadening the scope of American borders and transnational studies—a sign that historiographical boundaries are being reexamined. Expanding studies focused on minority experiences, MacDonald contends, will make US history more inclusive in general. Shifting the attention to multiple groups of students of color helps to expand the scope of what was once considered a set of minority experiences—narrowly defined by a few racial groups—into a more complex, yet more American history. As the history of education field grows, and the more that comparative race methods are at the center of studies, the more the scholarship will reflect the complex and multiple pasts that make up our nation's history.
Thinking of education as part of an imperial project makes us think more deeply about its relationship with colonization and the ways in which scholars can decolonize their own research. Lomawaima's approach to scholarship on colonization and empire highlights the importance of studying Native American education outside of the physical confines of schools. She underlines the importance of “teaching, learning, and intergenerational transmission of knowledge embedded within and constitutuive of Native histories.”Footnote 22 Farina King models a response to this call in her book, The Earth Memory Compass, which traces several generations of the transmission of Diné education centered on culture, spirituality, epistemology, physical landscape, and time.Footnote 23 Similar to MacDonald's request that we challenge our categories of American history, Lomawaima's and King's works make us think about how we can broaden definitions of education and transmission of knowledge from generation to generation.
Intersections and Inquiry for the Future of the Field
My teaching and research on race and gender in US history have helped me to understand the importance of making those who have been underrepresented more central to narratives about America's past, but we have much more work to do. Comparative race methods have helped to make American history of education more inclusive, but so too have the fields of civil rights and gender rights studies. Those fields, in particular, have also made clear the importance of an intersectional analysis of people's experiences in the past. As we think about modes of inquiry in future history of education scholarship, comparative race methods will continue to be useful, but so will thinking about the ways that gender, class, sexuality, and other categories of experience and identity intersect with racialized and ethnic histories.
Kimberlé Crenshaw has convincingly explained the limitations of “single-issue analyses” through the field of legal studies. The law can be critiqued for struggling to embrace the different standpoints that one person can occupy—black women are both black and female, for example, and thus vulnerable to either sexism and racism or both.Footnote 24 So, too, the history of education can be critiqued for not fully exploring the multiplicity of students’, teachers’, and parents’ identities. Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge define intersectionality as an investigation of how “intersecting power relations influence social relations across diverse societies as well as individual experiences in everyday life,” giving historians of education a chance to examine power relations in the context of student, school, community, teacher, and parent interactions.Footnote 25
More work in this area is vital for the future of the history of education, although it is important to acknowledge the intersectional history of education that already exists. For example, a particularly significant intervention that foregrounds the gendered history of education is a collection of essays edited by Margaret A. Nash, Women's Higher Education in the United States.Footnote 26 The new perspectives that Nash promises to deliver are updates to Barbara Solomon's 1985 publication, In the Company of Educated Women.Footnote 27 In total, contributors to Nash's volume offer a broad overview of women's roles in higher education by focusing on new voices and viewpoints from the antebellum period through the 1970s. Nash provides a framework for each chapter that examines the nature of power in relation to women's roles as students, instructors, staff, or president and their own conceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and national origin. Following an intersectional approach modeled by anthologies like Unequal Sisters: An Inclusive Reader in U.S. Women's History, Nash's volume does not simply insert more women into the history of education narrative. She compels her contributors to think about power dynamics by answering questions about exclusion and inclusion in order to show how women have been both transformed by and changed higher education.Footnote 28
One of the products of intersectionality is a better understanding of hierarchies and power dynamics. Scholarship about the contest of power by examining civil rights and integration strategies can to turn to histories of college campuses and elite secondary schools as models. For example, Stefan M. Bradley's Upending the Ivory Tower and Michelle A. Purdy's Transforming the Elite join Joy Ann Williamson-Lott's Jim Crow Campus to remind us of the evolution of college campuses as sites for expansive social change in their surrounding communities.Footnote 29 Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber examine ways in which high-achieving students of color have made pathways into higher education as professors in Increasing Faculty Diversity.Footnote 30
The historic lack of diversity in faculty members in the academy persists, so more study in this area of imbalance is warranted to understand the barriers to more inclusive leadership in K-12 schools and universities. Christina Collins's study of race and merit among urban teachers in New York provides groundwork for such inquiry, and although inequity among miniority students is the point of examination of Jonna Perrillo's book Uncivil Rights, the focus on the role of teachers and their unions leads to the larger conclusion that civil rights efforts have not necessarily led to linear outcomes.Footnote 31 More scholarship that tries to get to the heart of Collins's and Bilge's point that “people's lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other.”Footnote 32
While significant publications have focused on women's education and women educators and reformers, scholarship focused on the ways in which women have been transformed by and have transformed education is still needed. More nuanced studies of teachers from underrepresented groups will also expand the field. For example, Margaret Smith Crocco and Cally L. Waite's study of black women who earned PhDs and then went on to become professors of education is an important analysis of black women's negotiations with cultural expectations and day-to-day activism. Crocco and Waite state, “To varying degrees, they found themselves at odds with prevailing notions of black middle-class womanhood; their research and activism provided opportunities for ‘talking back’ to those who would limit women's scope for racial uplift and recognition of those contributions.”Footnote 33
Deondra Rose takes a broader approach to these questions in Citizens by Degree, as does Richard M. Breaux in his article on black women college students in Iowa.Footnote 34 These types of approaches help to enrich our understanding of the relationship between school communities and community uplift within the context of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's charge to understand civil rights as a long process with antecedents before Brown v. Board of Education and beyond formally identified civil rights groups.Footnote 35
New directions in the history of education have expanded our understanding of intersectionality, but scholars could think more deeply about the ways in which racial and ethnic identities and histories of education intersect with sexualities. The field has started to include LGBTQ history, but this subfield is virtually unexplored, especially with intersections with race and ethnicity identity formation. Karen Graves reminds us that the field “remains a critical enterprise—essential to a collective understanding of our past, vulnerable to those who do not approve of its subject(s), and undergoing significant change.”Footnote 36 Joanne Barker outlines a methodological and theoretical framework as a model for this type of intersectionality in Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Barker's volume includes scholars who “defamiliarize gender, sexuality, and feminist studies to unpack the constructedness of gender and sexuality and problematize feminist theory and method within Indigenous contexts [emphasis in original].”Footnote 37 Barker outlines the intimate relationships among government, educational, and religious organizations in the education of Native Americans.
Mishuana R. Goeman adds that the time has come for a more vigorous critique of “Indigenous-U.S. relations as multicultural narratives that purport to have incorporated Indigenous peoples successfully as American citizens,” and that “institutions of American education, the legal system, and others have limited our visions of what is possible in realizing sovereignty.”Footnote 38 Such scholarship demonstrates deeper understanding of the connections between race and sexuality, as well as the ways in which those intersections affect educational and daily experiences.
Additional Futures
The year 2020 is bound to remind scholars of the potential to see the past more clearly, but this new decade also prompts us to think about future possibilities. While historians of education have vastly expanded the field over the past few decades, we have only begun to embrace new methodologies and theories that would further our understanding of complex racial and ethnic identities and relationships. From a methodological and theoretical standpoint, the most important consideration for continued diversity, equity, and inclusion in the history of education is that race and ethnicity, along with its intersectional analysis of gender, class, and sexualities, are employed as vital ways of thinking about the past and informing the future.
