IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 20

illustrations of the frame from our
experience as engineering faculty
at U.S. higher education institutions.
We close the paper with some rec-
ommendations for what each of us
can do with this frame.

Definition of Race and Racism
We are engineering education re-
searchers, and we know most read-
ers of this piece may not be. There

What if we thought about
race not as an unchanging
characteristic of individuals,
but as the way that phenotypical
differences between bodies
are made relevant in the social
arena in order to hierarchically
organize them?
is a wealth of research on the dis-
proportionately small numbers of
women and men of color in engi-
neering education, and how that
representation has persisted over
time. In summary, for the amount
of effort and attention that has been
publicly paid to improving racial
representation, the needle has
moved little over the last 30 years,
in both education and engineering
practice [4]. Much of that diversity
research in engineering education
research (EER) investigates race
statistically - that is, demon-
strating racial disparities by look-
ing at the racial identifications of
engineering students, faculty, or
others, and noting statistically sig-
nificant differences between racial
groups along particular measures
or constructs.

20

Throughout much of this research,
however, the notion of race itself is
undertheorized. Researchers tend to
adopt the functionally racial catego-
ries laid out by the National Science
Foundation, themselves built on the
Office of Management and Budget
federal guidelines adopted in 1997.
These guidelines themselves form
a theory of race, framing it on an
amalgam of geography, family his-
tory, culture, community
recognition, history of colo-
nization, and language, which
embodies internal inconsis-
tencies. Scholars across
disciplines that engage social
and scientific theory agree
that " race " itself is a social
construct, not a biological
reality - that what schol-
ars Omi and Winant call
the " ocular " aspects of race
[7]. The shape and color of
people's bodies have been
historically organized by
people into categories to
order the categories hier-
archically [7]-[8]. Through
a variety of legal and cultur-
al projects over time, those hierar-
chical categories have been framed
as normal and natural (implying that
it took no great social effort to pro-
duce the categories). We use these
categories every day in the United
States, many of us only occasional-
ly experiencing the social inconsis-
tencies that demonstrate the social
construction of race.
A key challenge to navigate when
thinking about race in engineering
education is the tension between,
as Omi and Winant call it, seeing
" race as essence " compared to
" race as illusion " [7, p. 110]. " Race
as essence " is about seeing race as
" objective, " or " something fixed and
concrete " 7, p. 109], in contrast with
" race as illusion " where race is " an
ideological construct, something
that masks a more fundamental
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material distinction or axis of iden-
tity [... R]ace is often treated as a
metonym or epiphenomenon of cul-
ture [...], inequality and stratification
[...] or primordial peoplehood " [7, p.
109]. Omi and Winant reject both
frames for thinking about race as
decidedly insufficient, instead defin-
ing race as " a concept which signi-
fies and symbolizes social conflicts
and interests by referring to differ-
ent types of human bodies " [7, p.
110]. They center their definition on
the social constructedness of race
as serving certain groups' interests,
based on the social selection of
phenotypes. In their definition, race
is neither essence nor illusion, but
a social project, at least 400 years
old, to order groups of people hier-
archically, in powerful groups' eco-
nomic interests, and which we have
now come to see as natural and
straightforward.
We know that this definition is at
odds with how most people who are
not researchers on race think about
race itself. We urge you to adopt
a perspective of thought experi-
ment, or " what if?, " for the rest of
this paper. What if we thought about
race not as an unchanging charac-
teristic of individuals, but as the
way that phenotypical differences
between bodies are made relevant
in the social arena in order to hierar-
chically organize them? If we adopt
such a definition to our thinking
about the small numbers of peo-
ple of color in engineering with
respect to the general population,
it should drastically change how
we go about trying to increase
them. From this position of experi-
mentation, we now turn to describ-
ing the core tenets of Critical
Race Theory, which makes use of
this idea.

Critical Race Theory
The field of Critical Race Theory, or
" CRT, " has been used to understand
∕

DECEMBER 2020
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