IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 25

supports instructors intervening in
other forms of team dysfunction.
As a result of this realization, a
research team is working on iden-
tifying marginalizing behaviors
present in teams that aren't explic-
itly legible to instructors of large
classes, in order to build in flags
t o the system to help identif y
when teammates are harassing
other teammates [51].

especially true for U.S.-born white
people, as one of us is, because
whiteness in the United States has
come to mean that white people can
largely avoid conversations about
race, and that they have been able
to think about their own experience
as a raceless " American " experi-
ence. What race looks like in inter-
national contexts will be different,
although will likely have colonialism
and forced labor at its heart.
Our intent for offering this deep
dive into color-blind racism theory is
to push change deeper into institu-
tional structure. We offer three ideas
for instructors and faculty to consid-
er in their programs.

Discussion
We have found CRT and color-blind
racism theory rich theoretical envi-
ronments for " shaking up " engi-
neering education work focused
on broadening participation, both
empirical research and intervention
work. Elsewhere [30] we discuss
some theoretical affordances and
limitations of applying Bonilla-Silva's
theory to thinking about engineer-
ing education's demographic homo-
geneity in the United States. What
we focus on here, however, is some
practical implications for readers.
We think that one indicator of
the importance of using these sorts
of theoretical frameworks to under-
stand how engineering education
remains so dominated by white peo-
ple is how embedded the notion of
meritocracy is in United States engi-
neering's culture, and how a belief in
meritocracy is also incorporated into
abstract liberalism, the most impor-
tant frame of Bonilla-Silva's color-
blind racism theory. In engineering,
meritocracy may be repurposed as,
or operate under the veil of, main-
taining an environment of " healthy
competition " or " being worthy of the
profession " instead of being recog-
nized as a way to leave unquestioned
color-blind racist practices and per-
petuate racist ideologies about what
it means to be an engineer in the
United States.
We re-acknowledge that using the
color-blind racism framework may
be difficult for many people. This is
DECEMBER 2020

Interrupt Unconscious
and Conscious Bias
Decades of efforts in the United
States have raised awareness of
the influence of unconscious bias
in admissions, hiring decisions, and
grading. But with so much attention
on unconscious bias, we think many
engineering educators have over-
looked the fact that overt racism,
even we might quip " conscious bias, "
still exists and is part of the daily
experience of many students and
faculty of color. Faculty and instruc-
tors, particularly white domestic fac-
ulty, and international faculty, need
to learn tools to interrupt both overt
and implicit racist statements from
their peers and from students about
each other. Color-blind racism theo-
ry can offer ideas on constructing a
script of possible counter responses
both to others, and to oneself.

Rethink Policy
Faculty and instructors need to cali-
brate their expectations of daily life
to anticipate that students, staff and
faculty are experiencing both subtle
and explicit racialized harassment
throughout each day [52]. But most
of us design our courses and our
expectations of professional behav-
∕

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

ior as if such experiences do not
happen, as they habitually don't to
white people. If we designed learn-
ing experiences and assessments
from a place anticipating such grind-
ing chronic trauma, how might we
rethink what is important to teach,
or what kinds of behavior we hold
our students to? How might we
design course policies around atten-
dance, or rubrics if we began from
a place presuming that our students
and colleagues experienced daily
discrimination and microaggres-
sions (and the constant threat of
macroaggressions)? How might we
look to build our policies and rubrics
on the assets that communities of
color have developed in order to sur-
vive in a system set up to minimize
and naturalize racism, or blame the
outcomes of racism back onto com-
munities of color? To help see what
unfair privileges white students,
staff, and faculty have been operat-
ing with, we should reset our base-
line of expectations calibrated to the
experiences of students, staff, and
faculty of color, rather than to white
people. Color-blind racism theory
can help unearth the places we have
normalized expectations around the
experiences of white people and
their unearned privileges.

Reject Depoliticization
Engineering educators, both in the
United States and outside of it,
often with uncritical educations
themselves preparing them to think
about the ethics and value systems
incorporated into engineering, re-
peatedly frame ethical thinking
as merely about microethics [53], or
as competing with technical content,
positioned as more important. Edu-
cators' positioning of engineering as
depoliticized [54] is itself an impor-
tant, and problematic, educational
outcome, one that mirrors the fram-
ing of baseline experience or expec-
tations on the lived experiences of

25
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020

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