Race, Poverty, and Educational Equity

Gerald Torres is a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin. He is former president of the Association of American Law Schools.

The debate over new Department of Education rules for how schools and colleges count students by race and ethnicity reveals a tension between students of mixed racial background who want their entire background to count and those Hispanic/Latino students who must ignore their racial complexity in order to count their ethnicity.

In issuing the new regulations concerning racial and ethnic data collection, the department confronts two aspects of changing life in the United States. First is the continuing reality of racially identifiable educational inequality. Second, the younger generation of Americans is less likely to feel confined by rigid racial categories and thus may be harder to identify.

Categorizing and counting students by race still has relevance since blacks and Latinos continue to experience educational inequality as shown by achievement data and the resources available in the public schools they attend. Where poverty and race are linked these problems are compounded.

To get a handle on possible solutions we need to know who is going to school where, how those schools are performing and whether performance is linked to the demographic make-up of the student body. To address these problems the Education Department has to be able to track the characteristics of the students as well as the schools.

American society has, however, become more racially and ethnically complex and this is where the new survey questions come in. Latinos are the prototypical multiracial grouping. There are Latinos who identify as “white,” some who identify as “black” and many who identify themselves as “mixed” or mestizaje. However, there are issues that are common to Latinos regardless of racial identity. Just to be clear, I am not saying that the racial categories that have dominated the American social imagination have no impact on the lives of Latinos. Rather I am saying that Latinos often stand at the intersection of many of these categories.

The department has opted for an ethnic definition that is commonly treated as if it were a racial definition (see for example the definition of “white” under the guidelines). Does giving priority to Latino ethnicity over race for “non-white”/"non-black" social groupings make sense? For Latino ethnicity the answer seems to be yes, because of the complex and inclusive racial mix that is at the heart of the ethnic definition. Moreover, it makes sense for Latinos in the historical context of American racial politics and perhaps for the educational evaluations the department needs to make as well.

The rise of multiracial identification stems from a resistance to obdurate historical racial categories and the reality that there are more children now with parents of different races. Do you erase part of who you are if you are forced to choose one race over another when you really feel like you are part of both? Do you diminish the political power of a historically oppressed group if you do not choose to make that group your primary identifier? And who gets to say who you are anyway?

This resistance to racial ascription is part of the reality that is exposed by the questionnaire. But perhaps it points the way to who we are becoming.