Making the Implicit Explicit: Building a Case for Implicit Racial Attitudes to Inform Mathematics Education Research

Scholars continue to document that African American kindergartners bring the same competencies as their white peers (Ginsburg et al, Int J Psychol 16(1):13–34, 1981; O’Connor et al, Rev Res Educ 33(1):1–34, 2009). Research has found, however, that they experience low-quality mathematics instruction (Davis and Martin, J Urban Math Educ 1(1):10–34, 2008; Lubienski, J Negro Educ 71(4):269–287, 2002), which does not leverage the mathematical abilities of African American students. The mechanisms for how these disparities are produced are less clear (Battey, Educ Stud Math 82(1):125–144, 2013a; Lubienski, J Negro Educ 71(4):269–287, 2002). For instance, we do not understand the mechanism through which mathematics instructional quality or the cognitive demand of tasks is reduced for African American children. In this chapter, we argue that a potentially missing piece in understanding mechanisms that produce disparities in mathematics education is implicit racial attitudes. To make this theoretical case, we draw on work both inside and outside of mathematics education across four literatures: (1) the quality of mathematics instruction that African American students receive, (2) relationships developed with teachers, (3) racialized teacher perceptions of behavior and academic aptitude, and (4) racial microagressions in mathematics. The chapter ends with two examples of how implicit racial attitudes can be embedded in existing research in order to illustrate how the field could study ways to disrupt the perpetuation of deficit perspectives shaped by racial ideologies and systemic forms of oppression.