Making race visible: Literacy research for cultural understanding (2003) reveals that racialized ways of thinking, relating, and teaching continue to be integral aspects of our society and our schools. An important task for researchers and practitioners concerned with social justice is the examination of race and racism, and this is the primary undertaking of the authors who contributed to this volume. It presents research conducted both by university-based scholars and by practitioners (teachers who are doing research), providing rich insights from a variety of perspectives. In examining issues of race and racism in literacy instruction, the authors included have four main objectives: to study local literacy practices through long-term commitments to communities; to acknowledge and theorize their own racialized positions as literacy researchers; to examine the ethics of their research agendas; and finally, to use literacy research for positive social change.

In her foreword, Gloria Ladson-Billings, a renowned educator and author of The dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African-American children (1994), argues convincingly that the concepts of race and racism are implicit and ever-present in the discussion and implementation of literacy and literacy instruction. She explains, and the research presented in this volume demonstrates, that these concepts need to be made explicit. In foregrounding the historical roots of literacy as an aspect of liberation for many oppressed people, she calls for researchers to do more than just illuminate the social inequities that continue to exist in our public schools: She calls for research as activism, as praxis to change the inequities that exist.

In their useful and thorough introduction, Stuart Greene & Dawn Abt-Perkins state that they focused explicitly on race because there continue to be distinct links among being a person of color, being poor, and lacking access to equal educational opportunity. They note that although race may be a social construct, it has real social, economic, psychic, and physical consequences. The chapters that follow use the precepts and assumptions of critical race theory (CRT) as a framework to examine the ways in which racism affects the research and practice of literacy instruction. A key underlying assumption of CRT is that racism is a permanent feature of our society (Bell 1992), an institutionalized and normalized system of privilege, and a fundamental aspect of our social organization. Rather than uncritically assuming that democracy and racism are incompatible, critical race theorists attempt to uncover the ways in which racism has been integral to the founding of the democratic U.S. nation. Following critical race theory, many of the authors in this volume use storytelling and narrative inquiry as their primary methods of collecting and communicating data. Personal experience and reflection are crucial aspects of their projects. The research process is thus made transparent and open for inquiry. Not only is the reader made privy to the researchers' decision-making processes, but the authors also strive to make space in their work for alternative framings and interpretations of data.

The book is organized into three sections. The chapters in the first section, titled “Recognizing teacher and student racial identities,” focus on teachers' and researchers' burgeoning self-awareness of the salience of race and racism in their own work, classrooms, and writings. The opening chapter by Courtney Cazden prepares the reader for the various perspectives portrayed in the following chapters by juxtaposing insider (practitioner) and outsider (university-based) research on issues of racism, teacher attitudes and expectations, and educational opportunity. On the one hand, she shows the value of practitioner research for understanding the complex, intensely interpersonal emotional issues related to racism. On the other, she illustrates how university-based researchers can provide a view of the wider social and historical context in which racism is embedded. The other two chapters in the first section are self-reflexive and autobiographical. Arlette Ingram Willis, discussing her undergraduate students' reactions to texts and activities focused on racism, reflects that in her eagerness to move her more privileged students toward deeper understandings of their own racialized selves, she may have tailored the class to suit her white students at the expense of the students of color. Deborah Appleman explicitly addresses the dangers inherent in “writing up” ethnographic research and the potential ways that narrative vignettes of participants may reinscribe racial and class stereotypes.

The two chapters in part II, titled “Working against ‘color blind’ practices and contexts,” demonstrate how long-term and self-reflective research can illuminate how race and racism are produced in institutional contexts. Joanne Larson draws from two long-term research projects to illustrate how the issues of race that surfaced in her fieldwork “had specific consequences on access to data and public revelation of findings” (p. 89). She found that many teachers had deficit views of their students and their language practices. Her subsequent research report was censored by the school district because it revealed teachers' low expectations and negative attitudes regarding their African-American students. Larson argues that students' literacy practices were frequently marginalized through a process she terms “reciprocal distancing … a discourse process in which teachers and students invoke sociohistorical and political distances between their communities in classroom interaction” (92). For example, one teacher she interviewed noted that her African-American students lacked the “natural” ability to conjugate verbs, and chuckled about her students' use of Black English. Larson interpreted this teacher's laughter as perhaps “indicating a colluding stance” (95) with her, the white researcher. She notes: “The idea of collusion presents an ethical dilemma for me. Do I participate in this collusion to get the data? Or do I point out the potentially racist implications of her comments?” (95). Larson chose to remain silent during this particular interaction to “get the data,” which she then shared with other teachers and administrators, thus facilitating positive social change. In her own words: “To use a colluding stance and not challenge their negative assumptions to get the data was a choice I made because I felt it was more important to expose the insidious workings of the deficit model as it plays out in today's classrooms” (102).

Part III, “Making visible power and discrimination,” relates insights and findings based on empirical research done in K–12 classrooms in public schools. The research reported in these chapters explores students' exposure to the themes of racism and social injustice in school, and their interpretations and analyses of texts that deal with these topics. For example, in the final chapter, Colette Daiute & Hollie Jones study students' uses of “diversity discourses” in third and seventh grade classrooms. The authors explain that “diversity discourses are the stated or implied assumptions, expectations, or goals about social relations in oral and written language” (178). This chapter focuses more on the authors' methods of data analysis than on their findings. The authors examine their data, which include class discussions as well as various forms of student writing, using three distinct analytical frames. First, the researchers read across all data sources looking for the ways that teachers and students talk about issues of difference – their diversity discourses. Second, they categorized the use of diversity discourses by genre, or by the context in which the data was collected. The purpose here was to determine whether certain kinds of discourses were privileged in particular settings (such as teacher-led discussions vs. personal narrative essays about conflicts.) Finally, they looked at students' conflict narratives across the racial categories of White, Latin, and African-American to see what patterns emerged. The authors emphasize the importance of doing multiple kinds of analysis to avoid reinforcing stereotypes and essentializing groups, especially when addressing issues of racial and ethnic identity.

The book is closed by a short Afterword by Sonia Nieto, who points out that although researchers often hide behind claims of objectivity, the authors in this volume “demonstrate in numerous ways that research is not neutral, and they show how it can be used to either uphold the status quo or disrupt it” (203). Although Making race visible includes much more self-reflection than is typical in the reporting of sociological and educational research, the authors generally avoid the self-indulgence that occasionally accompanies such a perspective. As a graduate student and novice researcher in the field of education, I found the authors' reflexivity and openness refreshing. All too frequently, decisions made by researchers during the research process are not included in the final polished product: Findings are presented as though unproblematic and disconnected from real people and real lives. The gap between educational research findings and educational practices continues to be wide. One way to narrow this gap is for practitioners and researchers to communicate with one another with respect and honesty, because both parties have something to offer and something to learn. The essays in this book are an important contribution to that endeavor.