DISRUPTING ORTHODOXIES IN THE RACIALIZATION OF DISABILITIES
The quest for educational equity has been elusive and fraught with paradoxes throughout the history of American education, particularly for racial minorities and disabled learners. These two groups have complicated and politically charged histories linked to assumptions of deficit often used to justify inequities. Both have endured significant barriers and injustices ranging from limited access to educational resources to overrepresentation in poorly funded schools and negative post-school outcomes (Anyon Reference Anyon2005). Although massive political and technical resources have been deployed in efforts to secure educational equity, remedies for one group can have deleterious consequences for the other, thus muddling the effects of well-intentioned justice projects. For instance, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), students with disability diagnoses are extended rights and entitlements intended to ensure educational equity, on the assumption that disability diagnosis is beneficial to covered students. However, this guiding assumption has been critiqued by racial minority groups who have argued that disproportional diagnoses of disability in students of color creates a “double bind” that further compounds the structural disadvantages that each group has historically endured (Artiles Reference Artiles2011).
The racialization of disability is of concern because disability diagnoses for racial minorities often have concomitant negative consequences, such as educational segregation, limited access to the general education curriculum, and a host of negative long-term outcomes (Artiles Reference Artiles2003). This problem is connected to poverty, geographical location, cultural practices, and ideologies of difference (Albrecht et al., Reference Albrecht, Skiba, Losen, Chung and Middelberg2012; Artiles Reference Artiles1998). Moreover, it is visible across a range of disabilities—including high-incidence categories such as learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, emotional/behavioral disorders, and speech/language impairments—accounting for approximately 4 million students (i.e., two thirds of the special education population) (U.S. Department of Education 2009).
The evidence has consistently shown that African American learners have substantially higher probabilities than their counterparts to be diagnosed with high incidence disabilities. At the national level, these students are three times more likely to be diagnosed as intellectually disabled and over 200% more likely to be diagnosed with emotional/behavioral disorders. American Indian/Alaska Native students have a 50% greater chance than their peers to be identified as learning disabled (U.S. Department of Education 2006). Latino/a students are overrepresented in some categories in certain regions, states, and school districts, though not at the national level (Artiles et al., Reference Artiles, Waitoller, Neal and Valencia2011).
These statistics defy easy explanation. For instance, despite the disproportionate poverty rate among these groups (e.g., Latinos/as), racial inequities are not observed in disability categories generally associated with biological causes linked to poverty, such as sensory and orthopedic impairments and multiple disabilities (Losen and Orfield, Reference Losen and Orfield2002). Moreover, after controlling for poverty, race still makes a significant contribution to predicting a disability diagnosis (Skiba et al., Reference Skiba, Simmons, Ritter, Gibb, Rausch and Cuadrado2008).
While the problem is long-standing, the racialization of disability has received more attention in the last decade (Waitoller et al., Reference Waitoller, Artiles and Cheney2010). Federal government actions have intensified: there is an increase in the number of published studies acknowledging federal funding support, technical assistance centers have been created to address the problem, and there have been key changes in IDEA (i.e., requirements for reporting, monitoring, and eliminating racial inequities in placement patterns). Despite progress, unsettling questions remain unanswered: How do legal protections for one marginalized group—e.g., people with disabilities—become sources of inequities for another marginalized group, such as racial minority students? What types of evidence would be needed to document the ways in which the equity agenda of the IDEA collides with racial groups' search for justice? Why have research and policy communities given so much attention to this longstanding problem in the last ten years? Perhaps more importantly, why have the historical and cultural sedimentations of race and disability, and their complex intersections, not been theorized and analyzed in this scholarship?
The racialization of disability has not occurred in a vacuum. Scholars have documented how “disability has always been racialised and how race has been conceived as disability” (Bolaki Reference Bolaki and Bell2011, p. 48). Since at least the nineteenth century, race and disability have been intertwined and linked to ideologies of evolutionary hierarchy—“nonwhite races were routinely connected to people with disabilities, both of whom were depicted as evolutionary laggards or throwbacks” (Baynton Reference Baynton, Longmore and Umansky2001, p. 36). Moreover, attributions of disability were often used to justify the institution of slavery and deny basic rights to African Americans (Baynton Reference Baynton, Longmore and Umansky2001).
Douglas Baynton argued that “not only has it been considered justifiable to treat disabled people unequally, but the concept of disability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by attributing disability to them” (Reference Baynton, Longmore and Umansky2001, p. 33, emphasis in original). The racialization of disabilities reminds us that racial minorities have been consistently subjected to such “double bind” discrimination (Artiles Reference Artiles2011). Unfortunately, the racialization of disability scholarship has been dominated by the notion of “damage imagery”—the idea that African Americans and other racial minorities “are and historically have been psychologically damaged” (Scott Reference Scott2007, p. 1). It is typically assumed that damage imagery is the byproduct of innate inferiority and/or the sequela of poverty or inferior cultural practices; the result is deficit-driven narratives about racial minorities in which mental and cognitive pathology are paramount (Scott Reference Scott2007; Valencia Reference Valencia2010).
Despite recurrent historical convergences, scholars in psychology, education, and medicine artificially maintain a divide between race and disability, enforcing troubling silences and invisibilities. Key dimensions of marginalized groups are simultaneously visible and invisible. How and for what purposes do scholarly communities manage to maintain what Ned Mitchell (Reference Mitchell and Bell2011) described as the “absent presences” of raced and disabled bodies? What work is accomplished when race and disability are kept in separate spheres? (Bell Reference Bell2011).
Most scholarship on the racialization of disability has been grounded in the so-called “medical model” in which the unit of analysis is the individual, completely devoid of social or historical influences. My colleagues and I have found a profound silence about race in research based on this model (Artiles et al., Reference Artiles, Trent and Kuan1997). The medical model fragments the individual, focusing either on race or on disability, rarely examining the interplay of race and disability with other key dimensions such as social class and gender.
Social and cultural models of disability have also been used, though to a lesser extent, in analyses of racial inequities in special education. The social model locates disability in a societal plane, “conceptualized as a discourse of opposition, directed primarily against societal oppression” (Schillmeier Reference Schillmeier2010, p. 4), particularly against barriers imposed by an ableist society, prejudices and biases against disability, and deficit models that dismiss the lived experiences, viewpoints, potential, and contributions of disabled people. The cultural model, in turn, raises the question of the social construction of disability, though it has been less concerned with the perspective of disabled people as a minority group, and more with the inequities endured by racial minorities as they are disproportionately placed in special education (Patton Reference Patton1998).
We know little about how scholarship based on these models has paid attention to the historical intersections of race and disability, how it has framed justice questions, and the similarities and differences among the analyses conducted from the vantage points of medical, social, and cultural models. Given these substantial gaps, an alternative interdisciplinary analytical project is needed. Two theoretical aspects are central to this project.
First, we need to use the lens of intersectionality to analyze these bodies of research for “[r]ace and disability are always imbricated with gender, sex, sexuality, and class” (Dolmage Reference Dolmage2011, p. 27). The notion of intersectionality emerged in critical race theory, and has been subsequently developed in the social sciences and humanities, precisely as a resource to understand the complexity of people's identities and experiences in stratified institutions and societies (Collins Reference Collins, Lott and Pittman2003; Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991). Intersectionality is a useful theoretical framework to understand the tensions between the lived experiences of people with multiple intersecting identities and communities' needs for identity politics: racial minorities and disabled people need group identities for material and symbolic purposes, but this does not mean group categories are essentializing artifacts as community members embody complex intersectional identities (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991). Intersectionality attends to identity categories—such as race and disability—because they have meaning, social gravity, and consequences; indeed, “power has clustered around certain categories and is exercised against others” (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991, p. 375). Thus, intersectionality affords crucial insights about the racialization of disability, compelling us to focus on both the power of assigning categories to individuals and on the authority of those categories “to have social and material consequences” (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991, p. 376).
Second, we can benefit from a contrapuntal reading of intersectionality in the scholarship produced from the medical, social, and cultural models. Contrapuntalism links ideas and practices that are regarded as being opposites or in contradiction, thereby revealing points of contact across these bodies of work that are not readily apparent. “A contrapuntal reading is to emphasize and highlight the disjunctions, not to overlook or play them down” (Said Reference Said1993, p. 146). From a contrapuntal standpoint, we are compelled to cross the liminal spaces between different disability lenses. As Said explained in the context of discussing exile, “[b]ecause the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in isolation” (p. 60, emphasis added). Thus a crucial implication of a contrapuntal analysis is an unceasing concern with what to read (i.e., disproportionality research grounded in seemingly contradictory models of disability) attached to an unremitting mindfulness about how to read—i.e., being reminded of the “intertwined and overlapping histories” (Said Reference Said1993, p. 18) of race and disability as they intersect with gender, social class, and language. Through a contrapuntal analysis we can “be able to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them coexisting and interacting with others” (Said Reference Said1993, p. 32).
What can we gain from using the double vision of a contrapuntal analysis of intersectionality to read disproportionality research across medical, cultural, and social models of disability? First we can gain insights about blind spots in these literatures to understand how various categories and domains of experience have been disaggregated; such analysis will allow us to read these categories and realms of experience in an integrated fashion and as mediated by institutional processes (Ribet Reference Ribet2010). Moreover, a contrapuntal reading of intersectionality in this research literature will enable us to claim that
disability and race do more than intersect in order to reinforce or intensify ideological stereotypes … it is not simply that the inherent, acquired or attributed characteristics possessed by members of racial groups are interpreted based on a white supremacist construct of ability. Literally physical or psychological disablement (as well as social and political subordination) can also be a process that results in disability imposed through racial power relations
(Ribet Reference Ribet2010, p. 217).Thinking through critical interdisciplinary questions can help us approach the racialization of disabilities from a more complex perspective. These questions include: How has research on the racialization of disabilities examined the historical entanglements of race and disability? How has it examined intersections in categories of difference (e.g., race, disability, social class, gender)? What insights about racial inequities in special education result from the analysis of research based on purportedly opposing models of disability? I argue that a contrapuntal analysis of the racialization of disabilities using an intersectional prism promises important insights into these questions and illuminate generative and enduring questions about educational justice. Following Chris Bell (Reference Bell2011), this analytical project enables us to keep alternative disability models in conversation with one another; it will ultimately assist us to re-interpret the cultural dynamics of difference that mediate representations of marginalized groups.
I first provide an overview of research on disproportionate representation, various disability models, and intersectionality. I then present a contrapuntal critical reading of intersectionality in the scholarship on the racialization of disabilities across disability models, and conclude with reflections on future inquiries into this topic.
SETTING THE CONTEXT: RACIALIZATION OF DISABILITY RESEARCH, DISABILITY MODELS, AND INTERSECTIONALITY
Why Are There So Many Minority Students in Special Education? A Historical Outline
The research on why there are so many minority students in special education (see Harry and Klingner, Reference Harry and Klingner2006) paints a complex picture in which individual factors, institutional practices, organizational forces, and fiscal and bureaucratic pressures contribute to the racialization of disability (Skiba et al., Reference Skiba, Simmons, Ritter, Gibb, Rausch and Cuadrado2008). There is little consensus on a theoretical explanation of the problem; some studies do not even specify the theoretical frameworks that guide their analyses. Research has tended to examine the role of individual or structural factors, mostly from a quantitative perspective (Waitoller et al., Reference Waitoller, Artiles and Cheney2010). This literature commonly concludes that a disproportionate number of racial minorities live in poverty, which in turn can mediate the onset of certain disabilities, particularly those conditions with biological etiologies. For instance, American Indians/Alaska Natives are overrepresented in the category of deaf-blindness, and along with African Americans, are disproportionately diagnosed with developmental delays. However, developmental delays are not consistently diagnosed with clear biological roots. Indeed, this diagnosis tends to be grounded in a view of human development that largely ignores its cultural roots (Rogoff Reference Rogoff2003). There is evidence of systemic forces at play—e.g., student race makes a significant contribution to risk of being identified as disabled, even after statistically controlling for poverty level; students who are racial minorities tend to be placed in segregated programs more often than their White counterparts with the same disability diagnosis (Skiba et al., Reference Skiba, Simmons, Ritter, Gibb, Rausch and Cuadrado2008).
Nonetheless, some commentators still question whether the racialization of disabilities is a problem, claiming that concerns are likely grounded in an opposition to special education. They overlook the significance of the problem. First, disproportionality raises the question of misidentification in the case of overrepresentation, and exclusion from services in the case of under-identification. Second, overrepresentation adds another layer of marginalization and disadvantage for racial minority students—particularly since disability identification is closely associated with long-term negative consequences that include persistent lower academic achievement, higher risk of placement in the juvenile justice system, higher school dropout rate, and lower access to higher education (Artiles et al., Reference Artiles, Kozleski, Trent, Osher and Ortiz2010). Third, these commentators overlook the specific arguments involved: critics of the racialization of disabilities remind us of the histories of using disability to justify inequities for disabled people as well as for racial minorities and women, of the material and symbolic negative consequences of the entanglement of race with disability and its relation to the concept of the “normal.”
Changes to federal law in 2004 require states to track and address racial disproportionality. This legal change was welcomed by most commentators as a step forward. But confusion about the new legal requirements and manipulations of racial disproportionality definitions and metrics, along with converging pressures stemming from educational accountability reforms, are shaping a perverse policy climate and landscape (Artiles Reference Artiles2011). For instance, disproportionality may be deepening in some states and districts, but it is not acted upon because of placement threshold requirements. Daryl Scott (Reference Scott2007) documented similar problems in examining the persistent association between race and mental health pathology: “the threshold for what experts considered a mental health problem continuously shifted” (p. xiv). This difficulty is exacerbated because federal law now requires that states determine whether disproportionality is present; if so, they must decide if such patterns are the result of inappropriate practices that must be redressed through specific actions and extra resources. Unfortunately, a sizable number of states are concluding that high disproportionality levels are not the result of inappropriate identification practices (Artiles Reference Artiles2011).
Discussions about the disability models underlying this research are virtually nonexistent. The de facto lens has been the medical model, though some analyses have been grounded in social and cultural models. I outline these paradigms in the next section as a means to inform the contrapuntal reading of intersectionality in this research across disability models.
Ways with Theories: Professional Visions of Disability
I outline key ideas of the three disability models, though there are not impermeable lines demarcating the models (Shakespeare Reference Shakespeare2006) and there are points of tension among them (Ribet Reference Ribet2010, personal communication).Footnote 2
Medical Model
The medical model's defining characteristic is the assumption that disability is located in biological impairments within the individual, “neglecting the reality of discrimination” (Watermeyer Reference Watermeyer2013, p. 14); policies and services consequently aim to fix the disabled person (Crossley Reference Crossley1999).Footnote 3 Implicit in the “damaged body” trope of the medical model are uninterrogated assumptions about a normal body. Thus, this model is driven by a “moral imperative to ‘healthy normalcy’” (Watermeyer Reference Watermeyer2013, p. 29) that will cure or rehabilitate impairments; it regards disabled people as different and inferior, a premise that justifies their exclusion and creates barriers for rights and entitlements (Crossley Reference Crossley1999), or as Tobin Siebers (Reference Siebers2008) described it, for the “right to have rights” (p. 176). Given the biological roots of disability, it is assumed that “the social disadvantages and exclusion that accompany the disability can be explained as natural and not ascribable to any social cause. Because disability is not socially caused, the disabled individual has no claim of right to social remediation, and any benefits or assistance that society chooses to bestow on persons with disabilities can be viewed as a charitable response” (Crossley Reference Crossley1999, pp. 651–652).
The medical model views disabled people as dependent upon professionals, not only to validate their condition via a diagnosis, but also to determine and provide the best treatment or prosthetics needed to be cured or rehabilitated, to decide on relevant social benefits, and to certify any entitlement to exemptions (e.g., work), as long as individuals agree to receive the prescribed treatment (Crossley Reference Crossley1999). The perspective of the disabled is irrelevant, and hence, no efforts are made to gather or use such information (Linton Reference Linton1998).
Despite the strong critiques raised against the medical model, it pervades the legal, policy, and professional domains. It has been the primary lens to examine the racialization of disability. Because the medical model foregrounds the individual as the unit of analysis, it disaggregates race from disability and other markers of difference (e.g., gender, social class, and language), resulting in a fragmented individual. In this model, racial and cultural differences can be construed as comparable and indexed as demographic markers (Artiles et al., Reference Artiles, Kozleski, Trent, Osher and Ortiz2010).
Social Model
The social model of disability offers “new and political understandings of disability … [which] is seen as interacting with social, cultural, historical, legal, and medical discourses, as well as further complicating factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, and class” (Connor and Ferri, Reference Connor and Ferri2005, p. 110). The social model sees the idea of disability as the product of oppression and structural exclusion that should be eliminated (Shakespeare Reference Shakespeare2006). This vision has significant implications for policy; instead of fixing disabled bodies, it encourages policies informed by an “accommodation imperative” that change the social and physical structures of society (Crossley Reference Crossley1999, p. 658). Disabled scholars and activists have led the way in developing the social model of disability.Footnote 4 This model regards disability as a social construction, thereby locating disability in society (not the body), and drawing distinctions between disability and impairment. In this view, the presence of an impairment does not necessarily constitute a disability. Disability arises out of society's ableist assumptions and practices about what is considered normal. Thus, it is a social environment that “disables” a person in a wheelchair if stairs are the only means to reach different building floors. The “wheelchair user is disadvantaged not by her inability to walk, but by the way in which buildings are designed and constructed” (Crossley Reference Crossley1999, p. 654).
The concept of the impairment-disability binary has been criticized. Indeed, disabled authors have called attention to the messy and ambiguous overlaps between bodily aspects of their experiences and societal dimensions of both impairments and disabilities. Experiencing impairments rests on cultural meanings, emphasizing the “interpenetration of impairment and disability” (Shakespeare Reference Shakespeare2006, p. 37). Moreover, the social model can elaborate its attention to the psychological realm and the body (i.e., impairment) (Watermeyer Reference Watermeyer2013).
This model also encourages attention to the cultural construction of disability as reflected in the images and perceptions of people with disabilities in popular culture, policies, media stereotypes, and the like. These constructions contribute to the othering of disabled individuals and mediate processes of exclusion that this community endures over time (Crossley Reference Crossley1999). Embedded in these constructions are assumptions about “normal” that structure cultural and material worlds that cater to the needs of nondisabled individuals (Watermeyer Reference Watermeyer2013). The social model is critical of the notion of “normalization” because it rests on ideologies of homogeneity and control that date back to the nineteenth century when statistical reasoning and technologies were produced (Crossley Reference Crossley1999; Watermeyer Reference Watermeyer2013). However, just as the social model has criticized the essentialist logic embedded in the idea of normal, the emergence of the social model has required the adoption of a kind of “strategic essentialism” (Garland-Thomson Reference Garland-Thomson and Davis1997, p. 283). Moreover, criticisms have been raised about the social model's attention to the experiences of Western white middle class males with physical disabilities (particularly in its early work) (Watermeyer Reference Watermeyer2013).Footnote 5
Cultural Model
The third perspective is reflected in a body of scholarship concerned with racial disproportionality. This corpus of scholarship shares some traits that I label here the cultural model. For instance, this work critiques the racialization of disability with an utmost concern for the oppression endured by racial minorities (Patton Reference Patton1998). This work also relies, to some degree, on a social construction view of disability. Finally, some analyses based on the cultural model tend to be informed by a dynamic and historically-based notion of culture that opens analytical spaces to examine the agency and cultural assets of communities (Artiles et al., Reference Artiles, Kozleski, Trent, Osher and Ortiz2010). It is not clear, however, how issues of intersectionality are addressed in this scholarship.
To summarize, the racialization of disabilities has been studied primarily through the lens of a medical model, with some attention by those using social and cultural models. But do the differences among models result in disparate framings of the problem, alternative insights across analyses conducted from different models, and distinct ways of engaging with the intersections of race and disability? Before I address these queries through a contrapuntal reading, I provide an introduction to the concept of intersectionality.
Complexity in Analysis of Unjust Practices: The Promise of Intersectionality
Intersectionality examines the influence of power to provide limited frames for people's multidimensional experiences, particularly those of women of color, as a response to “the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1989, p. 139). Intersectionality acknowledges that “systems of race, social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually constructing features of social organization” (Collins Reference Collins2000, p. 299). Intersectionality, thus, rejects the “separability of analytical and identity categories” and captures “the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations” (McCall Reference McCall2005, p. 1771). Intersectionality challenges essentialist views of groups, single-axis analyses, and additive models of identity (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991). Intersectionality's sensitivity to within-group diversity challenges the logic of “group unity equals group uniformity” (Hancock Reference Hancock2007, p. 65). Intersectional analysis aims to document the convergence of multiple forms of oppression in people's lives as shaped by distinct markers of difference. An implication of this analytic perspective includes policy responses that are sensitive to the convergence of multiple forms of oppression (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991; Hancock Reference Hancock2007).
There are a number of types of intersectionality. I discuss structural and political intersectionality here and other types when critiquing the racialization of disability in the next section. Crenshaw (Reference Crenshaw1991) describes structural and political intersectionality. Structural intersectionality refers to how intersectional locations make the experiences of groups qualitatively different. In this analysis, structural intersectionality suggests that boys of color from low-income backgrounds, particularly African Americans and Americans Indians, at the intersection of race, gender, and class experience their identification as disabled and efforts to address it in ways qualitatively different from that of White middle-class boys. In turn, political intersectionality emphasizes that intersectional identities may be situated “within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas. The need to split one's political energies between two sometimes-opposing groups is a[n additional] dimension of intersectional disempowerment” (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991, p. 360). Thinking in terms of political intersectionality suggests that low-income boys of color with disabilities or with a heightened probability of disability identification are situated within multiple subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas. This liminal position creates a sort of intersectional disempowerment that middle-class boys with disabilities, low-income boys of color without disabilities, and White girls and girls of color rarely experience. Intersectional analysis has the potential to address this problem.
INTERSECTIONALITY IN DISPROPORTIONALITY RESEARCH: REIFICATIONS, CONTRADICTIONS, AND PROTEAN NOTIONS
The bulk of the evidence on racial inequities is based on quantitative analyses, mostly based on a medical model. A few quantitative studies have been informed by cultural perspectives. There are fewer qualitative studies designed with cultural processes in mind.
This section discusses trends in this research with regards to intersectionality across the three disability models, with specific focus on the use of the unitary approach and hybrid narratives. I used the scholarship of a few established authors working in the medical, social, and cultural models of disability to exemplify distinctive inquiry features of each model. I selected articles that broadly addressed at least two vectors of discrimination, even though some of these authors did not originally set out to conduct intersectional analyses.
Written on the Body: The Unitary Approach
Many disproportionality studies rest on a “unitary approach” to identity. As described by Ange-Marie Hancock (Reference Hancock2007) this approach endorses a universalistic perspective in which one “variable” or marker of difference, such as race or class, is assumed to be both more important than the others and stable. Thus, researchers set to identify the one variable that has the greatest explanatory power in predicting special education placement. Inquiries are generally constrained by adherence to the medical model of disability, as outlined above. Typically, secondary datasets at the school district, state, or (less frequently) national levels are used to gauge the factor that best explains/predicts placement. Structural conditions in the special education field offer incentives for a unitary approach in disproportionality research. For example, federal law defines learning disabilities diagnosis as unrelated to socioeconomic and cultural differences. Thus, the law indirectly prevents intersectional analyses of disabilities with other markers of difference.
The search for the variable with the greatest explanatory power is sometimes imposed through methodological means, such as use of covariates. One such example is the work of Jacob Hibel and his colleagues in which they investigated “how student and school characteristics relate to the student's placement into special education” (Reference Hibel, Farkas and Morgan2010, p. 313). These authors explained that “[d]isproportionate representation may be especially likely to occur for those types of disabilities that rely more on a teacher's judgment and contextual factors (e.g., LD, EBD) than those types that rely on relatively more objective criteria (e.g., MR, visual impairment)” (p. 314). Building on the force of a unitary logic, individual judgments, such as teacher referral decisions, were examined as mediated by a single factor—e.g., teacher's race or school/classroom demographics.Footnote 6 This led them to conclude that
teacher judgments of acceptable student achievement or behavior are necessarily based on the performance of the teacher's particular referent group, which naturally consists of the other students in the school. Thus, the student's peers within his or her school provide the normative standard for identifying whether the student is disabled and so is eligible for special education
(p. 315).For this approach, not only is disability an objective condition that is written on the body (Watermeyer Reference Watermeyer2013), but it is also the result of linear and unidirectional causal influences (even though the links between these factors are often correlational) that move from membership in a racial or ethnic group, to living in poverty, and end up in disability status. Donald MacMillan and Daniel Reschly, for instance, concluded that, “social class, and not ethnicity, would explain more variance in the rates of detection for these high-incidence disabilities, particularly MMR” (Reference MacMillan and Reschly1998, p. 20). Hibel and his colleagues offered a comparable theory by explaining that class and race effects for lower income African American and Hispanic children are compounded by greater exposure to factors “that themselves contribute to disability identification,” including
biological trauma (e.g., low birth weight, poor nutrition, and child health) and increased exposure to environmental toxins[;] “social trauma” such as being raised in poverty or by a single or teenage parent [; and having] parents who are high school dropouts or second-language learners, depressed, disorganized, unemployed, or incarcerated and who reside in high-risk neighborhoods. These factors may result in the lower cognitive and behavioral performance displayed by low-income minority students when they begin kindergarten
(Reference Hibel, Farkas and Morgan2010, p. 316).Other studies have applied similar intersectional reasoning (Hosp and Reschly, Reference Hosp and Reschly2003; Oswald et al., Reference Oswald, Coutinho, Best and Singh1999; Skiba et al., Reference Skiba, Poloni-Staudinger, Simmons, Feggins and Chung2005).
Four themes stand out in the unitary work: (a) essentializing sociocultural groups; (b) stripping historical and structural influences from the study of people's actions and decisions or framing them as static factors with linear relations; (c) neglecting the problematic historical intertwining of race and dis/ability; and (d) assuming that disabilities are objective features located in the individual. In this sense, the unitary approach naturalizes the racialization of disabilities, marshalling evidence that conceivably legitimizes racial disproportionality.
Hybrid Circular Narratives: Between Intra-Categorical and Unitary Intersectionalities
Let us now review what I call “hybrid circular narratives” of intersectionality. One form of intersectional analysis is concerned with examining intra-categorical complexity. This perspective
interrogates the boundary-making and boundary-defining process [of categorization]…. It acknowledges the stable and even durable relationships that social categories represent at any given point in time, though it also maintains a critical stance toward categories…. [It also] tends to focus on particular social groups at neglected points of intersection”
(McCall Reference McCall2005, pp. 1773–1774).Work by disability studies scholars that relies on premises from this perspective includes Erevelles and Minear (Reference Erevelles and Minear2010), who linked Critical Race Feminist Theory with Disability Studies Theory in their assessment of the historical nexus between race and disability (see also McCall and Skrtic, Reference McCall and Skrtic2010). They situated the connections between race and disability in historic and postcolonial contexts, arguing for an intersectional analysis that avoids limiting the scope of inquiry to a single marker of difference. Taking the history of the eugenics movement and its concomitant conflation of race with disability, they argued that “the continued association of race and disability in debilitating ways necessitates that we examine how eugenic practices continue to reconstitute social hierarchies in contemporary contexts via the deployment of a hegemonic ideology of disability that have real material effects on people located at the intersections of difference” (pp. 133–134). Similarly, in a recent paper (Artiles Reference Artiles2011), I situated the racialization of disability in historical context by exploring conflation of the two in laws covering “ugly” and impaired bodies. I went on to stress the complicity of research communities in this conflation by revealing associations drawn between racial minority status and deviance, illness, and depressed abilities.
Bringing together frameworks deployed in both Cultural and Disability Studies affords a number of opportunities for nuanced analysis of intersectional identities because the theoretical apparatuses in these scholarly communities engage with complexity in contextualized and systematic ways. These frameworks afford powerful tools to examine disability as it is constituted discursively, culturally, and institutionally across multiple contexts, ultimately revealing that disability is a protean notion that requires situated scrutiny with sociocultural and historical imaginations.
Other intriguing patterns emerge in work based on the social and cultural models. Works grounded in a social model start with a compelling critique of disability as historically and bureaucratically situated, showing how definitions evolve over time, ultimately reminding us of the ways in which race, class, gender, and disability have had entangled histories. In this sense, these works are rooted in an intra-categorical intersectional frame, though the focus is on disability. That is, disability is at the center, with all of the other difference markers linked to it. This is apparent in the fact that these inquiries do not include comparable in-depth critiques of race, social class, and gender—in other words, critiques of other difference markers are proffered only to the extent they inform disability. These works provide a more balanced theorizing of other markers when they acknowledge, for instance, that special education placement was used to maintain the racial segregation of schools in the post-Brown era (Baker Reference Baker2002; Connor and Ferri, Reference Connor and Ferri2005). Thus, on the one hand, disability is socially constructed and is a tool of exclusion for racial minority students, but on the other hand, oppression is stressed only in discussions of race. While such analyses reveal how disability is constituted and used with specific purposes—i.e., through the concerted efforts of cultural, historical, and ideological processes—some scholarship on the racialization of disabilities grounded in social or cultural models only foregrounds oppression as it relates to race in its analysis. In other words, while these works pay attention to processes and instrumentality in the analysis of disability, they stress the end result when dealing with race.
When the tropes of disability and race converge and the analysis focuses on the racialization of disability, complications crystalize. One such example arises when researchers premise their work with the caveat that “certain disability categories may be considered more problematic than others” (Connor and Ferri, Reference Connor and Ferri2005, p. 111; emphasis in original), an assumption which stands in tension with understandings of disability as social construction. A quasi-unitary framework emerges since the bulk of the analysis relies on studies framed from a unitary vantage point. For example, evidence on student placement by student race is discussed to support the argument about the racialization of disability, but certain structures and blind spots are left intact. Scholarship committed to a cultural model (Artiles et al., Reference Artiles, Rueda, Salazar and Higareda2005), has made the same move in some studies, serving as reminder of the protean nature of disability as analyses morph from a critique of disability as a social construct to a medically-based category (as embodied in the databases used in these studies) within the same investigation. Such studies may theorize disabilities as socially constructed, but call some categories “subjective” or “soft,” with a structural argument leveled against special education, namely that the bureaucratic and middle-class nature of this system oppresses families of color (Blanchett Reference Blanchett2006). Agency and within-group diversity in low-income racial minority communities tend to be invisible in this work, which may reflect an essentialized view of these groups.
In all fairness, scholars using social and cultural models are aware and do recognize more complex views of culture and give analytical space to agency when working with marginalized communities. My point is that a contrapuntal analytic stance shows that competing views of race, disability, and intersectionality coexist in this work, in part, because we use some of the analytical tools of the medical model (e.g., analysis of placement patterns by race and disability category) that we strive to contest.
A contrapuntal reading of the research literature makes visible the coexistence of tools and premises from opposing paradigms within and across work based on distinct disability models. Researchers using a medical perspective have occasionally drawn tools from social and cultural models. For instance, MacMillan and Reschly (Reference MacMillan and Reschly1998) drew on arguments based in social construction to argue for strengthening measurement precision. They argued that race and ethnicity are ambiguous constructs measured in disparate ways and “should not be interpreted as scientific and anthropological in nature … yet, that is exactly how they are treated in the OCR overrepresentation dataset” (pp. 18–19). They highlighted the inaccuracies and inadequacies of racial categories for capturing information about within-group diversity and mixed race groups and noted that schools collect such data idiosyncratically. Their arguments are used to justify the need to control for ethnicity, particularly as it is often a proxy for social class, which seems to be their preferred explanation for the disproportionality problem.
These authors acknowledge the ambiguous and unstable nature of ethnicity for identity purposes while also arguing that it is necessary to take within-group diversity in racial and ethnic minority groups into consideration when analyzing the overrepresentation of students of color. The implication is that we do not know who these learners really are. Yet within the same analysis, these authors summoned an essentialist model of White students and a medical frame of disability to support a poverty hypothesis. They cite a study that found the prevalence of mild intellectual disabilities to vary as a function of social class: the lower the social class, the higher the prevalence of disability, with no occurrences in the highest status. The authors' reliance upon essentialist models and a medical frame are illuminated by the following disclosure: the “study was conducted in Aberdeen, Scotland involving only White subjects, thereby avoiding the confound of ethnicity and social class” (MacMillan and Reschly, Reference MacMillan and Reschly1998, p. 19).
This comment then implies that in some cases the measurement of ethnicity and disability is no longer problematic. The authors assumed there is no within-group diversity in White communities, ignoring the cultural history of Europe, and the United Kingdom in particular. This is a longstanding trope in the “othering” of non-White communities that keeps White folks at the center of defining consequential categories like ability and dis/ability. Following a longstanding tradition in the history of the United States and the social sciences, these authors made two problematic conceptual moves within the same article. First, they equated race with ethnicity, which deflects discussion of race: “the origins of … ethnicity lie in an attempt to find another way of talking about race” (Harris Reference Harris2001, p. 1773). Second, the authors relied on a recognition/de-recognition dynamic to “see race” (i.e., the racial identities of particular bodies) in order to de-recognize or not see race (i.e., a structural system of group-based privileges and disadvantages produced by socio-historical forces) (p. 1758).
To conclude, a contrapuntal reading of the disproportionality literature enables us to discern hybrid patterns in intersectional analysis and warns us about the need for strengthening theoretical clarity and its concomitant methodological implications.
COMPLEXITY IN FUTURE RESEARCH ON THE RACIALIZATION OF DISABILITY
A contrapuntal perspective enables us to challenge our assumptions about coherence and purity within conceptual models. A “contrapuntal analysis should be modeled not … on a symphony but rather on an atonal ensemble; we must take into account all sorts of spatial or geographical and rhetorical practices … all of them tending to elucidate a complex and uneven topography” (Said Reference Said1993, p. 318). A contrapuntal analysis of the racialization of disability could stimulate conversation between seemingly opposite or contradictory disability models, and between their respective ontological assumptions about disability and race. A contrapuntal analysis asks: what can we learn about the nature of disability and race in bodies of academic work that are deemed to be distinct and even mutually exclusive?
This initial critique suggests the potential of an intersectional analysis grounded in a contrapuntal perspective for studying the racialization of disability. This analysis illustrated the ambivalent status of categories and illuminated the shifting topographies between the discursive and material dimensions of these categories (McCall Reference McCall2005). Indeed, race and disability have mimetic properties across and within the various models of disability. While the study of race and disability intersections often relied on a unitary approach, a contrapuntal reading of the disproportionality literature based on alternative disability models also revealed complex hybrid patterns in intersectional analysis, and suggested the need to strengthen theoretical clarity and its concomitant methodological implications. Social and cultural approaches to disability used medically-based tools and analytic strategies to address race-disability intersections. While we possess sophisticated toolkits to theorize and study race and ability discrimination, we routinely fail to deploy them when studying the racialization of disability. What cultural dynamics are at play to produce this state of affairs? To what extent does the history of the racialization of disability—and the ways in which intersectionality has been addressed in the research across the medical, social, and cultural paradigms—constitute what Fischer called “involutionary change,” where the construction, treatment, and consequences of race and disability intersections become “more elaborately the same”? (cited in Danforth et al., Reference Danforth, Taff, Ferguson and Brantlinger2006, p. 19).
This preliminary analysis identified connections not readily perceived, connections between notions such as race and disability that are often dichotomized. To some extent, this emerging contrapuntal analysis suggested a blurring of boundaries between paradigms. An intersectional prism, in turn, revealed the protean nature of disability and race not perceptible through single axis analysis. The potentially negative consequences of hybrid circular narratives require us to forge a new language about the complex intersections between race and disability. This contrapuntal analysis suggests that we undertake what Lennard Davis described as the Chris “‘Bell imperative’ to think more clearly, more politically, about disability” (Davis Reference Davis and Bell2011, p. xi) and its entanglements with race.
In closing, I offer several reflections to consider for further developments in this line of work:
1. Prepare the next generation of scholars with an intersectional imagination. We need more scholars using intersectional analysis to study racial inequities in special education. In the United States, few doctoral programs in special education (and even in Disability Studies) include training in intersectional analysis. Theoretical and methodological attention to intersectionality will stimulate the growth of communities of scholars that can benefit from each other's engagement with this perspective.
2. Take advantage of the potential of intersectionality: Probe the depths within categories. Intersectionality provides tools for complex “intergroup” analyses, going beyond examining a single dimension of a category (e.g., race, gender, and class), at the expense of dimensions within categories (McCall Reference McCall2005). McCall, for example, has produced quantitative intersectional analyses in which “different contexts reveal different configurations of inequality in [a] particular social formation” (p. 1791). This is the direction that Erevelles and Minear are taking, examining the lived experiences of individuals as located in “structural conditions within which … social categories are constructed by, and intermeshed with each other in specific historical contexts” (Reference Erevelles and Minear2010, p. 131). Studies could also address a variety of other intra-categorical issues, such as what Cathy Cohen (Reference Cohen1999) described as the “politics of secondary marginalization” through which marginalized individuals with privilege—in our case male students of color—police those without privilege (i.e., disabled male students of color). To my knowledge, studies examining secondary marginalization processes in the racialization of disabilities have not been conducted.
3. Add detail and texture to analysis of categories. An implication of the previous point is the need to look at neglected categories or subdimensions of categories. Although racial inequity in special education research has made visible the historical intersections of race and disability, “visibility in and of itself does not erase a history of silence, nor does it challenge the structure of power and domination, symbolic and material, that determines what can and cannot be seen” (Hammonds Reference Hammonds1994, p. 141). For instance, certain racial groups (e.g., Latinos/as and American Indians), and language minorities have been largely invisible in special education research. Other dimensions such as gender require more complex analysis: a great deal of attention has been given to boys in special education, particularly from racial minority backgrounds (the majority in a number of disability categories), without drawing on important scholarship on gender and sexuality from other fields. Such scholarship can provide more insight about gender differences in school disengagement, violence, and crime. A nuanced analysis of categories and their intersections also requires attention to students' agency. The research to date has primarily used static demographic markers to identify students, overlooking their active, innovative, and improvisational lives.
4. Build coalitions to advance equity agendas. While there are always complications in building coalitions (see Engel and Munger, Reference Engel and Munger2003), this project can advance equity agendas in politically profound ways, creating possibilities for coalitions not previously considered (see Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991). Although coalitions between inclusion advocates and individuals addressing the racialization of disability, for instance, could have been formed in the early years of the inclusive education movement, such work could be pursued in the future.
5. Nurture disciplinary reflexivity through contrapuntal critiques. Using contrapuntal critiques in examining intersectionality offers opportunities for dialogue across communities of scholars within and between disciplines. They can explore the benefits and consequences of “strategic borrowing” of analytical tools across disability models. For instance, statistics about race and disability deployed in the medical model have already been used for research grounded in the social and cultural models. Previous uses of racial statistics in this literature compel analysts to fragment and purify identities by extracting the potential intersections with other markers of oppression. But, as Kenneth Prewitt (Reference Prewitt2012) challenged us, “can there be a policy that misuses race statistics” (p. 1)? There is already evidence about gaming strategies being used in states and districts to avoid sanctions from federal policy requirements to monitor racial disproportionality. The point is not that racial statistics are useless; indeed, complex statistical analyses of intersectionality are possible due to methodological advances. Here, the contrapuntal reading of this research allowed us to unveil how analytical tools are used across disparate disability standpoints that do not necessarily subscribe to the tools' core assumptions. An unintended consequence is that the scholarship on racialization of disability (independent of its theoretical commitments) continues to use tools that maintain the focus on traits typically located in the individual. This prevents us from broadening the analytic spotlight to account for influences such as the nature of the categories involved, the role of ideological influences in the design of curricula and assessment, and the mediating force of institutional racism in the racialization of disability. In turn, these contrapuntal readings of disparate research traditions can inform disciplinary reflexivity to raise questions about the postulates and toolkits deployed to understand the complex predicament described as the racialization of disability.
Ultimately, this line of analysis promises to answer Bell's “invitation to keep [race] and disability in conversation with one another. It is an invitation to rethink embodiment and representation” (Reference Bell2011, p. 4). A critique of the research on the racialization of disability affords us opportunities to examine “particular social groups at neglected points of intersection of multiple master categories” (McCall Reference McCall2005, p. 1780). It enables us to prevent shifting views of difference from reifying enduring educational injustices in the contemporary policy, research, and practice landscapes of U.S. education.
