The place of race in past and present: Student and state narratives of race in U.S. History

Abstract

This three-study dissertation addresses the broader question of identifying a collective memory of race in the Northern United States. The studies are conceptually linked by a critical race perspective and are distinct in research focus, methods, and findings. In the first study, I examined how 128 students from two New England states represented their understandings of the history of enslavement in the United States. I used inductive and deductive approaches to investigate how they connected this history to race and notions of national progress. In the second study, I used document analysis to investigate the representation of people of color in New York’s state standards for 11th grade U.S. history. I found that less than one-third of standards cited people of color, and the majority of such standards cited them alongside White people. This practice of exclusionary grouping reinforced Whiteness as normative by implying a essentialist view of race and ethnicity. In the third study, I employed discourse analysis to examine the representation of race in the New York U.S. history curricular framework and in the policy context of its intended use. I found that policy defining the purpose of social studies promoted nationalist and race-evasive discourses. Through strategic periodization, the curriculum segregated explicit references to race into an “alternate timeline,” whose narrative arc strongly implied racial progress. Moreover, I found that the selectively ahistorical use of the word “American” was used to mark groups as non-White. Ultimately, the state’s manipulation of time and language functioned to preserve discourses of national progress and U.S. moral exceptionalism and to suppress the study of race in history.