The Cultural Production of Racial Narratives About Asian Americans in Mathematics

Although considerable literature illustrates how students’ experiences and identities are racialized in mathematics education, little attention has been given to Asian American students. Employing ethnographic methods, this study followed 10 immigrant Chinese-heritage families to explore how the racial narrative of the model minority myth was locally produced in mathematics education. We draw on constructs of racial narratives and cultural production to identify the local production of the narrative Asians are smart and good at math during K–12 schooling. Specifically, the Asian American students (re)produced racial narratives related to three cultural resources: (a) Their immigrant parents’ narratives about the U.S. elementary school mathematics curriculum; (b) the school mathematics student tracking system; and (c) students’ locally generated racial narratives about what being Asian means.

Identity propaganda: Racial narratives and disinformation

This article develops the concept of “identity propaganda,” or narratives that strategically target and exploit identity-based differences in accord with pre-existing power structures to maintain hegemonic social orders. In proposing and developing the concept of identity propaganda, we especially aim to help researchers find new insights into their data on misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda by outlining a framework for unpacking layers of historical power relations embedded in the content they analyze. We focus on three forms of identity propaganda: othering narratives that alienate and marginalize non-white or non-dominant groups; essentializing narratives that create generalizing tropes of marginalized groups; and authenticating narratives that call upon people to prove or undermine their claims to be part of certain groups. We demonstrate the utility of this framework through our analysis of identity propaganda around Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2020 US presidential election.

Critical Latinx Indigeneities and Education: An Introduction

Indigenous Latinx children and youth are a growing population that has been largely invisible in U.S. society and in the scholarly literature (Barillas-Chón, 2010; Machado-Casas, 2009). Indigenous Latinx youth are often assumed to be part of a larger homogenous grouping, usually Hispanic or Latinx, and yet their cultural and linguistic backgrounds do not always converge with dominant racial narratives about what it means to be “Mexican” or “Latinx.” Bonfil Batalla (1987) argued that Indigenous Mexicans are a población negada—or negated population—whose existence has been systematically denied as part of a centuries-long colonial project of indigenismo (indigenism) in Mexico and other Latin American countries. This systematic denial in countries of origin often continues once Indigenous people migrate to the U.S., as they are actively rendered invisible in U.S. schools through the semiotic process of erasure (Alberto, 2017; Urrieta, 2017). Indigenous Latinx families are often also overlooked as they are grouped into general categories such as Mexican, Guatemalan, Latinx, and/or immigrants. In this issue, we seek to examine the intersections of Latinx Indigeneities and education to better understand how Indigenous Latinx communities define and constitute Indigeneity across multiple and overlapping colonialities and racial geographies, and, especially, how these experiences overlap with, and shape their educational experiences.

The Development of Ethnoracial Market Segments

Racial minority markets today are now multi-million-dollar ventures, but little is known about how these markets develop. This chapter uses the case of Latino media to show how market demands interact with racial narratives to channel the development of ethnoracial market segments. In a nutshell, the case shows that ethnic entrepreneurs exploit stereotypes about racial and consumer differences to build their minority market, but these racialized understandings can also prohibit market growth in the long run. The author contends that the study of racial and ethnic markets presents an important opportunity for economic sociologists to better understand how inequality and institutionalized meaning systems structure consumer markets over time.