Disability as Status Competition: The Role of Race in Classifying Children

Abstract

Many African American and Hispanic children are classified as mildly disabled. Although this makes special education services available to these and other children who need them, contention endures as to whether disability classification also is racially (and ethnically) biased. The authors view disability classification as status competition, in which minorities are overrepresented in low-status categories such as intellectual disability and emotional disturbance, and whites are overrepresented in high-status categories such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism. The authors address the racialized construction and evolution of the mild disability classification system along with mechanisms that perpetuate racial segmentation in contemporary classification. They analyze a large federal longitudinal data set (1998–2007) to examine racialization and find that classification continues to operate at least in part as a racial sorting scheme. Implications for research and policy are discussed.