Racialized deviance as an axiom in the mathematics education equity genre

Abstract

In this conceptual paper, the author argues that equity research in mathematics education is a genre that operates according to certain implicit ideological and rhetorical rules and assumptions—or discursive formations—that form how one can think about equity and inequity. One such rule that forms the basis of this paper is the axiom of racialized deviance, a logical tool developed by whiteness to establish its dominance and to justify physical, psychic, and epistemic violence against blackness. The author takes up whiteness and blackness related to global systems of racialization beyond the reference to white and Black people that is more typical in the United States. The author proposes three ways that the deviance axiom shows up in equity research in mathematics education: ethnomathematics, repair orientations, and success counternarratives. This issue of racialized deviance unveils equity research in mathematics education as a project whose logical foundations undermine its stated aims. The logic of global white supremacy under which school mathematics operates creates a situation where it is impossible for equity in mathematics education to exist outside because the genre requires that anyone who elects to participate accepts the axiom of racialized deviance on some level.