Coloring Epistemologies: Are Our Research Epistemologies Racially Biased?

Abstract

espected scholars of color have suggested (e.g., Stanfield, 1985, 1993a, 1994), even within the pages of this journal (J. A. Banks, 1993, 1995; Gordon, Miller, & Rollock, 1990), that the epistemologies we typically use in educational research may be racially biased. They have argued that our epistemologiesl-not our use of them, but the epistemologies themselves-are racially biased ways of knowing, implicitly proposing, thus, a new category of racism that could be labeled epistemological racism. There has been, however, a provocative lack of response-pro or con-to this race-oriented argument by leading educational methodologists in journals of education, including this one.2 But this lack of response is in curious contrast to the lively and contentious debates on other epistemological issues, such as quantitative versus qualitative (e.g., Cizek, 1995), objectivity versus subjectivity (e.g., Heshusius, 1994), validity (e.g., Lenzo, 1995; Moss, 1994), or paradigmatic issues in general (e.g., Bereiter, 1994; Delandshere & Petrosky, 1994; Gage, 1989). If we were among those raising this race-oriented issue, we would wonder why our efforts to argue that the epistemologies of educational research were racially biased provoked virtually no response, particularly among those who author the quantitative and qualitative research methods textbooks we all typically use. We would certainly wonder whether our argument was ignored because it raised the disquieting issue of race, because it was thought to be a weak or irrelevant argument, or because the argument was simply not understood. Unfortunately, we might also wonder whether this was just one more incidence of Ellison's (1972) invisible man syndrome, of Whites ignoring racial issues and people of color. As researchers whose race is White and who have