Color-evasion and the production of individualist deficit accounts of educational inequality: The case of parental discourse on selective schools

Color-evasion is a discursive process of power that upholds and reproduces dominant race-blind ideologies, but the discursive strategies and tactics—along with their ideological effects—that individuals mobilize to evade race require further and more specific examination. Drawing on interviews with parents of children who attend highly selective and racially disproportionate public magnet high schools in the United States, I offer a typology of color-evasive strategies used to actively evade race, arguing that such tactics allow people to circumvent taking a critical stance toward systematic educational inequality while reinscribing racism in the form of individualist deficit discourses. This critical discourse analysis demonstrates how individualist deficit thinking is ideologically tethered to color-evasion and how evading race makes race significant.