Domains of Power

Institutional racism (Bollia-Silva, 2010) addresses institutional and structural functions and processes of racism. The lens of institutional racism tends to focus on how seemingly race-neutral policies disproportionately affect people of color and advantage White people. Collins (2009) expands the theoretical scope of racism and offers a heuristic device that articulates racism through four domains of power: cultural, disciplinary, structural, and interpersonal. (Institutional racism plays out in the disciplinary and structural domains of power.) These domains reveal how privilege and oppression function in different settings. Collins (2009) uses the domains of power to analyze racism in an educational setting and we specifically use the domains of power to analyze racism within mathematics education. We explain each of these domains here, provide a short set of examples related to mathematics education, and later give more extended examples in relationship to tracking and curriculum, two predominant areas related to racism in mathematics education.

The cultural domain of power considers how images and narratives of minoritized people in media, popular culture, and elsewhere maintain a racial hierarchy by perpetuating negative stereotypes. For example, when asked to draw a mathematician, most students draw pictures of white men with glasses and Einstein-like hair (Picker & Berry, 2000). Images of white male mathematicians appear in many movies (e.g., A Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting, Sherlock) and television shows (e.g., Big Bang Theory).

Although the word “disciplinary” is typically used in mathematics education to mean the discipline of mathematics, here the disciplinary domain of power refers to the use of rules, routines, practices, and policies to discipline or surveil people into certain roles in society. For example, with the predominant version of mathematics in schools, students end up spending many hours using and practicing the standard algorithm to solve math problems. Even in more problem-solving oriented classrooms, the overemphasis of standardized assessment tends to funnel students into particular strategies and solutions, thus disciplining students into particular ways of doing and knowing mathematics. Additional examples of the disciplinary domain of power in schooling include tracking and response to intervention practices, or RTI. There practices are used to justify placing students into different learning environments, often along racial lines. These groups are then afforded different opportunities to learn, as a result, where particular routines and practices are provided for some groups of students and not others - all the while messaging to students what they are capable of (e.g., Anyon, 1980).

The structural domain of power refers to the ways in which various institutions are networked to uphold the racial hierarchy. For example, the kinds of resources schools have, people’s access to healthcare, lending practices by banks, and so on, all interact and shape the ways people gain access or not to resources. For instance, schools that serve primarily students of color receive less funding than schools that serve White students, in part due to the direct link between school funding and property taxes. Differences in property taxes (and thus, school funding) is linked to the history of redlining and block-busting which decreased home values in neighborhoods where people of color lived. Moreover, lower levels of funding of neighborhoods of color make it difficult to attract and retain teachers.

The interpersonal domain of power relates to the types of relationships and communities we engage in. It is the area of “ordinary social interactions where people accept and/or resist racial inequality in their everyday lives” (Collins, 2009, p. 53). For example, people from nondominant groups experience microaggressions (For more about the cumulative effect, see the second video below). An example of a microaggression in math classrooms can be seen in who gets called on to answer particular kinds of questions. Research describes how girls and Black males tend to get asked to explain and justify their thinking less than White males (see McAfee, 2014; D. Sadker, M. Sadker, & Zittleman, 2009). We view these examples as taking place within the interpersonal domain of power.

In this tool, we use three of Collins’ (2009) domains of power--cultural, disciplinary, and structural-- and add an intrapersonal domain to imagine how MTEs may work toward an antiracist pedagogy. The intrapersonal domain incorporates each person’s internalized unconscious biases and prejudices that we all form due to our socialization in a racist society. To enact a pedagogy toward antiracism means to actively and intentionally counter racism (e.g. racist policy, racist ideas, etc.) in one or more of the domains of power.

Collins (2013) argues that different domains of power have been more influential in different times and spaces. For example, in the pre-civil rights racism era, racism in the structural and interpersonal domain was much more overt and tolerated. In the current era of colorblind ideology where overt racism via structural and interpersonal domains are not tolerated, the cultural and disciplinary domains of power are more influential and need close scrutiny. Collins (2013) further asserts that “the interpersonal domain is the on-the-ground workings of racial practices from the structural, disciplinary, and cultural domains…” (p. 181). “When it comes to practicing resistance against racism, becoming an educated person might mean seeing one’s actions as embedded in all domains of power. In other words, when joined to an individual commitment to practice resistance in the first place, the structural, disciplinary, and cultural domains of power provide a useful way to see how our everyday actions in the interpersonal domain take on great significance” (Collins, 2009, p. 130).

As mathematics teacher educators, we have a unique platform and responsibility to use our interpersonal agencies to engage in “specialized resistance” (Collins, 2009, p. 131) across the structural, disciplinary, and cultural domains of power.

In the U.S. context, individuals are socialized into acting and believing (either consciously or not) in ways that reinforce the existing systems of racism (Harro, 2013). This “cycle of socialization” (Harro, 2013, p. 45) can only be interrupted by making a conscious decision after some type of experience has “triggered” a new understanding. As Harro (2013) states, “once you know something, you can’t not know it anymore, and knowing it eventually translates into action” (p. 52). This means that antiracist pedagogy is not possible without the conscious commitment of mathematics teacher educators (MTEs) to interrogate their own beliefs (Kimishoto, 2018) and socialization at an intrapersonal level.