Abstract
Despite growing racial justice projects in STEM Education, Mathematics continues to fall behind other hard sciences. Moreover, existing literature centers STEM students in general, failing to explain why mathematics specifically continues to disengage in racial justice projects. I focus on the student experience to understand the relationship between math students’ individual racial ideologies and department-level racial structure. I conduct 15 in depth interviews enriched by ethnographic observations of 4 different mathematics classrooms, and various department events and community spaces. I center the mathematics department at Brandeis as a case study to understand how racial inequality is reproduced in mathematics education. I outline the Norm of Assumed Knowledge, Norm of Correcting, and Norm of Limited Time as three institutional norms which have disparate racialized effects. These meso-level institutional norms alongside institutional processes which render mathematics as “distinct” from other fields, inform the way individuals cultivate what I theorize to be their Mathematics Identity. I find that students rely on this necessarily colorblind Mathematics Identity to find belonging in the department, positioning the “ideal” mathematician as raceless, despite their belief that diversity is generally valuable. I theorize Racial Generalization and Racial Individuation as the two processes students use to rationalize their often contradictory colorblind and diversity ideologies. Interestingly, these two processes are precisely informed by the logics of math itself, revealing that while math equips students with the logics for understanding and thinking through structural racism, it is the mathematician who disengages.