Scholars have tried to understand the impact of race and racism on the educational experiences of African American students for several decades. Unable to make causal claims of racism as directly contributing to achievement gaps, scholars have documented inequitable access and opportunity as both a historical phenomenon (Anderson, 1988;Ladson-Billings, 2006) and a contemporary manifestation of social processes that appear to create disproportionate outcomes for African American students relative to their White peers across a number of domains. Indeed, an inference that one can draw from the qualitative and statistical data is that race does matter when it comes to the education and educational experiences of African Americans and other students of color. Overwhelmingly, the data suggest that despite making gains in terms of high school graduation and college attendance, students of color-particularly African Americans-still face schooling environments that are often racially hostile or, at the very least, places that refuse to address
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