IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 24

free market. " However, the argu-
ment establishes that only " some
working-class whites " have these
characteristics but the same rheto-
ric is not used when talking about
people of color. The authors opted
to use an all-encompassing lan-
guage to define people of color as a
monolithic group highlighting their
" inadequacies. "
While this scholar is not directly
situated in or speaking about engi-
neering, our students and faculty
are still hurt by such problematic
rhetoric. Engineering students and
faculty, both majority and minori-
tized, do not just engage in engi-
neering culture; they also engage
in broader academic or public cul-
ture where arguments are common
that cultural factors are to blame
for the systemic injustices faced by
people of color. This narrative sets
the tone to blame the victim. People
use similar rhetoric to minimize the
contributions of people of color to
society [42]-[44], even though there
are of course a wide variety of con-
tributions to engineering, and soci-
ety in general [45]-[47] that emerge
from the cultures of those who
our example authors described as
" incompatible " and not aligned with
" bourgeois norms. "
In engineering education, the
" bourgeois norms " that must be
followed to achieve success in en-
gineering are hard work, self-disci-
pline, and respect for authority.
Godfrey and Parker argued that, for
many students and faculty, learn-
ing engineering involves engaging
in difficult tasks, and those who
succeed are those that can endure
what is considered an arduous, even
punitive, workload [48]. Only those
who are willing to take up this chal-
lenge and work extremely hard are
allowed to accomplish the goal of
becoming engineers. This value
system is echoed in the " weed out "
system engineering departments

24

as " a frame that suggests discrimi-
nation is no longer a central factor
affecting minorities' life chances "
[31, p. 77].
While we describe several exam-
ples elsewhere [30], our illustra-
tion for this venue comes from
one author's experience teaching
in a first-year engineering course.
This course is taught in multiple
sections of 120 students who are
organized into teams of 3 or 4, and
we use a team evaluation tool mul-
tiple times during the semester to
assess how well the teams work
together. That term, two particular-
ly important events related to race
happened: the white supremacist
rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on
August 12, 2017, and subsequent
violence, and the repeal of the
Deferred Action for Childhood Arriv-
als (DACA) program. Conversations
about race were occurring more
frequently in engineering education
outside of the frame of broadening
participation. In the context of this
teaching, however, Alice had a team
of four white-presenting students,
and during the team evaluations,
one teammate noted that another
teammate's racism was disrupting
the team's work. She read these com-
ments, and thought about what to do
about it, but to her shame and guilt,
ultimately did nothing, because she
did not know what to do. Through
this event, however, she realized how
the course's team evaluation prac-
tice does not ask people whether
teammates display overt racist
or sexist behavior, nor identify this
as flags to instructors interpreting
the resulting data. Both Alice, as a
white person, and the designers of
the team evaluation designing in a
predominantly white environment,
were operating as though overt
racism does not exist, or manifest
itself in team dynamics, or require
monitoring and then instructor
intervention, even though the tool

created and described by Seymour
and Hewitt [34]. This belief creates a
culture where engineering is seen as
a field that is reserved for those who
can endure the " tough " courses,
justified by engineering educators
who say that such tough circum-
stances are necessary to make sure
that engineers take seriously their
responsibility for preserving human
lives in their designs. The system is
reinforced when educators claim that
because the learning system trained
them (personally) well, that it should
be reproduced for the next genera-
tion. Countless instructors, schol-
ars, and students themselves frame
these values as baseline, default,
and neutral. But this calculus does
not recognize the additional endur-
ance that minoritized students must
show through the day-to-day lived
experiences of microaggressions
[49] and other everyday discrimi-
nation, nor justify the problematic
nature of this framing of engineer-
ing work. Why do we think that engi-
neers must work in unpleasant work
conditions in order to do rigorous
calculations to ensure, as they say,
the bridge doesn't fall down?
Through this illustration we focus
on how framing the lack of minori-
tized students in engineering as a
cultural problem (e.g., minoritized
students want to pursue " social jus-
tice " professions rather than engi-
neering) makes it justifiable to leave
unquestioned the broadly accepted
definition of engineering as an
objective, acontextual, gender- and
race-neutral profession [50]. In other
words, the frame of cultural racism
explains away the paucity of minori-
tized students in engineering to their
" culture " rather than to an exclusive,
unpleasant, yet framed as desirable,
culture of engineering.

Minimization of Racism
Bonilla-Silva describes the final
frame of " minimization of racism "
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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DECEMBER 2020
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