Chapter 2: Access to Opportunity Framework: Conceptualizing Class to Race 15

T. S. Eliot once wrote, “The circle of our understanding is a very restricted area.” It is us, in our attempts to understand and categorize the world, who have made this restricted circle and thereby limited our understanding and perceptions of the world. High modernist views (Scott, 1998), in some cases, have limited our knowledge by creating narrow and unrepresentative constructs of reality. Building from critical race theory (CRT) and critical theory (broadly defined), we attempt to present a conceptual framework for understanding how social class interacts with race. There is an argument that, “critical raced-gendered epistemologies… offer unique ways of knowing and understanding the world based on the various raced and gendered experiences of color” (Bernal, 2002, p. 187). We offer further evidence for quantifying the roots of disadvantage that are “cooked” into our society. Since 2002, many scholars have looked into the nature of disadvantage from many angles. For example, Solorzano, Villalpando, and Oseguera (2005) explored the educational inequities for Latina/o youth and found that “higher education continues to reflect a state of de facto racial segregation for Latina/o college students” (p. 288). Gillborn (2014) explored the conception of governmental policy throughout the world, serving as an overt “context for the preservation of [W]hite supremacy” (p. 36). The perceived “level playing field” in society is, in essence, a skewed landscape that confers benefits to Whites and limits individuals of color and those with less affluence. The framework we present can provide the basis for better understanding and, more specifically, demonstrate the ever-present racialized attitudes that lay beneath the surface of nearly every aspect in society. Through the application of this framework to education, housing, and the criminal justice system, we will be able to exhibit how the color of one’s skin and how societal affluence are at once an asset and a liability in our so-called “equal society.”