Theme
Heavier demands and harsher consequences for students of the global majority, delivered as benevolence.
Journal entries
Sep 25, 2026 · Research idea · school demographic data
In 2018 our girls basketball team was predominantly white — I don't think there was a single Black player. For the past three to five years the team has been mainly Black, more highly skilled, and last year we won state for the first time in school history. I want to study the data behind that change.
Sep 16, 2026 · Dissertation thinking · a term I am trying to coin
A microaggression is something a student hears. A micro-assumption is the thing I believed a half-second before I opened my mouth. This entry is about well-meaning white adults — me included — and the daily arithmetic of small guesses that adds up to a mountain a student has to climb alone.
Sep 4, 2026 · Field thinking · public and private school settings
The demand is heavier, the grace is thinner, and the whole arrangement is delivered as care. I am trying to describe how racialized rigor actually shows up in a building — because until it is describable, it is deniable.
Sep 1, 2026 · EDOC 7120 · Slides 24–25
How do we take all of these layers and move toward more equity for neurodiverse students in schools? Start with who gets identified — and who gets sent to me.
Open questions
live
live
live
live
Research ideas
developing
The direction my professor gave me when my first title proved too broad: study BIPOC students at the intersection of neurodiversity and the other crossroads that meet at my particular school — how that intersection relates to their sense of belonging, and how belonging influences achievement.
emerging
A descriptive study of my own school's changing demographics since 2018 — enrollment, rosters, courses, clubs, discipline — sparked by watching the girls basketball team go from predominantly white in 2018 to mainly Black and state champions for the first time in school history.
emerging
Micro-assumption: the small, silent, usually unexamined inference a well-meaning adult makes about a student's ability, background, intent, or belonging before the student has supplied any evidence. The microaggression is what the student hears; the micro-assumption is what the adult believed a half-second earlier.
emerging
Racialized rigor: when white teachers and administrators place heavier demands on students of the global majority, believing they are preparing them for college and career, while white students in the same building are held to a lighter standard.
Reading & influences
Article · AERA Annual Meeting paper · 2026
The closest prior use to my own setting: an AERA 2026 paper using an Afrofuturist lens and Spencer's PVEST framework to examine how Black high school students conceptualize college as mobility and possibility, centering youth voice and lived experience in a vision of college readiness grounded in affirmation, cultural identity, and resilience. It shares my population and my conviction that students' own accounts are evidence. Where it looks forward to college futures, my blueprint looks at the building the students are standing in now — who the school was drawn for, and how to redraw it. Author details still to be confirmed from the AERA program before citation.
Article · Derald Wing Sue, Christina M. Capodilupo, Gina C. Torino, et al.
The foundational taxonomy — microassault, microinsult, microinvalidation — and the source of the line I cannot stop thinking about: that the perpetrators are usually well-intentioned people unaware of the harm. This is the article my micro-assumptions idea has to argue with. Sue names what is said; I am trying to name what was assumed a half-second before.
Article · Daniel Solórzano, Miguel Ceja, & Tara Yosso
Moves microaggressions out of the clinic and into the institution: focus groups showing students of color reading a racial climate through small daily slights. The methodological gift here is counter-storytelling — it is exactly the paired-account structure I want between teachers and students.
Article · Lindsay Pérez Huber & Daniel Solórzano
Insists microaggressions are not interpersonal accidents but the everyday surfacing of a racial hierarchy — structure appearing in a sentence. This is my defense against the objection that micro-assumptions are just individual bad habits. They are a system running through individual heads.
Article · Rita Kohli & Daniel Solórzano
A whole article on the mispronounced name, and it is devastating. The teacher means nothing by it; the student carries it for years. This is the cleanest example of a micro-assumption I have found — the assumption that a name is too hard to be worth learning — and it is squarely in K-12, not higher ed.
Article · Quaylan Allen
High school, not college — and middle-class Black boys, which strips away the class explanation entirely. Their families' resources do not protect them from being read as a risk. Directly relevant to my private-school setting, where adults assume affluence solves belonging.
Article · Malik S. Henfield
Boys describing the daily labor of managing other people's assumptions in a mostly white school — deciding how loud to be, how smart to seem, when to let something go. The word navigating is the point: this is unpaid work the school assigns only to some students.
Article · Jackson A. Collins & Howard C. Stevenson
593 students of color in predominantly white independent schools — my exact setting, with numbers. It measures their confidence in noticing microaggressions, reframing them, and confronting them, and links school-climate perception to belonging through racial stress. The phrase "bracketed commitment to diversity" describes more independent schools than will admit it.
Article · Rosalie Rolón-Dow
Names academic microaggressions specifically — doubts about intellect, invisibility except when race is the topic, curriculum that never reflects you. This is the bridge between microaggression research and racialized rigor: the slights are not social, they are about whether you are believed to be capable.
Article · H. Richard Milner IV
This is the methodological spine of my dissertation. Researching the self, then the self in relation to others, then shifting from self to system — it is why the study is a self-study of my own classroom rather than an audit of somebody else's. The dangers I am least likely to see are my own.
Article · Kimberlé Crenshaw
Gave me the language and the picture for something my students live: discrimination arrives on several roads at once. Once I had the diagram I could not un-see it in placement decisions.
Article · Edward W. Morris & Brea L. Perry, Social Problems
The closest thing I have found to hard evidence for half of racialized rigor. Suspension is not just a response to an achievement gap, it helps produce one — the discipline itself removes learning time and then the lost time is read back as the student's deficiency. If demands are higher and consequences arrive faster, this is the mechanism that turns that into a transcript.
Article · Jason Okonofua, Gregory Walton & Jennifer Eberhardt, Perspectives on Psychological Science
This is the piece that keeps me from writing racialized rigor as a story about villains. Two identical infractions, same file, different name at the top — and by the second one the teacher already sees a pattern. It is stereotype plus discretion plus fatigue, looping. My question is whether the same loop runs in the opposite direction with academic demands: the student who is already read as needing toughening gets toughened.
Book · Amanda E. Lewis & John B. Diamond
The book that gave me the words opportunity hoarding in a school building rather than an economics paper. Well-resourced, self-consciously progressive school; white parents work the system for AP placements, exceptions, and second chances, and Black students meet the rules as written. The good intentions are real. So is the sorting. This is the private-school half of my question.
Book · Ann Arnett Ferguson
Ethnography, so it shows the thing that referral data can only imply: adults deciding, in the moment, which eleven-year-old is being a kid and which one is being a problem. "Adultification" is the term I was missing. It also models the method I would need if I studied racialized rigor honestly — you have to be standing there.
Article · Luigi Esposito & Victor Romano, The Western Journal of Black Studies
The theoretical name for the part of racialized rigor I find hardest to say out loud. Harm delivered sincerely, as help, by people who would fail any test of explicit bias. "I'm hard on him because the world will be" is a sentence I have said myself. I need to be able to critique it without pretending I stood outside it.
Talk · Gloria Ladson-Billings, AERA Presidential Address
Reframes the whole vocabulary. A gap sits between two groups and implies somebody should catch up; a debt sits on the institution and implies somebody owes. If I am going to coin a term, this is the standard — the name should locate the problem in the right place. Racialized rigor has to point at the adults.
Article · Bettina L. Love, Education Week
Short, and it stung. Gap language keeps the conversation comparative and comfortable; harm language forces a question about who did what to whom. It is also a warning for me — a coined phrase can become another polite euphemism if I let it.
Article · Thomas S. Dee
Evidence that being assigned a teacher of one's own race measurably changes achievement for Black and white students. Directly relevant to my mostly white faculty: if teacher race shapes outcomes at scale, then the interpretation and grace decisions inside a classroom are never race-neutral, no matter how kind the teacher.
Article · Gloria Ladson-Billings
The 1995 foundation: academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness — all three, not one. It gives me a way to ask whether our rigor is actually rigorous, or just more compliance in whiter packaging.
Book · Gloria Ladson-Billings
The book I keep returning to. Ladson-Billings asked parents and principals to name the teachers who actually succeeded with African American children, then studied what those teachers did. They saw teaching as giving back to the community, believed every child could learn, and held academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness together. This is the standard I want my research to be measured against — and the reason narrative inquiry fits: the whole book is built from teachers' stories.
Article · Francis Boateng
Pushes on my intersectionality thread: Blackness is not one experience, and immigrant students negotiate identities schools rarely see. If I ask 'who is being held to the white standard,' I also have to ask which Blackness the standard is measuring.
Article · Sarah Clark & Megan Soutter
A useful caution for my research vocabulary: schools love 'growth mindset' talk, but demanding risk-taking from students who are punished more harshly for mistakes is not mindset work — it is racialized rigor wearing a motivational poster.
Book · April Baker-Bell
Connects language to everything else I study: when we correct Black students' language 'for their own good,' we are doing benevolent harm in the register of grammar. Racialized rigor lives in red pens, not only in referrals.
Book · Tracey A. Benson & Sarah E. Fiarman
Written for working teachers like me and my colleagues: bias work as a developmental process, not a one-day training. Useful because my dissertation needs a frame my white colleagues can enter without feeling indicted — the door has to be open before the conversation can be honest.
Article · Derrick R. Brooms
Documents what it costs Black boys to succeed in schools like mine — resilience as a burden they should not have to carry. I want to ask the harder question: what if the school changed, instead of the student getting tougher?
Book · Geneva Gay
The theory side of the same coin as Ladson-Billings: teaching through students' cultural frames of reference is not lowering the bar — it is the only way most students ever reach it. A direct counter to the 'rigor means ignoring culture' instinct.
Article · Carol Goodenow
One of the foundational belonging studies: students' felt membership predicts motivation and achievement. It anchors the private-school side of my question — belonging there is conditional and priced, so measuring it carefully matters.
Dissertation · S. Danielle Harley
A dissertation about exactly the world I work in: Black girls at a predominantly white independent school, and what the unwritten 'assignment' of surviving it costs them. This is both a model for my methodology and evidence that my questions are not hypothetical.
Book · Philip W. Jackson
Where the 'hidden curriculum' comes from — the lessons school teaches that are never in the syllabus: waiting, compliance, being evaluated. Racialized rigor is a hidden curriculum finding, which is why this old book is still on my desk.
Website · National Center for Education Statistics
The demographic ground truth for my dissertation setting: who actually attends and teaches in U.S. private schools. When I write 'a mostly white faculty serving a diversifying student body,' this is the dataset I will cite.
Article · H. Richard Milner IV & Judson C. Laughter
The title is my dissertation in six words. Good intentions are the operating system of schools like mine — and they are not enough. This gives me the literature base for treating benevolence as a mechanism of harm, not a character trait.
Article · H. Richard Milner IV
Milner's case that teachers must build racial awareness as instructional practice, not as an add-on workshop. Pairs with his positionality work: who the teacher is, is part of the curriculum.
Book · H. Richard Milner IV
Milner takes poverty seriously without treating it as destiny, and insists the curriculum is where race gets taught whether we mean to or not. This is where my private-school setting fits: affluence on campus does not exempt students from race — it just changes the mechanism.
Article · H. Richard Milner IV
Milner arguing that reflection is not neutral — what a teacher notices, names, and remembers is shaped by cultural context. For my decision logs this is the caution: my reflection can itself be a racialized act, so I pair it with student accounts and a critical friend.
Article · Shirley Mthethwa-Sommers & Obed Kisiara
Documents how school culture itself — the rituals, the expectations, the unspoken rules — lands on African immigrant students. Reminds me that 'school culture' is the thing I am actually studying, and that it is legible to the people it excludes.
Article · Katherine Probherbs & Jody Freeman
One of the few sources that names private schools specifically: racial discrimination in independent schools has measurable mental-health costs. Closest to home of anything on this list — the harm I am studying is not abstract.
Article · Jordan G. Starck, Travis Riddle, Stacey Sinclair, & Natasha Warikoo
Large-scale evidence linking county-level implicit teacher bias to racial achievement gaps. This is the quantitative spine for my claim that perception gaps between teachers and students are not just interpersonal noise — they pattern, at scale.
Article · Chinwe J. Uwah, H. George McMahon, & Christopher F. Furlow
Belonging predicting aspirations and self-efficacy for Black boys specifically — the students most exposed to racialized rigor in my own building. Gives my student-interview protocol a validated construct to listen for.
Article · Gregory M. Walton & Geoffrey L. Cohen
The belonging-uncertainty experiments: Black students' achievement was dragged down not by ability but by persistent doubt about whether they fit — and a brief, well-timed intervention closed much of the gap. This is the mechanism my micro-assumptions idea needs: small daily signals accumulate into a verdict about whether you belong, and the verdict does academic damage.