Toward a Critical Race Praxis for Educational Research: Lessons from affirmative action and social science advocacy. (original) (raw)

The goal of this study is to determine the applicability of pluralist, elitist, plural-elitist, Marxist class analysis and protest theory for explaining African-American political participation from 1940 to 2000. The significance of this study lay in the need to associate African-American politics with a major theoretical model. For theory has a great effect on the society at large, as it can influence public policy and the perceptions that policy makers have of target populations. A sociohistorical qualitative analysis was conducted by analyzing African-American political participation from the perspective of the tenets of each of the five competing models. A time series analysis was conducted to determine the impact of violent and nonviolent protests, the percentage of Democrats in congress, the percentage of African- Americans in the total voter population, the percentage of former Asian and African colonies gaining independence, the percentage of African-American in congress and the African-American poverty rate on the enactment of civil and social rights legislation from 1940 to 2000. The qualitative findings showed that pluralist theory had the greatest explanatory power when confined to the nature of state and group interaction, and the efficacy of democracy, while the other theories had some limited utility. In the areas of economics Marxist theory was of limited utility, whereas the other theories lacked significant explanatory power. Protest theory was at its strongest when explaining social change and social movements with regards to African-American political participation during the time period under investigation. None of the theories provided and adequate explanation of race relations or succinctly delineated the contours of the African-American historical political participation. The time series analysis found nonviolent protest, violent protest and Asian and African decolonization to have the greatest impact on the enactment of civil and social rights policies and showed that the control of congress for the majority of the period by the democratic party was not statistically nor substantively significant in accounting for the development of civil and social rights policies.