Amy D. Robertson

The continued, extreme underrepresentation of People of Color in physics and a growing number of first-person accounts of the harm that People of Color experience in physics classrooms and departments speak to a system that valorizes whiteness and marginalizes People of Color. Taking Critical Race Theory as a lens, we expect that maintaining white supremacy in physics happens in part via discipline-specific instantiations of broader mechanisms that reproduce whiteness. In this study, we illustrate one such mechanism: race evasiveness, a powerful ideology that uses race-neutral discourse to explain away racialized phenomena, evading race as a shaping force in social phenomena, offering examples from interviews with twelve university physics faculty, showing what race-evasive discourses can look like in physics and how physics epistemologies, discourses, and stories reify race-evasive frames.