Race, Racial Projects, and Mathematics Education Danny Bernard Martin University of Illinois at Chicago Critical scholars have argued that mathematics education is in danger of becoming increasingly influenced by and aligned with neoliberal and neoconservative market- focused projects. Although this larger argument is powerful, there are often 2 peculiar responses to issues of race and racism within these analyses. These responses are characterized by what I see as an unfortunate backgrounding of these issues in some analyses or a conceptually flawed foregrounding in others. These responses obscure the evidence that, beyond being aligned with the market-oriented goals of these proj- ects, mathematics education has also been aligned with their prevailing racial agendas. Key words: Critical theory; Knowledge; Race/ethnicity/SES; Social and cultural issues WHAT KIND OF PROJECT IS MATHEMATICS EDUCATION? In her analysis of the increased corporate influence on the affairs of Canadian universities, sociologist Janice Newson (1998) suggested that these external pres- sures have caused a fundamental shift in the way that the university functions, including matters of day-to-day operations, the production of knowledge, and the ability of the university to serve the broader public interest. According to Newson, there has been a shift in the university from a social project to a market force. She argued: these changes in university practices constitute a potentially, if not realized, significant transformation in the raison d’être of the university: from existing in the world as a publicly funded institution oriented toward creating and disseminating knowledge as a public resource—social knowledge—into an institution which, although continuing to be supported by public funds, is increasingly oriented toward a privatized concep- tion of knowledge—market knowledge. (para. 7) To support her argument, Newson conducted a historical analysis of the post-World War II university in terms of its evolving relationships to these democratic and economic projects: The expansion of higher education in the late 1950s and 1960s was justified primarily in terms of two societal needs. On the one hand, massive financial investment of public Portions of this article are based on a plenary address that I gave at the Sixth International Mathematics Education and Society conference in Berlin in 2010. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education 2013, Vol. 44, No. 1, 316–333 Copyright © 2012 by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Inc. www.nctm.org. All rights reserved. This material may not be copied or distributed electronically or in other formats without written permission from NCTM.