"Other" encounters: Dances with whiteness in multicultural education

Educational Theory

Volumn 50, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 255-273

  Richardson, Troy ^a   Villenas, Sofia ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

^b HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 4244207570     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2000.00255.x     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Audrey Thompson, "Not the Color Purple: Black Feminist Lessons for Educational Caring" Harvard Educational Review 68, (Winter For a provocative analysis of how "colorblindness" shapes both teachers' beliefs about diversity as well as the underlying assumptions of educational research. 1998), 522-54
2. James Banks, Multicultural Education, Transformative Knowledge, and Action: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Teachers College Press., 1996
3. Susan Huddleston Edgerton, Translating the Curriculum: Multiculturalism into Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996)
4. Robert K. Fullinwider Public Education in a Multicultural Society: Policy, Theory, and Critique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996
5. Peter McLaren, Revolutionary Multiculturalism: Pedagogies of Dissent for the New Millenium (Boulder: Westview PressThese books will be cited as ME. TC. PE, and RM. respectively, in the text for all subsequent references., 1997).
6. We the co-authors both identify as native indigenous peoples of the Western hemisphere. The term Native designates the whole indigenous heritage of the peoples who are native to the lands known as North Central, and South America. See Simon J. Ortiz, "Introduction: Wah Nuhtyuh-yuu Dyu Neetah Tyahstih [Now it is my turn to stand]" in Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing (Tucson, Ariz., The University of Arizona Press, 1998), xi-xix.
7. Ward Churchill, Since Predator Came: Notes From the Struggle for American Indian Liberation (Littleton, Colo.: Aigis Publications, 1995), 250.
8. As Audrey Thompson asserts in her review essay "Colortalk: Whiteness and Off White," Educational Studies 30, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 141-60 the list of recent publications on whiteness is very extensive with new work coming out every month. Thompson provides an extensive bibliography of some 0f this scholarship. A few of the recent edited volumes include Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, Linda C. Powell and L Mun Wong, eds., Off White: Readings on Race. Power, and Society (New York: Routledge. 1997), Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Ruth Frankenberg, ed., Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997
9. Mike Hill, Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997
10. Joe Kincheloe, Shirley R. Steinberg, Nelson M. Rodriguez, and Ronald E. Chennault, eds., White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998) and Alice Mclntyre, Making Meaning of Whiteness: Exploring Racial Identity with White Teachers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
11. An understanding of the practice of whiteness as power has for centuries been a part of the everyday lives of native peoples and people of color. It is recorded in both oral and written texts including songs, dances, stories, homilies, poetry, communal conversations, talk, gossip, and, in the last hundred years, scholarship too extensive to cite exhaustively. In terms of popular culture, for example, Mexicano/Chicano corridos or Mexican ballads have recorded counternarratives challenging the United States' occupation of the Southwest. In scholarship, counternarratives are often "unsettling" to the white audience. For example, bell hooks's "Whiteness in the Black Imagination" in Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Helt and Company, 1995), 31-50, addresses the terror and fear felt for whites by African Americans in the apartheid South; and Vine Deloria Jr., "Anthropologists and Other Friends" in Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988),, voiced the collective rage for Anthropology as an imperialist project in Native communities, long before the Western male Anthropologists discovered the poetics and politics of textual representation.78-100
12. Vine Deloria, Jr., Red Earth. White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (Golden, Colo.: Fulerum Publishing, 1997). Frances Rains, symposium paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, Calif., 1998.
13. Bell hooks, "Whiteness in the Black Imagination," In Killing Raget 185.
14. In Critical Pedagogy for the New Millenium: An Interview with Peter McLaren, co-executive produced by Kevin Kelly and Sofia Villenas (Phoenix, Ariz.: Education Management Group, Sirnor. end Shuster Publishers), McLaren is responding to the notion that if he as a white middle-class male cannot escape his privilege or the embodiment of racism, then he will work to be antiracist.1999
15. Fine, Powell, Weis, and Wong, preface to Off White, ix.
16. National Education Association, "Status of the American Public School Teacher, 1995-1996," cited in Digest of Educational Statistics 1998 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1999).
17. Hector Calderón and José David Saldivar, Criticism in the borderlands (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 7.
18. Chela Sandoval, "U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consiousness in the Postmodern World" Genders 10 (Spring 1991): 1-24.
19. These contradictions include our embodiment of "Third World" status. We, the co-authors are the first generation of college students in our families. Yet, crossing the borders into academia allow us privileged education, validation within the university setting (even in the process of our exoticization), and indeed the privilege of being solicited to write this article.
20. Troy Richardson, "The Contemporization of Native Continues: Critical Native Essays in Academic Time" (Unpublished manuscript, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, 1999).
21. E.D. Hirsch Cultural Literacy: When Every American Needs to Know(New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1988) and Allan Bloom, The Closing of The American Mind (Mew York: Touchstone, 1987).
22. Here wo are referring to Banks's work on school reform. According to a typology of "multiculturalisms," Christine Sleeter in Multicultural Education as Social Activism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) places Banks as a proponent of transforming the structure and curriculum of schools to make them more equitable. Banks addresses the transformation of institutions (schools) but does not put an emphasis on questioning the validity of these institutions as a social reconstructionist multicultural educator or a radical multictilturalist would do. Banks calls for change within the parameters of the established institutions and under the assumptions of a democratic nation state.
23. Sleeter, Multicultural Education as Social Activism.
24. We qualify "America" to remind the reader that indigenous people have been on this continent and hemisphere long before it was "discovered" as America.
25. Cameron McCarthy, Race and Curriculum: Social Inequality and the Theories end the Polities of Difference in Contemporary Research and Schooling (New York: Falmer Press, 1990
26. Alicia Pallcrols Rodriguez, "The Limits and Possibilities of Multicultural Education" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996
27. Marie Annette Jaimes Guerrero, "Academic Apartheid: American. Indian Studies and "Multiculturalism" In Beyond Comfort Zones in Multiculturalism: Confronting the Politics of Privilege, ed. Sandra Jackson and José Solis (Wcstport, Conn.: Berlin and Harvey, 1995), 89-112.
28. Ward Churchill, Since Predator Came: Notes From the Struggle for American Indian Liberation.
29. Rudy Acuna, Anything but Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1997).
30. Acuna, Anything but Mexican and Churchill, Since Predator Came.
31. Churchill, Since Predator Came, 325.
32. Peter McLaren, "The Pedagogy of Che Guevara:Critical Pedagogy and Globalization Thirty Years after Che", Cultural Circles (Summer 1998): 29-103.
33. Enrique Murillo Jr., Interview in Noises in the Attic, produced by the Noises in the Attic Working Group, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "Noises in the Attic" also forthcoming in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.
34. Sleeter, Multicultural Education as Social Activism, 94.
35. Fullinwider's "habits of mind" appear in various soundbites consistently throughout the collection. These include for example, Fullinwider's argument for a patriotic history in creating a "usable past" or even in the rationale of a "common political culture" behind Gary Nash's progressive argument for an inclusive and contested view of history.
36. Chilla Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminism: Women's Diversity in a Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
37. Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science in Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-97.
38. Article II, section VI of the U.S. Constitution.
39. Vine Deloria For this Land: Writings on Religion in America (New York: Rotitledge, 1999).
40. Winona LaDcke, "Succeeding into Native North America: A Secessionist View," in Struggle for the Land: Indigenous Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide, and Expropriation in Contemporary Nerth America, ed. Ward Churchill (Monroe, Wis.: Common Courage Press, 1993), 4.
41. Churchill, When Predator Came, 250.
42. We find that in our predominantly white university claHMooms, we wicstle with speaking to the one or two students of color in a language that signals our own imperatives. Instead, our language of accommodating and challenging middle-class white students overtakes the development of a culturally/politically rooted language of critique with students of color who often find themselves reacting and defending rather than creating.
43. We do not want to reify the notion of culture since "culture" is itself an anthropological invention created in the terms of Western science. See Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) and Linda Tuhi wai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Research and Indigenous Peoples (New York: Zed Books, 1999). Indeed, many native tribes do not have the word for "culture" in their languages. However, we use this term to signify traditions or way of life.1981
44. Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (New York: Plume/Penguin Books, 1994), 220
45. Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Worth: Hhck Women and ihe Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
46. William Mores and Rma Bcnmayor Launo Cuitural Citizenship; Chiming Identity, Space, and Rights (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).
47. Kimberiy M. Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996] and Gerald'Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Hanover, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1994).
48. Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, 39.
49. Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).
50. Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 92.
51. John Trudell With Paola Igliori, Siickman (New York: Inanout Press, 1994).
52. Warrior, Tribal Secrets, 91.
53. Vine Delorin, We Talk. You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 123.
54. Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 15.
55. Warrior, Tribal Secrets, 93.
56. Aurolyn Luyx, The Citizen Factory: Schooling and Cultural Production in Bolivia (Albany: State University of New York Press) asks a similar question in situating the context of Aymara identities in Bolivia.1999