Educational Injustices among Margins and Centers

Introduction

Phillip A. Boda

Our living depends on our ability to conceptualize alternatives … Colonialization made of us the colonized—participants in daily rituals of power where we, in strict sado-masochistic fashion, find pleasure in ways of being and thinking, ways of looking at the world that reinforce and maintain our positions as the dominated … [and, in return for this obedience,] one of the deepest expressions of our internalization of the colonizer’s mentality has been self-censorship.

—hooks, 1990, pp. 149, 155, 157, bolding added

As the eminent bell hooks explains above, Living as a historically marginalized person in the world is both an act of resistance, as well as comes with a haunting of the colonial artifacts left over as the Western white European nations slaughtered, razed, and pillaged the lands of all people around the world, but most impactfully, Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples. To “conceptualize alternatives,” then, is the act of resistance when colonized peoples around the world (re)cognize and bear witness to the cultural hegemony that has been used for centuries in ways that can only be described as oppressive, tortuous, and downright murderous. And even then, as we witness this hegemony push forward ways of knowing and being that are in direct opposition to how peoples of the world have come to know themselves and their environment, we find institutions, such as schools in the West, where cultural domination and hegemony used to support repressive and ideological state apparatuses like the military and prison industrial complexes, there continue purposeful designs to uphold whiteness, heterosexism, ableism, and imperialism. They thereby become necessary factors used to exploit those peoples that have been historically marginalized even further, such as Trans Queer Black and Brown Disabled Peoples, where the goal is to strip them of their Lives-Hopes-Dreams, replacing their Futures with pathways and patterns of knowing that lead to contributing more power for the global capitalist project of Modernity where humans are valued for what they can produce, sell, and/or buy.

In turn, this volume is, first and foremost, a coalition-building work of love—radical, self-empowering Love (hooks, 2001). Moreover, given that “the primary responsibility for defining one’s own reality lies with the people who live that reality” (Collins, 1991, p. 34), this volume sought out proposals that deconstruct structures and subjectivities, doing so by honoring authorship with and for those whose lived realities are discussed, authentically valuing and interweaving their experiences—who, then, “write all the things they should have been able to read,” paraphrasing Collins (1991). Such workings, thus, also reconstructed new narratives of transformative futures that may not have answers right now. Following in the tradition of critical pedagogy, walkways of change that go together with rituals of questioning (conocimiento; Anzaldúa, 1987), and the charge for all educators with the “preparation of critical political subjects” (Giroux, 1993, p. 376), work that pushed the boundaries of what we have defined as equity, social justice, and liberation in schools and schooling were elicited. The submissions that were accepted, revised based on the Editorial Board’s feedback (listed below), and included here constitute radical departures from what we have previously assumed are the margins and centers.