Vocalizing Silenced Voices
White Supremacy, social caste, cultural hegemony, and narratives to overcome trauma and social injustice
©2024
Textbook
XXXVI,
228 Pages
Summary
In this book, we argue that authoritarian forces are working harder than ever to maintain, reinstate, and pass laws and policies that are antithetical to a kind, equitable, and socially just society that meets all of its citizens’ needs. American cultural hegemony—the dissemination process by which people are persuaded through laws and policies, institutional and cultural ideologies, norms, values, and practices to privilege the interests of powerful, disproportionately white, highstatus, and wealthy individuals and families—is ubiquitous. We learn to take for granted that the capitalist, social caste system in which we live, in largely segregated, racial, ethnic, and social class communities, is the best and fairest of all possible systems and just ‘the way things are.’ For example, large numbers of media and educational programs sell white supremacy, racism, social caste, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, as normal, natural, and common sense. Few schools teach children to become critically conscious of the hegemonic process by which social hierarchy in the United States has been handed down over more than four hundred years.
Our research in this book names some of the above-mentioned laws, policies, and ways of framing reality that maintain the inequitable system in which we live, and silence and traumatize students, faculty, staff , and social justice activists in education and beyond. It also includes some alternative narratives being enacted by extraordinary educators, supporting collective action, critical consciousness, accountability, hope, equity, and social justice. Despite some social change, social caste continues to de- ne our lives. So, those of us who value democracy, equity, and social justice need to contribute, collectively and individually, to help our students and communities see through the gaslighting that conceals the lack of historical and current equity in our society—in other words, to recognize how cultural hegemony works to reproduce inequities.
Our research in this book names some of the above-mentioned laws, policies, and ways of framing reality that maintain the inequitable system in which we live, and silence and traumatize students, faculty, staff , and social justice activists in education and beyond. It also includes some alternative narratives being enacted by extraordinary educators, supporting collective action, critical consciousness, accountability, hope, equity, and social justice. Despite some social change, social caste continues to de- ne our lives. So, those of us who value democracy, equity, and social justice need to contribute, collectively and individually, to help our students and communities see through the gaslighting that conceals the lack of historical and current equity in our society—in other words, to recognize how cultural hegemony works to reproduce inequities.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- Author Narratives
- Introduction: Contextualizing Silenced Student, Faculty, Staff, and Community Voices in Higher Education
- Hegemonic Practices Designed to Maintain the U.S. Social Order
- Research on Silenced Student Voices in the Context of Covid-19 and Anti-racist Protest: Methodology
- Research on Silenced Student Voices in the Context of Covid-19 and Anti-racist Protest: The African American, Hmong and Latinx Cohorts
- Research on Silenced Student Voices in the Context of Covid-19 and Anti-racist Protest: The White Cohort, White Privilege and White Supremacy
- Community Activism: Faculty, Staff and Community Perspectives on Race, Racism and Whiteness
- Campus Activism: “E-Race and E-Radicate Stereotypes” Dialogues and “Breaking Barriers”
- A Framework for Identifying How Voices Are Silenced by Racism, Social Caste and White Supremacy
- Conclusions: Toward a More Perfect Vocalizing of Student, Faculty and Community Voices
- Appendix 1: Definitions of Theory
- Appendix 2: Social Justice, Counter-Hegemonic Resources
- Appendix 3: Student Participants in Our Original Research
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
List of Illustrations
- Figure 1.Silenced student voices collage (Source: student research)
- Figure 2.Public demonstration (Source: SnapChat public maps)
- Figure 3.Public demonstration (Source: Wisconsin Public Radio). https://www.wpr.org/regents-approve-expulsion-students-disrupting-free-speech-campus
- Figure 4.Painting in Harvey Hall (Source: UW-Stout). https://www.wpr.org/uw-stout-moves-controversial-80-year-old-murals
Appendix 1 Definitions of Theory
Cultural hegemony (Gramsci, 1971; Lea, 2014)
- • Cultural hegemony is a kind of hidden curriculum. It represents the laws, policies, rules, regulations, norms, values, and practices that are governing everyday practice taking place under the surface of a society to reinforce the privilege and advantage of elites and those who most benefit from the power of these elites.
- • Cultural hegemony is the process by which people are persuaded to accept as normal, natural, and common the neo-colonial, neoliberal and newer power structures that largely benefit those in power—elites, oligarchs, plutocrats, the wealthy among us.
- • Modern education systems and pedagogy may be examples of structures put in place during colonialism that have taken on persuasive elements of equity but still benefit those who have traditionally held power in a society. In other words, they remain as examples and evidence of neocolonialism. Certain curricula and competitive, individualized testing practices that represent the cultural practices and/or interests of the dominant caste/social class in society are an example.
- • The notion of “race” is a cultural hegemonic tool or narrative (it is a myth/faction) that was created to support inequities through racism (slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and well as personal, cultural and other structural violence) and whiteness.
Critical pedagogy (Freire, 2018)
- • Schools are contradictory and contested social sites.
- • Classrooms are filled with empowering, dialogical, teaching and learning practices: The teacher recognizes that culture and pedagogy produce rather than just transmit knowledge within asymmetrical power relations.
- • Teachers and students assist each other in critical reflexivity and critical consciousness, emphasizing the value of voice, power, culture, and ideology.
- • Teachers act as researchers in analyzing the cultural content, pedagogy, and other school and societal practices in their classrooms and schools, paying attention to the colonial, race and racism, class and caste, corporate power, and globalization contexts in which these and other divisive strategies take place.
- • Teachers engage in a critical analysis of the ways language and literacy are normalized and used in the construction of dominant meanings.
- • Teachers are committed to critical literacy, beginning their classes by drawing on culturally relevant language and generative themes.
- • Teachers recognize that we know the world through language, and do not attempt to marginalize their students’ maternal languages.
- • Prevalent pedagogies include problem-posing education.
Critical multiculturalism (May & Sleeter, 2010; Sleeter, 2013)
- • Critical multicultural education grew out of racial and ethnic struggle. Teachers’ content and pedagogy involves naming and actively challenging racism, whiteness, and other forms of oppression and injustice.
- • Critical multicultural education is politically guided practice that goes beyond current multicultural education practice that tolerates, accepts difference and diversity. In this educational framework, the classroom is a place in which difference is affirmed, and teachers and students engage in a critique of themselves and the world (they read the word and the world—Freire, 2018).
- • Teachers link dynamic conceptions of culture to students’ identities and lived experiences. For example, teachers consistently attempt to link the details of everyday school practice to the wider social structure, communities and social relations in which students and their families live, work and play.
- • Teachers embrace the theoretical viewpoint that it is possible to radically change social structures because human beings have historically demonstrated “agency” and “a praxis of possibility.”
- • Teachers facilitate classrooms that allow for the possibility of alternative and hybrid ways of thinking, feeling, believing, and acting in the world.
- • Critical multiculturalism is an answer to the question: “We may oppose practices that reproduce dominant discourse but what do we put in its place?” Teachers and students look for solutions to local and global inequities and injustices.
Anti-racist education (Center for Ethnicity and Anti-Racism studies, 2021; Gillborn, 1990; Kendi, 2019)
- • Anti-racism began as community activism for institutional and systemic change in terms of racism and interlocking oppressions.
- • Anti-racist teacher activists are concerned that multiculturalism has become a discourse used to “manage” the problems of diversity in terms of the interests of the dominant white population. For others, multicultural education and anti-racist education are synonymous.
- • Anti-racist education specifically challenges systemic racism in education. One example of a systemic racist school structure is tracking in which students are allocated to different “ability” tracks, which research indicates result in self-fulling prophecies (Domina et al., 2017).
- • Anti-racism situates culture within power relations. The “Let’s all get long” (cultural relativism) does not challenge oppression.
- • Anti-racism connects school with community and problematizes whiteness and white privilege
Critical race theory (CRT) (Crenshaw et al., 1996; Sawchuk, 2021)
- • Developed largely by legal scholars of color to overcome the white bias of critical pedagogy, critical race theory aimed to transform the relationship between race, racism, white supremacy and power.
- • Critical race theorists address the ways racism, classism, sexism, and other forms of oppression interlock.
- • CRT teachers privilege historical and contextual descriptions over ahistorical and abstract ones.
- • CRT teachers help students to understand how master narratives that reflect racial power can be produced even through liberal discourse—for example, Disney (Giroux & Pollock, 2010).
- • CRT teachers refuse to be silenced. They use counter-storytelling, metaphor, composite characters, and deliberate, conscious listening as methodological and pedagogical tools to help their students perceive alternative/counternarratives to those that reproduce inequities. Right-wing legislators are trying to stop us from teaching for racial justice. We refuse.
- • Critical race theorists are concerned with the daily struggle against discursive racist practices and developing a positive sense of cultural identity.
- • CRT teachers challenge Eurocentric epistemologies, and dominant ideologies such as individualism, meritocracy, and neutrality.
- • One example of CRT as an analytic tool is “the property issue” (Harris, 1993, 2020). For example, “What and who has traditionally been considered property? How has ownership been legitimized? How does the economic value of property power define the property value of schools? How does power define what is considered intellectual property and highly valued in school today?”
- • Critical race theorists also encourage critical debate about the structure of power and oppression in the United States and globally, employing counter-hegemonic norms and values. (Please see Chapter 7 for an account of how the Hegemony Project (2022) engaged students and faculty in such a debate. We describe “E-race and eradicate stereotypes” dialogues with students on campus, as well as a yearly conference titled “Breaking Barriers,” which brought together students, faculty, and community to share ideas to advance social justice on campus and beyond.)
- • Students in critical classrooms frame and reframe their struggles in terms of possibilities and future roles that empower all students’ critical awareness, empathy & social responsibility. They are very aware that many of us who teach are less than conscious of the stereotypes and assumptions that we bring to the classroom. Our teaching strategies are too often framed by whiteness and result in silencing students. We do need to encourage the disproportionately white professors (and students) to self-interrogate, most definitely including ourselves.
Details
- Pages
- XXXVI, 228
- Publication Year
- 2024
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433152207
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433152214
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781433152221
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9781433152191
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433152184
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21328
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2024 (August)
- Keywords
- Silencing white supremacy race racism social caste/class cultural hegemony historical trauma social justice and injustice Vocalizing Silenced Voices White supremacy, social caste, cultural hegemony and narratives to overcome trauma and social injustice Virginia Lea Sapna Thapa Emily Hines
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2024. XXXVI, 228 pp., 4 color ill., 2 b/w tables.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
