ERIC Number: EJ842261
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2009
Pages: 9
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0895-9048
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Available Date: N/A
Is Racism in Education an Accident?
Apple, Michael W.
Educational Policy, v23 n4 p651-659 2009
People live in a time where neoliberal positions, with their assumption that private is good and public is bad, are dominant. Yet, as the author and others have demonstrated, such positions consistently privilege particular and identifiable classed and raced groups. This is not accidental. Society, like many others throughout the world, is organized around extremely powerful dynamics that are very hard to interrupt. As David Gillborn, author of the book "Racism and Education," would claim, this privileging is one of the predictable effects of the ways in which such things as "race" permeates people's everyday lives. It is not intentional in the usual sense of that word. However, to say that the effects are potent is to engage in understatement. How are people to understand these effects and the realities that both produce and are produced by them? Do people see them as accidental, as oddities that somehow seem to happen? Or are they truly constitutive dynamics that are at the very core of society? Over the years, it is the latter position that has become ever more telling in critical analyses of major economic, political, and cultural institutions. There are a number of traditions that have helped take this set of critical understandings as seriously as it deserves. In this article, the author discusses Gillborn's "Racism and Education," which provides one of the clearest expositions of critical race theory (CRT) available. Among its guiding principles is that the "shared power and dominance of White interests" provides the center of gravity in the complex of social structures, relations, and actions in this society and in so many others. In the process of marshalling his evidence and arguments, Gillborn is also careful to show that CRT deals with issues of "intersectionality," that is, not only with race but with the axes of differentiation of such constitutive dynamics as class, gender/sexuality, and disability. This is a key point. Although CRT bases its arguments in a clear concern for the structures, processes, and embedded assumptions surrounding White dominance, it has increasingly shown its ability to come to grips with the contradictory assemblage of differential power relations in the real world. Gillborn also reminds people of what is at stake inside and outside of schooling if they ignore the realities of racism and of the constant struggles against it.
Descriptors: Racial Bias, Critical Theory, Educational Practices, Racial Attitudes, Racial Discrimination, Racial Segregation, Politics of Education, Ideology, Social Justice, Educational Discrimination, Educational Environment
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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