The Handbook of Race and Adult Education

A Resource for Dialogue on Racism

Vanessa Sheared, Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Scipio A. J. Colin, Elizabeth Peterson, Stephen D. Brookfield, Vanessa Sheared, Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Scipio A. J. Colin, Elizabeth Peterson, Stephen D. Brookfield

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470610671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Erwachsenenbildung

The Handbook of Race and Adult Education

While much attention has been given to inclusion, diversity, and multiculturalism within adult education, The Handbook of Race and Adult Education is the first comprehensive work to engage in a dialogue specifically about race and racism and the effect these factors have on the marginalization or oppression of groups and individuals.

This landmark book provides the field of adult and continuing education with a model for the discussion of race and racism from social, educational, political, and psychological perspectives, and seeks to articulate a conceptual challenge to the ethnocentric focus of the discussion in the field. It offers adult education scholars, as well as those engaged in research and teaching about race, an opportunity to engage in a discourse about race and racism, including examinations of how these factors have been seen through multiple theoretical frameworks; how they have affected many lived experiences at work, home, and within educational settings; and how they have served to privilege some and not others. The book offers an exploration into how these factors need to be centered in a discourse and perspective that can provide those in the margins as well as in the center with ways to think about creating changes in their classrooms, communities, and homes.

This volume is a timely addition to the intense racial debate occurring in this country today. It is a long overdue medium through which those in higher education, as well as the general adult education field, can engage in a discussion that leads to critical understanding and moves us into meaningful change.

PART ONE

The Myth Versus the Reality of Race and Racism

This section examines the ways in which race and racism have affected and marginalized the life stories, histories, and research of “people of color,” in this case women of various ages and languages and from varied geographies. These women discuss how race and racism are maintained and perpetuated within their particular educational, work, or personal spaces or contexts. They address the ways in which the myths and the realities of race and racism have served at times to obfuscate and at other times to inform their practice and their lived experiences.

A myth is what we have come to believe about a phenomenon. And the reality is what we feel we know about a phenomenon. And so what are the myths and realities around race? It’s simple: the myths and realities around race are dependent on one’s perspective. The authors of the chapters in this section share a belief that race is a powerful social construct that shapes our society and often determines the actions of people intentionally and unintentionally. Even when we try to deny the existence of race and its partisan adherent, racism, the construct exists nevertheless—constant yet changing, powerful yet pathetic, unyielding yet compliant. Despite their knowledge of race and racism, the authors of this section readily admit that their experiences and expertise about race, their comprehension of it, is as shifting as the phenomenon. They collectively acknowledge that even though they have an understanding of race and racism, they continue to struggle with these constant companions.

What is voiced in the collection of chapters in this section is that the authors are on a journey to understand the myths and the realities of race, and they feel that this journey is an ongoing sojourn in which they negotiate between a state of double consciousness (knowing of a normed existence while being seen as the other) and a single-minded, quintessential realization of home. The disorienting dilemma of otherness—of being seen as the one with “race”—is tiring. However, the lessons and teachings provided by the authors’ indigenous cultures have given them a refuge and the strength to maintain their humanity. Overwhelmingly, the section authors expressed again and again that they sustain a spiritual connection with a place that provides them comfort, voice, acceptance, and strength.

Although it was not deliberate, all the authors in this section are women of color, albeit from different backgrounds, races, tribes, regions, and hemispheres. Furthermore, they are all feminists and consequently stand on a shared political base and common existence—the communal intersection of race and gender—a location in the margins or of being marginalized.

In the first chapter, “Rebirth of the Indigenous Spirit: Turning the World Right Side Up,” Rose Borunda, a Native American, has a powerful spiritual message borne out of the pain of being an indigenous scholar whose voice emerges from an American apartheid with a message that is filled with love and kindness. Yet this author first created a bridge that melded bits and pieces of her lost and then discovered native world with the culture of the colonizer in an effort to find balance. But finally, this bridge of acculturation led Borunda back to her home culture and provided her with a methodology for showing and teaching others. Although she does not speak specifically of theory, her teaching approach is strategic and developed from trial and error, from observations, and from making connections using the specific to explore and make conjectures. Borunda is grounded in the theory of her people.

Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, the African American author of Chapter Two, “Reading, Writing, and Racism: Developing Racial Literacy in the Adult Education English Classroom,” has taken a different path to developing her educational practice. Sealey-Ruiz has decided to use theory merely as a base to inform her practice. She is unflinching in dealing directly with the untidy, ugly clutter that race and racism has deposited on our academic doorstep, and she has developed strategies to use in the classroom to help students of color and White students deal with the issues and dilemmas that arise when race is discussed.

Although the two Chicana writers who speak to us in the third chapter of this section, “Experiencing the Race, Gender, and Socioeconomic Divide in Academia: A Chicana Perspective,” are also sending us messages learned from their lives in the academy, their voices are their lived experiences, telling cultural narratives aimed at empowering their sisters and brothers who may still live in fear of the telling. Raquel Gonzáles and Maria Mejorado speak of the prejudice and pain that hides behind the seemingly liberal walls of academia, where polite behavior and detached sanitized words and texts miseducate the disenfranchised to places of self-loathing, hopelessness, passivity, and gratitude. As activist scholars, Gonzáles and Mejorado want to openly express love for their community, and pledge to each other and their community to engage in an agenda of uplift.

Just as the authors of Chapter Three have used higher education as a base for establishing a shared plan for survival and struggle, Nichole Ray, the author of the fourth chapter, “Transforming Teaching and Learning: Teaching Race,” uses her teaching practice to sharpen her Black feminist consciousness and to engage her White students, who are often encountering her as their first Black professor. She wades through resistance, attacks, and cries of alleged colorblindness to “speak race” to her students while they are in moments of cognitive dissonance, in an effort to make change and to take advantage of those teachable moments that will be transformative.

And magically, as if summoned to this place, Lesley Ngatai, a Maori woman and the author of the final chapter in this section, “ ‘Who Is This Cowboy?’ Challenging the Cultural Gatekeepers,” calls from New Zealand to give a précis of Part One, “The Myth Versus the Reality of Race and Racism,” by embracing theory, academic practice, lived experiences, and the pains of struggling in higher education to find healing in the spiritual exercise of teaching from a place of peace, acceptance, and cultural truth.

1

Rebirth of the Indigenous Spirit Turning the World Right Side Up

ROSE BORUNDA

I am now considered well educated because of the formal degrees I hold. Yet I somehow have also held onto the value of being bien educada, the essence of having respect for one’s elders and living in harmony within one’s community. On my journey toward becoming bien educada, I also discovered that Columbus did not “discover America.” No one told me, but I came to know this as being a lie. I also came to understand when to and when not to speak of this truth, because speaking such truths publicly challenges the illusion created by a people who need to believe in what Loewen (1995) refers to as “heroes,” however symbolically violent (Anderson and Herr, 2003) this position may be to those of us who claim roots in this land.

We are all born into a world, a situation, a story over which we do not have control but ultimately must understand. In order to gain control over how we live in this world, I believe that a rebirthing of one’s self, a reconnection to one’s spirit, is necessary. It is a journey that requires us to let go of stories and images that have caused us to devalue ourselves, and it is a journey in which we each reframe our story, rediscover and rewrite the story as it is told through the voices and stories of our ancestors, thereby turning the world right side up so that ultimately we each take control of our own story. Taking control of the story is not enough though. We must share the story through our life’s work. This is the journey, the story, the reclaiming of truths, and the sharing of those truths that I repeat with the students I teach in my classes.

THE JOURNEY: MY STORY

A family friend recently reminded me that as a child I used to gleefully announce to anyone who would listen, “I was born on Columbus Day!” This statement from a young child of indigenous ancestry—but what else could I say? In elementary school I was required to memorize facts about Christopher Columbus, the Italian-born mariner hailed “discoverer.” Later in life I learned how this man had turned this side of the world upside down. Subsequently, even though my ancestors lived in the “New World” for thousands of years, I have no knowledge of their language and only limited knowledge of their history. I can, however, readily name the three ships under Columbus’s command when he first voyaged across the Atlantic; the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. This is one of many “truths” I was taught about “his”tory. This chapter addresses my voyage to uncover “my” story and the subsequent impact that my discoveries have had on my teaching as a university professor.

“In fourteen hundred ninety-two / Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” As children we were taught this song that immortalized this “discoverer.” I remember outlining the images of the three ships with my color crayons. Blue construction paper provided the backdrop of a vast blue ocean. This child’s artistic rendition was proudly displayed on the classroom wall. It was a fitting tribute to a man portrayed to be gallant and valiant and whom we honored with song, study, and artistry. I was taught to believe that we were indebted to this mariner, whose feats warranted a day off from school, holiday sales and promotions, and parades in tribute.

The activities in which I engaged during my childhood expected me and conditioned me to show gratitude and to celebrate the fact that I was being introduced to an advanced “civilization” attributable to this momentous “discovery.” From the perspective of my childhood eyes, it seemed appropriate that we honor someone who brought this advanced culture to fill the void of nothingness assumed to have existed prior to Columbus’s arrival. Yet, even while we sang praises to Columbus and I exclaimed, “I was born on Columbus Day,” I intuited that I was not intended to be where I was, in the United States, and that somehow who I was, a descendant of indigenous people, was a source of contempt, disdain, and even inconvenience to many confronted by my existence.

Even as a child I sensed an existential chasm between the society in which I existed and the home in which I lived. Attempting to bridge the two worlds, I drew from my home culture’s tradition of storytelling and created my own story. This tale was repeated to teachers and classmates in order to justify my existence in a land in which I subconsciously recognized that I was the “other.”

I came from a walnut that grew in a tree that is south of here. One day I fell off the tree and landed in a creek below. Protected by the outer shell I traveled on the water for many miles. I came to rest in Walnut Creek, California, and that is where I came out of the shell and so I was born here.

Americanization had claimed my identity by omitting to explore my heritage and instead, in its place, attempting to inculcate me with a homogeneous, nonethnic identity. To integrate myself into the colonizer’s story, I instinctively adapted to the fixed reality (Freire, 1970/1998) and creatively merged “my” story with “his”story, and in my story the attempt of a child to rationalize her existence where she is otherwise absent is evident. I was too young to understand that without the use of chains and locks, my mind had been enslaved by “edification” skillfully designed to ensure that the reality of the world in which I lived reflected the reality of the conqueror, the subject, and not the vanquished, the subjugated.

This enforced alien worldview is not new to the people from this land. My ancestors experienced this force through the violence of guns, swords, biological warfare, relocation, genocide, broken treaties, and rape. My generation came to know this force through the violence of the pen that erased the existence of anything pre-Columbian and that characterized anything related to my culture as savage and uncivilized. Conquered people are rendered harmless as long as the conqueror’s weapons remain visible to remind the conquered of the pain they can cause. Sustaining the bondage of the descendants entails convincing these oppressed people that “true knowledge” came from beyond the ocean to the East, thus rendering their minds harmless.

A child’s mind is malleable and can be easily deceived. Absence of knowledge about my heritage, my origins, my ancestry, rendered me harmless and therefore incapable of posing threat. Weaponry of pen replaced physical violence to dominate a conquered people. My coping mechanism rendered me incapable of recognizing that I had been culturally invaded and historically raped. Born, I was, on Columbus Day.

READING AN UPSIDE DOWN WORLD

Freire (1970/1998) posits that most children do not have the capacity to read their world from beyond their state of submersion. So, being born on the day that Columbus discovered America meant that who I was, who I am, was shaped by how those in America treated and celebrated this date. For me, hanging onto the coincidence of my date of birth with the “discovery” of America made my reality more palatable. The teachers who shaped my day-to-day reality provided history books that bore nothing positive about anyone whose origins might be traced to my own heritage. The absence and invisibility of my ancestors implicitly conveyed the value they were to be given.

As I moved into adolescence, my eyes began to perceive a world that revealed my place in it. In my community, those who looked like me worked long hours in agriculture, steel mills, or canneries. On weekends and vacations, we worked in the fields of those who owned them, but on weekdays we attended school alongside the owners’ sons and daughters, where self-imposed segregation commonly occurred. My childhood illusion of being exceptional due to my coincidental date of birth no longer satisfied my adolescent mind, which perceived this reality differently. The seed of anger sprouted. The adolescent and the child were now at odds with one another.

My child self found validation through a meaningless, coincidental connection with a significant historical date. My adolescent self detected an unspoken silence that encapsulated my reality. And this silence grew louder each day. Unwritten rules spoke to an implicit understanding, that the way of being and using language that mattered in one context, my home, was not accepted or valued in the dominant context represented by school. And while I academically excelled in this dominant context, there was a growing spiritual void. Silent anger—my adolescent self swallowed it like a pill.

SEARCHING FOR THE RIGHT MEDICINE

Freire (1970/1998) notes that differences in culture, language, and worldview exist where conquest and colonization have led the way for forces of cultural invasion. The pen follows the swath left by guns, swords, biological warfare, and rape, then holds the power to write history from the vantage of the colonizer. The colonized, indigenous child is left to endure the differentiated outcomes of a world devoid of her essence. Yet her place in the existing class structure is clearly prescribed. This same child is also indoctrinated to believe that she can make it in this world because there is a meritocracy and that only those who work hard will succeed. What the indigenous child is not told is that there is a cost to her soul for engaging in ways that disassociate her from her authentic self. That cost often leads to alienation and isolation from a person’s family and community.

Even though on occasion there is an exception in how this person is perceived, all too often he or she becomes known in the...