Educating Activist Allies

Social Justice Pedagogy with the Suburban and Urban Elite

Katy Swalwell, Katy M. Swalwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415529464
• eBook ISBN: 9781136305849
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2013!

Educating Activist Allies offers a fresh take on critical education studies through an analysis of social justice pedagogy in schools serving communities privileged by race and class. By documenting the practices of socially committed teachers at an urban private academy and a suburban public school, Katy Swalwell helps educators and educational theorists better understand the challenges and opportunities inherent in this work. She also examines how students responded to their teachers' efforts in ways that both undermined and realized the goals of social justice pedagogy. This analysis serves as the foundation for the development of a curricular framework helping students to foster an "Activist Ally" identity: the skills, knowledge, and dispositions necessary to negotiate privilege in ways that promote justice. Educating Activist Allies provides a powerful introduction to the ways in which social justice curricula can and should be enacted in communities of privilege.

PART I

The Education of Privileged Youth in Theory

1

WHY THE EDUCATION OF PRIVILEGED CHILDREN MATTERS

In the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, [the oppressors] suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have.

(Freire, 2000, p. 58)

It is possible that if I surveyed a group of educational scholars and practitioners, a majority would respond with a quick and firm “we shouldn't” to the question of whether we ought to be concerned with the education of elite children. For the record, I am not unsympathetic to this position as there are many other populations of students whose schooling is clearly in crisis. And yet, I find this question to be not so easy to dismiss. For me, it hangs in the air, lurking in the shadows of conversations about justice and equity in education, buried deep in the assumptions of current educational reforms, and haunting the critical reflections of my own schooling. If we begin to entertain this question, if we let it linger, we soon find that it begets other even more difficult and important questions: How should these students be educated? What happens when we try to educate them in those ways?

Why Ask This Question Now?

Before providing a few possible answers to this fundamental question of why we ought to care about the education of elite children, and before diving into stories about how these students can and should be educated, we must first position this inquiry in a particular context of time and space. I write this from the United States at the end of the first decade of the 21st century when a widening gap between the rich and poor and increasing de facto segregation are startlingly harsh realities playing out amidst mythic claims of living in a “post-racial” society where anyone can get ahead if they work hard. While political debates rage about why economic and racial inequalities persist and what ought to be done about them, few debate this basic truth: in fundamental ways, the United States is becoming more separate and less equal.

Despite recent Supreme Court decisions effectively disavowing a need for race-conscious educational policies (e.g., Parents v. Seattle School District, Meredith v. Jefferson County), public schools nationwide struggle with significant and increasing economic and racial segregation (Orfield, Frankenberg, & Garces, 2008). As more White families enroll their children in suburban, charter, and private schools with little exposure to students (or teachers) from other racial groups (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, & Wang, 2010), more students of color are siphoned into under-funded “hyper-segregated” or “apartheid schools” in the country's large urban centers (Frankenberg, Lee, & Orfield, 2003). Though the stereotypical White, wealthy suburb on the outskirts of a diverse, working-class urban center is changing,¹ racial homogeneity for White students is still the norm. In fact, the average White student attends a school where 77% of the student body is also White (Orfield, 2009). Underlying economic inequalities exacerbate this racial segregation. For example, as of 2009, 43% of Black and Hispanic students attended schools with poverty rates over 80% while fewer than 4% of White children attended such schools (McArdle, Osypuk, & Acevedo-García, 2010). Overall, Black families earn a median income that is 58% of Whites’ (Isaacs, 2007), are much less likely to experience economic mobility than Whites (Sharkey, 2009), and have disproportionately felt the negative effects of the recent foreclosure epidemic (Rothstein, 2012).

Mobility has decreased for all racial/ethnic groups, however, as the correlation between productivity and income has unhinged for the working class (Sawhill & Morton, 2007; Allegretto, 2011). Simply put, the current gap between the rich and the poor is one of the widest ever in American history. While the average American household saw their earnings increase about 25% in the past forty years, the income of the richest 5% has increased by 68%, the top 1% by 323% and the richest one-tenth of a percent by 492% (Khan, 2011). A recent Economic Policy Institute report notes that the top 5% of households currently control 63.5% of the nation's wealth (Allegretto, 2011). To make matters worse, it is not just that the rich are getting richer: the poor are getting poorer (Bernstein, McNichols, & Nicholas, 2008). Though some may defend a system capable of producing such wildly disparate wealth as a meritocracy that rewards “hard work,” this kind of gap is socially corrosive and fundamentally unstable (Pickett & Wilkinson, 2009). It is also unlikely to change soon given steeply rising education, health care, and energy costs coupled with a push to privatize or eliminate many social safety nets.

These worrisome statistics demonstrate that, at the very least, whether or not we should care about the education of privileged children is not an irrelevant topic: such students exist and their privilege (particularly with regards to their economic security) is intensifying. Before justifying why we indeed ought to care about how they are educated, however, we must first address the problematic nature of a category like “privilege” given the multiplicity of ways that all of us experience advantage or marginalization to some degree.

Who Is Privileged?

A discourse of privilege within social justice circles has emerged in the last several decades from a rejection of traditional justice-based work focusing on the oppression of particular groups towards a deconstruction of the ways in which dominant groups maintain and reproduce power (i.e., studying the ways in which men actively reproduce sexism as well as researching women's experiences of oppression) (Bonnett, 1996; Choules, 2007). With her landmark article “Unpacking the White Knapsack,” Peggy McIntosh (1990) is probably the most famous example of how someone adopting a position of privilege (in her case, White privilege) finds herself made newly accountable to those whose oppression benefits her. Postcolonial, postmodern, cultural, and critical theorists have also been quite productive in problematizing traditional liberal and conservative understandings of oppression and privilege, particularly with regards to male privilege and Whiteness (e.g., McIntosh, 1997).

A variety of terms with different connotations has surfaced: terms that de-center privileged people like non-marginalized, terms that indicate active intent like oppressor and dominator, and terms that imply an invisible hand producing inequality like advantaged, privileged, and dominant. An emerging field offers work focusing on a pedagogy for the non-poor (Evans, A., Evans, R., & Kennedy, 1995), pedagogy of the oppressor (Schapiro, 1999), pedagogy for the children of the oppressors (van Gorder, 2007), or education for the privileged (Goodman, 2000a, 2000b). Because of their prevalence, I have adopted the terms communities of privilege and privileged, with the hope that they encourage “the beneficiaries of injustice to see themselves as implicated and having some collective responsibility for the perpetuation of injustice” (Choules, 2007, p. 474).

I adopt this discourse with great caution, however, in an attempt to listen to the insightful critiques from scholars who warn that the term “privilege(d)” obscures the subject of domination by describing oppression as happening without the knowledge of the oppressors. For example, Hernández-Sheets (2000) critiques the use of this “nice word” in relation to race as a “benevolent and socially imposed prerogative of Whites … [that] can reinforce feelings of superiority and help construct personal and group identities based on the devaluation of others” (p. 19). To avoid the use of a term that reinforces injustice, critical race scholars recommend a discourse of “supremacy” that acknowledges privilege, but only, in the case of race, as a “function of whites’ actions toward minority subjects and not as mysterious accumulations of unearned advantages” (Leonardo, 2009, pp. 89–90). If it weren't so cumbersome, I would rather identify elite or privileged students as those positioned by power relations within systems of supremacy that are continuously shaped by historical social, political, and economic factors and that are made stronger when rendered invisible, consciously or not, to those who benefit from them most. To prevent reader fatigue, however, I use the term privileged as shorthand for this long-winded clarification.

Traditionally, scholars have made sense of privilege as a set of unearned advantages based upon socially constructed categories (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation) within which people are largely unable to avoid benefiting from regardless of their level of consciousness. While it may be tempting to tally privileges in an additive fashion, “our social identities are not a balance sheet in which one can just compare the number of identities on the dominant side and the number on the subordinate side and know how much power, privilege, or freedom one has” (Goodman, 2000b, pp. 32–22). Such a commodified understanding of privilege is rightly being complicated by a new generation of scholars focusing less on the unequal benefits enjoyed by “privileged” people and more on the unjust processes of privileging as socio-culturally mediated identity formation and its related distribution of resources (e.g., Howard, 2008; Khan, 2011).

Rather than a set of clear-cut, fixed characteristics, then, privilege represents a context-dependent, mediated process by which fluid dynamics produce complex, sometimes contradictory, identities (Brantlinger, 2003; Johnson, 2006; Curry-Stevens, 2007; Denis-McKay, 2007; Leonardo, 2009). Such a situated process of privilege serves as a lens that shapes and maintains values, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and actions regarding one's self in relation to others. Rather than someone simply identifying as “marginalized” or “privileged” writ large, what is more likely is an “intersecting identity” (Edwards, 2006) or “modified binary framework” wherein aspects of one's multiple identities interact in concert with others’ identities and the situation at hand to either “moderate or exacerbate an experience of privilege, on one hand, and oppression, on the other” (Curry-Stevens, 2007, p. 37). In my case, for example, the ability to claim membership in dominant racial, social class, sexual identity, citizenship status, and physical ability groups positions me in powerful ways in most situations; conversely, my gender, home region, and religious background at times (and in relation to certain people) tend to position me more outside the margins of power.

Several scholars outline aspects of this privileging/marginalization process to help identify who is privileged and who is marginalized in a given situation. Goodman (2000b) helpfully distinguishes among the characteristics of privileged individuals and privileged groups. Privileged individuals are those who lack consciousness regarding privilege and its benefits, who easily deny or avoid the privileging process, and who maintain a sense of superiority and entitlement that their needs should be met even when it is at the expense of oppressed people. Similarly, Hackman's (2005) taxonomy identifies dominants as people who are actively taught not to see their privilege, who believe that their life and its privileges are the norm for society and humanity, and who have done nothing to earn the benefits that accompany privilege.

Privileged groups, on the other hand, are those which maintain cultural and institutional domination by creating structures and systems that reflect and promote the internalization of privileged values, normalize their values and beliefs by supporting particular policies and practices, believe in the superiority of their values, and actively grant material and psychological benefits to their peers at the expense of subjugated groups. This process does not require nefarious intentions to work; in ways both subtle and explicit, these systems condition people to think of themselves as normal (Goodman, 2000b; Johnson, 2006) and to make small allowances for critiques in order to silence them (Buras, 2008).

Ultimately, all of us embody traits by which these forces oppress and privilege us based upon aspects of our personhood deemed important for membership in subordinate or dominant groups. Though these identities are complex, fluid (to a point), and relationally situated, it is important to recognize that there do exist people who, in general, garner unearned advantage in most situations and who more often than not can claim association with elite groups. These people, and I would include myself in this category, are net beneficiaries of privilege who, “because of their positioning within the dominant group at both a local and/or global level, attract privilege of different sorts [granting the] ability to act without consequences and as if one had the right to set the rules” (Choules, 2007, p. 461, 472). In other words, these are people who have the “luxury of obliviousness” (Johnson, 2006). Conversely, there are people who dominant groups consistently marginalize and whose actions are severely constrained regardless of context— net maleficiaries.²

It is important to note that acknowledging the ways in which one is not permanently privileged does not justify a relativist stance whereby all people oppress and are oppressed so that everyone is equal in a sort of injustice wash. On the contrary, there are individuals who claim membership in certain groups that tend to be unjustly favored by hegemonic forces at the macro and micro levels in ways that make a deep and lasting difference. To claim otherwise is arrogant at worst and ignorant at best, especially if one's “knapsack,” as Peggy McIntosh (1990) would say, is very full. For the purposes of this project, then, these net beneficiaries are referred to as privileged people while net maleficiaries (those whose experiences in the aggregate tend to deny them access to resources and opportunities) are referred to as marginalized people. These experiences of domination and oppression take a variety of powerful forms including sexual orientation, physical ability, and gender.³ In American society, however, there are few ways in which this process of privileging operates more powerfully than by the racialization of people and their stratification by social class.

Race

Recent advances in genetic technologies prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that race is not a biological truth (Templeton, 1999), but rather a social construction that originiated out of a desire to distribute power based upon hierarchies that favored White over Black identities. For as deeply embedded as it is in society, “Whiteness” is a relatively new yet nefarious category that has grown more powerful through conscious legislation and deliberate actions beginning with the colonization of the Americas when laws granting rights distinguished between enslaved African people and indentured servants of European heritage (Lipsitz, 2002; Johnson, 2006). There is a rich and complex history of immigrants struggling with how to negotiate the connection between Whiteness and citizenship, particularly among those from Ireland, Greece, Italy, India, and a range of Latin American countries. Often, people from these regions have been compelled to distance themselves rather than ally with Black peoples in order to gain social and economic advantages (e.g., Foley, 2002). Historically, legislation has encouraged such divisiveness in order to support systems of White supremacy (Lipsitz, 2002). Throughout the history of the United States, becoming “American” has thus often been conflated with becoming “White” (Barrett & Roediger, 2002).

In the past thirty years, growing attention to Whiteness as a socio-historical phenomenon has resulted in a sub-discipline of “White studies.” There seem to be at least three approaches to this field: a deconstructive analysis of Whiteness from a social and historical perspective (e.g., Dyer, 1988), a call for the total abolition of Whiteness (e.g., Garvey & Ignatiev, 1997), and the advocacy of a re-articulation of Whiteness (e.g., Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1998, Leonardo, 2009). In thinking about social justice pedagogy with people typically privileged by their racial identity, I advocate re-articulation based on a deconstructive analysis that “examines whiteness in relation to oppression and domination and as a viable, progressive, and contradictory category” (Rodriguez, 2000, p. 16). This position rejects calls for abolition given that such an approach tends to ignore how deeply embedded race is in society, overlooks the differences within Whiteness (e.g., the marginalization of people referred to as “White trash”), and, ironically, may strengthen the flawed position that race does not matter which can unwittingly lead to the srengthening of White supremacy (Rodriguez, 2000).

Social Class

In addition to and often in conjunction with this history of racialization in the United States are the deep influences of an economic system grounded in the principles of a competitive market system. Modern capitalism is rooted in the sixteenth-century rise of Western European profit-sharing corporations engaged in high-risk investments to compete for control over natural and human resources in Africa and the Americas. The growth of such an economic system depended upon the exploitation of cheap and free labor in the forms of indentured and enslaved peoples as well as cheap resources, including the conquest of indigenous peoples and their territories through military means and imperialist political agendas (Marx, 1990; Wright, 1997).

We live today with the result of these efforts: the United States is among the wealthiest of nations in the world yet struggles with a history of indigenous genocide, slavery, segregation, and increasingly high numbers of people living below the poverty line. It has also produced a fairly fixed class structure: a small yet extremely rich capitalist and corporate managerial class, an unstable middle class whose position is tied to training in technical skills for jobs with pa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor's Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Education of Privileged Youth in Theory
• Part II The Education of Privileged Youth in Practice
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• References
• Index