Strategies for Incorporating "Racism" Into a Multicultural Education Foundations Course

A primary component of any course in multicultural education must be the issue of racism. However, strong consideration must be given on how best to approach this topic. Although there is no "one best way" to help preservice teachers begin to understand and confront the issue of racism, this article provides an overview of the approach used by the authors in a required course on multicultural education at the University of Nebraska. Key aspects of the approach include establishing a safe learning environment based on the principles of effective dialogue, cultural immersion tactics, and specific resources. Several strategies are shared to generate discussion and to help preservice teachers understand the many dimensions of racism and the ways in which it has been perpetuated.     

Cultural values and attitudes toward immigrants and multiculturalism: The case of the Eurobarometer survey on racism and xenophobia

The current paper uses archival data to examine variations in Schwartz's and Hofstede's cultural value orientations and their relationship to attitudes toward immigration and multiculturalism reported in the Eurobarometer Survey [Attitudes towards minority groups in the European Union: a special analysis of the Eurobarometer 2000 opinion poll on behalf of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. Eurobarometer Opinion Poll. Retrieved September 1, 2003, from http://europa.eu.int/comm/public_opinion/index_en.htm] on racism and xenophobia. The results demonstrated that mastery, masculinity, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and collectivism were associated with weaker support for policies that promote social co-existence. Masculinity and mastery were also linked to more pessimistic attitudes towards multiculturalism, and increased harmony was correlated with less desire for cultural assimilation. The results largely converge with research undertaken at the individual-level of analysis, and the data suggest four clusters of cultural values related to immigration attitudes: humanitarianism-egalitarianism, conservation, collectivism, and instrumentality.     

“No More Mr. Nice Guy”: Preservice Teachers' Conflict With Classroom Management in a Predominantly African-American Urban Elementary School

Using methods of naturalistic inquiry, this study examines preservice teachers' conflict with classroom management strategies used in a predominantly African-American urban elementary school. It highlights the theory/practice dilemma, focusing on the tensions between the democratic strategies taught in university classes and the more authoritarian strategies actually found in the urban classrooms. The use of power and caring, evident in the interactions of the teachers with their students, was seen as a way to make sense of these strategies. The African-American and European-American researchers, both university faculty, share their differing perspectives, insights, and questions as they tried to make sense of their students' experiences, especially how subtle forms of racism and strong cultural norms impact one's teaching.     

Han Chinese racism and Malaysian contexts: cosmopolitan racial formations in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists

ABSTRACT

This essay explores what it means to theorize Han racism in Malaysian contexts, where ethnic Chinese constitute a minority. Given the history of Malay political dominance and recent intensification of Malay-Muslim ethno-nationalism as part of a backlash against the historic change of government in 2018, theorizing Han racism might seem like a move to downplay these factors and minimize the various forms of racialized violence directed at Chinese identified bodies. To the contrary, I show that doing so involves tracking the transnational process of racial production, which requires understanding how racist and capitalist modes of hierarchy operate in tandem, and how racial discourses are used by the state to manage domestic political exigencies and global economic forces to facilitate ongoing capitalist accumulation. I then turn to consider the arena of world Anglophone literature, which has emerged as a transnational site for narrating Chinese Malaysian experiences, by considering an exemplary text, a 2012 novel by Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists. In examining the material and ideological conditions of the global literary marketplace in shaping the novel, I consider how the cosmopolitan nature of global Anglophone literary production can obscure the racial underpinnings of its cultural productions as in the case of Tan’s novel.     

Sterilizing society: social order and policing sex work in Taiwan

This article utilizes Michel Foucault's view of state racism to analyze the criminalization of sex workers in Taiwan. To explore the political significance underlying the term “sex work” for anti-prostitution activists, we must historically situate their discourses and their impact on legal control in the late 1980s women's movements. Their efforts to reform society followed from their commitment to child protection and from their long-standing goal of eliminating women's sexuality through motherhood. An uphill battle, marshaled chiefly by the amendment of the Youth Welfare Act in 1988 and the legislation of CYSTPA in 1995, it became more furious in its assault on sex workers. By 2009, whereas those anti-prostitution activists had promoted anti-human trafficking provisions to protect victims under the age of 18, such provisions had in reality become mechanisms for arresting anyone related with the sex industry. This means that what was put forward as a principle for the integration of society and its visible order was based on sexual inequality. Contrasting the strategies and rhetoric of regulating sex workers in Taiwan, what is really necessary is to bring the cultural dynamics behind policies into a sharper view of state racism.     

Teachers Initiating Conversations About Race and Racism in a High School Class

This qualitative study explores the techniques, materials and processes of a Black teacher and a White teacher who introduced issues of race and racism in their team-taught high school class. The teachers explicitly put the issues of race and racism on the table, asked questions that challenged students to think about the topics, and used race-related curricular materials and assignments. The teachers' initiative encouraged the students in the class to speak out about the language and meaning of race and racism.     

White Fatigue: Naming the Challenge in Moving from an Individual to a Systemic Understanding of Racism

This article introduces the notion White fatigue. White fatigue occurs for White students who have grown tired of learning and discussing race and racism, despite an understanding of the moral imperative of anti-racist and anti-oppressive practices. The article differentiates White fatigue from ideas like White resistance, White guilt, or White fragility, arguing that each of these phenomenon occur at different stages of White Racial Identity Development. Distinction is also drawn among White fatigue and other forms of racially based fatigue, specifically racial battle fatigue and White people fatigue syndrome. Further drawing on the notion of stereotype threat, the article considers the challenges for White students learning about race and racism while simultaneously resisting being labeled a racist. This struggle is elemental to the manifestation of White fatigue. Ultimately, the author argues that educators must be more accurate in how they define the range of responses from White students, consistently humanize all students in the process of understanding race and racism, and encourage further research for understanding a condition that is happening to a growing number of students.     

Effective Multicultural Curriculum Transformation Across Disciplines

Resistance to multicultural curriculum transformation has long been assumed to be a function solely of faculty racism, sexism, classism, and so forth, especially in the fields of "advanced" mathematics and "hard" sciences. Although this may account for a percentage of that resistance, it is a small percentage. In fact, most faculty are interested in multiculturally transforming their curriculum. The problem is that few know how to go about doing it. Until recently, few, if any, doctoral programs included coursework on how to teach one's discipline, much less how to teach it from a multicultural perspective. Faculty need opportunities to learn how to develop multiculturally oriented curricula content, pedagogical approaches, and methods of evaluating student learning and teaching effectiveness. Faculty also need opportunities to learn how to build positive relationships with increasingly diverse bodies of students, and how to create more supportive educational environments for that interaction to occur. This article provides faculty with an overview of effective approaches to multicultural curriculum transformation, applicable across disciplines vis-á-vis content, pedagogy, evaluation, relationship building, and environment creation.     

Constructions of Race Among Religiously Conservative College Students

The “Whites as victims” motif in conversations about race has been well documented in recent decades. When discussing affirmative action hiring policies, a common belief expressed by Whites is that people of color have been permitted to progress unfairly at the expense of harder working Whites. Whites using this discourse see themselves as victims of a political process that ignores individual responsibility and caters to people of color who are not willing to work toward their own success. Using students’ Blackboard discussion forum postings, the author analyzes ideas about race expressed by students in education classes at a small denominational Christian college in the northeastern United States, and compares these students’ constructions of race to those analyzed in previous research using Whites as subjects in both religious and non-religious settings. The author argues that these students do not differ in their constructions of race and racism from other Whites in non-religious settings. Further, with more complete education and intentional conversation about the history of racism in the United States, these students are able to incorporate understandings of deeper structural causes of racial inequality.     

Racial Identity and Challenges of Educating White Youths for Cultural Diversity

Establishing trust and breaking down social and psychological barriers are essential in multicultural education courses. Contributing to the complexity of establishing trust and minimizing barriers is the varying applicability of these concepts across ethnic and nonethnic groups. Ten suggestions are provided to combat resistance and establishing trust in such classes. They include (a) Know yourself as a cultural, ethnic, and racial being; (b) Understand that culture is neither ethnicity nor race; (c) Don't treat the classroom as a therapy group; (d) To be equitable is to be responsible; (e) Everyone is at their own stage of awareness and ethnic development; (f) Understand dynamics of institutional and individual racism; (g) Everyone's voice is important; (h) Multiculturalism is contextual; and (i) Know your role as instructor.     

Storying a Social Drama: How Discourse and Practice Prevent Transformation Through Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

In a sociohistorical moment during which racism has become more widely accepted as a social fact, U.S. scholars and practitioners of education continue to struggle with how schooling might participate in its eradication. In suburban, elite, Midwestern Pioneer City Public Schools, a series of initiatives I refer to as “the transformation” aimed to eliminate racial predictability in standardized test scores through efforts (a) to redistribute children from a racially and economically isolated elementary school across the district's four elementary schools, and (b) to train all district staff in a particular brand of culturally relevant pedagogy. In this article, I argue that Pioneer City School District was unable to address the transformative goals of culturally relevant pedagogy—in part because of irresolvable tensions between an explicitly anti-racist theory and the authoritative discourses suggesting that racism is a thing of the past.     

Capturing the vanishing point: Subjective experiences and cultural value

This article is prompted by the observation that many accounts of the value of the arts and culture have failed to engage first-order, empirical data and to take full account of the experiences of those directly involved in cultural activities and practices. This neglect is the result of a complex path dependency. The more obvious explanation is that the current situation is caused by too much humanism in the field of cultural studies, that is, the tendency to think of cultural value as an “‘ineffable’ human moment which somehow lies outside this purview of representational method” (Law, J., Rupert, E., & Savage, M. [2011 Law, J., Rupert, E., & Savage, M. (2011). The double social life of methods. Milton Keynes: CRESC. [Google Scholar]]. The double social life of methods. Milton Keynes: CRESC). This may well be true in some cases but it is not the main reason why empirical and experiential data have been lacking. The absence of the phenomenological dimension is, to the contrary, best explained by not enough humanism in cultural studies. The reluctance to embrace the first-person perspective was motivated by an anxiety that this would make cultural theorists and sociologists complicit with the “dubious” theories of subjecthood originating in idealism. The default outcome of this has been the preponderance of structuralism in cultural studies which led to anti-empiricism and “theoretical heavy breathing” (Thompson, E. P. [1995]. The poverty of theory: Or an orryery of errors. London: Merlin Press). I argue that to overcome the current impasse, cultural theorists and the theorists of cultural value specifically must revisit this self-incurred suspicion of first-order constructs and address their unease with the category of experience by actively engaging first-person data. In short, the remedy I prescribe is to embrace elements of empirical, phenomenological sociology as part of the methodological framework. Looking at three projects funded by the AHRC Cultural Value Project, I show how this can be practically achieved. I conclude with some reflections on how the considerations presented here might have broader implications for the future research into cultural value, sociological inquiry and cultural policy.     

Engaging White College Students in Productive Conversations About Race and Racism: Avoiding Dominant-Culture Projection and Condescension-Judgment Default

Conversations about racism and White privilege are rarely easy, but are necessary in order to have a more equitable society. Through honest and properly facilitated dialogues, people can work through their prejudices toward other people. In this article the author explores two ways in which White preservice educators inadvertently halt classroom conversations about racism.     

Echoes of the Bandung movement in the Caribbean and China's presence in the region today

The ideas of Bandung had echoes in the anti-colonial and decolonization movement in the Anglophone Caribbean from the 1950s to the 1970s. These echoes were signals of international solidarity that emerged among the political leadership and radicalized publics in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. That sense of solidarity has been replaced by pragmatic business relations in the era of global neo-liberalism and the growing role of China and other ex-colonies as economic powers. There is an urgent need for renewal of mutually beneficial political association among ex-colonial countries. The spectres of racism and racial stereotypes need to be confronted in the building of stronger economic relations. These racial stereotypes arise from the growth of anti-black racism over the past 500 years. Similarly, racial stereotypes of Chinese and other peoples of Asia are rooted in colonial histories. New political relations cannot be based exclusively on trade and economic relations but on an explicit elaboration of ideas that can encourage discussion, debate and the development of institutions. These new political ideas can build on shared principles in an anti-racist direction, which helps to restore human dignity to international relations.     

Racial Justice,Hegemony, and Bias Incidents in U.S. Higher Education

Formal administrative protocols for responding to bias incidents are now the norm in higher education. In considering these developments, the author of this article poses critical questions about racial justice work on campus, identifies key features of an under-acknowledged institutional racism, and contributes to discussions about ways that diversity and social justice efforts often reproduce rather than challenge systemic inequities.     

“The Horror” of Structural Racism: Helping Students Take a Critical Stance Using Classic Literature

The goal of this piece is to provide educators with the knowledge and practical application needed to build critical literacy within their students using a traditional text that might not be considered multicultural. This essay challenges the idea that “outdated” literary works have no place in today's multicultural classroom, as it connects critical literacy concepts to classic works and explores how such concepts are inherent in our society based on the ideas presented in the literature. Using Heart of Darkness, this work connects structural racism to Conrad's novella and explores how students can examine how structural racism is inherent in our society.     

Lost in TransNation: Tokyo and the urban imaginary in the era of globalization

Abstract

The 2003 film Lost in Translation has attracted both acclaim and critique concerning its representation of the urban imaginary of Tokyo. Examining both the film representation and the critical responses to the imaginary, this paper discusses how they illuminate some of the emerging issues that Tokyo and Japan face in the era of globalization, such as the loss of the idiosyncratic status of non‐Western modernity that Japan has long enjoyed; post‐(self)Orientalist cultural othering; and the transnational alliance of media and cultural industries in a global cultural economy of branding the nation through media and consumer cultures, all at the expense of the issue of intensifying migration and multicultural situations in the urban space. It will be suggested that both the film and Japanese critiques of the film are lost in the actuality of Tokyo (indeed, of Japan) and its populace, which is being radically transformed by intensifying transnational flows of people, capital, and media imagery.     

Multicultural literature: An essay

Effective teacher education should guide preservice and practicing teachers in comprehending and facilitating educational concepts and pedagogical practices that examine and promote equity for all learners. Teachers and young learners benefit from sundry opportunities to recognize their self identities and to celebrate both individual and shared cultural characteristics while increasing their understanding and appreciation of others and society. Teachers' cultural characteristics frequently do not match the cultural characteristics reflective of their young learners, and teachers may not be cognizant that their young learners do not see and operate in the world as they do. Critical pedagogy frequently fails to occur when dissonance lies between teachers' backgrounds, beliefs, and behaviors and those characterizing their young learners. Therefore, a major responsibility of pre-K-12 school administrators and teacher educators focuses on developing cultural self-awareness in teachers concomitantly empowering them to develop cultural self-awareness in their young learners. This article addresses how to initiate and further enhance the development of cultural self-awareness in educators by viewing a short yet provocative video titled, "The Lunch Date." A synthesis of university class discussion techniques drawing on the experiences of two professors provides guiding questions and useful suggestions appropriate for pre-K-12 teachers, administrators, staff developers, and teacher educators.     

The Gentrification of "Black" in Black Popular Communication in the New Millennium

This issue of Popular Communication features two particularly interesting pieces of scholarship whose salience should be noted in that the authors work expressly to extend our ideational boundaries regarding racial identity-in these two instances, the categories of Blackness and Whiteness. The authors share a common goal, though one taken with great care: to disrupt plebeian notions of what is thought to be essentialized Black cultural forms (e.g., hip-hop culture) by studying what they consider out-of-the-common practices of Blackness. Adopting the "different contexts" modality, one author locates the Black popular within Whiteness to reveal the elasticity of performative Blackness as well as evidence an accessibility to, and even mastery of, Black cultural participation by those outside of the African American race. The other author locates Blackness within "high culture" Black communicative practices and celebrates the fact that the presumed prole core of the Black popular can be elevated to a higher and, therefore, more worthy cultural plane. More, the author characterizes this ascent of Blackness as being especially noteworthy because it is facilitated by a figure believed to be marginalized within Black popular discourses-a member of the Black bourgeoisie.     

The development of comparable European cultural statistics

UK cultural statistics are far from complete, so the development of comparable European cultural statistics sounds like an ambitious task and one for which clear objectives are needed. One spin‐off from comparing the statistical systems of different countries should be some improvement in national statistics, as best practice is examined and taken up by other countries. However, the essence of the on‐going programme of work described in this chapter is the search for a common statistical language, to be used whenever cross‐country comparisons are wanted or European totals are to be compiled.

Compiling cultural statistics for different countries on a comparable basis sounds like a contradiction: how can the cultures of one country be harmonised with those of another? The key is to identify why the comparison needs to be made. In this chapter, therefore, current developments in European cultural statistics are reviewed by first exploring the needs for pan‐European cultural statistics that flow from policy.

The chapter describes and reviews a European Union project to develop cultural statistics that reported at the end of 1999. The results of this project have been taken into the European statistical system. Hardly any statistical results have yet been published. The chapter questions how far this work will progress beyond the UNESCO framework for cultural statistics. One significant issue is that the UNESCO framework, compiled some 15 years ago, gave relatively little attention to the creative industries. These industries now feature more strongly in policy responses to the wider economic and social challenges facing European countries and the European Union. The new work on cultural statistics gives some recognition to the creative industries but it does not embrace the full extent of the creative industries as defined in the UK.