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Disaster Education: 'Race', Equity and Pedagogy
Using critical race theory and whiteness studies the book argues that information about disasters has always, tacitly or overtly, prioritised the survival of certain groups of citizens above others. Drawing on examples from the UK and the US, from past and contemporary disaster education and popular culture, it considers that rather than being kitsch, naïve and ephemeral, such campaigns are central to the way in which states define survival, life and death.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published May 25, 2012
12 people want to read
About the author
John Preston
7 booksDr. John Preston is a Reader in Lifelong Learning, Competitiveness and Social Cohesion at the Institute of Education in the University of London.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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June 28, 2014
I’m currently working on my thesis and part of that is to look at how white and non-white children are represented in school marketing materials. Every racial cliché is there, but what is particularly surprising is how rarely (if ever) these clichés are inverted in the imagery presented. And so, a big part of what I’ve been also thinking about at the moment is what I’m starting to think of as ‘audience theory’. Given the racial mix of people in Australia – and in some of the areas that the schools I’ve been looking at service, the racial mix is remarkably large – why do non-Anglo Saxon people put up with this overt and covert racism? I mean, in some schools there are over 50% of the kids at the school from non-English speaking backgrounds, and in Australia that increasingly means from non-White backgrounds – and yet in all schools (from what I can tell from decidedly problematic statistics) there is about a 20% over representation of white kids in the photographs used to market schools. What all this seems to be pointing to is a kind of Gramscian ‘common sense’ or hegemony where the image that is accepted by everyone in society as ‘normal’ is the ‘dominant’ image, even when that image stands in stark contrast with the reality of the school population. I can’t begin to tell you how many photographs use depth of field so as to highlight the blonde girl, sitting beside a slightly out of focus white boy, beside a more out of focus East Asian girl, beside a nearly completely blurred brown-skinned boy.
I’m mentioning this because this book does with disaster education what I’m hoping to do with school marketing materials – that is, highlights the underlying racial, gendered and class assumptions that frame these materials while also trying to bring to the fore the ‘real world’ problems such assumptions leave in their wake.
So, what is disaster education? The education that is looked at here is mostly public education put out by government departments, rather than, say, school education. This is interesting as it fits with what Basil Bernstein liked to call the ‘pedagogisation of life’ – something it is worth thinking about when you next here the phrase ‘life long learning’. It isn’t that disaster education didn’t or doesn’t occur in schools, but that it is thought to be so important that alternative ways have been necessary to educate people of the imminent threats our society faces. What is interesting, though, is that for much of the time this book considers – post World War Two – those threats came from the Soviet Union. That is, Godless Commies that were unlike us in that they were more ‘communal’ as in ‘less individuals’. So, even our responses to potential disasters – nuclear war, for instance – stressed what the individual (or family) could do to protect themselves. Most of the things involved these families being decidedly middle class. For example, they needed to have about two weeks of food and water on hand. They were advised to stay indoors, preferably in their cellar or in a room with as little access to outside walls as possible. They were advised to get building materials or sandbags to reinforce their house. All of which, of course, implies having enough money to buy such things at a time of panic. All of which implies you live in a kind of semi-detached house. All of which implies you are middle class. What to do if you live in a flat or simply do not have the money to perpetually have two weeks worth of food on hand wasn’t something the educators every discussed. It isn’t that they didn’t consider these issues – they certainly did, as is documented here, but these were issues that were simply put into the too hard basket.
But it is the racial issues that were raised by these materials that I found most interesting. There is an image that was used in Britain for its ‘Protect and Survive’ materials. Ironically enough, it is a nuclear family. But faceless and as the author so amusingly points out protected within a ring of whiteness. Nevertheless, there is no question that this family is while – even in silhouette, we know they are white. The kinds of eugenic assumptions that our society makes – that survival of the fittest will mean that nice, neat, middle class families will survive a nuclear explosion rather than an untidy, dark skinned, working class one – are on show repeatedly in the underlying assumptions and images presented. And this isn’t only true in relation to the disaster materials themselves, but also the films and television programs that were created at these times as a kind of cultural pedagogic process. Films like The Day After or, more recently, 24. The remarkable ‘whiteness’ of these puts on display who it is important to save.
And while we are discussing who it is important to save, there is also a very interesting discussion on the collapsed state and preserving continuity of government. Nuclear war can be a real pain, but it is hardly any reason for giving up on the joys of capitalism. After all, if nuclear war meant the end of capitalism, in a very real sense the bad guys would have won. So, plans were made for ensuring that currency would be available as quickly as possible after an event. There were also grave concerns that trade unionists or students would cause disruptions – and so plans were made to limit citizen rights. The ideal society, then: small government, free markets and repressive laws to keep everyone in their place. Perfect.
There is also a lovely discussion here of Zombies. You have probably noticed the kinds of Zombie marches that happen now and again through cities. I saw an article in a newspaper recently that suggested that part of the reason why women like these is that Zombie movies are violent, but very unlikely to involve rape. But this repeats the idea I first encountered in the book Uncertain Lives – that Zombies are a hardly disguised reference to the international problem of refugees. People who, almost by definition, are without ‘real lives’ and that are on the march to take over and destroy, almost by accident, our way of life. Unaware that they are infected or the walking dead, they would be happier and better off actually dead. Somehow we must be protected from these people – or unpeople – and that protection, in the end, can only come by their destruction. Manus Island, anyone? It is not just that individually Zombies are beyond help, but that there are so many of them, teaming hordes, that is the real problem. The similarities to our fears about refugees could hardly be more explicit, and yet, the distance between our image of Zombies and refugees is just far enough apart for us to be entertained by one and outraged by the other. Either way, it tends to be nice white local families that come under attack from Zombie aliens.
There is a lot of talk at the start of this one about whiteness as both a prosthetic - that is, something white people often think they are able to take off or put back on again in ways that people of other skin colours simply can not - and a realisation of a kind of Marxist notion of capital. That this is deeply symbolic of the nature of white privilege, in that it is very rare for anyone to call a white person on their privilege, even the privilege to see their whiteness as invisible. In a post-9/11 world, being white means avoiding a lot of racialised stereotyping and ‘profiling’ that other races simply cannot avoid. As the author points out, getting on a plane is a much less traumatic experience for him than it is for some of his friends of colour. While we allow this to be the norm, while we allow this to go unchallenged, we remain complicit in the racist assumptions that underlie such ‘normal’ behaviours.
The point is repeatedly made that ‘white’ isn’t rally just a skin colour. There are any number of books about this, of course, too. One I’ve read is called How the Irish Became White, but it seems there is also one called How the English Working Class Became White too. White has always been a middle class concept and for many non-middle class white skinned people, becoming White was something that needed to be earned.
And the consequences? Well, we have constructed a world that essentialises white skin, middle class virtues and hetero-normative sexual orientations and constructed such people as the symbolic representatives of those who ‘ought’ to be saved in a disaster. And as such our emergency plans make assumptions about the resources that individuals will have at their disposal which also match the presumed life situations of such ‘normal’ people. The point being that there is actually no point in even bothering to plan for people that don’t fit that particular cookie cutter.
And if you want to see what happens when this is played out in real life, look no further than Hurricane Katrina. As is quoted here, “The whites were described as carrying ‘bread and soda from a grocery store’ that they had found, the black man pictured was characterized as having ‘loot(ed) a grocery store”’. The point is both that our conceptions of how the world is raced have real impacts on our life experiences, but also that we are not mere automatons that must respond in conformity to how the world is raced and gendered about us. We have within our power the ability to disrupt these standard narratives – the ability to ask why it is that certain people are never shown in certain situations and others almost invariable are shown in those situations. Why some people get to do some things and other never do. I’m not pretending this will make the world a better place – but noticing is worthwhile for your own soul, even if it has little or no effect on the souls of those around you.
I’m mentioning this because this book does with disaster education what I’m hoping to do with school marketing materials – that is, highlights the underlying racial, gendered and class assumptions that frame these materials while also trying to bring to the fore the ‘real world’ problems such assumptions leave in their wake.
So, what is disaster education? The education that is looked at here is mostly public education put out by government departments, rather than, say, school education. This is interesting as it fits with what Basil Bernstein liked to call the ‘pedagogisation of life’ – something it is worth thinking about when you next here the phrase ‘life long learning’. It isn’t that disaster education didn’t or doesn’t occur in schools, but that it is thought to be so important that alternative ways have been necessary to educate people of the imminent threats our society faces. What is interesting, though, is that for much of the time this book considers – post World War Two – those threats came from the Soviet Union. That is, Godless Commies that were unlike us in that they were more ‘communal’ as in ‘less individuals’. So, even our responses to potential disasters – nuclear war, for instance – stressed what the individual (or family) could do to protect themselves. Most of the things involved these families being decidedly middle class. For example, they needed to have about two weeks of food and water on hand. They were advised to stay indoors, preferably in their cellar or in a room with as little access to outside walls as possible. They were advised to get building materials or sandbags to reinforce their house. All of which, of course, implies having enough money to buy such things at a time of panic. All of which implies you live in a kind of semi-detached house. All of which implies you are middle class. What to do if you live in a flat or simply do not have the money to perpetually have two weeks worth of food on hand wasn’t something the educators every discussed. It isn’t that they didn’t consider these issues – they certainly did, as is documented here, but these were issues that were simply put into the too hard basket.
But it is the racial issues that were raised by these materials that I found most interesting. There is an image that was used in Britain for its ‘Protect and Survive’ materials. Ironically enough, it is a nuclear family. But faceless and as the author so amusingly points out protected within a ring of whiteness. Nevertheless, there is no question that this family is while – even in silhouette, we know they are white. The kinds of eugenic assumptions that our society makes – that survival of the fittest will mean that nice, neat, middle class families will survive a nuclear explosion rather than an untidy, dark skinned, working class one – are on show repeatedly in the underlying assumptions and images presented. And this isn’t only true in relation to the disaster materials themselves, but also the films and television programs that were created at these times as a kind of cultural pedagogic process. Films like The Day After or, more recently, 24. The remarkable ‘whiteness’ of these puts on display who it is important to save.
And while we are discussing who it is important to save, there is also a very interesting discussion on the collapsed state and preserving continuity of government. Nuclear war can be a real pain, but it is hardly any reason for giving up on the joys of capitalism. After all, if nuclear war meant the end of capitalism, in a very real sense the bad guys would have won. So, plans were made for ensuring that currency would be available as quickly as possible after an event. There were also grave concerns that trade unionists or students would cause disruptions – and so plans were made to limit citizen rights. The ideal society, then: small government, free markets and repressive laws to keep everyone in their place. Perfect.
There is also a lovely discussion here of Zombies. You have probably noticed the kinds of Zombie marches that happen now and again through cities. I saw an article in a newspaper recently that suggested that part of the reason why women like these is that Zombie movies are violent, but very unlikely to involve rape. But this repeats the idea I first encountered in the book Uncertain Lives – that Zombies are a hardly disguised reference to the international problem of refugees. People who, almost by definition, are without ‘real lives’ and that are on the march to take over and destroy, almost by accident, our way of life. Unaware that they are infected or the walking dead, they would be happier and better off actually dead. Somehow we must be protected from these people – or unpeople – and that protection, in the end, can only come by their destruction. Manus Island, anyone? It is not just that individually Zombies are beyond help, but that there are so many of them, teaming hordes, that is the real problem. The similarities to our fears about refugees could hardly be more explicit, and yet, the distance between our image of Zombies and refugees is just far enough apart for us to be entertained by one and outraged by the other. Either way, it tends to be nice white local families that come under attack from Zombie aliens.
There is a lot of talk at the start of this one about whiteness as both a prosthetic - that is, something white people often think they are able to take off or put back on again in ways that people of other skin colours simply can not - and a realisation of a kind of Marxist notion of capital. That this is deeply symbolic of the nature of white privilege, in that it is very rare for anyone to call a white person on their privilege, even the privilege to see their whiteness as invisible. In a post-9/11 world, being white means avoiding a lot of racialised stereotyping and ‘profiling’ that other races simply cannot avoid. As the author points out, getting on a plane is a much less traumatic experience for him than it is for some of his friends of colour. While we allow this to be the norm, while we allow this to go unchallenged, we remain complicit in the racist assumptions that underlie such ‘normal’ behaviours.
The point is repeatedly made that ‘white’ isn’t rally just a skin colour. There are any number of books about this, of course, too. One I’ve read is called How the Irish Became White, but it seems there is also one called How the English Working Class Became White too. White has always been a middle class concept and for many non-middle class white skinned people, becoming White was something that needed to be earned.
And the consequences? Well, we have constructed a world that essentialises white skin, middle class virtues and hetero-normative sexual orientations and constructed such people as the symbolic representatives of those who ‘ought’ to be saved in a disaster. And as such our emergency plans make assumptions about the resources that individuals will have at their disposal which also match the presumed life situations of such ‘normal’ people. The point being that there is actually no point in even bothering to plan for people that don’t fit that particular cookie cutter.
And if you want to see what happens when this is played out in real life, look no further than Hurricane Katrina. As is quoted here, “The whites were described as carrying ‘bread and soda from a grocery store’ that they had found, the black man pictured was characterized as having ‘loot(ed) a grocery store”’. The point is both that our conceptions of how the world is raced have real impacts on our life experiences, but also that we are not mere automatons that must respond in conformity to how the world is raced and gendered about us. We have within our power the ability to disrupt these standard narratives – the ability to ask why it is that certain people are never shown in certain situations and others almost invariable are shown in those situations. Why some people get to do some things and other never do. I’m not pretending this will make the world a better place – but noticing is worthwhile for your own soul, even if it has little or no effect on the souls of those around you.
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