Kindle Notes & Highlights
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June 27 - June 29, 2022
those groups seeking to eliminate race-conscious admissions fail to critique meaningfully the underlying conditions that contribute to discrimination and reproduce racial inequality.
color-blind solutions have the effect of making race invisible and would invariably undermine the capacity to unmask and disrupt the privileges accompanying Whiteness.
any discourse that selectively attempts to press a racial group, in this case Asian Americans, into the service of advancing color-blind solutions should raise serious questions about the long-term purposes and goals of the organizations promoting those discourses.
the deployment of such misleading discourses not only artificially constrains action, but also conceals how Asian American interests diverge from the anti-affirmative action movement, distorting Asian Americans’ commitment to access and equity in higher education.
Blind faith and over-investment in pursuing those well-worn paths to achieving individual success, including obtaining credentials from elite institutions, are more likely to steer Asian Americans toward accepting, rather than challenging, White privilege and domination as being the natural order of things which cannot be disturbed.
Asian Americans will need more people to exercise proud defiance and “to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to dare to be interesting.”
Hiphop feminist work encourages feminist modes of critical analysis, political education, community institution building, and empowerment of women and girls (Peoples, 2008); promotes sexual agency and admits the pleasures of patriarchy, advancing a poststructuralist view of Black feminism, a complex and sometimes contradictory feminism for the gray areas of life (Morgan, 1999); emphasizes the strategic quest of artists, activists, and scholars to transform the perpetuation of oppressive popular media representations of young women and girls of color by using “the language and oppositional
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Figure 1. Racialized, classed, and gendered stereotypes read onto Black women and girls. Cloud image created by Stacey Robinson. Copyright by Rusiana Newsom/Shutterstock, standard license. Reproduced with permission.
Students participate in constructing the school climate from the moment they walk through the door. How they see themselves reflected (or not) in the material and how they experience (or don’t) a welcoming reception into their learning environment, both the classroom and the school in general, all influence whether a young woman responds to others in a way that she believes is respectful. Because children co-create their learning environments—they either choose to abide by stated rules or work in ways to circumvent them, discreetly or overtly—they are active players in their own socialization,
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Staples (2012) calls “literate witnessing”: compassionate, empathetic acts of sense-making and assessment of experience. These acts occur in relation to shared experiences, testimonials, or perspectives and are incited by participation in purposeful communal reading, writing, speaking, and listening that attests to truth, strong emotions, hardship, or negating behavior as a part of affirmation, healing, and self-recovery.
Edward Said and the Coloniality of Power
historicize forms of knowledge that otherwise appear to be universal. In doing so, we affirm the historical conditioning of all forms of knowing.
knowing the other is part of exercising social control over them by defining their history, representing them, and speaking for them. In other instances, we recognize that “history is of no matter, especially when force is available” (Bové, 2005, p. 403).
Writing someone else’s history then becomes tantamount to force.
knowledge is also a potential site for epistemic disobedience, or using knowledge to cut against the grain of accepted and universalized forms of knowing.
the act of knowing is no longer an innocent moment but one that must be posed as a problem in order to decolonize education. In other words, knowing becomes a politically generative way of acting on the world as an agent in that world.
“coloniality of power” (Lugones, 2008; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2000; Quijano, 2000) refers to the continuation of the geopolitics of colonial relations, which remains a stubborn ideology and institutional arrangement. That is, colonialism morphs into its current form as a cultural relation of power between the West and non-Western traditions, Europeans and non-Europeans, or Whites and non-Whites. As a contestation that happens within knowledge production, the struggle between colonizer and colonized continues in a form that pivots on how places, nations, and people are made or
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uptake, education becomes a crucial network of institutional forms as we investigate colonialism.
political interests of knowledge production and the colonizer’s will to distort,
are not simply misrepresentations since they never intended to represent it correctly in the first place.
Knowledge production is central to the colonizer’s will to dominate and the colonized’s counter-will to resist this domination (Said, 2001).
that it is necessary to transform relationships of power through a knowledge project.
The vitriol surrounding Mexican American studies (MAS) in Arizona reveals precisely the high stakes involved in shifting the orientation toward knowledge, even when the change shows clear improvements for MAS student achievement.
the pen is the sword that enables the colonizer to cut the colonized a thousand times.
similar process of cultural resistance is necessary in order to unseat colonialism in education.
colonizers’ power to stay often comes with staying power for their knowledge system, influencing social life through the creation of a myth system long after its beginnings.
In the sociology of education, culture of poverty and deprivation arguments are problematic in the way they have given culture its autonomy from social structures and blamed communities of color for their own educational lot in life (Leonardo, 2015).
knowledge as a political force as it becomes a tool for educating the world about social groups who are embodiments of national anxieties that need to be controlled or stamped out.
both groups are disciplined by a regime of knowledge that confirms a mythical norm that is the White child.
The formalism behind organized knowledge allows ideological state apparatuses to create recognized bodies of information that all students should know, such as the curriculum (Althusser, 1971; Leonardo, 2010).
ideologically White scholarship paints people of color into a corner.
Imagine an ignorance that resists. Imagine an ignorance that fights back. Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly— not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge. (p. 13; italics in original)
indivisibility of the power/knowledge ratio that implicates knowledge’s complicity with power rather than the separation of knowledge from power in more modernist accounts.
urban classrooms are products of internal colonialism (Barrera, Muñoz, & Ornelas, 1972; Blauner, 2001; Muñoz, 2007; Tejeda, Espinoza, & Gutiérrez, 2003), where American educational ideals inform Eurocentric colonial narratives that create, reproduce, and maintain social inequity (Apple, 2004; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Brayboy, Castagno, & Maughan, 2007).
The transformation approach to integrating ethnic content changes the structure of curricula entirely and the perspective of the course is taught from various frames of reference, highlighting the vantage points of people of color
the social action approach incorporates the new structure that is inclusive of subaltern perspectives and engages students in the process of making decisions about the curriculum and taking action to help solve social issues (pp. 25–26).
The social action approach encourages students to think from, with, and alongside ethnic/racial groups within their communities, where members are subjects of their own stories ...
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Ethnic studies aims to counter the distorted teaching of American history and the normed “American” experience in U.S. schools through a lens that highlights the epistemic diversity of the nation
critiques subtractive schooling strategies that require students to shed their cultural identities in order to fulfill Eurocentric, colonial agendas of assimilation
Colonial epistemologies within U.S. schools foster competition, individualism, internalized oppression, and often reprodu...
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a constant questioning of the relations of power in constructing knowledge is necessary to accept and honor the counter-epistemologies of communities of color.
site to equip him with epistemological tools to contest and dismantle the dominant perspectives on his community, particularly “undocumented Raza, U.S.-born Raza, and other minorities” (p. 68) but also to reimagine new ways of being and knowing.
views students as co-constructors and co-producers of knowledge
developed a teaching pipeline to recruit more Filipina/o American teachers to decolonize curriculum and pedagogy.
highlight the potential these courses offer as a catalyst for decolonial interventions in U.S. schools, thereby expanding educators’ understanding of colonialism and race.
The challenge is to ensure that connections are made between curricula and students’ everyday lives.
learning does not end with knowledge acquisition in the classroom but continues with student engagement in continual processes of action and reflection, particularly within the students’ local communities.
When we transition from Western ways of knowing to decolonized knowledge systems, knowledge is no longer something to own or occupy but is relational, applicable to our lived experiences, and crucial to our survival.
taking actions toward community and self-determination, ultimately transforming one’s way of being and participating in the world. Knowledge, then, becomes actionable or “actional” in Fanon’s sense (see Leonardo, 2017). What is to be done with these new perspectives?
While the school board did not comply with the group’s demands, students “gained an increased awareness of injustice … [and] became more confident that they could make some kind of difference” (p. 247). The student actions in Tucson also had national implications.
