The articles, “Critical Literacy for Xenophobia: A Wake-UP
Call” and “Making people Our Policy: Grounding Literacy in Lives” address
issues that are significant to students of all backgrounds, but in particular
students of color. It is no aberration that students of color continue to be
marginalized and struggle with instruction, as they are in a learning
environment that doesn't not promote or resemble them as well as their
experience. It isn't peculiar that, laws are made in parts of the United States
that promote the same attitudes that allowed Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson
become practice. It is in some ways a mere formality that students in Arizona
are being forced to coalesce to Eurocentric curricula, and that those we deem
capable of making and upholding the law, and also protecting and serving, have
been given free rein to detain and mistreat anyone they feel is an immigrant in
Arizona. Unearthing these issues expose the depth of white privilege and
refusal to release power, control and a damning of equitable due process in and
out of the law. Critical literacy is not what lawmakers in Arizona (SB 1070, HB
2281) rolled out in 2010 to address what they deem an attack on American
freedom and pedagogy. To say that learning about oneself, culture and people,
rather that culturally appropriating and acclimatizing to American norms and culture
is anti-American is simply false.
As educators that are trying to deconstruct widespread
notions of power and privilege, whilst yet constructing solidarity and
self-worth, it is improbably more difficult without the support of legal
proceedings, and a general societal movement towards equity. On a more succinct
level, it is made more difficult by the school districts, school proprietors
and the generic standards/curriculum. In addition, we not only deconstruct, we
must also demystify the ideologies that permeate student’s minds about
themselves and about the rightness of whiteness. As long as students see
themselves, their intersections, and their experiences as a deficit, they will
lack the desire (not ability) to do well in the current education system. Yes,
that was a blanketed statement, but it is one that reveals the alienated experiences
of students of color in the United States. Also, it affirms the concept that
education is a one size fits all paradigms that can only be fixed with
standardized testing, and a consistent diatribe of Eurocentricism. One may
question, well how was it working before? It wasn't. That’s exactly why we’re
here as a society, identifying, analyzing and grappling with the failures of
the system of education presently. The pedagogy of the oppressed is salient
through the purposeful choice to ignore non-Eurocentric curricula, and is
accentuated by the hegemonous narrative of the media.
Media portrayal continues to ostracize people of color, and
students are not the least to be affected by what they see as addressed in popular
culture. Students can’t continue to contrive ideas of themselves through the
lens of corporate media, since it doesn't seem to have them or their lived
experience in mind. Knowing all that we do about the systems of oppression that
put students at a disadvantage in their learning, how then can we as educators
create a space that deconstructs, demystifies, rebuilds, resembles and affirms
the students that we teach on a day to day basis? Also, what tools do we use to
tackle the issue of politics, media, and curriculum that are stacked up against
students of color? How does one address an educator who is considered “highly
qualified according to the language of the policy,” about the social contexts
of urban youth of color?
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