Table Of ContentCULTURE AND POWER IN THE CLASSROOM
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Series in Critical Narrative
Donaldo Macedo, Series Editor
University of Massachusetts Boston
Now in Print
The Hegemony of English
by Donaldo Macedo, Bessie Dendrinos, and
Panayota Gounari (2003)
Letters from Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda
New Updated Edition
by Noam Chomsky (2004)
Pedagogy of Indignation
by Paulo Freire (2004)
Howard Zinn on Democratic Education
by Howard Zinn, with Donaldo Macedo (2005)
How Children Learn: Getting Beyond the Deficit Myth
by Terese Fayden (2005)
The Globalization of Racism
edited by Donaldo Macedo and Panayota Gounari (2006)
Daring to Dream: Toward a Pedagogy of the Unfinished
by Paulo Freire (2007)
Class in Culture
by Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh (2008)
Dear Paulo: Letters from Those Who Dare Teach
by Sonia Nieto (2008)
Uncommon Sense from the Writings of Howard Zinn (2008) Paulo Freire and the Curriculum
by Georgios Grollios (2009)
Freedom at Work: Language, Professional, and Intellectual Development in Schools
by María E. Torres-Guzmán with Ruth Swinney (2009)
The Latinization of U.S. Schools: Successful Teaching and Learning in Shifting Cultural Contexts
by Jason G. Irizarry (2011)
Culture and Power in the Classroom: Educational Foundations for the Schooling of Bicultural Students
by Antonia Darder (2011)
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THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
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Culture and Power in the Classroom
Educational Foundations for the Schooling of Bicultural Students
Antonia Darder
With a Foreword by Sonia Nieto
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First published 2012 by Paradigm Publishers
Published 2016 by Routledge
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711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2012, Taylor & Francis.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
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and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Darder, Antonia.
Culture and power in the classroom : educational foundations for the schooling of bicultural students /
Antonia Darder ; with a foreword by Sonia Nieto. — The twentieth anniversary ed.
p. cm. — (Series in critical narrative)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61205-069-0 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61205-070-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Multicultural education—United States. 2. Educational sociology—United States. 3. Educational
equalization—United States. 4. Teaching. I. Title.
LC1099.3.D37 2012
370.1170973—dc23
2011022075
Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.
ISBN 13:978-1-61205-069-0 (hbk)
ISBN 13:978-1-61205-070-6 (pbk)
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This book is dedicated to Mr. Horace Viditoe, A. P. Gonzalez, Carol Brunson Day, and Barbara Richardson—
brilliant educators of color who believed in me when I could barely believe in myself.
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Contents
Foreword—Unapologetic Biculturalism: Beyond the Politics of Tolerance, by Donaldo Macedo
Foreword by Sonia Nieto
Acknowledgments
Author's Preface
Chapter 1 The Problem with Traditional American Pedagogy and Practice
Chapter 2 The Link between Culture and Power
Chapter 3 A Critical Theory of Cultural Democracy
Chapter 4 Testing, Inequality, and the Brain
Chapter 5 The Foundation for a Critical Bicultural Pedagogy
Chapter 6 Creating the Conditions for Cultural Democracy in the Classroom
Chapter 7 Forging a Critical Bicultural Praxis: Stories from the Field
Epilogue by Paulo Freire (original preface, 1991)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
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Fore word
Unapologetic Biculturalism
Beyond the Politics of Tolerance
Donaldo Macedo
Series Editor, University of Massachusetts–Boston
At a 1987 CONFERENCE ON THE WORKS OF PAULO FREIRE, THE PRESENCE OF FREIRE himself reenergized the spirit and
the vision of the progressive educators gathered that day at the University of California, Irvine, all of whom
were adherents to Freire’s unshakable belief that no matter how difficult, change is possible. one voice in
particular called out to me as it passionately and fearlessly denounced patriarchy and white supremacy—the
voice of Antonia Darder. I still vividly remember sensing her bottled-up energy, her long-submerged voice that
was fighting its way to the surface.
Paulo’s presence at the conference brought renewed to hope to progressive educators such as Tom Wilson,
Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Antonia Darder, Anaida Colon-Muniz, and me, a far-flung group that had
coalesced around the conviction that it was imperative to fight against the right-wing attacks that were
shaping the educational reform debate in the 1980s. As Antonia Darder wrote about that time, “liberal
influences [were being] suffocated by a politically mean-spirited neo-conservative movement, which began to
gain momentum and prominence in the 1980’s through the support of former Secretary of Education William
Bennett.” This reactionary movement was fast appropriating the educational narrative with its call for “the
common utilization of behavioral objectives and, more recently, standardization of knowledge as a framework
for the curriculum development and implementation.” This call constituted a spirited defense of Western
tradition as exemplified by Allan Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, which had “tapped the
[conservative] and the elitists’ collective nerve” (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1988, p. 177).
Although Darder’s unrelenting interrogations during her interventions at the Freire conference made some
people uncomfortable, her comments presaged the current obscene “Arizonafication” of America, as Latinas/os
and other non-white ethnic groups are subjected to incessant attacks by ultra-right conservative politicians and
talking heads who blame the ills of U.S. society—from rising crime rates to economic insecurity—on the
presence of undocumented immigrants. They conveniently overlook the fact that these same immigrants
constitute the backbone of our economy in the service and agricultural sectors from California to the Carolinas.
By stirring people’s fear and normalizing xenophobia, the antiimmigrant movement made racial profiling legal
in Arizona, and twenty-three other states are moving quickly to pass similarly draconian laws to contain the
invasion of what former presidential candidate David Duke referred to as “hordes of dusty third world
peoples.” Duke went on to say that “with each passing hour our economic well-being, cultural heritage,
freedom, and racial roots are being battered into oblivion” (cited in Macedo & Bartolomé, 1999, p. 12).
Antonia Darder’s new edition of Culture and Power in the Classroom is particularly timely given the
insidious xenophobia that is now shaping our society and the efforts underway at many U.S. higher education
institutions to close down ethnic studies. Meanwhile, the penal system hustles to build more jails to house
those who have been ethnically profiled and excluded. This book provides educators with critical
counterhegemonic tools to deconstruct the dominant ideology’s defense of the tradition espoused by Allan
Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, and other conservative scholars. In a pointed attack on multicultural education, they
argue that multicultural education should be abandoned in favor of a reemphasis on content that is rooted in
our “common cultural” background and knowledge. The brilliance of Darder’s proposals lies in her courage to
indict both conservative and liberal educators who fail to recognize that the “common culture” considers the
term descriptive rather than anthropological and political. As Aronowitz and Giroux (1988), write, “[The
common culture’s] meaning is fixed in the past, and its essence is that it provides the public with a common
referent for communication and exchange” (p. 187). Darder astutely problematizes the notion of common
culture as nothing less than a veiled information-banking model based on a “selective selection” of the features
of Western cultures that “dismisses the notion that culture has any determinate relation to the practices of
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power and politics or is largely defined as part of an ongoing struggle to move history, experience, knowledge,
and the meaning of everyday life in one’s own terms” (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1988, p. 186). Her critique goes
beyond a denunciation of the dominant fossilized encyclopedia of mainstream pedagogy that selectively leaves
out other important cultural facts. She is equally critical of liberal multicultural education that, for all its
promises, ends up celebrating an equally fossilized pedagogy that is devoid of any discussion of power
relations that show how ideology “is present in capitalist social relationships based on class interests that in
practice negate autonomy, despite adherence to the doctrine of individualism [where] . . . capitalism’s
individualist ideological underpinnings simultaneously emphasize and deny the individual’s subjectivity.”
Thus, Darder correctly interrogates the expansion of so-called multicultural education, with its rapid growth of
textbooks ostensibly designed to teach racial and cultural tolerance. what these educational texts in fact do is
hide the asymmetrical distribution of power and cultural capital through a form of paternalism that promises a
dose of tolerance to the “other”—in other words, “I will tolerate you.” Missing from this message is a sense of
mutual respect and even racial and cultural solidarity. As David Theo Goldberg (1993) argues, tolerance
“presupposes that its object is morally repugnant, that it really needs to be reformed, that is, altered” (p. 6.).
Culture and Power in the Classroom represents an alternative to the often facile liberal call for multicultural
celebration and cultural tolerance. Darder truly understands the pernicious racism contained in the call for
tolerance of different racial and ethnic groups by some white and non-white liberals. Such calls represent a
thin veil behind which they hide their racism and classism, thus putting liberals in a compromising racial and
class position. while calling for racial tolerance, a paternalistic term, liberals often maintain the privilege that is
complicit with the dominant ideology. In other words, the call for tolerance never questions the asymmetrical
power relations contained in the class structure that give them their privilege in the first place. Hence, many
liberals, white and non-white alike, willingly call and work for cultural tolerance and diversity but are
reluctant to confront issues of inequality, power, ethics, race, and ethnicity in a way that could actually lead to
the kind of concrete social transformation that would make society more democratic and humane.
For all the celebration of cultural diversity among “good liberals,” bicultural individuals are not really
accepted as fully American, especially if they are nonwhite. Even my use of the term “dominant white ethnic
group” jolts people who consider themselves apolitical. The very imposition of assimilation by the dominant
ideology is replete with the false promises and limitations inherent in the myth that only by giving up your
culture and language and assimilating can you become fully American. This hegemonic ideology is so
successful that even its victims see it as natural and commonsensical. This ideological acceptance is normalized
into the English language, which requires hyphenation when referring to certain non-white cultural and ethnic
groups. Hence, it is common usage in the English language to have African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans,
Asian-Americans, among other hyphenated Americans. Likewise, currently it would be considered odd to refer
to European-Americans, German-Americans, British-Americans, and Belgian-Americans, although in the past,
European groups that were considered less human, like the Irish, were also hyphenated. The limitations are
demonstrated by the fact that currently only people of white European ancestry enjoy the privilege of been
called American (no matter how recently they immigrated to the United States) without the use of
hyphenation as a marker of unwashed ethnicity. Thus, the dominant ideology that imposes a blind assimilation
also requires that we become immune to the dehumanization implicated in the use of hyphenation which, in
turn, coerces the implementation of a cruel cultural and ethnic ranking that shapes and normalizes inequality.
Cultural hegemony is so successfully complete that even the victims of the ranking see the labels as natural
and that it is commonsensical to characterize themselves as such. To do otherwise and forcefully claim to be
American without the hyphenated cultural and ethnic qualifiers can be regarded by the dominant white ethnic
group as either not necessary or unnecessarily making a political statement—a political statement that does not
sit well with most conservatives and “good liberals.” For example, even though President Obama is half White,
he cannot not escape the hyphenation imposition, which in turn leads to incessant questions about his place of
birth, the status of his citizenship, and his religious affiliation. Moreover, despite his being president of the
United States, a sizable segment of the society expects him to constantly demonstrate his patriotism.
Congressman Darrell Issa from California accuses Obama of being “one of the most corrupt presidents in
modern times,” and none other than Sarah Palin quipped that the president apologizes for America, that he
sees “America [as] the problem . . . [rather than] as the solution.”
Given these contradistinctions, Antonia Darder insists that teachers need to be able to teach more than two
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