A Dialogue on Multiculturalism and Democratic Culture

Author(s): Kelly Estrada and Peter McLaren

Source: Educational Researcher, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Apr., 1993), pp. 27-33
Published by: American Educational Research Association
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-RESEARCH
NEWS
L
A

AND

Dialogue
and

Editorsnote:Thefollowingarticleis in the
formof a dialoguebetweenPeterMcLaren,
directorof the Centerfor Educationaland
CulturalStudiesat MiamiUniversity,and
Kelly Estrada,a doctoralstudent at the
Universityof California,LosAngeles.They
address multiculturalismfrom a critical
researchand remindeducational
perspective
ers that researchis alwaysaboutpolitical
representation.
Theyarguethat we might
createdthepeoplewe
have,unintentionally,
(The
dialogue
began at the 1992
study.
Annual Meetingin San Francisco.)
Kelly Estrada: Peter, in your article
"Critical Pedagogy: Constructing an
Arch of Social Dreaming and a Doorway to Hope," you wrote that critical
educators "have both revealed and
unsettled the ways in which the inequities of power and privilege that exist in classrooms-with respect to the
acquisition and distribution of knowledge and the institutional practices
which support them-are an extension
of the conditions which prevail in the
larger society" [1992, p. 10]. While
critical educators such as yourself,
Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Kathleen
Weiler, and Michael Apple continue to
write about the inequalities and injustices experienced by public school
students as a result of society's failure
to critically examine oppressive social
practices, we have yet to realize any
fundamentalchanges in the state of our
nation's public school system. At this
historical juncture, with the present
state of the nation's economy and with
the focus shifted away from educational
issues and on to maintainingjobs in the
face of canceled defense contracts,what
in your view are some of the most
pressing struggles facing educators?
PeterMcLaren:Kelly, I believe we are
living in dangerous times. Dangerous,
but not untouched by hope. What we
are witnessing at this present moment

OMMENT.
on

Multiculturalism

Democratic

Culture

in our history is an attemptby the New

Right to establish its own version of
multiculturalism-what I refer to as corporate multiculturalism-thateffectively
disguises its allegianceto the ideological
imperativesof consumer society: that of
subordinatinglocal knowledges and interests and interculturalalliancesto the
promotional logic of the capitalist
marketplace. Our subjectivities and
identities are assaulted by and virtually saturated with a consumer ethics
such that our very desires are in the
process of what French philosopher
Gilles Deleuze calls "reterritorialization"-an ideological process that
couples our identity as citizens with
neocolonialist universals such that
democracyand capitalismare viewed as
almost synonymous. Whereasmany see
a deep-laid antagonism between
democracy and capitalism, our society
fails to challenge oppression in its many
guises because oppression has become
so institutionalized that we fail to
recognize it. IrisMarionYoung calls our
attention to the "five faces" of oppression in the United States: exploitation,
marginalization, cultural imperialism,
powerlessness, and violence. Such
structural oppression is not always
perpetuated by an identifiable agent of
oppression-it does not necessarily
refer to the conscioustyrannyof one individual or group over another. Consequently, it is harder to identify
[Young, 1992, pp. 174-195].
KE: What is education's role in addressing these circumstances?How are
we, as educators, to transform institutional practices that actually support
and reinforce compliant, passive consumerism? One location in need of
critical examination is the classroom.
We need to engage in a focused
scrutiny of the nature of classroom
practices.Do they work to fostercritical,
politically conscious, independent
APRIL 1993

thinkers, or do they instead produce

complacent, obedient consumers? We
can look at the pervasiveness of the
strict recitation "script" [Guiterrez,
1992] which allows the teacher to be
cast in the role of ultimate authoritycoupled with materials such as basal
"literature" materials and culturally
and historically incomplete social
studies texts-for evidence to support
either the former or the latter conceptualization of education, and I believe
we are faced with conclusions which
reinforce the latter.
All students who are served by the
public school system are exposed to this
type of socialization for passive consumerism, yet students from nonmajoritybackgroundsstand to suffer more
from this type of educationalinteraction
than do those from majority backgrounds. Theireducationaltransactions
occur in a social and cultural context
that rewardsimages associatedwith the
White majority, an interactional zone
where differenceor deviation from this
image implies a deficit. Few persons in
control of the information exchange
which takes place in classrooms, from
textbook publishers to classroom
teachers, activelyengage students in activities and discussions that provide
positive counterdefinitionsto those portrayed in the curriculum and in the
larger social and cultural context.
While the classroom context constitutes one location from which it is
possible to view practices which contribute to the institutional marginalization of ethnic minorities, many forces
outside of the public school system
shape and reinforcedeficitideologies of
multiculturalism.
PM: I believe that, as a nation, we are
further sliding into a state of historical
amnesia. Our identities are being refigured at the level of our unconscious
by forms of ideological production

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linked to postmodern media literacies

shaped by multinationalarenas of corporate power. If what Neil Postman
and others say is true, that television
impedes cognitive development from
the "egocentric"or "narcissistic"stage
to the reciprocalstage of mature object
relations, then you are going to see the
infantilization of the viewer and the
construction of what Piaget calls a
"sociocentric" cognitive formation accompanied by a childlike vulnerability
to propaganda from right-wing discourses that play on our fears of the
Other-the Willie Hortons, the L.A.
rioters, the "wildings"-and that require racistpracticesunder the guise of
law and order to be forcefully employed. Not to mention the hegemonic
masculine sexuality that underwrites
the depiction of most relationships between men and women.
KE: Peter, I think we have to stop
and ask ourselves whose interests are
being served by present-day schooling
practices. Even a cursory examination
of the structural nature of our educational system reveals that democracy
and equality are the ideal, not the reality. Differentstudents have differentaccess to the academicresourcesavailable
at any one school site. Students are
presumed to have different abilities
with respect to academiccontent and as
a result are "tracked" into classes
which are deemed appropriatefor them
[Oakes, 1985]. While many studies of
this kind of academic tracking differ,
one conclusion emerges clearly: "No
groupof studentshas beenfoundto benefit
consistentlyfrom beingin a homogeneous
group" [Oakes, 1985, p. 7, emphasis
added].
When statistical figures are broken
out by racialor ethnic origin, they result
time and again in the same distribution:
disproportionatelylarge percentages of
White students in high-track classes
and disproportionately high percentages of non-Whitestudents in low-track
classes. Thus, our system of racial and
social inequality perpetuates itself
through a public educational system
which masquerades under the guise of
equality.
PM: Our public school system is
under a massive assault by New Right
constituencies who are calling for a virtual dismantlingof publicschooling and
its replacement by private schooling.
And this is occurring at a time when
cultural and ethnic studies programs
are under criticismand when racialten-

sions are increasing dramatically in

public schools across the country. At
the same time, minority voices are
beginning to challenge monocultural
America as they are sounded forcefully from the margins. This polyphonic
chorus of "other" voices makes Anglos
in particular very anxious, and often
they react to demands by oppressed
groups for greater social and economic
justice as a wanton attack on Western
cultureby untutored and unruly special

As oppositional agents,
teachers and students
need to displace
dominant knowledges
that oppress, that
tyrannize, that
infantilize- such
knowledges should not
be replaced but refused
and transformed.

interest groups who are trying to

undermine the cornerstonesof Western
civilization and virtue. Anglos
somehow see themselves as free of
ethnicity, as the true custodians of the
host country and keepers of civilityand
rationality, and oppressed groups are
viewed as parasiticon the nation-state.
Whiteness, in this instance,becomes an
invisible marker against which the
Other is constituted and judged. This
degrading attitude towards oppressed
groups reciprocallybinds Anglos to an
image of themselves as rulers, as
managers, as inheritors of the Empire.
We are now witnessing the collapse of
the American Empire and the intellectual and cultural emergence of the
Third World-Asia, Africa, and Latin
America.And we have too many politicians with border-guard mentalities.
New Right mavens have attempted to
coordinate efforts in conservative
political, educational, and cultural
circles to define for this country a narrow, monolithicvision of what it means
to be a citizen, an educated citizen. I
believe it's a crippling vision, a
28

neocolonialist vision that needs to be

confronted by what Michel Foucault
calls "the insurrection of subjugated
knowledges"--knowledges forged in
the suffering of oppressed, immiserated, and peripheralized peoples.
What D. Emily Hicks, Renato Rosaldo,
Gloria Anzalduia, Luisa Valenzuela,
Henry Giroux, and others are telling us
is that bordersare sites of interlinguistic
play and liminal identities where many
realities come together. There exists a
"borderization"of the United States in
which borders are widening, creating
culturalsites of instability-sites that are
not Anglo and not not-Anglo; not
Chicano and not not-Chicano. La
fronterais a place where cultures can
collide creatively or destructively.
Teachers need to stress how these
border cultures can co-articulatemeaning creativelysuch that the identities of
those who "cross over" are enriched
and challenged. But identities can also
be denuded and deracinated-and we
need to work againstforms of linguistic,
cultural, and institutional coercion.
Kelly, I'm interested in knowing how,
as a minority female, you experience
currentthinkingabout multiculturalism?
How do you see the debates over diversity and difference from your own
politics of location?
KE: Peter, I think one of the major
concerns is that the language in which
we discuss our issues is a language
permeated with ideas, beliefs, values,
and positionings that have been formulated by the dominant majority.
Terms such as multiculturalism,
diversity, ethnicity,race(and more) have been
defined and discussed by White,
upper-middle-class,male academicians
and politicians. Women and minorities
who engage in this discourse must do
so using a language formed by those
who, historicallyand currently,occupy
power positions in our society. Women
minoritiesare particularlyvulnerableto
this type of oppression through contextualized, historical"languaging"asthey
must speak with the voices of those
who, for the most part, have not shared
and cannot even imagine their experiences of domination, subjugation,
devaluation, and dismissal.
PM: Anglo-Americansare really anxious about the stabilityof contemporary
Western civilization. And part of this
nervousness stems from xenophobia
and a willed scholarly indifference to
how they have constructed the Other
through both researchpracticesand the

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popular imagination. I agree that subjects.As oppositionalagents,teachers

through dominant discourses-or what and students need to displace dominant knowledges that oppress, that
you refer to as cultural narrativesthose who occupy privileged positions tyrannize, that infantilize-such knowlin our society forge a universalized, edges should not be uncritically resanitized, and naturalized "we" that placed but refused and transformed.
prevents the "they" from speaking for We also need to imagine possible
themselves. Minority discourses and worlds, create new languages, new
rhetorics threaten to unsettle, destabi- modes of sociality, new institutional
lize, and in some instances subvert the and social practices.
"archival" knowledge of the Western
KE: Peter, although I agree that the
academy-empirical culture's cabinetof process of transformationbegins with
facts. StandardEnglish is the language imagining possible new worlds and
of such archival knowledge, and the creating new languages, I also am conEnglish Only movement is a means to stantly beset with the urge to push
keep the "they" domesticated and beyond the intellectualization of
marginalized. It is a language that transformative social practice to exhistoricallyhas been aimed'at disciplin- amine the enactment of such practices.
ing the disruptive voices of the Other. We must keep in mind that those pracA critical multiculturalism argues that tices which currentlyoperate to disemwe need multiple languages of power both females, minorities, and
resistance-many insurgent languages low- to mid-incomewage earners do so
on basic subsistencelevels such as earnof criticalresearch around which new
forms of agency can be constructed.We ing a living, paying the rent, and takconstruct our narratives of identity ing care of the children.
As a single working mother with two
through difference, but the critical
multiculturalist position understands children, I can appreciatethe obstacles
difference as more than self-evident that women confront each day in the
physical or culturaldistinctions;rather, struggle to transcend oppressive social
difference brings perspectives that of- practices. As the sole wage earner for
fer valid counterpositionsand dialogical my family, I live in constant fear that
perspectives on culture. Oppositional one of my childrenwill become ill or informs of difference constructed in the jured at school because there is no one
margins of the dominant culture resist other than myself to call should this octheir construction in the nonmargins. cur. If I am called away from work,
I'm thinking here of AfricanAmericans there is no second salaryto compensate
strugglingfor teaching styles suitableto for the deduction from my own, no one
African American ways of knowing, of other than myself to stay at home and
teachers involved in building feminist care for a sick child, losing a day's (or
pedagogies, or Latino groups who are perhaps many days') pay. However, as
fighting for bilingual education pro- a mother, my first priority is my chilgrams and who are under siege at the dren and I put their health and safety
moment by the English Only move- above all else, and so the end result is
that in the event of an illness or injury,
ment and a White settler mentality.
Teachers and students are currently I will stay home from work to be with
menaced by a view of corporatecitizen- my child.
What is most telling from this examship that assumes we possess selfhomoauthenticating, self-regatding,
ple is that the capitalistsystem does not
geneous, seamless, and coherent iden- reward such behavior, demonstrated
tities. This bourgeois assumption that for the most part by its female workers,
we have stable, self-possessed identities even in two-parent families. Further,
misses the insight that subjectivity is our enactment of or compliance with
constructed as part of decentered and these practices constitutes our own
shifting positionalities linked to discur- complicity in a system of domination
sive arrangements that advantage cer- and oppression. We take on an identitain groups of people. Our identitiesare ty that reinforcesdefinitionsconstituted
structured in material relations of by the capitalist, elitist, corporate conpower and privilege. We aren't just an sciousness. In order to resist such comensemble of mentalisticobservationsor plicity, one must constantly struggle to
a cluster of organized perceptions; we redefine and maintain a "resistant"
are not just inner thought or thought identity. This process of redefining
connected to some transcendental socially and culturallyconstituted idensource-we are historicized, bounded tities has direct implications for a
APRIL 1993

reconceptualizationof what constitutes

transformative teaching practices.
PM: Yes, I agree that identity formation must be emphasized as processual
and as an ongoing process but only as
long as identities are also emphasized
as historicaland relational. In trying to
develop a frameworkfor the construction of oppositional teaching practices,
I believe we need to dispense with the
notion of having "authentic" identities
and instead consider identity as
hyphenated or hybridized and subjects
as always multiple and contradictory
and temporarily sutured or stitched
together. Identities that are not simply
vehicles for the production of sameness, for the reproduction of racial
andpurity,but identitiesthat
authenticity
can enable us to cross borders and experience differentculturallocations.We
lack an adequate language to talk about
race or to theorizesubjectivityand identity and their relationship to cultural
determination, one that escapes the
binarisms of the dominant discourse of
male versus female, rich versus poor,
White versus Black.
KE:Peter, I agree that we, as teachers
and educational theorists, lack an adequate language to talk about race and
identity;however, as everyday citizens,
interacting in a social and cultural setting permeatedwith racismand sexism,
we have more than adequate "resources" to talk about race and identity.
What I consider to be the most significant, most depressing aspect of our existing language, especially with regard
to our students, is that it is overwhelmingly negative and exploitative. Few
positive, affirmativediscourses on race,
ethnic identity, multiculturalism,
and/or gender have made their way into mainstream schooling or, for that
matter, into mainstreamsociety, except
as tokenisms (e.g., Cinco de Mayo Day,
Martin Luther King Day).
Languageis a generativetool, capable
of expressing and shaping our beliefs
and values and affecting the way we
view others. Yet language is also a
"power" tool, giving voice to conceptions of reality held by one group of
people and suppressing alternativevisions and experiences of other realities.
Our technological advances in the processing and dissemination of information, and the sensationalistictendencies
of the media, have effectively resulted
in the peripheralization of minority
viewpoints with the exception of a few
selected divergences from the existing

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Anglocentric worldview. Women minorities are especially impacted by this

suppression, hailing from two locations
of socioculturaldominationand oppression. This positioning has had a fundamental impact on the way women of
color express their vision of reality
when counteringthe dominant conception of reality.
PM: The African American cultural
critic bell hooks reminds us of the
dangers for Blackwomen within White
supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Intellectuallife for Blackwomen is placed
"off limits" as they continue to be
depicted as a global servant-as a body
"that is organic, closer to nature,
animalistic, primitive" [hooks & West,
1991, p. 153]. They are taught to be
selfless "service workers"-to assume
"multipurpose caretaker roles"-and
this includes Black female corporate
professional and service workers.
Kelly, I believe that as intellectuals,
teachers need to avoid those bourgeois
models of intellectual life that Cornel
West and bell hooks criticize so eloquently. In other words, we should
resist conceivingof intellectuallife in individualistic or elitist terms, but rather
adopt a position of "insurgency."
Theory must not be kept ghettoized in
the ivory tower but must become part
of a practical politics, even if for the
forseeable future the gains seem to be
rather small, given the current impropitious politicalclimate. We need to
engage in collective and communal
forms of resistance and refusal. (Of
course, communal activist work is
easier for men, as bell hooks notes,
because society has granted men from
all class locations more autonomy than
women to remove themselves from
family and community life and reenter
when they choose to do so.) The insurgency model of intellectual practice
entails interrogationof Euro-American
regimes of truth, structuralconstraints,
and social hierarchiesand a struggle for
new, innovative forms of social life that
promote social justice.
KE:In keeping with the model of insurgency you have described, I believe
an additional concern in our struggle
for new, innovative forms of social life
is that we need to focus our attention
on the students and their role in collective forms of resistance to and redefinition of the status quo. Consider that
there are approximately 1,300,000
[Development Associates, 1984] to
3,600,000 [O'Malley, 1981] language

minority or non-English-speakingchildren enrolled in our schools. There are

much largernumbersof childrenwhose
home culture is different from that of
the dominantAnglo culturerepresented
in most mainstream school curricula.
Yet there are presently only 3% Latino
teachers and 8% African American
teachers in the public school system.
A fundamentalbarrierto social transformation in the public school context
lies in this social and cultural opposition which exists between teachers and
students, produced through the same
types of mechanisms which operate in
the larger social context. Fewer numbers of minoritystudents graduatefrom
high school, fewer still go on to college,
and even fewer graduate and become
public school teachers. Larger and
largernumbersof minoritystudents are
being socialized in an institutionalcontext which reflects values, beliefs, and
experiences not their own.
This sociocultural "skewing" towards a White, majority population
operates at many levels within the
educationalhierarchy,from teaching to
research about teaching and schooling.
Many of the most visible and vocal
critical educators are White males.
Criticalpedagogicaldiscoursederives in
part from an academictraditioncreated
and shaped by Western European and
Anglo-American thinkers. While we
cannqt deny that this work has contributed substantiallyto a praxisfor interrogating the dominant world view,
the most vehement criticism of critical
pedagogy is that it really is all about
White males speaking for everybody
else.
PM: As a White male whose early
years were working class and whose
adolescence and years as a young adult
were middle class, I need to consider
my own positionality as an intellectual
and social agent, to interrogatemy own
location in terms of the privilege it affords me. But I reserve the right to be
part of a collective struggle for liberation. In taking part in such a struggle,
however, all of us must be wary of
speaking for others. Speaking to others
and in solidarity with others does not
exempt me from takinginto accountmy
own situatedness within the bourgeois
academy. As difficult as it is, I do
believe that intellectualscan and should
make a differencethrough an active engagement in counter-hegemonicstruggles of resistance to racism, sexism,
homophobia, and capitalist exploita30

tion in its many insidious formations.

A politics of insurgency and transformation needs sincere commitment
through a decolonization of our dominant ideologies but also through concrete praxis in our daily lives as
educators, as parents, as siblings, as
lovers. Of course, we will make mistakes along the way, as well as discover
inconsistencies and contradictions in
our thinking and behavior.
KE: I think that experience of differential relations within a society and
peoples' means for expressingthose experiences is what creates culturaldiversity. In a hierarchicalsociety such as our
own, those in power promote and validate their own experienceof social and
cultural reality at the expense of all
other groups. The result of this suppression of alternativeviews of reality
from differentialexperiences of it is the
conviction that people in the United
States lack a culture, that they are
essentially culture-less.
Contraryto this popular conviction,
the United States does have a culture,
though unequal relations among diverse populations within this country
create a smokescreen through which
only high relief images of what constitutes the dominant U.S. culture
emerges. It is as if one only sees the
tops of mountain peaks and an occasional valley, with all the rest of the
cultural landscape obscured. What we
are left with is an impression of U.S.
culture which is often called "popular"
culture, the most highly visible, most
recognizable view of the United States
manufacturedand disseminated in the
media. Although this popular vision of
U.S. culture is a limited one, it often
serves as a point of entry for many nonmainstream images and can provide a
location for articulating alternative
social realities.
Few educational settings take advantage of the opportunity popular culture
provides for deconstructing and redefining the Anglocentric version of U.S.
culture. How can we, as criticaleducators, draw upon this social and cultural
resource in order to provide students
with opportunities for expressing and
shaping alternative realities?
PM: Popular culture is one of the
most importantsites for building a curriculum, because it's the terrain that
often cuts across class differences
(although certainformationsof popular
culture are linked to class, race, and
gender formations)and it is something

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that young people take seriously in

forming their identities. It's the primary
terrainwhere young people affectively
invest in and make identificationswith
particularviewpoints, styles of dress,
and physical appearanceand behavior.
Take rap, for instance. Teachers who
are not familiarwith rap and the controversiessurroundingit and who work
with students are really missing an opportunity not just for making teaching
"relevant" but for providing a context
for critiquing White supremacist consumer culture in order not simply to
resist it but to transform it in the interests of greater social justice. I think
rap is a form of pedagogy, of teaching,
of testifying, a form of communicating
solidarity in the face of the tyranny of
racism. But that doesn't mean rap is
ideologically innocent. Black feminist
criticisms of the sexism in rap music
need to be addressed. But I want to
make an even broader point. We generally are unaware of how media shape
our desires and identities; we don't
seem concerned as educators about
what the media is reporting and perhaps more importantly, what it is failing to report. Let's take the issue of environmental racism. Publications such
as Extra[1992]point out that 60%of the
Black and Latino populations in this
country live in communities with one
or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites.
This is also true for about 50% of all
Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native
Americans. Nearly 8 million inner-city
children are sufferingfrom lead poisoning. Reproductive cancer among the
Navajo is 17 times the nationalaverage.
And why isn't this being reported in
the media? Why, in fact, have government agencies tried to divert public attention away from these issues? Race
and not just class is at issue here. Sixtyeight percent of Black children from
families earning less than $6,000 annually have lead poisoning compared
to 36%of White children. These aren't
really issues the media wants to treat
and we have to ask ourselves why this
is the case. During the L.A. uprising,
for instance, news coverage focused
mainly on the White victims of beatings-but what about Blackand Latino
victims? There were 25 African Americans killed, 19 Latinos, and 10 Anglos.
Racism and social injustice were issues
that were largely ignored. Television
coverage of minority communities has
dwindled-especially since the Reaganera deregulation of broadcasting agen-

cies. The media have become a spectacle for the general public.
KE: Broadcast news is a genre of
popular programming subject to the
same kinds of constraints as situation
comedies and soap operas, chief among
them to sell the products of the advertisers. Objectivity and subject breadth
does not operate in the selection of
news stories; producers and editors
choose those stories that will hold the
attention of the viewers through to the
commercials.Forthe first time in a long
time, Los Angeleans (and people across
the United States) saw parts of the city
and the daily existence of the residents
of these areas which is mostly ignored
by the media. In addition, viewers had
opportunities to witness people and
events which contradictedthe popular
conceptions of African Americans and
Latinos:cooperation, self-sacrifice,and
community pride.
However, it is the popular narrative
that people want to and do believe
about diverse communities in the
United States which is proliferated
through the media, especially through
the news media. What is especially
lacking in the popular consciousness is
both accurate knowledge of our
culturally diverse U.S. population and
the desire to become aware of the
positive aspects of that diversity.
PM: I'm against the conservative
multiculturalists' call for a common
culture, which has become an alllicensing excuse for privileging the
culture of whiteness and maleness, as
I'm sure you're aware. The term multihas been appropriated-very
culturalism
skillfully-by the New Right, and that's
why I choose to call my position critical
multiculturalismor resistancemulticulturalism.And I think that the following
reasons provide some justification for
doing so. For instance, conservative or
corporate multiculturalism:
* refuses to treatwhiteness as a form
of ethnicity and in doing so posits
whiteness as an invisible norm by
which other ethnicities are judged (as
seen in the work of Diane Ravitch, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lynn V. B.
Cheney, Chester Finn, and others);
* uses the term diversityto cover up
the ideology of assimilation that
undergirds their position;
* reduces ethnic groups to "add
ons" to the dominant culture (before
you can be "added on," you must first
adopt a consensual view of culture and
learn to accept the essentially EuroAPRIL 1993

American patriarchal norms of the

"host" country);
* adopts the position that English
should be the only officiallanguage (its
monolingual and White supremacist
ideology is virulently opposed to bilingual education programs);
* posits standardsof achievementfor
all youth that are premised on the
cultural capital of the Anglo middle
class;
* fails to interrogate high-status
knowledge, knowledge that is deemed
of most value in White, middle-class
America and to which the educational
system is geared (it also fails to question the interests that such knowledge
serves);
* ignores the ways in which dominant regimes of discourse and social
and culturalpractices are implicated in
global dominance and inscribed in
racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic
assumptions.
Resistance multiculturalism is different. It refuses to see culture as nonconflictual, harmonious, and consensual. Democracy is understood as
busy-it's not seamless, smooth, or
always in a relativestate of politicaland
cultural equilibrium. Resistance multiculturalism doesn't see diversity itself
as a goal but rather argues that diversity must be affirmedwithin a politics of
cultural criticismand a commitment to
social justice. It must be attentive to the
Differenceis always
notion of difference.
a product of history, culture, power,
and ideology. Multiculturalismwithout
a transformative political agenda can
just be another form of accommodation
to the larger social order. The answer
is not, in the present politicalreality, to
eliminate all forms of capitalism, even
though we recognize the problems and
perils of both command economics and
free enterprise. While we struggle
against a marketsociety (as opposed to
a society with markets) and work to
bring about economic justice, we can,
as Cornel West suggests, promote nonmarket values such as love, care,
justice, equality, sacrifice, communal
accountability, and moral responsibility to disadvantaged groups.
KE: I absolutely agree with your
assertion that multiculturalismwithout
a transformativepoliticalagenda would
result in accommodation to the larger
social order. I believe we can already
see this happening in many school settings which are attempting to integrate
a multiculturalaspect into the existing

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curriculumwithout the kind of critical

examinationand redefinitionthat needs
to accompany such curricularreform.
As I stated above, such reform often
results in a form of (mostly)inadvertent
tokenism. Few attemptsare made to rethink the pedagogical structures within which a multiculturalcurriculum is
placed. These structuresreflectrelations
of power and knowledge distribution
which validate middle- and uppermiddle-class Anglo-American norms
and values. In this context, multiculturalism takes on the definition of the
Other or "the rest of" the population.
In this light, the present issue of multiculturalism, as we have discussed it in
this article, has many implications for
rethinking the idea of curriculum.
PM: Those of us working in the area
of curriculum need to move beyond
simply the tabloid reportage surrounding the politicalcorrectnessdebate and
take the issue of difference seriously
and challenge the dismissive undercutting of difference by the conservative
multiculturalists. We need to move
beyond admitting one or two Latin
American or African American books
into the canon of great works, as some
liberal multiculturalists recommend.
Rather, we need to move on a number
of initiatives:
* Legitimize multiple (and often
competing) traditions of knowledge.
* Invite teachers to interrogate the
discursive presuppositions that inform
their curriculumpractices with respect
to race, class, gender, and sexual orientation and encourage them to unsettle
their complacency with respect to
Eurocentrism.
* Enlist teachers in a project of
displacing what is erroneously portrayed as the inherent superiority of
whiteness and Western rationality.
* Help students recognize that
groups are differentiallysituated in the
production of Western high-status
knowledge and encouragethem to raise
questions about who is represented in
the official knowledge that makes up
the curriculum.Forinstance, are certain
groups stigmatized because they are
associated with the Third World? Are
critics of Western culture dismissed as
anti-American?
* Ask tough questions about the
role of teaching and research. For
instance, are teachers or student complicitous with the oppression of culturally different groups when they
refuse to interrogatepopular films and

TV shows that reinforcetheir subaltern which cast participantsas "informants"

status?
or "natives" and which create false
* Invite teachers and students to af- dichotomies between the uninformed
firm the voices of the oppressed; they "subject" and the "objective" analyst.
need to give the marginalized and the
A criticalapproachto the researchena
deavor
should engage participantsin a
powerless
preferential option.
Students should be encouraged to pro- dialecticalprocess of reflexivityand, ulduce their own alternativeand opposi- timately, transformation. What is imtional readings of curriculum content. portantto considerfromthis perspective
* Encourage teachers to recognize is that the researcher is truly a particithe importance of creating spaces for pant,subjectto the same kinds of biases
the multiplicityof voices in their class- and flawed interpretationsthat "informants" are subject to. This notion of
participation goes beyond most traditional implementations of qualitative
methodology, which dictatethat the researcherboth observe and interactwith
those present in the research context,
Those of us
questioning and analyzing their beliefs
and normativepractices,while keeping
working in
intact her own interpretiveframework
the area of curriculum of analysis. A critical approach to
research incorporatesthe perspectives
need to take the issue
and frames of interpretationpresent on
of difference seriously
both sides of the observational "lens."
Researchers must engage in an exand challenge the
amination and critique their own
dismissive undercutting assumptions and beliefs regarding the
practices being studied.
of difference by the
What is needed in a criticalapproach
to
qualitative research is the establishconservative
ment of the type of praxis among parmulticulturalists.
ticipants-both observerand observedthat critical theory describes, one in
which the formalistic(e.g., theoretical)
definitions which motivate observational research are called into question
and viewed as subjective and perspecrooms and building a dialogical tival. We need to rethinkand scrutinize
pedagogy in which subjects see others our own methods of placing the observer in the role of the sole authority
as subjects and not as objects.
KE: Peter, I feel that our discussion capable of rendering the definitive inof a "critical"multiculturalismhas im- terpretation.Further,as researchers,we
portant contributionsto make towards need to deconstruct the positions we
rethinking the nature of research con- construct within the academy.
PM: Kelly, I agree that there must be
ducted in the classroom. The recent
shift in educationalresearchaway from an emphasis on questioning the as(solely) quantitative studies towards sumptions of the researcher. For inmore qualitative,context-basedresearch stance, Patricia Ticineto Clough has
is timely, considering the highly com- recently advanced a brilliantargument
plex nature of present-day schooling. with reference to the master narrative
However, it is especially critical for underlying empirical social science-a
those working with issues concerning narrative which traditionally informs
ethnic minorities to question and to at- educational research [1992].According
tempt to move beyond traditional ap- to Clough, the narrativerealism of the
proaches to the study of social/cultural empirical sciences legitimates the
phenomena. Both you, in the research unified masculine subject as the
you conducted for Schoolingas a Ritual authority of factual representations of
Performance[1986], and I, in my own empiricalreality. This can be seen, Kelresearchon the processes of literacyac- ly, in many ethnographic studies in
quisition among Latino students, have which the researcher assumes a misreacted against using qualitativemeth- sionary frame of reference in which he
odologies and theoretical perspectives or she presumes to speakforthe research
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subjects. This perspective can be linked

to a modernisttraditionin anthropology
as well as to Germanromanticism.Specifically,I think educationalresearchers
need to engage in a more sustained and
serious conversationwith new developments in social science research, something Joe Kincheloe points out in
Teachersas Researchers[1992].
By new developments, I'm referring
here to the current impact of literary
studies on educational research-what
you could call a mixture of the literary
and the sociopolitical.I'm also referring
to the influence that the Frankfurt
School theorists are enjoying, as well as
continental social theorists such as
Michel Foucault, JacquesDerrida, Jean
Baudrillard,JuliaKristeva,Luce Irigaray,
Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jacques
Lacan. And U.S. social theorists and
criticssuch as bell hooks, Cornel West,
MichelleWallace,PatriciaWilliams,and
Gloria Anzaldita. Not to mention
feminist researchers such as Sandra
Harding, Nancy Harstock, and Donna
Haraway. We need an ecumenical approach that works towards a genuine
common ground of dialogue while
avoiding a false synthesis of disparate
theoretical approaches.
An encouraging sign is that researchers are beginning to move away from
the spectatortheory of knowledges and
the ide'efixe of antiseptic objectivityand
to understand how both research practices and the knowledge produced intertextuallyby both the researcher and
the research participantsare discursive
strategies that are never exempt from
the vagaries of rhetoric and are ineluctably entangled within largerstructures
of power and privilege. I am not talking about treatingknowledge as a realm
of generalized undecidability,revoking
standards of argumentative consistency, or appealing to the nonavailability
of truth-claims in social criticism. Nor
am I suggesting we abandon the idea
of value, validity, or modes of truthconditional entailment but that we reject transcendent, universal qualities as
verificationfor all evaluation.Evaluative
criteria are always historically embedded and culturally specific.
As Johannes Fabian[1983]points out
in his important work Time and the
Other:How AnthropologyMakesIts Object, research on human subjects is
always an amalgam of science and
politics, and Americananthropology in
particular is responsible for negating
the coeval existence of the subject and

object of its discourse. Our encounters

with other cultures are not simply taxonomic, as structuralistssuch as LeviStrauss would have us believe. When
we deny the existence of shared time
between the researcherand the Other,
then we tend to lend an aura of objectivity to the process of distancing ourselves from those whom we research;
as researchers,our rationalizingdenominators that allow us to assume the
stance of neutral and objective observers enable us to treat our own personal experiences as researchers as a
medium for universal categories of
knowledge. Hence, we align truth with
the knower-the researcher-and we
place ignorance and unconscious behavior on the side of the Other. As Fabian notes, we need to be aware of the
controlling cultural mode of our own
research. The agreements and governing conventions that produce our
"objects" of research, as well as our
relationshipwith our researchsubjects-often the "racial Other"-become the
artifacts of the epistemes and methodologies that both shape and result
from the direction of our theorizing. If
you take a look at the history of
Western attempts to understand "outsiders," you will see how often-in
everything from travel writing, to
to
structuralist
literature,
of "othernotion
anthropology-the
ness" and "difference" has been used
as a means of culturally annexing
"those people" for the benefit of exalting and monumentalizing "us." The
history of these researchpractices-and
they are by no means over-is informed
by the most hideous forms of racism,
sexism, and violence-especiallydirected
towards people of color, women, and
the poor. But research and scholarship
need not be invasive and oppressive
but can be revelatory and liberating.
Why this hasn't been the case with
respect to a great deal of research on
non-Whitepopulationsby White researchers is telling.
We need to understand that all
research is constituted by specific
distributionsof persons, places, events,
and perspectives in relation to structures and practices of power. For instance, feminist criticism has drawn
serious attention to the role that sexual
difference and self-division play in the
construction of the identity of the
researcher. We can no longer ignore
these issues. We need also to remind
ourselves, as PatriciaTicineto Clough
APRIL 1993

advises us, that research is always

about practices of reading and writing-in short, about the politics of representation. In this way we can begin
to understand how we have unintentionally createdthe people we study. In
a multiculturalsociety such as ours, this
is a challenge we must not take lightly.

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as researchers.
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Kincheloe,J. (1992).Teachers
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track:
HowschoolsstrucOakes,J. (1985).Keeping
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KELLY
ESTRADA
is a doctoralstudentat the
GraduateSchoolof Education,University
of Californiaat LosAngeles, 405 Hilgard
Ave., LosAngeles,CA 90024.Herresearch
interestsincludemulticultural
education
and
the social context of literacy. PETER
is director,Centerfor Education
MCLAREN
and CulturalStudies,RenownedScholarin-Residenceat Miami University,School
of EducationandAlliedProfessions,Miami
Universityof Ohio,Oxford,OH45056.He
specializes in curriculum theory, the
sociologyand anthropologyof education,
and culturalstudies.

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