Tag: power

It must be alienating to feel like one is on probation in one’s own country, that one’s presence is subject to the approval of white people. And it must be a familiar feeling, especially these days, for everyone who is not white (and male).

It occurred to me that white people rarely if ever experience questions like this, about their very legitimacy. Do they belong? Is having more of them around good for America?

On his podcast, Vox’s Ezra Klein recently interviewed Yale psychologist Jennifer Richeson, noting she “has done pioneering work on the way perceptions of demographic threat and change affect people’s political opinions, voting behavior, and ideas about themselves.”

One of Richeson’s key insights is that reminders of coming demographic decline – the notion that America will soon become a “majority minority” country, with people of color outnumbering whites – not only cause increased hostility toward other racial groups (which might be expected) but also push white people in a conservative direction on seemingly unrelated policy questions like tax rates and oil drilling.

Indeed, as research on “priming” shows, simply discussing race at all kicks up those effects among the racially dominant group. Or to put it more bluntly, in the US context: White people really don’t like being called white people. They don’t like being reminded that they are white people, part of a group with discernible boundaries, shared interests, and shared responsibilities.

After all, one of the benefits of being in the dominant demographic and cultural group is that you are allowed to simply be a person, a blank slate upon which you can write your own individual story. You have no baggage but what you choose.

The power and privilege that come along with that – being the base model, a person with no asterisk – are invisible to many white men. Simply calling them “white people,” much less questioning the behavior or beliefs of white people, drags that power and privilege into the open.

White men bridle at the notion of being part of a tribe or engaging in identity politics. (Ahem.) Alone among social groups, they are allowed the illusion that they have only their own bespoke identity, that they are pure freethinkers, citizens, unburdened and uninfluenced by collective baggage (unique and precious “snowflakes,” if you will).

No one else is allowed to think that – at least not for long, before they are reminded again that they are, in the eyes of their country, little more than their identity, their asterisk. No one else gets to pretend their politics are free of identity.

White people do. But simply saying the words “white people” is a direct attack on that illusion. It identifies, i.e., creates (or rather, exposes) an identity, a group with shared characteristics and interests. It raises questions (and doubts) about the group’s standing and power relative to other groups. It illuminates all that hidden baggage. Lots of white people really hate that.

Source: American white people really hate being called “white people” – Vox

I updated “Design is Tested at the Edges: Intersectionality, The Social Model of Disability, and Design for Real Life ” with selections from “Basic Principles for Equity Literacy”.

The Direct Confrontation Principle: There is no path to equity that does not involve a direct confrontation with inequity. There is no path to racial equity that does not involve a direct confrontation with interpersonal, institutional, and structural racism. “Equity” approaches that fail to directly confront inequity play a significant role in sustaining inequity.

The “Poverty of Culture” Principle: Inequities are primarily power and privilege problems, not primarily cultural problems. Equity requires power and privilege solutions, not just cultural solutions. Frameworks that attend to diversity purely in vague cultural terms, like the “culture of poverty,” are no threat to inequity.

The Prioritization Principle: Each policy and practice decision should be examined through the question, “How will this impact the most marginalized members of our community?” Equity is about prioritizing their interests.

The “Fix Injustice, Not Kids” Principle: Educational outcome disparities are not the result of deficiencies in marginalized communities’ cultures, mindsets, or grittiness, but rather of inequities. Equity initiatives focus, not on fixing marginalized people, but on fixing the conditions that marginalize people.

Source: Basic Principles for Equity Literacy

Critical pedagogy is a philosophy that “applies the tenets of critical social theory to the educational arena and takes on the task of examining how schools reproduce inequality and injustice” (Beck, 2005).

Critical pedagogy as developed by critical literacy elements in the classroom invites and encourages students to question issues of power. These issues include multiple indicators: socioeconomic status (SES), race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and age (Cervetti, Pardales, & Damico, 2001).

Source: What is “Critical Pedagogy”? | W. Ian O’Byrne

much education research takes the form of collecting data on people’s ability to learn nonsense.

where scientific theory conflicts strongly with the basic empathic responses of ordinary people, history (and Jane Goodall) would suggest that it’s a good idea to pay attention to those conflicts.

There’s an Orwellian quality to the spectacle of cognitive scientists reasoning from their own inability to meaningfully address the differences in our children to a finding that our children don’t have meaningful differences after all.

What needs to be noted here is how the claim that LEARNING STYLES DON’T EXIST has morphed directly and explicitly into a claim about lower intelligence in certain children.

The question, then, is this: is there a scientific reason we should assume every difference is a deficit until proven otherwise?

Or is there a historical reason that difference was framed as deficit from the beginning, intentionally, to perpetuate and justify a hierarchical society of winners and losers?

So before we uncritically accept the debunkers’ claim that the scientific research supports a One-Style-Fits-All approach to instruction, we should stop and ask ourselves: “Who invented that One Style? Who succeeds by it, and who fails? What historical power structures does it emanate from, and whose power does it perpetuate and reproduce?

The logic goes like this:

What “works?” Direct instruction. How do we know? Tests. Who designs the tests? The same people who have always designed the tests.

Source: Science / Fiction — Carol Black

Millions of people use social media to navigate identities too complex for single analytical frames like race, class, gender and sexuality to fully capture. We are messy and complicated and we seem to want our digital tools to reflect that. But, intersectionality was never intended to only describe lived experiences. Intersectionality was to be an account of power as much as it was an account of identities (Crenshaw 1991). Here, the potential of intersectionality to understand the reproduction of unequal power relations have not yet been fully realized.

In brief, intersectionality is one of those rare social theories to combine precision of theoretical mechanisms with broadness of method (Lykke 2011). That combination has served intersectionality’s diffusion through social sciences and humanities quite well. It has also created tensions about what intersectionality really means and how best to measure it (or, if it should be measured at all!).

In the black feminist tradition, examining the points of various structural processes where they most numerously manifest is a way to isolate the form and function of those processes in ways that can be obscured when we study them up the privilege hierarchy (Hill Collins 2000). Essentially, no one knows best the motion of the ocean than the fish that must fight the current to swim upstream. I study fish that swim upstream.

A roaming autodidact is a self-motivated, able learner that is simultaneously embedded in technocratic futures and disembedded from place, culture, history, and markets. The roaming autodidact is almost always conceived as western, white, educated and male. As a result of designing for the roaming autodidact, we end up with a platform that understands learners as white and male, measuring learners’ task efficiencies against an unarticulated norm of western male whiteness. It is not an affirmative exclusion of poor students or bilingual learners or black students or older students, but it need not be affirmative to be effective. Looking across this literature, our imagined educational futures are a lot like science fiction movies: there’s a conspicuous absence of brown people and women.

Intersectionality theories or methods have not yet been fully realized in the study of digitality and education, a critical institutional axis of social stratification.

The privatization of critical institutional arrangements like higher education is a serious challenge for digital sociology’s focus on studying inequalities. And, to keep expenditures low and profits high, faculty at for-profit colleges largely do not have a research imperative and physical campuses have few unstructured spaces for observation. Financial imperatives of privatized public goods shifts institutional responsibility from knowledge production to market penetration, privileging market competition over social inquiry.

Social media platforms afforded students who are rendered invisible in analysis because of privatization and intellectual enclosure to speak their experiences into legibility.

However, to move beyond giving voice to uncovering the ways in which power and privilege are often unmarked in social science research (Bonnett 1996; Zuberi 2008) intersectionality demands that we examine process and power relations. That is part of intersectionality’s political imperative.

Intersectionality theory argues that narrative methods de-centers privilege in rational actor theories. Therefore, I conceptualized the social media data I collected as autoethnographies rather than content. While content can absolutely be analyzed as narratives, they are most often analyzed as quantitative abstractions or without attention to qualitative differences in the power that frame content. In contrast, ethnographic data’s imperative is to situate meaning among various relational dynamics like power, privilege and social location (Ellis and Bochner 2006). Autoethnographies resist hegemonic sensemaking paradigms by centering self-authored texts and the co-construction of meaning. These theoretical imperatives, mechanisms and methodological choices are consistent with black cyberfeminism’s focus on intersectionality and unique characteristics of digitized social processes.

Source: Black Cyberfeminism: Intersectionality, Institutions and Digital Sociology by Tressie McMillan Cottom :: SSRN