It is the first day of the semester and we walk into the classroom of our undergraduate multicultural education courses. We turn to face our classes of predominantly Euro-American students and feel the tensions produced by our tenuous positions as racialized indigenous teacher educators who again are confronting white privilege in our often “well-meaning” and “colorblind” pre-service teachers.’ How many accommodations will we have to make? How much of our soul will we be selling? Whose language will we be using? Furthermore, we ask ourselves: What approaches do we use and for what end? What books must we take out?
As racialized indigenous peoples of the Western hemisphere (Troy, a Tuscarora- Saponi and Sofia, of the Quechua-speaking peoples of Ecuador and a Chicana in the Southwest), our intimate classroom struggles suggest a great dissonance we encounter with the field called multicultural education. This field ultimately speaks to students of dominant culture - be they conservative, liberal, or radical. Whether “multicultural” approaches and texts are about theorizing whiteness and oppression, or learning about the “Other” through the “Other,” what we choose is ultimately a cautious negotiation between our anticipation of white mainstream students’ assumptions of the world and a resulting pedagogy that will not leave us stripped of our dignity. This process of accommodation often leaves us, like our ancestors before us, vulnerable to militaristic, albeit verbal, attacks in the process of challenging the pervasive though often illusive power of white privilege.
Troy Richardson and Sofia Villenas in Educational Theory
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