I tried to make clear at the end of the message that I was not writing
mainly in the moral domain, where matters of guilt and blame or good and
bad are the primary issues (though I do concern myself with these). I was
trying to make an argument about the realistic contexts of policy ...
degrees of difference, of bias, of effectiveness, and likely relative rates
of change.
In the US, long experience with the basic liberal desire for a
'color-blind' world has led more and more educators to a different
position: differences are real no matter if they are also social
constructions, no matter if they are to some degree merely learned biases
of perception and interpretation of others. I have written in other times
and places about the need to deconstruct simplistic categories of
otherness; but the facts of difference need some accounting, even if a more
sophisticated one than our usual terminology of gender/class/culture
provides. More than an accounting, there is a need to question our response
to difference.
Just as it is quite true, as Phil Graham and others have said, that
differences between the dominant and other groups tend to get interpreted
as deficiencies (if not as innate inferiorities) by those aligned with the
dominant culture, so it is also true, I believe, that every movement toward
simple equality or the neutralization of difference disguises the
reinscription of the dominant culture's values and practices. Even with the
best intentions.
The problem lies in all cases with the dominant culture itself. Dominant
cultures are not just cultures; they are always also systems for the
perpetuation of their dominance. Mandarin culture in China, Brahmin culture
in India, and no doubt their analogues in all large-scale social systems
where dominance organizes diversity, show these features. Patriarchal
cultures, so pervasive as to seem almost inevitable until recent critiques,
show them as well. Dominant cultures must be forced to change, and can be
forced to change only by relentless criticism, changes in the distribution
of material resources, and frequently by meeting violence with violence (I
regret to say).
I took small examples: respect for dialect diversity in schools,
alternatives to the dominant self-presentation of science in curricula; but
they are examples of much larger phenomena. In the context of the larger
analysis, the policy goal cannot be either to assimilate everyone to the
dominant culture, or to deny the reality or significance of differences
that are inscribed by dominant practices and magnified by dominant
valuations. It must be to force the dominant culture to concede and change,
to shift from being a dominant culture to being one culture among many. It
does not matter that the differences that loom so large in dominant
perceptions and valuations are often exaggerated and stereotyped.
Deconstructing those stereotypes can be a tool to help change dominant
culture, but it is a means, not an end.
Nec Carthago, nec differentia, at Roma delenda est.
JAY.
[Philological note: Carthago delenda est. -- Cato, Roman leader calling for
the destruction of Rome's Other and adversary, Carthage. So, "It is neither
Carthage, nor difference, but Rome that must be destroyed." ]
[Hermeneutic note: "Rome" stands here for the principle of cultural
domination, for those aspects of a dominant cultural system which serve
primarily to reinscribe its dominance.]
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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