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Re/Presentation of Asian Americans in 50 States’ K–12 U.S. History Standards
Abstract
This study is a content analysis of K–12 U.S. history curriculum standards from 50 states regarding curricular re/presentation of Asian Americans. The guiding research questions are as follows: (1) What is the frequency of Asian American content covered in K–12 U.S. history standards from 50 states? (2) How do the standards depict Asian Americans in U.S. history? I analyzed U.S. history curriculum standards from all states using AsianCrit as a theoretical lens. The findings reveal that except for Japanese incarceration and anti-Asian immigration laws, Asian Americans are largely invisible in the state standards and, when included, they are primarily depicted as victims of nativist racism with a lack of civic agency as well as new immigrants with little contribution to nation-building. Being the first work to uncover curricular messages about Asian Americans across 50 states’ standards, this study presents a necessary empirical basis for disrupting curriculum violence.
... Too often, the Vietnam War is taught and remembered in the United States as exclusively an American tragedy, and Southeast Asian experiences of the war are neglected (Espiritu, 2014;Marciano, 2011;Pelaud, 2011;Vinh et al., 2018). Meanwhile, Southeast Asian refugees, when included in U.S. school curricula, are typically presented as desperate people who fled communism to find freedom and safety in the United States (An, , 2022. In this account, the aggressive role the United States played in generating the refugee exodus in the first place is elided (Espiritu, 2014;Palumbo-Liu, 1999). ...
... Yet the emphasis in these textbooks is on U.S. soldiers' suffering and does not extend to the suffering of soldiers or civilians of the United States' allies or enemies (Lachmann & Mitchell, 2014;Vinh et al., 2018). Meanwhile, research demonstrates that textbook accounts of Southeast Asian migration tend to depict the United States as a safe refuge for desperate people fleeing from communism while neglecting the U.S. role in generating the refugee exodus in the first place (An, , 2022. Such a decoupling of the war and the refugee crisis sends inaccurate messages to students that (a) the Vietnam War was only a moment of American sacrifice and deep loss and not a violent system that also spurred the death and displacement of Southeast Asians; and (b) the United States played no other role than rescuing and welcoming the displaced people (Espiritu, 2014). ...
Using critical refugee studies as a theoretical lens, I analyzed Southeast Asian refugee children’s literature to identify its pedagogical values and limitations for critical teaching about the Vietnam War. The findings suggest the children’s literature can help challenge the dominant narratives of the Vietnam War as exclusively an American tragedy and of the Southeast Asian refugees as simply helpless victims by centering Southeast Asian experiences of the war. Yet the children’s literature largely remained silent about the refugees’ complex personhood and the U.S. role as a violent aggressor generating the refugee crisis in the first place. The implications for teaching practice are suggested.
In 2021, Illinois became the first state in the United States to require that K-12 students learn about Asian American history. Illinois achieved this when lawmakers passed House Bill 376 (H.B. 376), colloquially known as the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (TEAACH) Act. H.B. 376 received praise for being the first legislation of its kind, and its passage inspired similar bills in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Given the bill’s influence, it is imperative to consider its language and utility. This critical policy analysis specifically investigates lawmakers’ employment of the term “Asian American.” The analysis ultimately argues that H.B. 376 is a necessary first step in breaking centuries of silence and dislocation for Asian Americans; however, the bill advances a social definition—or sociopolitical understanding—of “Asian American” that is potentially harmful.
This study conducts an in-depth analysis of the content in school history textbooks from East Africa, assessing the potential impact on socio-political stability in the region. Citing relevant research on multiperspectivity, the authors recognize the significant role power dynamics play in shaping historical narratives, suggesting that colonial structures and the dominance of majority groups continue to influence these dynamics. The paper provides a historical context by reviewing the educational systems in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. It particularly notes the challenges faced by the Muslim minority group, who often study in public schools managed by Christian entities or the government. These institutions predominantly use secular history textbooks, potentially biasing the learning experience. The researchers employed content analysis to qualitatively evaluate the data in these textbooks. The results indicated a biased presentation of historical events, overemphasizing the colonial and post-colonial periods while underrepresenting the influence of Islam in East Africa. The authors argue that this selective approach to history education might intensify existing socio-political tensions in the region. They advocate for a more balanced and inclusive representation of historical events in educational materials to foster a more equitable learning environment.
The increase in hostile behavior targeted at Asian people is a concern that school districts must address. To respond well, educators need to apply effective methods for preventing this problem. One of the ways they can achieve this goal is by implementing a culturally responsive approach to teaching. Another involves using effective anti-bullying programs. This paper provides details about the importance of implementing these strategies to prevent anti-Asian attacks. It also provides several examples of anti-Asian incidents that occurred shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic began. A few historical events involving the hostile treatment of Asian people are included to provide a context for understanding this problem.
Why is Korea forgotten in the U.S. imagination? Does curriculum contribute to this narrative? Research has been conducted on Asia’s overall representation, as well as China and Japan’s narrative in social studies curriculum. However, there has not been a large focus on Korea’s representation. This study used mixed methods to examine the top U.S. high school world history textbooks and analyze Korea’s place in the curriculum. In relationship to Said’s (1979) theory of Orientalism, findings revealed that Korea is marginalized and misrepresented to promote U.S. national interests in East Asia. Korea was characterized with the following themes in textbooks: Korea without a distinct society, Korean War as U.S. event, nuclear North Korea, and Korean innovations relating to U.S. cultural norms. This misses opportunities for students to learn the stories of South Korea’s success and the perspectives of Koreans in shaping their own history.
Drawing on their academic and experiential knowledge, the authors use AsianCrit as the guiding framework to present research-based strategies that promote anti-racist curriculum, pedagogy, and holistic development for Asian American students in U.S. K–12 schools.
Purpose
While Black teachers have engaged in racial justice-oriented teaching for centuries and the body of research on racial justice-oriented teachers is growing, very little is known about how teachers come to this work. The purpose of this paper is to focus on where and how Black teachers who teach with racial justice aims learned to engage in this work.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) study that was designed and analyzed using a critical race theory lens.
Findings
Participants learned to engage in racial justice-oriented teaching from their lived experience, particularly from their K-12 teachers who showed why this kind of teaching was necessary. Additionally, participants were highly skeptical of whether or not teacher education programs could prepare White preservice teachers to engage in this kind of teaching.
Originality/value
There is very little research focusing on how Black teachers come to engage in racial justice-oriented teaching, and even less that provides insight into how Black teachers perceive teacher education programs at predominantly White institutions (PWIs). This study sheds light on when, where and how Black teachers learn to teach with racial justice aims, and it also illuminates the experiences of Black teachers in PWI teacher education programs.
This chapter has two purposes. First, we review prior literature on narratives of Black history in K-12 textbooks, noting how Black history is constructed as curriculum, instruction, and a medium for Black students’ academic achievement and mental health. Second, we examine contemporary Black history textbooks from Canada and the United States. Using a theoretical framework of revisionist ontology, data analysis consists of exploring Black history within three curriculum orientations, epistemology, aesthetics, and intersectionality. We posit that the two countries have similar and divergent Black history textbooks that question racism and power influencing contemporary society. We argue that Black history curriculum is part of a larger goal of situating Black history as a space to humanize the Black experience. The chapter concludes with implications for history education and suggestions on how Black history can become more complex, diverse, and rigorous.
The construction of content standards has become one of the most politicized processes in K-12 public education as those who determine the value of knowledge(s) also shape who retains or gains political power (Placier, Walker, & Foster, 2002; Sleeter, 2002; Heilig, Brown, & Brown, 2012). In this study, authors examine the process of crafting secondary social studies standards in the state of Missouri. Findings indicate that common sense was deployed in three areas: committee selection, standards writing, and committee decorum. As a result, the standards generated through this process served to reify the neo-conservative/neoliberal status quo and failed to include reference to content beyond the scope of traditional knowledge, values, and intentions of conservative social studies. Authors also call for the adoption of a critical common sense which insists that the status quo of old-fashioned common sense is challenged.
Drawing from Black Critical Theory (BlackCrit) as a theoretical framework, this study examined how Afro-Latin@s are represented in U.S. world history textbooks alongside global narratives of race and anti-Black systemic racism that are fundamental to understanding Afro-Latin@s’ historical and contemporary lived experiences. Research findings revealed that world history textbooks confine Afro-Latin@s’ lived experiences and histories within two reductionist narratives: enslavement and mestizaje (race mixing). I argue that these representations perpetuate violence against Black bodies by reducing Afro-Latin@s to passive historical agents. Furthermore, Afro-Latin@ identities are circumscribed to fit within the neoliberal socio-political narrative of Latin America as a racial paradise.
Extant conceptions of patriotism in social studies curricula are centered upon blind allegiance to the state or a belief in ideals of a liberal democracy. Yet these conceptions fail to account for the complex racial experiences that mediate citizenship and civic action, especially for Black persons. In this article, we advance a theory of Black critical patriotism, which is rooted in the idea of personhood and, reciprocally, resistance to subpersonhood. Using Black critical patriotism as a theoretical framework, we examined how Black resistance, activism, and intellectual agency are represented in K–5 social studies standards across the United States. Findings revealed that Black critical patriotism is limited to temporal freedom movements and emphasizes individual acts of patriotism as opposed to sociopolitical traditions of Black collective resistance. Furthermore, Black critical patriotism was accredited to two historical figures, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, with their activism sanitized to fit within the master narrative of American progress. In light of our findings, we conclude with recommendations for elementary teachers to excavate standards in order to more accurately contextualize Black history and racialized citizenship. We also call for future research in social studies education that advances nuanced conceptions of racialized citizenship.
This article addresses how critical race theory can inform a critical race methodology in education. The authors challenge the intercentricity of racism with other forms of subordination and exposes deficit-informed research that silences and distorts epistemologies of people of color. Although social scientists tell stories under the guise of “objective” research, these stories actually uphold deficit, racialized notions about people of color. For the authors, a critical race methodology provides a tool to “counter” deficit storytelling. Specifically, a critical race methodology offers space to conduct and present research grounded in the experiences and knowledge of people of color. As they describe how they compose counter-stories, the authors discuss how the stories can be used as theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical tools to challenge racism, sexism, and classism and work toward social justice.
The recent deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and other Black males have generated new civil rights urgencies in Black communities and spirited academic discourses in higher education regarding the educational and social plight of Black males in America. Connecting the deaths of Black males to our lived experiences in the academy, we use a text messaging performative writing style to demonstrate how Black males are not only gunned down in the streets of America by police but also are metaphorically gunned down in the academy. That is to say, white colleagues and students attempt to use what we call the bullet of rejection, the bullet of silencing, and the bullet of disrespect to destroy us and our academic agenda. We conclude with a call to action for teacher education programs as a way to deepen their understanding of the racialized experiences of Black males in the academy and Black males in America.
Compared to other groups of color, Asian Americans and their perspectives have rarely been given attention in and of themselves in curriculum studies. This paper seeks to address the gap in the literature. It uses AsianCrit, a branch of critical race theory, as a theoretical lens to analyze and explicate common patterns across various states’ scripting of Asian American experience in their U.S. history standards. Informed by AsianCrit, the paper describes and troubles invisibility and consequent messages about Asian Americans and their experience in the story of the United States told from state U.S. history standards. The study suggest the benefit of AsianCrit as a theoretical, methodological tool to read and disrupt racism embedded in curriculum scripting of U.S. history. The study also adds a new knowledge to the long-held scholarship on inclusion and representation of historically marginalized groups in official school knowledge.
Foregrounding indigenous and feminist scholarship, this book analyzes militarization as an extension of colonialism from the late twentieth to the twenty-first century in Asia and the Pacific. The chapters theorize the effects of militarization across former and current territories of Japan and the United States, such as Guam, Okinawa, the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, and Korea, demonstrating that the relationship between militarization and colonial subordination—and their gendered and racialized processes—shapes and produces bodies of memory, knowledge, and resistance.
In this article, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Keffrelyn Brown, and Anthony Brown offer findings from a close textual analysis of how the Texas social studies standards address race, racism, and communities of color. Using the lens of critical race theory, the authors uncover the sometimes subtle ways that the standards can appear to adequately address race while at the same time marginalizing it-the "illusion of inclusion." Their study offers insight into the mechanisms of marginalization in standards and a model of how to closely analyze such standards, which, the authors argue, is increasingly important as the standards and accountability movements continue to grow in influence.
In this mixed-methods study, we use a postcolonial framework to investigate how state standards represent Indigenous histories and cultures. The research questions that guided this study include: (a) What is the frequency of Indigenous content (histories, cultures, current issues) covered in state-level U.S. history standards for K-12? (b) What is the difference between the frequency of inclusion of pre-1900 Indigenous content and post-1900 Indigenous content in U.S. history standards for K-12? (c) How do the standards depict Indigenous Peoples in U.S. history? U.S. history curriculum standards from all 50 states and the District of Columbia were analyzed using within-case analysis and quantified to represent each state’s depiction of Indigenous content. Findings reveal that standards overwhelmingly present Indigenous Peoples in a pre-1900 context and relegate the importance and presence of Indigenous Peoples to the distant past.
In direct contrast to Arizona’s criminalization of Ethnic Studies in Arizona, the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education unanimously adopted a resolution to support Ethnic Studies in their schools. As schools across the country begin to place Ethnic Studies courses on their master schedules, the lack of preparation and education to support effective Ethnic Studies teaching has emerged as a problem. Therefore, the central questions addressed in this paper are: What is Ethnic Studies pedagogy? and What are its implications for hiring and preparing K-12 teachers? This is a conceptual article that builds upon existing research studies to investigate the pedagogy of effective K-12 teachers of Ethnic Studies. From this literature, we identify several patterns in their pedagogy: culturally responsive pedagogy, community responsive pedagogy and teacher racial identity development. We then tease out these components, briefly reviewing the literature for each, leading to a synthesized definition of Ethnic Studies pedagogy. We conclude the paper by providing recommendations for practice and research in the interest of preparing and supporting effective Ethnic Studies teaching in K-12 classrooms.
This study explores how Asian American experiences are depicted in four high school U.S. history textbooks and four middle school U.S. history textbooks used in Virginia. The analytic framework was developed from the scholarship of collective memories and histories of immigration in Asian American studies. Content analysis of the textbooks suggests the overall narrative of Asian American history in U.S. history textbooks aligns with the grand narrative of American history, that is, the “story of progress.” This major storyline of Asian Americans – that they suffered from nativist racism and discrimination for a long time, overcame these obstacles through their hard work and efforts, and achieved the American dream – fits well into the master narrative of American progress, highlighting the process of their belonging to the U.S. as citizens. This storyline misrepresents the realities and diversity among Asian ethnic groups and their migration histories as well as the fluid nature of their identities across national borders. These findings stress the continued challenges in representing Asian American experiences as well as other marginalized groups in U.S. history textbooks.
Drawing from the historical lens of cultural memory, I examined the development of three social studies pre-service teachers’ African American history knowledge. The participants were engaged in a rigorous summer reading program dedicated to learning African American history. This qualitative case study examined both pre and post interpretations of African American history and discussed the varied ways the subject was interpreted by the pre-service teachers. The findings indicated that the reading program influenced African American
history knowledge both positively and negatively. The paper ends with recommendations for teacher educators interested in expanding the development of pre-service teachers’ knowledge of African American history.
Keywords: teacher thinking and knowledge; teacher education curriculum; theories of teaching
As Asian Americans join the legal academy in growing numbers, they change the face of the academy and challenge its traditional legal doctrines. The author announces an "Asian American Moment" in the legal academy and an opportunity to reverse the pattern of discrimination against Asian Americans. Traditional civil rights work and current critical race scholarship fail to address the unique issues for Asian Americans, including nativistic racism and the model minority myth. Space must be made in the legal academy for an Asian American Legal Scholarship and the narratives of Asian Americans. The author states that the rational-empirical mode is inadequate as a justification for narrative scholarship and argues for a post-structural basis for Asian American Legal Scholarship. He gives a few historical examples of how narrative can be used to effect social change. Finally, the author offers a framework for constructing an Asian American Legal Scholarship which acknowledges the tremendous diversity among the disempowered but which also recognizes that it is through solidarity that Asian Americans will gain the freedom to express their diversity.
This article details a national study of U.S. K–12 civics and government state-mandated standards, drawing specific attention to how Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty are represented. Utilizing QuantCrit methodologies informed by Tribal Critical Race Theory, this study makes visible colonial logics embedded within state civics and government standards that normalize the erasure of Indigenous nationhood, or that subtly and discursively erase Indigenous nationhood in other ways. Additional attention is also given to states that explicitly affirm contemporary Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty within the standards. By examining the ways state standards erase and/or affirm Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty, our hope is to support Indigenous and allied educators in their collective efforts to transform standards in their respective states to more responsibly reflect and support Indigenous nationhood and sovereignty.
How do children develop racial literacy? How do they make sense of and respond to the master narratives of race and racism? What role does elementary social studies education play in children’s racial literacy development? I explored these questions as a parent–researcher, inquiring how my child, an Asian American elementary student, develops racial literacy as she learns U.S. history at school. In the following, I first situate my inquiry within the literature on social studies education from a critical race perspective. Next, I delineate my positionality as a critical race motherscholar and the rationale for studying my own child. Last, I present the findings from my inquiry and discuss its implications for elementary social studies education.
War is central to U.S. immigration history. Yet too often that fact has been obscured by folktales that rhapsodize about the feel-good Ellis Island story: lured by the American Dream, strangers come to a promised land, put down roots, and triumph over adversity through industry, resolve, and pluck.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how frequently Latinxs and Latin Americans and/or topics related to these groups are represented in the Florida K-12 social studies standards and in what contexts. Drawing from critical race theory (CRT), this study further questions to what extent these contexts account for intersectionality among Latinxs and Latin Americans, challenge dominant narratives and stereotypes through counter-perspectives or reinforce whiteness as property.
Design/methodology/approach
All Florida social studies benchmarks relevant to Latinxs and/or Latin Americans were extracted and the frequency of representation and percentage of coverage were calculated. As a mixed-methods study, the context of representation was accounted for through a textual analysis of all extracted benchmarks which were grouped into emerging themes based on CRT tenets and principles.
Findings
Three contextual themes developed: political conflict/war, immigration and suppression or absence. Findings from this critical analysis of Florida social studies standards illuminate the continued racial and ethnic disparities in educational standards, curriculum and materials that leave some students and their histories out of the discourse.
Practical implications
Florida social studies standards require large-scale reform with input from Latinx communities and scholars to create an accurate and inclusive narrative and basis for social studies education.
Originality/value
This paper underscores the importance of culturally relevant and nuanced representations of Latinxs and Latin Americans in educational discourses.
Traditional narratives of U.S. history largely exclude Asian American histories, particularly at the elementary level. This qualitative case study examines how three Asian American elementary school teachers included Asian American histories in their social studies curriculum and scaffolded student understanding by sharing their own hybrid identities and experiences. The teachers (re)framed the purpose of the historical narrative and confronted the dominant narrative of Japanese American incarceration, while making connections between Japanese American incarceration and contemporary events. Through this work, the teachers illustrated the complexity of race in the United States and presented discrimination and racism as enduring issues worthy of discussion with young learners.
Citizenship education is considered a primary purpose for social studies education. However, in elementary classrooms, it is often limited to the memorization of mainstream civic knowledge and learning about a handful of American heroes. This qualitative study of three Asian American educators uses Asian Critical Race Theory to explore how the teachers drew from their own cultural and linguistic experiences to inform pedagogies of cultural citizenship education that interrogated what it means to be a citizen. By (re)defining the terms Asian American and American (citizen), the teachers enacted cultural citizenship education through the use of counternarratives and children’s literature that disrupted normative conceptualizations of citizen. Their work demonstrates how educators can present more inclusive depictions of civic identity, membership, and agency to young learners.
Purpose
How can we, as social studies methods instructors, assist future elementary teachers develop the knowledge and skills to engage young students in critical examinations of race and racism, and feel empowered to take action against racial oppression? In this article, I share one of many possible ways of “doing race” in elementary social studies teacher education.
Design/methodology/approach
First, I propose the topic of school segregation as a relevant and engaging inroad for elementary students to learn about race and racism. Then, I outline and problematize a dominant approach to teaching about school segregation in elementary classrooms and suggest an alternative approach informed by critical race theories. Next, I provide counterstories to dispel the dominant narrative of school segregation from an Asian critical race theory perspective. This is followed by an explanation of the lesson I teach in my elementary social studies methods course that utilizes these perspectives and counterstories.
Findings
By using Asian American counterstories of school segregation, the lesson seeks to assist preservice elementary teachers in disrupting the dominant teaching practices and discourses around school segregation and helps preservice teachers develop the critical understandings and competencies needed to successfully teach about race and racism in elementary classrooms.
Originality/value
I conclude by discussing the possibilities and implications of the lesson.
In this important book, Nicholas Hartlep and Daniel Scott’s detailed analyses on both visual and historical representations of Asian Americans in textbooks and teacher manuals used in our elementary and secondary schools poignantly tell us that generations of children are growing up being fed this single story about Asian Americans. As Hartlep and Scott write.
Asian Americans have once again been constructed as the “good minority” that can succeed on their own and be used as a political instrument to shame the Blacks for their underachievement and their fight for equality. Over and over again, the media has been telling “a single story” about Asian Americans to the public for the past fifty years. The consequence of this fabricated story is that it “discourages others—even Asian-Americans themselves—from believing in the validity of their struggles” (Linshi, 2014, p. 1).
As the rest of the nation, and indeed the world, prepared to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, a quieter remembrance was taking place in the halls of Asian American Studies programs around the United States. There was a special kind of grief at UCLA's Asian American Studies Center on September 6, 2002, when director Don T. Nakanishi issued a press release announcing the death of Yuji Ichioka on September 1. For more than three decades, Ichioka held the position of Senior Researcher at the Center; he taught the Center's first class shortly after its establishment in 1969. An award-winning author, he was effectively the creator of Asian America in the sense that, in 1968, while a young graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, he coined the term “Asian American,” and helped found the anti-Vietnam war, antiracist student group, the Asian American Political Alliance. The Asian students at San Francisco State College, who along with black, Chicana/o, Native, and leftist white students shut down the school for five months in a historic strike to call for, among many things, the establishment of a School of Ethnic Studies, might opt to identify themselves more as part of the “Third World Liberation Front” than a self-identified racial group, but gradually “Asian American” became the accepted descriptive term.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Although it is one of the least-known social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the Asian American movement drew upon some of the most powerful currents of the era, and had a wide-ranging impact on the political landscape of Asian America, and more generally, the United States. Using the racial discourse of the black power and other movements, as well as antiwar activist and the global decolonization movements, the Asian American movement succeeded in creating a multi-ethnic alliance of Asians in the United States and gave them a voice in their own destinies.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of its publication, Michael W. Apple has thoroughly updated his influential text, and written a new preface. The new edition also includes an extended interview circa 2001, in which Apple relates the critical agenda outlined in Ideology and Curriculum to the more contemporary conservative climate. Finally, a new chapter titled "Pedagogy, Patriotism and Democracy: Ideology and Education After 9/11" is also included.
In the 1800s and early 1900s, the United States assigned Indian Agents—non-Native employees of the federal government—to coordinate intergovernmental efforts, to encourage the assimilation of Native peoples into European-American society, and to serve as advocates for individual tribes. Although Indian Agents no longer exist in an official capacity in the United States, the potentially contradictory expectations that informed their work continue to influence communities across the country. Instead of decolonizing education, today's curricular agents typically misrepresent the historical and future agency of Native peoples while reinforcing the patronizing, normative, dominant-culture narrative. This article outlines the critical discourse analysis of five widely adopted U.S. history textbooks, as situated within the broader scope of textbook research and emerging educational movements. Findings show that textbook authors and other curricular agents use strategies of exclusion and passivation to control the historical and curricular agency of Indigenous peoples. Given the influence of educational reform efforts such as those related to the Common Core Standards, now is the critical time to retheorize curriculum design and inquiry as dialogic, dynamic, transformational, and agentive processes. The project's conclusions demonstrate the need to confront the biases of curricular agents in order to guide the decolonization of curriculum materials.
Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of people of color and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as "woman" or "person of color" as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. My objective here is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism... Language: en
In this study, I argue that American history textbooks present discrete, heroic, one-dimensional, and neatly packaged master narratives that deny students a complex, realistic, and rich understanding of people and events in American history. In making this argument, I examine the master narratives of Martin Luther King, Jr., in high school history textbooks and show how textbooks present prescribed, oversimplified, and uncontroversial narratives of King that obscure important elements in King's life and thought. Such master narratives, I contend, permeate most history textbooks and deny students critical lenses through which to examine, analyze, and interpret social issues today. The article concludes with suggestions about how teachers might begin to address the current problem of master narratives and offer alternative approaches to presenting U.S. history.
This study analyzes the treatment of Asian Americans in a group of selected high school U.S. history textbooks published between 1994 and 1996. Using a content analysis technique, nine of the textbooks most widely used in Hawaii were evaluated in terms of Asian groups represented, events and personalities identified, and multicultural concepts reflected. Textual references to Asian Americans ranged from .56% to 2.1%, while visual references ranged from 1.1% to 3%. The Japanese and Chinese were the most frequently mentioned groups in eight of the nine texts, accounting for 60% to 85% of the references. Asian Americans were depicted as passive rather than active agents in all the texts. And while every text cited how industrious Asian Americans have successfully assimilated into the mainstream culture (the model minority culture), none singled out their recent efforts to organize for greater visibility and voice through such groups as the Asian American Political Alliance and the Coalition of Asian Pacific Americans. Findings revealed variations among textbooks in the thoroughness and specificity of their treatment of Asian Americans. The paper suggests textbook improvements concerning coverage of the Filipino, Korean, and Asian Indian American groups; in-depth analyses of historical events and contemporary issues relating to all Asian Americans; and primary accounts that represent the insider's perspective. Contains a list of history textbooks examined, 35 references, and 7 tables of data. (BT)
"Research in Social Studies Education , James P. Shaver, Editor-- Social Education's Research Supplement, Number One, December 1969. (AP)
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic are completing a Tenth Anniversary Edition of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction for NYU Press. This best-selling primer explains the movement's organizational history, major themes, central figures, and likely future. The new edition contains material on developments that have taken place over the past decade, including the rapid growth in the Latino population, nativism against that group, the election of the nation's first black president, and the advent of right-wing populism in the form of the Tea Party Movement. The volume will be available in paperback in early 2011.
The original title of this paper was “Power, Desire, Interest.”1 Indeed, whatever power these meditations command may have been earned by a politically interested refusal to push to the limit the founding presuppositions of my desires, as far as they are within my grasp. This vulgar three-stroke formula, applied both to the most resolutely committed and to the most ironic discourse, keeps track of what Althusser so aptly named “philosophies of denegation.”2 I have invoked my positionality in this awkward way so as to accentuate the fact that calling the place of the investigator into question remains a meaningless piety in many recent critiques of the sovereign subject. Thus, although I will attempt to foreground the precariousness of my position throughout, I know such gestures can never suffice.