Blinded by Privilege: Negotiating Race, Class, and Power in a Justice-Oriented, Multicultural School

• In Event: Roundtable Session 14
  In Roundtable Session: Defending Democracy in Schools: Rethinking Privilege and Color Blindness

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the challenges of sustaining a community‐driven vision for school reform and educational justice in a racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse school community. By exploring the case of Academia de la Comunidad using data generated in a yearlong ethnographic study, I descibe how a multicultural community struggles to bring educational justice ideals to life while simultaneously reproducing privilege, power, and exclusion along race, language, and class lines. How can a shared commitment to educational justice be sustained in a school designed to serve the needs of Latino students and to be integrated? How are power and privilege changing this vision of justice—and how might the community resist the reproduction of inequality seeping into its work?

Author

• Melissa Leigh Gibson, University of Wisconsin - Madison