A Tale of Two Visions: Hegemonic Whiteness and Bilingual Education

• In Event: 70.065 - Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: 70.065-9 - Revitalizing Race-Radicalism in Bilingual Education

Abstract

This paper merges Foucault’s concept of governmentality (Foucault, 2007) with materialist antiracism (Melamed, 2011) to situate the growth of support in bilingual education during the Civil Rights Movement on a continuum of racial subjectivity. On the one end of this continuum was race radicalism and on the other end of this continuum was liberal multiculturalism. Race radicalism positioned bilingual education for Latinos within a larger project of racial liberation that sought to produce new subjectivities outside of white supremacist, imperialist, and capitalist relations of power. Liberal multiculturalism, on the other hand, positioned bilingual education for Latino students within a larger project of racial accommodation that sought to mold Latino students into hegemonic white subjectivities that were produced by these relations of power.

This paper examines representative examples of these two ends of the continuum. It first examines the race radical vision of bilingual education of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican nationalist organization based in the United States who had tremendous impact on the Puerto Rican/Latino community in the 1960s and 1970s and developed a coherent vision for an alternative society outside of hegemonic whiteness (Nelson, 2001). It then examines the liberal multicultural vision of bilingual education of Canadian scholars whose work emerged in the same time period and had a significant impact on U.S. bilingual education policy (Baker & Hornberger, 2001). It argues that while for race radicalism, the root cause of coercive relations of power is the white supremacy, imperialism, and capitalist relations of power of hegemonic whiteness, for the liberal multiculturalism, the root cause of coercive relations of power is the fact that language-minoritized students do not have equal access to the language practices of hegemonic whiteness

After describing these representative samples, the paper examine the ways that liberal multiculturalism has appropriated the social justice rhetoric of the race radicalism to reformulate bilingual education as an official antiracism. This reframing of bilingual education as an official antiracism offers a limited vision for social transformation—one embedded in hegemonic whiteness and privileges the idealized language practices of the white middle class while Otherizing and pathologizing the language practices of Latinos and other language-minoritized populations.

This paper ends with a call for reclaiming a race-radical vision of bilingual education. This new race-radical vision would no longer uncritically accept the goal of bilingual education to be the molding of Latinos into the idealized language practices of hegemonic whiteness. Instead, we must fight for spaces where these communities can be heard through their own versions of bilingualism—language practices that don’t to conform to hegemonic whiteness.

Baker, C. & Hornberger, N. (2001). Jim Cummins: A biographical introduction. In C. Baker and N. Hornberger (eds.), An introductory reader to the writings of Jim Cummins (pp. 1-16). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collége de France
1977-1978. New York: Picador.

Nelson, J. (2001). Abortions under community control: Feminism, nationalism, and the politics of reproduction among New York City’s Young Lords. Journal of Women’s Studies, 13, 157-180.

Author

• Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania