Toward an Antiwar Pedagogy: Challenging Materialism, Militarism, and Racism in Education

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: Radical Dreams: Using the Anti-War Lessons of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Fight for Students of Color

Abstract

This is a theoretical paper that will be used to frame the subsequent symposium papers as case studies for the potential of an anti-war pedagogy. In this paper we draw on educational statistics and phenomena to conduct a discourse analysis of King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech to elucidate the triplets of war—materialism, militarism, and racism—in U.S. education, and to contextualize King’s words within the contemporary moment.

In an era of post-Cold War transnational capitalism, post-9/11 militarism, and post-racial racism, we draw upon King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech to develop a clear articulation of the intersections of materialism, militarism, and racism with education. Education is situated within the global political economy that has facilitated exponential growth in the prison and military industrial complex, and simultaneous divestment in schools, teachers, and students domestically within the United States. Ultimately, such phenomena unevenly and detrimentally affect students of color. In response, we explicate King’s triplets of war as a proto-intersectional analysis and to conceptualize an anti-war pedagogy that places human life, and not capital accumulation, at its center.

An anti-war pedagogy is a way of teaching and learning that responds to the gross violence of materialism, militarism, and racism in American society and schools. Educators can use an anti-war pedagogy to frame an intersectional analysis that links global projects of U.S. imperialism and capitalism with domestic projects of racialized policing in and out of schools, the defunding of education, and the elimination of local jobs.

Further, we argue that King’s conceptualization of the triplets mirrors the contemporary concept of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1993), but we do not contend that ideas were nascent iterations of the theory. Although much scholarship in educational studies has taken up representational intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1993), or how stereotypes and narratives of particular forms of oppression mediate a student's experience in and out of school, structural intersectionality must be central in an analysis of education's function in the United States. As opposed to focusing on representational intersectionality to primarily address personal experiences of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and ability (among forms of social otherness), which has the potential to further inscribe neoliberal multiculturalist epistemologies by erasing structural power relations, an anti-war pedagogy centers a structural analysis and provides the means to understand how multiple forms of oppression and power function to oppress individuals and communities. Although we do not see intersectionality and an anti-war pedagogy as synonymous, they are complementary.

King’s triplets of war helps us to envision an anti-war pedagogy that places the pillars of neoliberalism, militarism, and racism as the center of analysis of American society in order to build locally a network of support that acknowledges and acts against oppression. We argue that social analysis must be embedded within local knowledge production and in the context of teaching and learning in the lives of the young and elderly. We contend that an anti-war pedagogy recognizes the relationship among psychic and material violence, micro and macro racism, and the global and intersectional nature of the triplets.

Authors

• Tracy Lachica Buenavista, California State University - Northridge

• Arshad Imtiaz Ali, George Washington University