When Cultural Bingo Just Isn't Enough: Theorizing Superficial Multicultural Curriculum for "Antiracist" Professional Development

• In Event: 31.028 - New Directions in Curriculum Inquiry: Pushing Against/From/With the Margins

Abstract

This paper illustrates and critiques the practices and mechanisms in which a professional development (PD) organization, Conway Equity Alliance (CEA), and its white facilitator, Eric (both pseudonyms), used superficial multicultural curriculum to distort anti-racism. Then, in response to this superficial curriculum, I use counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) to depict how a small group of teachers resisted this initiative by forming their own grassroots PD organization committed to understanding and contesting the racism occurring in their school.

The superficial PD organization conducted a series of workshops for middle and secondary school teachers (I was a participant in these workshops as a secondary English Language Arts teacher of color) advertised as “anti-racist” and “equity” centered. The workshops used a common-sense approach to “closing the achievement gap” with a list of cultural diversity games and strategies that, when implemented, would ostensibly go some way toward achieving racial equity. This approach embraced a watered-down version of multiculturalism predicated on ensuring comfort for the white teacher participants. This practice is particularly insidious considering that using critical labels for superficial multiculturalism has become a common practice for misrepresenting attempts at uncovering and disrupting racial oppression (Ahmed, 2007).

I employ three theories of racialization to demonstrate the intricacies and nuances of this type of curriculum: neoliberal multiculturalism (Melamed, 2011), white racial melancholia (Cheng, 2001), and epistemologies of ignorance (Mills, 1997). The critical intersection between these theories highlight how superficial multiculturalism becomes an attractive alternative to genuine anti-racism by resolving the contradictions of white liberalism—that is, balancing the belief that one is contesting racial inequities by substituting an active resistance of racism with facile cultural diversity curricula. My critique, using reflections I produced as a workshop participant and curricular documents collected from the sessions, centers on a theoretical investigation of three specific activities used by the organization: cultural bingo, flinging culture, and a musical concert where performers played songs with culturally diverse themes of unity and harmony.

The function of these activities, as part of a larger framework of superficiality used by CEA, creates the necessary “affective dispositions” (Melamed, 2011) that encourages and validates white epistemological ignorance of race. This “schedule of structured blindness” (Mills, 1997, p. 19) concerning race underscores how activities such as cultural bingo can actually undermine equity initiatives. The significance of the paper not only lies in the analysis of this deception but highlights how grassroots anti-racist PD groups can mitigate this type of superficial curriculum.

Author

• Justin Grinage, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities