A Freirean Response to Recent Iterations of Fascism in Brazil and the United States

• In Event: Freire's International Legacy in the Fight Against Fascism, Racism, and Social Inequalities

Abstract

This paper will address the current iterations of the politics of neoliberalism to analyze the recent attacks on Paulo Freire in Brazil by President Jair Bolsonaro, and the attacks in the US on critical race theory by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Although Trump did not mention Freire by name, he did attack the educational left, greatly indebted to Freire’s work, as anti-patriotic and blamed “cultural Marxism” for creating political correctness, and the political forces that accuse white men of racism, sexism, and homophobia.
And finally, as a response to these attacks, I will then develop a Freirean counter-pedagogy that I call “critical patriotism.”

Author

• Peter L. McLaren, Chapman University