Race and Critical Hermeneutics: Toward a Racial Conflict Theory of Interpretation

• In Event: 73.027 - Race, Discourse, and Justice: Making Intelligible the Unconscious of Structural White Supremacy in Education

Abstract

Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation, or how we make meaning of texts. The educational process is fundamentally hermeneutical given that so much of it is about learning to interpret textbooks, literature, dialogue, and so on (Gallagher, 1992; Smith, 1991). But education scholars pay little attention to hermeneutics. One reason is that hermeneutics seeks to unveil normative meaning making. As such, it is about not only the alleged “proper” interpretation of texts but also the critical interrogation of the underlying presuppositions, theories, and ontological claims that contextualize competing interpretative frames (Geuss, 1981).

From a critical lens, domination employs a hermeneutical imposition that regulates the interpretive process, ensuring that meanings that support the interests of the dominant group are legitimated over others (Leonardo, 2003; Leonardo & Allen, 2008; Roseboro, 2009). Schooling processes, like the explicit and implicit curriculum, play a major role in constructing hermeneutical hegemony. Critical hermeneutics seeks to intervene by, in part, exposing the problematic historical imaginaries often used to contextualize interpretation (Thompson, 1984).

Habermas (1987) is the scholar most associated with critical hermeneutics. He contended that meaning making is driven by historical theory. Furthermore, he argued for a conflict theory of history, that is, that society was and is formed out of group conflict, the attempt of one group to actively dominate others and re/produce an unjust social hierarchy. Dominant group members are invested in maintaining their status. Hermeneutically speaking, they interpret texts in ways that instrumentally rationalize their unjust social standing. They are engaged in a distorted form of social dialogue that masks, sometimes even to themselves, their social knowledge of the existing immoral condition. This repressed knowledge, or ideology (Hall, 1982), resides at the psychic level of the unconscious and represents the internalization of the social structure (Adorno, 1982). This constructed unconscious drives behavior and action, working to reproduce the social structure. For Habermas, everyday discourse, or the language of “common sense,” is unintelligible and in need of a critical hermeneutics to reinterpret the hidden presences of the structure and expose how power operates discursively.

However, critical hermeneutics, as a discourse itself, has its shortcoming in that it emphasizes capitalism to the exclusion of white supremacy; it is mainly focused on how capitalist ideology distorts communication and constructs the motives of social agents. It has rarely taken up the historical reality of structural white supremacy and how it, too, distorts communication in its own way. For example, theories such as CRT’s interest convergence principle (Bell, 1980) or sociology’s “racialized social system” (Bonilla-Silva, 1996) convey a theory of history rooted in racial conflict and domination. Therefore, this theoretical paper will borrow from critical hermeneutics’ insights about discourse, ideology, and the unconscious, while moving beyond its minimization of historical racial conflict, to develop a critical hermeneutics of structural white supremacy. Its importance for interpreting schooling’s role in the reproduction of white supremacy will be described in more detail. Also, the paper will discuss how race-focused frameworks can benefit from a more explicit hermeneutical exploration of racial discourse.

Author

• Ricky Lee Allen, University of New Mexico