From Reform to Redistribution: Developing a Race-Radical Politics of Bilingual Education

• In Event: Unsettling Educations: Language, Race, and Learning in White Settler Colonial Societies

Abstract

Omi and Winant (1994) argue that the institutionalization of the demands of the Civil Rights Movement politically incorporated them in ways that favored incremental reform rather than fundamentally transformation of white supremacist institutions. Harris (1993) argues that this focus on incremental reform failed to address the historical processes that constructed whiteness through property rights that by design excluded people of color through mechanisms of white settler colonialism and anti-blackness. She argued that in the Post-Civil Rights era this whiteness as property shifted into “a more modern form through the law’s ratification of the settled expectations of relative white privilege as a legitimate and natural baseline” (p. 1714).

Aggarwal (2016) traces the roots of this post-Civil rights reconfiguration of whiteness to the Brown vs. Board of Education that was the first effort to incorporate Civil Rights demands into US institutions. Aggarwal argues that the definition of harm used to inform the Brown decision was based on “a deficit framework of Black inferiority” that repositioned “political and economic questions as social problems” (Aggarwal, 2016, p. 132). This psychologizing of the impact of racism on the Black community left unaddressed the material distribution of wealth that has accumulated over generations as a consequence of whiteness as property.

In this presentation I analyze the ways that this ideological architecute of whiteness as property (Aggarwal, 2016) shaped the institutionalization of bilingual education. I trace the roots of this institutionalization of the bilingual education to the Bilingual Education Act (BEA). I describe three discursive moves reflected in debates related to the BEA that erased the history of whiteness as property that produced the racial inequalities the legislation sought to alleviate. The first of these moves was the complete erasure of indigenous communities through the prioritization of Spanish. The second of these moves was the construction of Latinxs as immigrants in ways that obscured the colonial relation between the US and Latin America. The third move was the framing of bilingual education as a compensatory strategy to fix perceived linguistic deficiencies of Latinx students. I then trace how these discourses have been taken up in the scholarly research and advocacy work related to bilingual education. I examine the ways that this research and advocacy work has obscured the structural mechanisms produced by the history of whiteness as property that lies at the root of the marginalization of racialized communities.

I end with principles of a race-radical (Melamed, 2011) approach to bilingual education. A race-radical approach to bilingual education situates bilingual education scholarship and advocacy within an explicit critique of whiteness as property. This explicit critique of whiteness as property must not only accounts for the colonial relationship between the US and Latin America but also account for white settler colonialism and anti-blackness within US society. Only through an explicit focus on the workings of white settler colonialism and anti-blackness can bilingual education scholarship and advocacy move beyond individualistic narratives of social uplift and, instead, refocus attention on the need for a radical redistribution of wealth.

Author

• Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania