Vocalizing Silenced Voices

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all past students, staff and faculty members and supporters of The Hegemony Project, without whose work and commitment this book would never have been possible. Please see our special words for Dang Yang and Ali Ahmed in our Dedications.

We thank all of our friends and colleagues who contributed narratives about their experiences of being silenced: Dang Yang’s narrative may be found in the Introduction to the book and, mostly in alphabetical order, the narratives of the following contributors may be found in Chapter 7: Kimmery Newsom, Roberta Ahlquist, Areeba Ali, Mayana Geathers, Josh Herron, Jean Ishibashi, Jean Ishibashi Interview with Babatunde Lea, Brian Jackson, Tanya Lazar-Lea, and Brandon Thoms.

We are also most grateful to Peter Lang for publishing our book and to our new editor, Alison Jefferson, for her support.

We would like to give thanks to Van Del Prete for their extraordinary image which represents our theme on the cover of the book. Van is only 16 years old, but their creativity and insights exceed their years.

Finally, we thank the folks who agreed to read our book and write an endorsement for publication. Thank you, especially, to Kevin Kumashiro, Christine Sleeter, Ana Cruz, and Theresa Montano. Your kind words and important critique were of enormous value.

Preface

This book is the result of our work as members of The Hegemony Project (see Chapter 6). We wanted to better understand and support the ways in which consciousness is socially constructed, often resulting in the silencing of voices antithetical to the interests of those in positions of power. To put it another way, our goal was to contribute to our students’, colleagues’ and our own greater awareness as to how cultural hegemony works to persuade people that they should consent to and comply with the norms, values, practices, laws and policies that most effectively meet the needs of wealthy oligarchs and plutocrats, and at the same time silence their own voices (see our Introduction/Chapters 1 & 2).

Committed to contributing to the growth of a much more equitable democracy and teaching profession that serves all of its citizens and supports the needs of the wider global community—humans, other animals and the environment on which our survival depends—we developed a theoretical framework that explained the world through the interwoven lenses of cultural hegemony, critical race theory and critical multiculturalism (see Appendix 1). Our research led us to add critical whiteness studies to these interwoven lenses. We then developed a meaningful, original research project (see Chapter 3) and analyzed our data using our theoretical lenses (see Chapters 4, 5 & 6).

Part of our quest in this book was to identify and share the hegemonic strategies that we continue to use, consciously and unconsciously, and which contribute to the reproduction of a social caste system. As teachers, these strategies are more culturally compatible with students who have been prepared in their homes for life in school. The outcomes are associated with inequities in education that represent a largely traditional educational hierarchy. These inequities are correlated in various ways with powerful, ideological, hegemonic narratives that represent the dominant, largely white-American worldview. This master narrative includes extreme individualism; dichotomous divide-and-rule thinking; standardization or normalization (normative discourses including whiteness and versions of Christianity); classification or categorization (seeing the world in boxes that lend themselves to stereotyping, versus recognizing relationships); regulation (viz the adage, “we are a nation of laws”); meritocracy (the myth that the U.S. system allows everyone who works hard to be successful); materialism; corporate capitalism; pseudo-democracy; and nativism. Ironically, white, middle-class people, who come from Western European nations or other disproportionately white, so-called Christian countries, have traditionally considered themselves native to the United States, while indigenous people and other immigrants have been considered less welcome. Muslim and Central American Immigrants of color experienced this exclusion most strongly under the recent Trump regime in the form of a Muslim ban and the removal of children of Mexican refugees from their parents at the border—although no United States government has ever genuinely welcomed all migrants.

These dominant, ideological narratives may also be seen as technologies or tools of power that are taken for granted as normal, natural, and common sense by many of us who live and work within the nation’s system of power and privilege. Of particular interest in our original research is how these technologies, which include race in a pivotal way, operate within the institution of higher education. While the impact of these technologies is broadly felt, the experiences among recipients vary widely. For example, “race” and social class issues still privilege the administrative level, where most although not all of these individuals remain white and middle class. There has also been a greater inclusion of White women.

While acknowledging gains made in numbers of women, it is equally significant to address the challenges women continue to confront: women hold the least senior administrative positions and are the lowest paid and hold the least senior administrative positions among higher ed administrators. The picture is starker for women of color: in 2016, only 14 percent of higher ed administrators—men and women—were racial or ethnic minorities. Women, and this is especially the case for those of color, are also underrepresented in tenured and full professorships, which in turn limits opportunities to advance into formal leadership positions at colleges and universities. Yet we know, from research and our own academic experience, that qualified and ambitious women are definitely not in short supply. (Bray et al., 2020, para 2)

Among the student population, race, white supremacy, gender, LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual, and more) and social class and caste, language, ability, and a slew of other social identities and experiences continue to play a significant role in determining the educational outcomes of not only underserved students, but also students from the dominant culture. Coexisting beside these cultural hegemonic structures and practices are counter-hegemonic practices that attempt to re-envision and reshape how the system operates in the pursuit of a more ideally equitable society.

From a critical multicultural perspective, we embrace the idea that we need to become conscious of our own social, economic, cultural and racial power and privilege, where it exists, so we are clear about how and why we act. Given this consciousness, we are better able to join in clear, collective, and peaceful expression of our cultural values. We must recognize what cultural hegemony in the form of technologies or tools of power entails and how the technologies sustain the social hierarchy or social caste system (Foucault, 1995); we need to be particularly aware of how color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2006) and other ways of gaslighting racism, inform this framework. For example, the mechanisms of cultural hegemony lie beneath white fragility, as defined by Robin diAngelo (2018). White fragility is not a new concept but has been made visible today in the voice of diAngelo, who is a White woman. White fragility was well understood by many social critics of color in the past like James Baldwin (Baldwin, 1988; Glaude, 2020) and large numbers of people of color researching today (Crenshaw et al., 1996; Delgado et al., 2017; Love, 2019). This concept helps us understand why many White people refuse to follow through on their rhetorical claims that they stand for social justice.

White fragility has many dimensions that we will discuss further in Chapters 4 and 5. Here we want to make the point that white fragility is partially based on whiteness as cultural hegemony, which equates with the driving forces of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft described in Chapter 2. Whiteness as cultural hegemony includes technologies of power like individualism (see above), which is a powerful incentive for white people to place themselves first and consider others/the collective as a much lower priority. The United States is the most individualistic country in the world (Spring, 2008). The dominant culture is undergirded with the values of whiteness, including individual achievement, self-direction, categorical thinking (either/or, bi-polar thinking), acting on the environment rather than considering the consequences of corporate behavior to the environment and climate; part to whole learning; and universal values (placing an over-emphasis on rules, policies and laws). How often have we heard the adage that the United States values the rule of law? This might be fine if the law has not often been unjust. As critical race theory tells us, racial inequities were inserted into the law from the outset of this nation, and in many instances remain embedded in the laws of the land. The law and social justice are not always the same thing.

In the book, we explore some significant interpretations of historical facts, without which the social caste system (Wilkerson, 2020) and the cultural hegemonic silencing of large swaths of the populations could not be adequately explained. Following colonialism and a revolution against the British crown, the United States was recognized in 1783 as a sovereign country. Thereafter, slavery and the genocide of Indigenous people and the silencing of enslaved Africans lasted another 82 more years within the United States. Jim Crow laws followed, or “slavery by another name” (Blackmon, 2008), and this system lasted from 1877 to 1965 when Civil Rights legislation was passed. These laws governed practice in the country, but they were not socially just by any standard. Whiteness as cultural hegemony continues to this day, providing those of us who embody whiteness with a lens that allows us to rationalize inequities in terms of our own interests. Our challenge is to better define this process and understand its implications that have permeated political, economic, cultural, and historical contexts and the current social and academic context of higher education.

We hope the book addresses the needs of students—preservice and practicing teachers, education and liberal arts faculty, and community members—to gain a deeper understanding of why it is so hard to make change in the field of education and beyond. We also hope to inspire some readers to develop their own alternative narratives and counter silencing strategies by reframing hegemonic narratives, working with the media and decision- makers, and promoting teaching critical awareness and activism. Our hope is that this may lead to collective action, critical consciousness, accountability, hope, equity, and social justice in today’s highly inequitable socio-economic context. We honor the extraordinary work that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) and activists for social justice from all ethnic groups have accomplished to create a fairer United States society and world.