MULTICULTURAL DISCOURSES AND CURRICULUM REFORM: A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE Cameron McCarthy Department of Curriculum and Instruction University of Illinois-Champaign ---------------------------- CAMERON McCARTHY is Associate Professor in the Departments of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1310 S. Sixth Street Champaign, IL 61821. His primary areas of scholarship are post-colonial theory, cultural studies and media criticism, race relations and the state, and qualitative research on adolescent identity and popular music. ---------------------------- INTRODUCTION Within the past two decades "multicultural education" has become a popular slogan in American schooling. In general, it has been perceived as a useful strategy in promoting racial tolerance and sensitivity toward the history and culture of the ethnically diverse groups composing the United States. Multicultural education has been adopted in a growing number of educational institutions and school districts as a solution to racial antagonism and minority underachievement in schooling. In this essay, I will offer a critical appraisal of the main assumptions and goals of current multicultural discourses on curriculum reform in the area of race relations. I will also call attention to the spuriousness of the claims to a necessary Western Culture emphasis in the American school curriculum advanced by conservative opponents of multiculturalism Drawing on the work of Robert Connell and Paulo Freire, I will make the case for a critical or emancipatory multicultural education that emphasizes a "common learnings" approach that goes beyond the present preoccupation with incrementally of adding more content to the dominant curriculum. Instead, I will focus attention on the general interconnectedness and heterogeneous bases of knowledge production across traditions and cultural groups. MINORITY DEMANDS, MULTICULTURALISM, AND THE DOMINANT CURRICULUM RESPONSE Propelled by demands from African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and other marginalized groups for equality of opportunity, and by the efforts of the professional educational community to provide solutions to the problems of racial antagonism and minority underachievement in schooling, "multicultural education" has become one of the most powerful slogans in the 1990s. Legislation for ethnic and bilingual studies has underscored the federal government's support for multicultural approaches to curriculum reform. A growing number of school districts and university-based preservice teacher education programs have espoused various forms of multicultural education. Multiculturalism must therefore be understood as a product of a particular conjuncture of relations among the state, contending racial minority and majority groups, educators, and policy intellectuals in the United States, in which the discourse over schools has become increasingly racialized. These developments can be traced to the civil rights era. Multicultural education emerged in the United States, in part, as a minority response to the failure of compensatory education programs launched by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s. For a brief period in the United States' educational history [early 1960s to early 1970sI, minority groups fought a limitedly successful but very intensive "war of position" within the institutions of education themselves. Of particular significance was the connection that minority school critics made between knowledge and power. These critics pointed specifically to the deep imbrication of traditional, canonical school knowledge in the legitimation of authority and inequality in society. In this sense canonical knowledge was official knowledge which undergirded official stories about social stratification and minority educational marginalization. In contrast to the dominant preoccupations of traditional educators, African-Americans and other minority groups emphasized a variety of transformative themes, insisting that curriculum and educational policy address the vital questions of community control, the distribution of power and representation in schools, and the status of minority cultural identities in curriculum organization and arrangements. But over time the powerful connection between multicultural education and the wider social movement for civil rights and equality came apart. The transformative themes of the multicultural movement were quietly rearticulated into just another reformist set of discourses to be absorbed into the dominant curriculum. Appropriated by a dominant humanism, multicultural education is now entrenched in highly selective debates over content, texts, attitudes, and values. Warren Crichlow argues, "this ideological encirclement currently serves to mute more fundamental chap lenges to the symbolic mechanisms and scholarly operations by which dominant knowledge is historically legitimated and subordinated traditions are repressed." As departments of education, textbook publishers, and intellectual entrepreneurs push more normative themes of cultural understanding and sensitivity training, the actual implementation of a critical emancipatory multiculturalism in the school curriculum and in pedagogical and teacher education practices in the university has been effectively deferred. Critical multiculturalism is to be understood in what follows as referring to multicultural education operating on the notion that both the teacher and the student in the classroom must have the flexibility to draw on the well-ground of history and on the variety of cultural resources that fan out across the myriad groups that make up this society and the world. No one group has a monopoly on intelligence or beauty. On the one hand, in promoting this framework, I challenge the tendency toward lukewarm curriculum programs of cultural pluralism that are associated with some models of multicultural education. On the other, I am deeply skeptical of the kinds of cultural exceptionalism and solipsism that are associated with movements such as Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism that privilege the knowledge, history, and culture of one group over that of others in an unreflexive manner. A critical multiculturalism also seeks to safeguard the idea that teachers and students are producers, not simply consumers, of knowledge, while at the same time pointing to the social interests and purposes that are implicated in the school curriculum. Such a new multicultural framework aims ultimately to engage teachers and students in critical reflection about the organization and arrangement of knowledge in schooling and the connections between the curriculum and the differential experiences and futures of minority and majority youth beyond the school door. Conservative educators and commentators have responded vigorously to these more transformative themes as well as the multicultural challenge in general. Within the past few years there has been a virulent reaffirmation of Eurocentrism and Western culture in debates over the school curriculum and educational reform. As we shall see, proponents of multicultural education also "claw back" from the radical themes associated with minority challenges to the white-dominated school curriculum and school system, emphasizing instead a normative rhetoric that accepts the broad structural and cultural parameters and values of American society and the American way. By "clawing back," I refer to the way in which some multicultural educators tend to graft the theme of diversity onto the negotiated central concerns and values of this society—the values of possessive individualism, occupational mobility, and status attainment—leaving completely untouched the structural organization of capitalism in the United States. Within this framework the emancipation of the minority individual is fulfilled when he or she becomes a good capitalist. The nonthreatening social centrality of the "good bourgeois life" for the minority poor is what the multiculturalist ultimately seeks to promote. In what follows, I offer a critique of current multicultural approaches to education before outlining an alternative framework for thinking about curriculum reform in this area. Any discussion of reform in the name of multiculturalism must go beyond the current preoccupation with curriculum content to address issues of representation as well as issues of unequal distribution of material resources and power outside the school door. In outlining a path beyond current multicultural models, I deepen the critique of the privileging of Westernness underwritten in the dominant curriculum and I point to a critical multiculturalism founded on principles of relationalityand intellectual autonomy. For this new approach to multiculturalism I draw directly on some of the more critical insights in the curriculum and cultural studies literatures. Let me say from the outset that there are subtle and important variations within the field of multiculturalism with respect to general perspectives, core ideological assumptions, and desired outcomes advanced by its proponents. Multiculturalists vary in the way in which they mobilize the themes of race diversity, and culture. It is therefore possible to identify three different types of multicultural discourses on racial inequality as embodied in various school curriculum guides and preservice teacher education programs, as well as in the articulated theories of some multicultural advocates. MULTICULTURAL CURRICULUM DISCOURSES DISCOURSES OF CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING First, there are those proponents who articulate discourses of cultural understanding. Discourses of cultural understanding are inscribed in various university-supported human relations programs that place a premium on "improving communications" among different ethnic groups. The fundamental stance of this approach to ethnic differences is that of cultural relativism. Within this framework, all social groups are presumed to have a formal parity with each other. The matter of ethnic identity is understood in terms of individual choice and preference—the language of the shopping mall. Curriculum guides for ethnic studies translate this stance of cultural relativism in terms of a discourse of reciprocity and consensus: We are different but we are all the same. The idea that racial differences are only "human'' and "natural" is, for example, promoted in the teaching kit The Wonderful World of Difference: A Human Relations Program for Grades K-8, in which the authors "explore the diversity and richness of the human family." In a similar manner, Iris and Pamela Tiedt, in their Multicultural Teaching: A Handbook of Activities, Information, and Resources, require students to make up a list of cultural traits that would be characteristic of Sue Wong. Students are then told to complete the sentence "Sue Wong is...." This tendency to focus on the acceptance and recognition of cultural differences has led in recent years to a movement for the recognition of the cultural uniqueness of white ethnic groups, Poles, Swedes, Norwegians, and so forth, in order to counterbalance demands for the study of African-American, Latino, and-Native. American cultures. DISCOURSES OF CULTURAL COMPETENCE A second emphasis in the multicultural field is that of cultural competence. Underpinning this approach to education is a fundamental assumption that values of cultural pluralism should have a central place in the school curriculum. This concept of social institutions as sites for the confluence of a plurality of ethnic interests was formulated in the 1960s by liberal social scientists such as Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan. Some educators, such as lames Banks, contend that there is a general lack of cross-cultural competencies, especially in the area of language, among minority and majority groups in the American populace.' The American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE), in their often cited "No One American Model," makes a particularly strong case for cultural pluralism in education. AACTE maintains that Multicultural education is education which values cultural pluralism. Multicultural education rejects the view that schools should seek to melt away cultural differences or the view that schools should merely tolerate cultural pluralism. Instead, multicultural education affirms that schools should be oriented toward the cultural enrichment of all children and youth through programs rooted to the preservation and extension of cultural alternatives. Multicultural education recognizes cultural diversity as a fact of life in American society, and it affimms that this cultural diversity is a valuable resource that should be preserved and extended. Educators who promote the idea of a cultural competence approach to curriculum reform argue for various forms of bilingual and ethnic studies programs based on pluralist values that would help to "build bridges" between America's different ethnic groups. These programs aim at preserving cultural diversity in the United States, particularly the language and identity of minority groups such as Native Americans and Latinos. It is expected that white students will also acquire knowledge and familiarity with the languages and cultures of minority groups. It is felt that such cross-cultural interaction will contribute to reduced racial antagonism between majority and minority students. DISCOURSES OF CULTURAL EMPOWERMENT Third, models of cultural empowerment go somewhat further than the previous two approaches in suggesting that a reformist multicultural curriculum can boost the school success and economic futures of minority youth. Theorists such as lames Rushton and Jim Cummins argue that a reform-oriented curriculum which includes knowledge about minority history and cultural achievements would reduce the dissonance and alienation from academic success that centrally characterize minority experiences in schooling. As Cummins notes, "Considerable research data suggest that, for dominated minorities, the extent to which students' language and culture are incorporated into the school program constitutes a significant predictor of academic success." Such a reformed school curriculum is expected to enhance minority opportunities for academic success and better futures in the labor market. This thesis of a "tightening bond" between multicultural education and the economy is summarized in the following claim by Rushton: The curriculum in the multicultural school should encourage each pupil to succeed wherever heorshecan and strive torcompetence in what he orshe tries Cultural taboos should be lessened by mutual experience and understandings The curriculum in the multicultural school should auow these things to happen. u it does, it need have no fear about the future career of its pupils. Multicultural educators who promote the idea of cultural empowerment therefore hold a great deal of faith in the redemptive qualities of the educational system and its capacities to influence positive changes in the job market and in society. TOWARD A CRITICAL EMANCIPATORY MULTjCULTURALISM Though these three types of multicultural discourse significantly differ in emphasis, it is generally the case that their proponents attach an enormous significance to the role of attitudes in the reproduction and transformation of racism. Human relations and ethnic studies programs based on these approaches pursue what Banks calls the "prejudiceless goal." The strong version of these multicultural paradigms directly targets white students and teachers as the flawed protagonists in their racial relations with minorities. It is expected that negative white attitudes toward minorities will change if these prejudiced individuals are exposed to sensitivity training in human relations and ethnic studies programs. In my view, the three multicultural paradigms identified here do not provide adequate theories of or solutions to the problem of racial inequality in schooling. Within these frameworks, school reform and reform in race relations depend almost exclusively on the reversal of values, attitudes, and the human nature of social actors understood as "individuals." Schools, for example, are not conceptualized as sites of power or contestation in which differential resources and capacities determine the maneuverability of competing racial groups and the possibility and pace of change. In significant ways, too, the proponents of multiculturalism fail to take into account the differential structure of opportunities that helps to define race relations in the United States. A case in point is the tendency of proponents to lean toward an unwarranted optimism about the potential impact of the multicultural curriculum on the social and economic futures of minority students. Indeed, the linear connection between academic credentials and the job market asserted by some multicultural theorists is problematic. The assumption that higher educational attainment and achievement via a more sensitive curriculum would lead to a necessary conversion into jobs for minority youth is frustrated by existing racial practices in the job market itself. Barry Troyna, in an incisive analysis of the British job market, challenges the myth that there is a necessary "tightening bond" between education and the economy. In his investigation of the fortunes of educated Black and white youth in the British job market, Troyna concludes that racial and social connections, rather than educational qualifications per se, "determined" the phenomenon of better job chances for white youth even when Black youth had higher qualifications than their white counterparts. The tendency of employers to rely on informal channels or word-of-mouth networks, and the greater likelihood that white youth would be in a position to exploit such networks, constitute one of the principal ways in which the potential for success of qualified Black youth in the labor market is systematically undermined. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, and Manning Marable have made similar arguments about the racial disqualification of Black youth in the job market in the United States. In a more recent ethnographic study of youth crime and work in the inner city, Mercer Sullivan documents the frustrations of Black " Projectville" and Puerto Rican "La Barriada" youth in the job market. He maintains that there is a racialized job ceiling that limits the working futures of these racial minority youth. Further, Sullivan's study corroborates the claims that Carmichael and Hamilton made almost three decades ago with respect to the unfair advantages that help to boost job opportunities for white youth in the labor market. In sharp contrast to their minority counterparts, white working-class kids from "Hamilton Park" were able to secure early "off- the-books'' jobs in their neighborhood and high-wage union-protected jobs later. Micaela di Leonardo points to a further significance of Sullivan's work: Sullivan offers...well-documented surprises. White, Puerto Rican and black kids had similar education levels, even though the white neighborhood had family incomes roughly twice as high as those in Projectville and La Barriada. Blacks valued education most highly, and returned most o ten to work on G.E.D.s and gain college credits. Sullivan's findings introduce a necessary caution with respect to the multicultural optimism about the responsiveness of the job market to curriculum change in the multicultural area. Another issue for examination is the status of the multicultural text itself and what Stuart Hall calls the "semiosis of encoding and decoding." Various studies have shown that the drive toward the elimination of prejudice through exposing white teachers and students to sensitivity training has not produced the intended result of prejudicelessness. Indeed, as Joel Fish indicates in a study of student responses to a University of Wisconsin human relations program, and David Buchngham underscores in his report on the British educational television series "The Whites of their Eyes," white students often make "aberrant decodings" of multicultural texts. Indeed, Joel Fish's study of the Wisconsin human relations program showed that prejudice against Blacks had increased by the end of the fieldexperience component of the semester-long human relations program administered at that university in 1981. In a more recent essay, Christine Sleeter discusses a similar collision between a well-meaning staff development program in multicultural education and white leachers' prior constructions of minority racial groups. Sleeter calls attention to the necessity of problematizing the text of multicultural sensitivity training, pointing to the fact that white teachers' vested interests and prior experie0nces tend to subvert any guaranteed reading of the multicultural text. Besides these concerns, it must be noted that multicultural proponents do not systematically pursue the very premise that set the multicultural project in educatlon m motion m the first place: the interrogation of the discourse of the Eurocentric basis of the American school curriculum that links the United States to Europe and to "Western Civilization.'' Indeed, within the past few years contemporary conservatlve educators such Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and Diane Ravitch have sought to gain the upper hand in the debate over curriculum reform by reinvigorating the myth of Westernness and the role of Europe in the elaboration of American institutions and culture. No one puts this more directly than George Will: Our country is a branch of European civilization...."Eurocentricity" is right, in American curricula and consciousness, because it accords with the facts of our history, and we—and Europe—are fortunate for that. The political and moral legacy of Europe has made the most happy and admirable of nations. Saying that may be indelicate, but it has the merit of being true and the truth should be the core of the curriculum. In response to these frontal attacks on multicultural education, proponents have tended to propose models that emphasize the addition of "new" content about minority history to the school curriculum, not of questioning or challenging the content that is already there. The multiculturalist strategy of adding diversity to the dominant school curriculum serves, paradoxically, to legitimate the dominance of Western culture in educational arrangements in the United States. Multiculturalists have failed to provide a systematic critique of the ideology of "Westernness" that is ascendant in curriculum and pedagogical practices in education. Instead, proponents articulate a language of inclusion. RETHINKtNC MULTICULTURALISM Where does this multicultural strategy of inclusion leave us with respect to the question of race and the curriculum? How should we begin to rethink current approaches to the issue of race and curriculum organization? What are the elements of a new critical approach to multicultural education' Here I would like to offer the outlines of a critical approach to multiculturalism. First, such a new approach must begin with a more systematic critique of the construction of school knowledge and the privilegingaf Eurocentrism andWesteruness in the American school curriculum. The rather Philistine assertion of Eurocentrism and Westernness on the part of conservative educators is itself a wish to run away from the effort of coming to terms with the fundamental historical currents that have shaped the United States—a wish to run away from the fundamentally "plural," immigrant, and Afro-New World character that defines the historical and current relations among minority and majority groups in the United States. To claim a pristine, unambiguous Westernness as the basis of curriculum organization, as Bloom, Hirsch, Ravitch, Will, and others suggest, is to repress to the dimmest pasts of the unconscious a fundamental anxiety concerning the question of African American and minority identities and "cultural presence" in what is distinctive about American life. The point I want to make here is similar to one that John Berger makes in Ways of Seeing and Toni Morrison develops and extends in her book Playing in the Dark: there is nothing intrinsically superior or even desirable about the list of cultural items and cultural figures celebrated by traditionalists like Hirsch and Bloom. We should remember that at the end of the last century the English cultural critic Matthew Arnold did not find it fit to include in the "the best that has been thought and said" any existing American writer. This powerfully reminds us that what is "Western" is not synonymous with what is "American," no matter how hard some people may try. It also reminds us that the notion of Westernness is a powerful ideological construct, one thoroughly infused with an ongoing struggle over meaning and values. What is Western is therefore highly problematic, as June Jordan has argued. In light of the fact that African Americans have been in the Americas for at least as long as whites, how is it that their history, writings, and culture are considered non-Western? Who is demarcating the West? Do we, for instance, want to say that Ernest Hemingway is in and Alice Walker is out ? Where is this line to be drawn within the school curriculum? Where does Westernness end and where does Americanness begin? Multiculturalists have tended to counter the Western civilization movement by insisting on "diversity" and cultural pluralism. But this approach leaves untouched the very premise of the interchangeability of the culture of the United States and Europe and the notion that there is an easy fit between white America, the West, and Europe—a notion that needs to be questioned. This brings me to my second point of departure from the multicultural models discussed earlier. A critical approach to multiculturalism must insist not only on the cultural diversity of school knowledge but on its inherent relationality. School knowledge is socially produced, deeply imbued with human interests, and deeply implicated in the unequal social relations outside the school door. A critical multiculturalism should therefore be more reflexive with respect to the relationship between different social groups in the United States and the relationship of developments in the United States to the rest of the world. This would mean, for instance, that we begin to see the issue of racial inequality in global and relational terms—in the context of what Immanuel Wallerstein calls "world systems theory." A world systems approach would call attention to the fact that the development of Western industrialized countries is deeply bound up in the underdevelopment and the exploitation of the third world. C.L.R. James, for example, points out that in the 1770s, at the time when the French government was helping to bankroll the American Revolution, its West Indian colony in Haiti was generating two-thirds of France's overseas trade. A world systems approach would also emphasize the links that African Americans have had in terms of their intellectual and political engagement with the peoples of the Caribbean, Africa. For example, the civil rights movement in the United States has had profound multiplier effects on the expansion of democratic practices to excluded groups in Australia, the Caribbean, Africa, and England, as well as in the United States itself. By emphasizing the relationality of school knowledge, one also raises the question of the ideological representation of dominant and subordinate groups in education and in the popular culture. By "representation," I refer not only to mimesis or the presence or absence of images of minorities and third-world people in textbooks; I refer also to the question of power that resides in the specific arrangement and deployment of subjectivity in the artifacts of the formal and informal culture. This is what Louis Althusser calls the "mise-en-scene of interpellation"— the way in which the orchestration of cultural forms in textbooks and in the popular culture generates the capacity to speak for whole groups, to arraign these groups, as it were, before a deeply invested court of appeal, draining social life of its history and naturalizing dominant and subordinate relations in the process. This is, by and large, what textbooks do as a matter of course. For example, as Edward Said has pointed out in his brilliant book Orientalism, contemporary Westem scholars arbitrarily draw a fine of demarcation between "East" and "West," "West" and "nonWest," the "North" and "South," the "first world,' and the "third world." These apparently neutral geographic temms are deeply informed by ideology and by histories of conquest and subordination. This arbitrary line of demarcation is stabilized by the constant production and reproduction of attributions, differences, desires, and capacities that separate different cultures and regions. The West is rational; the third world is not. The West is democratic; the third world is not. The West is virtuous, moral, and on the side of good and right; the third world is vicious, immoral, and on the side of evil. For example, the electronic media images generated during the Persian Gulf War exploited many of these dichotomies in order to help the typical American viewer separate the cause of the allies of the West from that of the enemies of the East—Saddam and the Iraqis. This was a case of the Crusades all over again. It is therefore possible to find in textbooks used in U.S. schools very negative social constructions of the third world. The production and arrangement of images in textbooks draw intertextually on a media language that saturates the popular culture outside and inside the school. More significant than simple stereotyping, then, is the characterization of the relationship of developed countries like the United States to third world countries such as Panama and Guatemala in Central America. As the Interracial Books for Children Bulletin notes about textbooks currently in use in schools across the United States: Textbooks distort the role of the U.S. in Central America, portraying it only as the perennial "helper."The U.S. has repeatedly intervened in the internal affairs of Central American nations. Rarely are these interventions mentioned. The 34 U.S. military interventions in the area from 1898-1932—and the numerous interventions [once every yearand half since WorldWar ll ] overt and covert, since then—are ignored. Of course, besides these strategies of omission and marginalization in textbooks one has to confront the larger system of representation and production of images in the media and popular culture that position minorities, women, and third world people in relation to dominant whites. In many cases our students depend on the media, more so than on textbooks or the classroom, for their understanding of exlstmg relations of dominance and subordination in the world. We must therefore find some way to interrogate dynamically the current production of images in the popular culture; we must find some way to examine critically films, television newspapers, and popular music in the classroom. We must always bear in mind that the textbook is never far from the ruling myths and common sense that inform our understanding of social differences and people who "do not look like us." A third point of consideration in a critical multiculturalism is the status of the conceptualization of the race category within the multicultural paradigm. Current multicultural formulations tend to define racial identities in static or essentialist terms. By this I mean that proponents tend to treat racial identities as a settled matter of physical, cultural, and linguistic traits. Minority groups are therefore defined as homogeneous entities. For example, as discussed earlier, Tiedt and Tiedt's fictional character, "Sue Wong," is presented in their handbook for preservice teachers as a generic Chinese Americana. She is defined by the presumably invariant characteristics of her group. A critical approach to multicultural education requires a far more nuanced discussion of the racial identities of minority and majority groups. This critical approach would call attention to the contradictory interests that inform minority social and political behavior and that define minority encounters with malority whites in educational settings and in society. These discontinuities in the needs and interests of minority and ma jority groups are expressed, for example, in the long history of tension and hostility that has existed between the Black and white working class in this country. Also of crucial importance within this framework are the Issues of the "contradictory location" of the "new" Black middle class within the racial problematic, and the role of neoconservative Black and white intellectuals in redefining the terrain of contemporary discourse on racial inequality toward the ideal of a "color blind" society." Just as important for a nonessentialist approach to race and curriculum is the fact that because of the issue of gender inequality, women and girls have radically different experiences of racial inequality than those of their male counterparts. A nonessentialist approach to the discussion of racial identities allows for a more complex understanding of the educational and political behavior of minority groups. In short, it is not possible to diagnose or predict the political behavior of minority groups from assumptions about race, pure and simple. Different class interests within minority groups often cut at right angles to racial politics. In a related sense, predicating multicultural education on the basis of static definitions of what white people are like and what minorities are like can lead to costly miscalculations that undermine the goal of race relations reform in education itself. DEMOCRATIC INITIATIVES A new approach to multicultural education must go much further than a critique of current definitions of racial identity. A critical approach to the fostering of multiculturalism must also seek to promote democratic initiatives in curriculum and pedagogical practices and in social relations in schools. In this matter, certain facts have become painfully clear. There is now considerable documentation in both the mainstream and radical literature indicating stagnation and, in some cases, reversals in the educational fortunes of Black, Latino, and Native American youth in the emerging decade of the 1990s. These studies also draw attention to some of the most pernicious ways in which current curriculum and pedagogical practices—not simply content—militate against minority success and alienate minority students from an academic core curriculum. For instance, studies show the following: that minority girls and boys are more likely than their white peers to be placed in low or non-academic tracks; that teachers' encouragement and expectations of academic performance are considerably lower for Black and Latino students than for white students, that Black students have access to fewer instructional opportunities than white students; and that ultimately Black, Latino, and Native American youth are more likely to drop out of school than are white youth. These racial factors are complicated by dynamics of gender: Black girls fare better academically than Black boys but are more likely to be denied the academic and social status accorded to white girls and boys in desegregated classrooms. They are further complicated by dynamics of class: increasingly, Black youth from professional middle-class backgrounds are abandoning predominantly Black institutions and opting for white-dominated state colleges and Ivy League universities, thereby imperiling the autonomy and survival of Black institutions and raising disturbing questions about the maintenance of cultural identity. As we have seen, multicultural proponents have stressed attitudinal models of reform. They have tended to paste over the central contradictions associated with race and the curriculum, promoting instead a professional discourse of content addition. These approaches to curriculum and educational reform have consequently had the effect of stabilizing rather than challenging the modus operandi of schooling and curriculum practices such as ability grouping and tracking—the principal mechanisms through which minorities are culturally excluded from the academic core curriculum and "prepared" for the secondary labor market. These practices of curriculum differentiation, teaching different types of curricula to different groups of students, also constitute the core processes of racial marginalization and subordination of minority students in the institutional culture of the school Fundamentally, then, mainstream educators and policymakers have failed to engage teachers and students in a sustained examination of the sociological and racial dimensions of current curriculum and pedagogical practices of tracking and ability grouping. All students should have access to an academic curriculum. The fact that disproportionate numbers of America's African American, Latino, and Native American youth are now alienated from such a curriculum in the public schools is both intolerable and indefensible. The idea of a general academic curriculum also poses direct political questions about the selective tradition in curriculum organization. As school populations become more ethnically diverse, and as minorities have become majorities in many school districts across the country, the moral and practical support for the hegemony of Eurocentrism in the curriculum has been imperiled. The hegemonic truce that existed over the years between school authorities and the rapidly diversifying constituencies they serve has become frayed. Minority youth and women have begun to offer a more systematic challenge to the structure of existing school knowledge and the assumptions and practices that undergird the curricula of colleges and universities in the United States. Questions are being raised about "traditional dichotomies such as the division between the hard 'masculine' subjects like mathematics and the sciences, and the soft 'feminine' arts subjects." Minority students are mounting "new" demands for democratization and diversity in the curriculum and course offerings of dominant educational institutions across the country. This point of rupture within the dominant curriculum paradigm has made possible the introduction of even more radical demands for critical antiracist and antisexist curriculum materials and pedagogical practices. As school critics such as Bob Connell and Madan Sarup have argued, the school curriculum for minority and majority youth should have an organic link to other experiences and struggles within the society, with respect to such issues as the loss of infrastructural supports and jobs in minority communities in the inner cities. Such a new critical approach to the multicultural curriculum would also "celebrate the contributions of working people, women, and minorities to our general cultural pool" and would be the point of departure "for providing students with their own cultural capital. By insisting that radically diverse cultural knowledge(s) rooted in the social bases and experiences of oppressed groups should be introduced into the school curriculum, we can avoid the "benign" pluralism and cultural relativism that is now embodied in certain innocuous forms of multicultural education. As Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd argue, "Such pluralism tolerates the existence of salsa, it even enjoys Mexican restaurants, but it bans Spanish as a medium of instruction in American schools." But merely moving beyond simplistic models of cultural relativism is not enough to '`invert the hegemony" of Eurocentrism in the curriculum. We must go further than the compensatory strategy of simply adding diverse cultural knowledges to the dominant curriculum. A critical approach to the transformation of school knowledge requires a second strategy, one aimed at promoting difference and heterogeneity as what Connell calls a program of "common leamings." Such a strategy aims at reconstructing the dominant curriculum—which we now know legitimates the experiences and practices of the white middle class—by bringing the uninstitutionalized experiences of marginalized minorities and working-class women and men to the "center" of the organization and arrangement of the school curriculum. The ultimate objective of a "common learnings" educational strategy is to seek the generalized diffusion throughout the whole system of schooling of counterhegemonic knowledge based on the experiences and perspectives of the disadvantaged. Connell argues for such a proactive and generative approach to "universalizing" the heterogeneous experiences of oppressed groups in the eurrieulum. His argument rests on two important principles. First, he suggests that a political and ethical principle of positive social justice should inform the selection of knowledge in the school curriculum. In practice this implies that a "new" critical curriculum should privilege the human interests of the least advantaged. Second, he maintains that the radical transformation of the school curriculum should be based on epistemological principles that affimm the validity of the points of view of marginalized minorities and working-class men and women. It is useful to quote him at some length here: Different standpoints yield different views of the world and some are more comprehensive and powerful than others....[I]f you wish to teach about ethnicity and race relations, for instance, a more comprehensive and deeper understanding is possible if you construct your curriculum from the point of view of the subordinated ethnic groups than if you work from the point of view of the dominant one. ,'Racism " is a qualitatively better organizing concept than "natural inferiority," though each has its roots in a particular experience and embodies a social interest. Another case is provided by the growth of knowledge about gender. There has long been a body of information and discourse about the family, women's employment, children's social development, masculinity and femininity, which remained for decades a backwater in social sciences hegemonised by the interests of men. The standpoint of the least advantaged in gender relations, articulated in feminism, has transformed that. Modern feminism has produced a qualitatively better analysis of a large domain of social life through a range of new concepts {sexual politics, patriarchy, the sexual division of labor, etc.} and new research informed by them. The implications of this conceptual revolution are still to be felt across much of the curriculum. Connell's arguments for reconstructing the curriculum from the standpoint of those "carrying the burdens of social inequality" are well founded. A critical multicultural curriculum, which emphasizes antiracist and antisexist changes in understanding and in social reorganization and draws from the points of view and experiences of oppressed minorities and working-class women and men as the primary bases for a transformative curriculum, would constitute a fundamental step in the direction of preparing students for democratic participation in a complex and lifferentiated world. However, there is a real danger here of drifting towards a model that promotes cultural exceptionalism and privileged epistemologies in reverse. We must be ever-mindful of the dangers that Freire pointed out in his volume, Pedagogy of the Oppressed—that is, that the oppressed "are at one and the same time hemselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized." There are no simple guarantees in political or educational life, and critical multicultural educators must avoid the tendency to reify the oppressed through an activism shrouded in "monologues, slogans and communiques." In this sense Connell's common leamings approach still reflects significant limitations. Connell's standpoint theory tends toward a monological emphasis: only the oppressed group has purchase on its experiences and the interpretations of those experiences. Connell ignores the relationality and multivocality of knowledge and experience discussed in the beginningaf thisessay. This dynamicof relationalityparticularlydescribes the categories of knowledge and experience and the cultural forms of resistance of the oppressed. The production of knowledge and cultural forms among the oppressed floes embody an encounter and a double reading of dominant knowledge. Paul Gilroy calls thisprocess "popular modemism"—the process by which the oppressed decode and Reconstruct the meaning of style of the oppressor and respond with their own counterhegemonic forms. A very good example of this process is Derek Walcott's recently completed epic poem, Omeros, in which he reworks the inherited tradition of colonial literature prosecuted in the Caribbean school systemic In this extraordinary work, Homer's Odyssey becomes a vehicle for the literary exploration of the middle passage of the peoples of the African Diaspora. This, however, is a middle passage in reverse, in which the Caribbean peoples reclaim their history, their landscape and, most important, the tools of language. In a similar manner, Zora Neale Hurston, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, discovers in the everyday speech of her Black characters, lanie and T-Cake, and others, the liberating power of a dialect that reorders the world in the language of the people in the margins of the South. It would be interesting to have a ninth grade literature class compare and contrast Mark Twain's use of dialect in Huckleberry Finn with Hurston's use of dialect in Their Eyes were Watching God. In my view, multicultural changes in the curriculum to address the present and the future of race relations in the United States must be founded in the recognition that knowledge is socially produced and systematically relational and heterogeneous—the product of human beings in what the Marxist novelist George Lamming calls "their rendezvous with history." CONCLUSION: GOING BEYOND CONTENT Changing the present content of the school curriculum, even in the "common learnings" direction proposed by Connell, is not an adequate or sufficient model for meaningful curriculum reform in the area of race relations in schooling. A critical multicultural education needs to look at the constraints and barriers to teacher creativity and innovation in the institutional culture of schools, in the educational priorities set by district offices and building principals, and in teacher education programs in the university. In all these areas, emancipatory multiculturalism, as a form of what Henry Giroux calls "critical literacy," is now suppressed. To go beyond the instrumental reasoning and additive models of multiculturalism that I discussed earlier, critical educators must articulate an affirmative set of practices that takes seriously the differential needs, desires, and interests of minority and disadvantaged urban youth. This means that as a first priority we must insist that urban schools meet their end of a social contract with African American and Latino students and their parents. Much greater effort must be placed on the issue of equality of access to instructional opportunity and equality of educational outcomes. What is also needed is a far more dynamic approach to school knowledge that goes beyond the tendency within the traditional curriculum to reduce school knowledge to selected bits of information. Instead we must see the production of school knowledge as a dynamic and multifacetedprocess. Critical multiculturalism should be founded on a multidisciplinary model that stresses interdisciplinarity, intellectual challenge, debate among contending perspectives, and the vigorous interrogation of received traditions. Curriculum reform in the multicultural area should stress students' autonomy with respect to multiple sources of information, not their necessary Submission to corrective bits of knowledge that are presented as already-settled truth. There is a desperate need for schools, district offices, and university-based teacher education programs to come up with strategies of interpretation of the urban context through a process of close collaboration and dialogue with the heterogeneous groups that live in these urban centers. These strategies of interpretation and dialogue with urban communities should lead to specific curriculum and instruct tonal initiatives that give priority to the needs of disadvantaged youth. Schools must not continue to be armies of occupation in the inner cities. Finally, efforts to redefine the curriculum in the name of multiculturalism must get beyond the narrow prescription of incremental addition and replacement. A c ritical approach to multicultural reform must make salient connections between knowledge and power. Such an approach would bring the entire range of traditional and contemporary arrangements within schools, and between schools and communities, into focus for reexamination with a view toward transformation.