Critical Pedagogy in the age of Obama

For the past ten years I have practiced a form of critical pedagogy in all of my undergraduate and graduate classes.  Regardless of the content of the course, I have tried to encourage my students to think more critically about the political nature of schooling and education; to examine the relationship between knowledge and power; to address subtleties of ideology in the teaching and learning process; to think through the notion of authority; to analyze the formation of social identities; to critique social norms and take an accounting of the affects of these norms in terms of exclusion and inclusion; to think about the relationship between institutional and individual needs; to analyze what are often contradictory values in capitalist and democratic discourses; and to become aware of how dominant epistemological frameworks position our understanding of what is possible. 

Because there are so many misrepresentations of critical pedagogy, it should be noted that I try to practice a form of critical pedagogy that is sensitive to the notions of fallibility and positionality.  My ultimate goal as a critical pedagogue is to provide the opportunity for my students to think beyond the parameters of dominant power so that they may make informed, ethical decisions about the challenges they will face in their everyday and professional lives. However utopian it may sound, I want them to become free thinkers, which means that, together, we struggle to understand how, what and who limits our ability to freely think.  This is important, because too often critical pedagogy has been caricatured as a rigid, universalizing discourse that attempts to push students to think and act in a certain way.  If anything, critical pedagogy is an evolving discourse, one that continues to adjust itself to changing times and the construction of new knowledge.    

Under the regime of George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfield, and Dick Cheney to name only a few of the leaders of the new conservatism, critical pedagogues have had, to say the least, easy targets.  As neo-conservatives systematically gutted constitutional protections, weakened the rule of law and democratic institutions, and effectively made cynicism the heir apparent to knowledge, many of us who are committed to deepening democratic life through both grassroots struggle and intellectual work have had a field day critiquing and fighting against what can only be called the gross negligence of these ideological commissars.  Combine this gross negligence with the kind of educational malpractice that has been allowed to go on under the banner of a socially conservative neoliberalism and we have the perfect storm for intellectual critique and analysis. 

But with the election of Barack Obama, the language of change, hope, and possibility, once a rallying cry for critical pedagogues, is quickly seeping into the nation’s vernacular.  This, it would seem, would be a reason to celebrate.  But before we get too giddy from the elixir of our apparent success, I want to bring attention to a few new pedagogical and educational challenges that I see on the horizon in spite of, or maybe because of President Obama’s magnificent win.  I expect that many teachers are already dealing with some of the unexpected fall-out from his election.

The first major hurdle Obama’s election creates is born out of the beautiful reality of the first person of color elected to the highest office in the United States.  For many liberals and conservatives this means that race is no longer important or as important a theme for the nation.  Indeed, much ink has been shed declaring the end of racism and our capacity as a nation-state to move beyond the issue of race.  Apparently, for many we now live in a post-racial nation state.  For liberals, Obama’s election signified their long-running dream of living in a colorblind society, a world in which racial differences no longer affected our perceptions of each other or shaped opportunities, specifically in terms of education and work.  In a colorblind society, every person, regardless of skin color would have the same opportunities, which assumes that people would also have the same healthcare, education, cultural opportunities, and economic justice.  With the election of President Obama, many seem to believe that we have either arrived, or at the least, moved closer to this utopian state of consciousness and the reality of equality.
For this to be the case, we have to ignore some difficult realities.  Ian Thompson, writing for the magazine Socialism and Liberation (http://socialismandliberation.org/mag/index.php?aid=476) provides a partial overview of some of the most current and disturbing truths about the continued affects of white supremacy in the United States. 

•    The biggest divide between Blacks and whites in the United States is economic status. The Black poverty rate was three times greater than the white poverty rate in 2002. At the very slow rate at which the Black-white poverty gap has been narrowing since 1968, it would take 150 years—until 2152—to close. (The State of the Dream 2004: Enduring Disparities in Black and White, United for a Fair Economy)

•    The unemployment level of Black people is more than double that of white people, 10.8 percent to 4.7 percent—a wider gap than in 1972. Unemployment rates for Black men age 20 and over remains in double digits. (The State of Black America 2005, National Urban League)

•    Black people who find work are making far less than their white counterparts. For every dollar of white per capita income, African Americans earned 55 cents in 1968 and only 57 cents in 2001. At this pace, it would take African Americans 581 years to get the remaining 43 cents.

•    On average, Black people are twice as likely as whites to die from disease, accidents and homicide at every stage of life. Black men have the lowest life expectancy rate in the country. Black people still get far fewer operations, tests, medications and other life-saving treatments than white people. (Washington Post, Aug. 18, 2005)

•    More than 886,000 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if African Americans had received the same health care as white people, according to the December 2004 issue of the American Journal of Public Health. Millions of Black people have no health care at all.
•    Black infants are almost two and a half times as likely as white infants to die before age one—a greater gap than in 1970.

•    Although crime rates have decreased in the United States, every year federal, state and local incarceration rates rise, particularly among Black men. Black males born today have a 1-in-3 chance of going to prison during their lifetime, compared to a 1-in-17 chance for white males.

•    Of the more than two million prisoners in the United States, nearly half are Black. African Americans are three times more likely than whites to be incarcerated, and the average jail sentence for the same crime is six months longer for Blacks than whites.

Risking the label of spoiler, it is vital to consider that Obama’s election, if we are not careful, could hamper our efforts to bring about a form of critical awareness that can help us see and understand the complex workings of power, ideology, and race in the United States.  Already, we hear on the corporate airwaves how black people and other people of color can no longer use white supremacy as an excuse for their failures—economic or otherwise.  White people are absolved from years of their silent or not so silent participation in white supremacy. It is common to hear how we now live in a post-racial world, where old divisions of black and white no longer are relevant.  Obama is the new poster-child for that great liberal promise of equal opportunity, having pulled himself up by his bi-racial bootstraps all the way to the White House.  We are being subjected to a mass-media propaganda campaign about how we, as a nation, have finally shed the violent and pernicious legacies of slavery, and that even in the throes of a major systemic capitalist failure, we are resigned to accept that capitalism is the only option for structuring our economic lives.  Now, as much as in any other time, contradiction and hypocrisy work to confuse us, paralyze our thinking, reduce our actions to egoistic reflexes, and make us susceptible to the seductions of power.
This brings me to the second challenge I see.  The cynicism of the Bush and Clinton years is quickly being replaced by a dangerous naiveté, a form of ignorance that basks in the cult of personality just as it makes appeals to the vibrancy of democracy.  The ultimate achievement of the Bush administration was to make people believe that they had no power in combination with the myth that he and his cronies had it all.  This made blaming Bush as opposed to taking a look at why we allowed Bush et al to do what they did a popular hobby amongst liberals and lefties.  The perceived solidification of power is under girded by the perceived powerlessness of the individual.  It is the combination of these two things that signals a deep democratic crisis, not one or the other. The Bush legacy then is being lived out in how supporters of Obama believe that he alone can change the world, that he carries with him the promise of hope and possibility, just as Bush supporters were encouraged to believe that he carried with him the promise of compassion and personal responsibility. 

In a radical democracy, we the people are supposed to govern ourselves, and the only viable place in which hope, possibility, change, compassion, and personal responsibility lie is in each global citizen.  But in our new political landscape, we the people have been taught to look toward the presidency and Washington for answers. We the people are enamored and seduced by power and the promise of powerful people to use their power and influence in the interest of those with less power.  This totalitarian-esque plutocratic thinking rationalizes the hollowing out of democratic institutions by legitimating not only the concentration of official power, but by sanctioning its penchant to act in the service of its own interests. The ultimate coup in such political design is getting the people to reject their power through the hollow promise of comfort.  Exchanging power for comfort, as Stanley Aronowitz has argued, becomes the mechanism by which totalitarian values replace democratic ones. At its root, a vibrant and radically conceived democracy demands the dilution of official power not its celebration.     

Our students, many of whom know little else besides the cynicism of the Bush and Clinton years are now easily seduced by the cult of personality, by representations of power, by the false promises of 21st century political prophets. Naiveté is the dialectic of cynicism, so it should be of no surprise that after years of cynical governance, young people are drawn to the fiery and passionate rhetoric of hope.  Yet this kind of hope risks the force of liberation because it has not been attached to the messy social struggles that give it political force.  Unlike fantasy, hope is not a futuristic concept.  Rather hope is a radical conceit of the present; its promise for change is only as real as the current fight on the ground.

With few examples of democratic, grassroots power on display in their virtual and visually-rich worlds, many young people have grown up believing in their own political impotence while, at the same time, dependent upon our aging leaders to provide sound and virile leadership.  Many of these young people exchange terrestrial power for a kind of virtual power, one that has god-like qualities.  From changing one’s sex and race to condensing time/space relations so that standard geographical measures are nonsensical, young people haven’t so much abdicated their power as exchanged it for something entirely different, beyond the messy and unglamorous world of terrestrial politics. 
The problem, of course, is this exchange leaves democratic power no more than a vote for someone who will come along and do what you want, or at least make promises to do things that you want, but can’t do yourself.  This is when power doesn’t have to impose itself from the top down.  Rather, power on top is reinforced from the bottom up.  We become totalitarian subjects by choice regardless of who is in office, for it is not the person that matters, but the amount of power we give him or her.  Under Obama, at least at this early stage, nothing has changed in this regard.  It seems to matter little that he begs his followers to get busy in their communities, schools, counties and states.  It seems collectively that most of us drank the poison under Bush, and whether it was bitter or sweet at the time, it has had pernicious affects.

As critical educators I believe we need to be radically engaged in the struggle to teach our students as well as learn from them how to think collectively about our individual power.  We should try to educate our students as to the danger of hero-worship and help them develop the tools for critical analysis and critical grassroots, social action, especially at a time when many liberals and progressives are waving flags of national pride.  Indeed, now maybe more than ever, should we be dedicating our energies to righting the wrongs, not just of the last eight years, but the gross indecencies perpetuated upon poor people, women, and all people of color since the beginning of this nation’s establishment.  It should serve as a difficult reminder to us all that whether you agreed with Bush and his administration or not, we the people, in the end, allowed it to happen.  Complicity is a bitter pill and if we do not act up now and force this new administration to bend to the needs of those most in need, we will assuredly look back upon this amazing event and reflect upon an opportunity squandered. 
 

Eric J. Weiner