Beyond Comfort Zones in Multiculturalism: Confronting the Politics of Privilege - Hardcover

by Sandra Jackson (Author), Jose Solis (Author)

For peoples whose legal agreements, treaties, and other accords and conventions with the United States have been violated, multiculturalism as a pedagogical tool often becomes suspect of reinforcing the continued reification and abstraction of their cultures and nations with little if any real meaning for educational and social transformation. The continued oppression and repression of the exercise of self-determination for African Americans; the persistence of policies aimed at the destruction of indigenous populations and land; the insidious continuation of classical colonialism in the case of Puerto Rico are all vivid reminders to these peoples of the racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic patriarchy that characterizes their status. In order to restore people's rights to fully determine their own histories, Jackson and Solis point out that it is imperative to destroy the material foundations that breed and recycle the ideology, discourse, and cultural practices of domination. It is not enough to celebrate diversity and difference; there must be grand-scale social, political, economic, and educational transformation.

Author Biography

SANDRA JACKSON is an Assistant Professor of Education at De Paul University in Chicago.

JOSE SOLIS is an Assistant Professor of Education at DePaul University in Chicago. He is the author of Public School Reform in Puerto Rico: Sustaining Colonial Models of Development (Praeger, 1994).