Race and Racism

The Fourth Edition of The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities updates the definitive overview of the issues teachers face when creating learning experiences for students in social studies. The book connects the diverse elements of the social studies curriculum—civic, global, social issues—offering a unique and critical perspective that separates it from other texts. Thoroughly updated, the Fourth Edition includes 12 new chapters on: the history of the social studies; democratic social studies; citizenship education; anarchist inspired transformative social studies; patriotism; ecological democracy; Native studies; inquiry teaching; Islamophobia; capitalism and class struggle; gender, sex, sexuality and youth experiences in school; and critical media literacy. Chapters carried over from the previous edition have been substantially revised and updated, including those: on teaching social studies in the age of curriculum standardization and high-stakes testing; critical multicultural social studies; prejudice and racism; assessment; and teaching democracy.

Schools, colleges, and universities are vibrant human communities, instruments of public policy, and powerful political symbols involving, at one point or another, most members of society (Manzer 1994). They serve as a central mechanism for transmitting cultural knowledge and skilling future generations, as key sites of neighbourhood integration, in social capital formation, and in the development of civil society (Basu 2004a). Education is a central institution through which governing rationalities are materialized, creating educational spaces and land-scapes of educational disparities observable at various scales within nations, regions, communities, and schools (Apple 2001a; Basu 2004b; Hay 2004). As it is in schools, colleges, and universities that future generations are formed into the citizenry imagined in powerful political and economic ideologies, jurisdictional disputes over who controls education and the function it serves have been central aspects of educational politics (Bale and Knopp 2012). Education remains a key site for ideological contestation and for resistance to regimes of control even, and especially, as neoliberal reforms and the introduction of new technologies are transforming the spaces, subjectivities, and power relations of education (Apple 2001b; Giroux 2001, 2002). For all these reasons, educational spaces are rich subjects of critical geographical analysis (Basu 2010). In this collection we place particular emphasis on what geographic analysis can contribute to understanding the dynamic of difference in contemporary schools. Geographical analysis necessarily includes critical social analysis: race, class, and gender are not fixed identities but ongoing social productions; the multi-scalar spaces in which such social production takes place are vitally important to understanding how our societies work and, most importantly, how we might improve our social processes, especially for the most marginalized in our society. As critical scholars of education have long argued, schools are sites of cultural and social reproduction that legitimize broader social stratifications. As Marxist critics have suggested, schools discipline students for the workforce and inculcate dominant class structures, norms, and values (Bowles and Gintis 1976; Apple 2004). The streamlining of the production of knowledge into professional, vocational, and technical programs signals the differential subjection of students into deeply spatially structured roles within capitalist regimes, while the spatial segregation and redlining of schools further perpetuates inequalities (Dippo and James 2011; Harris and Mercier 2000; Robinson 2001, 2010). Similarly, the imposition of exclusionary spatial practices of a colonial system of education based on an idealized white norm have contributed to demoralizing and marginalizing Indigenous and racialized communities (Miller 1996; Kelm 1998; Milloy 1999; Lewis 2001; Harris 2002; Schick 2002; McCreary 2011). However, classrooms re-main sites of challenge and possibility.

Google has become a central object of study for digital media scholars due to the power and impact wielded by the necessity to begin most engagements with social media via a search process, and the near-universality with which Google has been adopted and embedded into all aspects of the digital media landscape to respond to that need.  Therefore, the near-ubiquitous use of search engines, and Google, in particular, in the United States demands a closer inspection of what values are assigned to race and gender in classification and web indexing systems and the search results they return. It also calls for explorations into the source of these kinds of representations and how they came to be so fundamental to the classification of human beings. In this research, I am interested in knowing two things: what kinds of results do Google’s search engine provide about Black girls when keyword searching, and what do the results mean in historical and social contexts? I also want to know in what ways does Google reinforce hegemonic narratives. To answer these questions, I use Critical Discourse Analysis as a method to explore the ways that Google Search results on the words “Black girls” discursively reflect hegemonic social power and racist and sexist bias. This research points toward a type of cultural hegemony within Google’s results on racialized and gendered identities, which prioritize the interests of its commercial partners and advertisers, rather than rendering the social, political and economic interests of Black women and girls visible.2

This paper addresses issues of centrality, marginality, and intercultural dynamics in psychology and religion from a historical perspective by examining how the category of primitivity in Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Jung’s psychological theories reflect not only their contrasting views on religion, but also their different identities – Jewish and German(-ic) Protestant respectively – in an age of increasing pan-German nationalism and anti-Semitism.  According to both psychologists, the term “primitive” refers to an early stage of psychological development that is indexed to race, meaning the dark-skinned “other” of the European colonialist and early anthropological imagination. In Jung’s theory, however, “primitive” peoples are also the living evidence for the primordial collective unconscious and its storehouse of “numinous” archetypal forces.  Furthermore, he describes “Jewish” psychology as “primitive” in the sense of infantile and collective, whereas the psychology of the “Germanic primitive” contains the kinds of tensions and potentialities that once gave birth to individual consciousness.