Critical Multiculturalism and Education

In the 1990s, multicultural education, and a wider public policy of multiculturalism of which it formed a part, seemed largely unassailable. After all, advocacy for it had had by that time a history of 30 to 40 years, beginning with the U.S. civil rights movement and extending to other Western countries such as Canada, Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. Schools in these contexts increasingly endorsed an overtly multicultural approach—or, at least, its most common variant of liberal multiculturalism—foregrounding respect for and inclusion of ethnic and cultural differences as the basis for teaching and learning. Even critics of multiculturalism conceded its impact on public policy, particularly within education—a wearied resignation most notably captured in Nathan Glazer's phrase, “We are all multiculturalists now.”

How times have changed. During the last decade, and particularly post-9/11, a rapid and significant retrenchment of multiculturalism as public policy has occurred, particularly within education. In the United States, a burgeoning standards and testing movement, spearheaded by No Child Left Behind, has replaced [Page 473]earlier attention to racial and ethnic diversity. Decades of affirmative action and related civil rights advances for African Americans have been dismantled, most notably in relation to access to higher education. The related provision of bilingual education, particularly for Latina/o Americans, has also been severely circumscribed, and in some states actually proscribed, by legislation promoting a monolingual English language philosophy as a prerequisite for U.S. citizenship. Meanwhile, across Europe, multiculturalism as public policy is apparently in full retreat, as European states increasingly assert that minority groups “integrate” or accept dominant social, cultural, linguistic, and (especially) religious mores as the price of ongoing citizenship.

These arguments are not new—the “threat” of multiculturalism to social and political cohesion has long been a key trope of the Right. However, the arguments have clearly gained purchase in the increasingly securitized post-9/11 environment, as both an explanation for, and a rejection of, the supposedly willful failure of minorities to accept dominant societal mores and values. But not only that: In the current anti-multiculturalist discourse, the newly disadvantaged are apparently middle-class Whites, trammeled by political correctness and the unwarranted privileges accorded minority groups. And this, despite a social and economic reality that (still) tells quite a different story. For example, residential taxation formulas in the United States consistently privilege wealthy White communities and their schools at the expense of poorer Black, Latina/o, and Native American communities and schools. Exclusions disproportionately target African American males and male Black British students in the United States and Britain, respectively. Non-White learners and English language learners have likewise been consistently overrepresented in special education classes, particularly in the United States. All these trends are the result of long-standing racialized institutional policies and practices that consistently disadvantage minoritized students, not the White middle-class.

Why do these structural inequalities continue to persist and why are they, along with multiculturalist educational policies, so easily dismissed in the current post-multicultural environment? This entry explores this apparent conundrum in two ways. First, it will be argued, liberal multiculturalism's preoccupation with “culture” and “cultural recognition” has actually contributed to the inability of multicultural education to meaningfully address ongoing structural inequalities, such as racism, institutionalized poverty, and discrimination faced on an often daily basis by minoritized students. Second, a more critical multiculturalism is needed that remediates the weaknesses of liberal multiculturalism and more effectively contests the current ascendancy of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric that so easily dismisses the reality and salience of disadvantage and discrimination.

...