Page 108 - Cultural Studies Volume 11
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102 CULTURAL STUDIES
William Pinar in an instructive essay entitled ‘Notes on understanding curriculum
as a racial text’ (1993). He asks the question ‘who are we as Americans?’ and the
answer he provides exemplifies not a revision but a transformation in teaching on
pluralism in the United States: ‘[the] African-American’s presence informs every
element of American life. For European American students to understand who
they are, they must understand that their existence is predicated upon,
interrelated to, and constituted in fundamental ways by African Americans.’
Pinar emphasizes that educators have to acknowledge in order to pass on to
students the inseparable, intertwined historical experience which black and white
Americans share and have been profoundly affected by, and this in turn must be
seen in the context of the relationship between the North and the South. John
Philips underscores these insights in a provocatively titled essay, The African
heritage of white America’:
In conditions of culture contact in the New World, common aspects of
European and African culture tend to reinforce each other. Previously,
when the same cultural traits survived among both blacks and whites, they
were considered to be European cultural survivals among whites but
African cultural survivals among blacks. It would be easier to consider a
dual origin for these cultural traits in both cases… African culture among
whites should not be treated as just an addendum to studies of blacks but
must be included in the general curriculum of American studies. Black
studies must not be allowed to remain segregated from American studies
but must be integrated into our understanding of American society, for our
understanding of white American society is incomplete without an
understanding of the black and African impact on white America.
(Philips, 1990:237)
I refer again to poet Ishmael Reed who relates: ‘I told a professor of Celtic
Studies at Dartmouth of my Irish-American heritage; he laughed. This was an
intellectual at one of our great Ivy League colleges.’
Where Philips’s integrationist model and Pinar’s approach to examining the
constitution of the American self as a racial self are adopted, the influence of
educators like the Dartmouth professor may not be neutralized, but at least it will
be called into question. The task of an educator is to cultivate an awareness of
how knowledge is made as well as restructuring ways of seeing. And I propose
that the guiding principle for criteria, selection and organization of material
should be ultimately aimed at the lofty goal of furthering social justice. Having
said that, one cannot overlook the terrible lack of correlation between knowledge
and the dissolution of prejudice; this is a subject which should perhaps solicit
some of our attention. More knowledge and information does not make for less
ignorance or bigotry.
The overall advantage that should be accentuated is that where inter-demands
that we examine interaction, processes and the power relations that inform