Objection Sustained: Revolutionary Pedagogical Praxis as an Occupying Force

Abstract

On April 9, Condoleezza Rice delivered a talk in San Francisco. Or tried to. The former Secretary of State was interrupted repeatedly by cries from the audience of ‘war criminal’ and ‘torturer’. (For which we can thank our comrades in Code Pink and World Can't Wait.) As one of the protesters was being taken away by security guards, Rice made the kind of statement that has now become standard for high American officials under such circumstances: ‘Aren't you glad this lady lives in a democracy where she can express her opinion?’ She also threw in another line that's become de rigueur since the US overthrew Saddam Hussein, an argument that's used when all other arguments fail: ‘The children of Iraq are actually not living under Saddam Hussein, thank God.’ My response to such a line is this: If you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if someone then remarked to you how nice it was that ‘you actually no longer have a knee problem, thank God.’… The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem. (Blum, 2011) Language is an invention that makes it possible for a person to deny what he is doing even as he does it. (Blum, 2012)

“They Don't Know Anything!”: Latinx Immigrant Students Appropriating the Oppressor's Voice

“…The social relations of production that McLaren (), Antonia Darder and Rodolfo Torres (), William Robinson (), and others associate with the transnational capitalist class create the conditions that result in a deep structure of racism that guarantees wealth, privilege, and power to whites by systematically denying equal rights and opportunities to people of color, especially blacks and Latinxs. The dominant group controls the production of accepted and commonsense knowledge and ideologies that become deeply embedded in our institutions and cultural practices.…”

“…Revolutionary critical pedagogy (Allman ; McLaren ) conceptualizes the violence toward and within communities described above as a function of capital interests. Under conventional Marxism, racism and other antagonisms constitute and are constituted by relations of production and function to divide workers and disrupt class consciousness.…”

“…For Latinxs and other people of color, this deficit is often attributed to race, culture, language, and immigration. Internalized oppression depicts a deeply ingrained acceptance of dominant ideologies (Pyke ) that support existing social relations of production and asymmetrical relations of power and privileges (Darder and Torres ; McLaren ).…”

“…Critical pedagogy, stemming from Paulo Freire's work (), foregrounds the conditions of inequality of our society and the role of education in critical consciousness and transformation. Peter McLaren () and others (Allman ) use a revolutionary critical pedagogy whose central aim is to confront the social and material conditions set up at local and global levels to serve the interests of a now transnational capitalist class (Robinson ). A revolutionary critical pedagogy brings our attention to class struggle and the conditions of exploitation that set up common antagonisms, including racism, that prevent class‐consciousness, including inter‐ and intra‐group conflict.…”

Deploying Guns to Expendable Communities

“…We live in a world that is plagued by inhumanity-the effects of the treachery of a capitalist system that promises the virtues of democracy, including freedom and equal opportunity, but instead delivers war, hatred, and greed (McLaren, 2012). Karl Marx prophesized that capitalism would extend its looming darkness over not only our economy but also our cultural ways of being and doing, that it would encroach on our psyche to such an extent that we would come to revere its logic of consumption, competition, and greed (Fischer, 1996).…”