Racism, public pedagogy, and the construction of a United States values infrastructure, 1661–2023: a critical reflection

Abstract

This paper argues that public pedagogy—an educational activity that takes place outside of the traditional classroom setting—has had a potent impact on the history of racism in the United States of America. Yet this paper questions why the education academy’s scholarship has not shown a commensurate focus on the subdiscipline of public pedagogy, particularly racialized public pedagogy. I explore these topics by first examining a fateful confluence of historical circumstances involving slave codes and indentured servant laws governing low-income white workers, laws passed by the Barbados Assembly in 1661, that made their way across the Atlantic to be lifted, word-for-word, by leaders of colonial territories that became the United States. These laws ended up regulating not only the legal status of black slaves and white indentured servants in the United States, but also regulating social relations between those same black and white people. The resulting black-white social relations led to the evolution of racialized customs in what eventually became the USA, inspiring practices that undergirded black inferiority and white superiority for hundreds of years. Those customs contributed to the construction of what I have labelled a United States values infrastructure dominated by racism, which I contend is a racialized values infrastructure that exists to this day. To gain more insight into this phenomenon, this paper considers the question: how might the complexity of racialized public pedagogy be addressed in the scholarship of education literature and be imagined in a way to fit into an anti-racist curriculum?